The best decision he ever made during his tour of duty in Iraq, says former US Army Capt. Jason Whiteley, was using government money to hire local hookers for a booze-fueled intramural blowout at Saddam’s palace. Unlike many of Whiteley’s other inventive, unconventional transactions, this one was incredibly cheap with unforeseen and long-term benefits.
“I paid, at most, $10 total for five hookers — and their pimp cooked dinner,” Whiteley says. “In the negotiations, they said they’d do only three guys each.”
After that party, Whiteley suddenly had inside knowledge of imminent IED attacks. “Those hookers were very popular with the [resistance] Mahdi Army,” says Whiteley. “Anytime those guys came through [the brothel] with a lot of money, we knew an IED had just been planted.”
Money walked out the door in Iraq, including $40 million sunk into this empty prison north of Baghdad, now occupied by squatters.
AP
Money walked out the door in Iraq, including $40 million sunk into this empty prison north of Baghdad, now occupied by squatters.
Also, one prostitute in particular — who had a crush on one of Whiteley’s men — would text whenever a customer slipped during pillow talk.
It was a masterstroke of psychological and practical warfare, holding a bacchanalian bash in Saddam Hussein’s former palace — a place where commoners were only ever permitted if they were about to be killed — and one that opened a portal into a crucial part of Iraq’s shadow economy. It was, Whiteley admits, one of many ideas born on the fly and out of desperation, one that’s microcosmically emblematic, he says, of the US government’s misplacement of funds and insistence on fighting a new war the old way.
As of November of last year, US taxpayers spent over $900 billion on the Iraq War. Of that, $9 billion has gone missing or is unaccounted for, along with $549.7 million in spare parts and 190,000 guns. In 2007, the US government halted construction on an Iraq prison due to serious structural flaws that apparently became evident only after $40 million dollars had been paid to contractors, who got to keep the money; $1.2 million in unguarded material such as piping, gravel and fencing was quickly stolen.
In 2003, the US sent $2.4 billion in pallets of cash to Iraq via a C-130 cargo plane, followed by other such flights, carryng a total of $6.6 billion. Astoundingly, all of the money went missing, and last June, the US and Iraqi governments said they’d been unsuccessful in tracking any of it down and were closing the case.
This, of course, isn’t a situation unique to Iraq, or the US. A report by ProPublica in October 2009 revealed that the UN couldn’t account for the tens of millions sent to Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission. As of December 2010, the US Army charged allies a 15% “handling fee” on the hundreds of millions raised internationally in pursuit of building the Afghan army, and Germany threatened to withdraw unless it was told the fate of its $42 million contribution. This past Wednesday, an audit published by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction said that the US can’t account for all of the $70 billion sent to Afghanistan throughout the now 10-year-old war and found both countries to blame.
Indeed, the fraud, waste and abuse of US taxpayer money in Afghanistan and Iraq isn’t one-sided; US contracting firms are also implicated in the loss of billions of dollars. All of which makes Whiteley’s new book, “Father of Money: Buying Peace in Baghdad,” that much more frightening and important. He writes of learning, quickly, that no amount of military might or peaceful propaganda could compete for the allegiance of Iraqi citizens the way the US dollar could.
“Everything there revolves around money,” Whiteley says. “Anytime you saturate an area with money, it calms things down. When money dries up, it’s very easily reversed.”
Money walked out the door in Iraq, including $40 million sunk into this empty prison north of Baghdad, now occupied by squatters.
AP
Money walked out the door in Iraq, including $40 million sunk into this empty prison north of Baghdad, now occupied by squatters.
Whiteley had been two days away from discharge when he was recalled by the US Army and deployed to Iraq in March 2004. He says that he and his men had no idea where they were going, nor were they given an actual mission: “Not at all. Zero. Zero percent. No idea.”
In flight, Whiteley’s battalion officer approached and said to him, “I hear you’re a smart guy — you’re going to be the governance officer.” Whiteley had no clue what that meant; the Army has no such thing.
“My impression was that we had the Coalitional Provisional Authority ruling Iraq from a high level, and USAID providing governance on a national level. But there was no one in the street talking to people about the lack of running water, or sewage, or electricity — this functional capability that was beyond, and below, the scope of the US Army.”
Iraqis, he found, didn’t care about democracy: “They wanted to know why the lights didn’t work,” he says, and he was frustrated that he couldn’t help, because he didn’t have the money and the resources.
“The Army is a bureaucracy,” he says. It was, and remains, common for multiple contracts to be given to different companies for the same job. “One school can be painted three times,” Whiteley says. Yet he couldn’t get an on-the-books stipend from the military to attend to the most basic of Iraqi needs, which, once attended to, quite literally kept the peace.
One of Whiteley’s initial meetings with a local senior sheik led to his epiphany. The sheik, Said Mallek, complained that a low-level Turkish crime syndicate had been stealing and smuggling scrap metal — which went for $50-$120 a ton — from a neighborhood junkyard. Mallek wanted in on the action, at least a cut of the profits, so that the neighborhood itself could benefit; Whiteley knew that getting this done would go a long way in engendering local trust. So Whiteley set out on an illegal run, quickly tracking down the Turk in charge, threatening trouble unless a 5% tribute on each truck of scrap was paid to Mallek. The Turk agreed, then handed Whiteley $20,000, still in original US Treasury wrapping.
It worked, for a while. Whiteley reported back to his battalion commander, a man he calls “smart enough” to recognize that money could buy security for his men and for Iraqi citizens. They agreed that they should get as much cash in the hands of as many Iraqis as possible, and came up with three programs: a makeshift “private army” that would be paid to warn US troops about IEDs; employment generated by the Army, which would pay violent insurgents to dig trenches or sweep streets; and a weapons buy-back program. Through his contacts on the street, Whiteley would learn the going rate on the black market for hand grenades or AK-47s, then offer just enough more, along with amnesty.
Money walked out the door in Iraq, including $40 million sunk into this empty prison north of Baghdad, now occupied by squatters.
AP
Money walked out the door in Iraq, including $40 million sunk into this empty prison north of Baghdad, now occupied by squatters.
The money itself came from a couple of sources. Some was all that Saddam Hussein left behind (Forbes magazine estimated his net worth at $2 billion in 2003), and the bulk of the rest came from Iraqi oil revenues. Whiteley’s battalion commander could approve requests for up to $50,000 and his brigade commander $100,000; forms would be filled out, and the requesting soldier would drive to the Green Zone and essentially make a monster withdrawal from the bank. At most, Whiteley would pay his contractors $10,000 and use the surplus as he saw fit.
“We’d always say that the contracts were coming down from the city of Baghdad — if we said they were American, the Iraqis would freak out,” Whiteley says. “I’d say, ‘We need bids by Thursday,’ but the Army worked off a matrix: the cost, the quality of past projects, and the political benefit.”
The latter was always the most important, especially as the quality of the work was uniformly shoddy. “If there was a particularly aggressive area, it would be good to give them the contract, get people working,” Whiteley says.
The Army doesn’t allow its soldiers to carry around any money at all, a dictate Whiteley finds pointless at best and, in a combat zone like Iraq, deadly at worst. The money he pocketed was an absolute necessity when, say, American forces accidentally killed an Iraqi child during the course of a firefight and Whiteley got the call to go visit the boy’s father.
“In that culture, it’s about blood money,” Whiteley says. A slain child has degrees of value, depending on how many wives a man has, how many children, and the ratio of males to females. (A dead boy is worth more than a girl.) A killing during an ambush also raises the price.
“That was a situation we needed to make right quickly,” Whiteley says. To legitimately get the money, Whiteley would have had to file a claim with the Army and wait five or six weeks to see if it had been approved. Such bureaucracy, Whiteley says, is a foreign concept to most Iraqis. In keeping with custom, Whiteley went to the local sheik and peeled off about $6,000; the sheik paid the family and was also given the next contract the Army had.
And then, suddenly, bribes and blood money no longer worked. In November 2004, Whiteley had what he now calls “a week of revelations” after his unit was attacked not far outside the protected Green Zone. “It was an ambush so complex and lethal,” he says, “the most complicated anyone had seen in Iraq.” Whiteley knew what that meant: Rag-tag insurgents weaponized and organized, the Mahdi Army and other followers of the charismatic anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr were revolting, cash no longer enough for the Americans to be seen as anything less than occupiers.
Money walked out the door in Iraq, including $40 million sunk into this empty prison north of Baghdad, now occupied by squatters.
AP
Money walked out the door in Iraq, including $40 million sunk into this empty prison north of Baghdad, now occupied by squatters.
In the wake of the ambush, Whiteley reached out to all his bought-and-paid-for friends. “I tried getting council members together — no one would show up,” he says. “No one’s answering my phone calls. I’m saying, ‘I’m looking for sheik so-and-so, I’ve got a $100,000 contract’ — no one cares. That’s when I realized my ability to lead these guys against their fellow countrymen was pretty limited.”
Whiteley’s hooker initiative, it turns out, was shut down long before that ambush, only two months into it. During a briefing attended by high-level US operatives, Whiteley said that a tip from an informant led him to believe the Army should target a specific house. “The guys from the CIA and other spook agencies said, ‘You guys aren’t authorized to have informants.’ ” Whiteley was stunned.
“I’m like, ‘I’m not Jason Bourne. I’m not flipping people. I just have a prostitute who told me something.’ ”
His argument did not go over well.
In the aftermath, Whiteley says negotiating Baghdad was akin to walking into a dark room with all the furniture rearranged. Whereas he could once say with certainty what weapons were on the black market, and what they were selling for, he was now clueless. “It’s not like I can look that up on the CIA website,” he says. “Once we stopped paying people and talking to people, it’s not like other agencies picked up the slack. We have a big blind spot.”
Whiteley, now 34, was discharged from the Army in 2005 and is a corporate lawyer about to relocate to DC. He says that everyone he’s talked to who’s still serving in Iraq says conditions have worsened, that things are as bad as they were in 2004.
As for what should be done, he’s not quite sure. On a large scale, he understands that the war will never be won with money, but on a small scale, he thinks it’s as necessary to the average soldier as body armor.
“The Army should authorize everyone from captains and below to carry a sum of $1,000,” he says, and he’s not even sure how or if that money should be accounted for. “They need it to pay people in the street, to buy an Iraqi set of eyes in a school, to pay people when you run someone over with a Humvee. The Army needs to look at it as a combat multiplier, as further force you bring to bear against the enemy.”
If money is going to continue to be lost, he thinks, there’s no better way to lose it. That said, he believes the war is interminable, that the US can’t win nor can we leave, that we’ll wind up a decades-long presence, the way we remain in South Korea and Germany still. He also fears that his book will wind up shelved in the history section; the story he tells, he says, remains a current one, iterations playing out in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya. He didn’t set out to write a polemic, but he knows it would be disingenuous to say he doesn’t have a message, that he’s not still bitter about the Army’s bean-counting compared to the government’s gargantuan losses of weaponry and cash throughout the region.
“You know the saying, ‘penny-wise, pound-foolish?’ ” he says. “We’ve somehow misplaced billions from the initial mission. I think anyone supporting these policies would do well to consider that it’s a messy process, and it has an ambiguous outcome. At best.”
