Piles of US currency, hundreds of millions of dollars so far, are being found in Iraq, even though the country has been under economic sanctions for nearly 13 years.
Investigators -- on the ground in Iraq and in the US -- are trying to track the money back to where it came from, a Herculean task, both officials and outside experts say.
The experts say there are plenty of possibilities, including oil and cash smuggling schemes, illegal trade deals, sham businesses and a web of middlemen located outside the country to conceal the true destination of the funds.
"Identifying a money trail can be very difficult to do. That's why it is so essential that some documentation of financial records is discovered. Then investigators can go backward and trace the movements of the funds," said Jimmy Gurule, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame.
Gurule recently served as the Treasury Department's undersecretary for enforcement in charge of the government's efforts to catch terrorists' financiers. He left the job in early February.
Investigators also are looking into whether any of the cash found in Iraq was counterfeited.
"We are working with the military to authenticate the seized currency," said John Gill, a spokesman for the Secret Service, which handles counterfeiting investigations.
In Baghdad, US soldiers -- trying to stop looting -- discovered more than US$600 million in tightly wrapped packets of new US$100 dollar bills hidden behind a false wall, US military officials said Tuesday. The US$100 bill is the most counterfeited US note outside the US.
In a neighborhood along the Tigris River, where senior Baath Party and Republican Guard officials lived, US forces found some US$656 million in US currency, the Los Angeles Times reported last week.
"When you discover such a huge amount of US currency, you know you are not dealing with Boy Scouts," said Robert Bonner, commissioner of the US Bureau of Customs and Border Protection.
US President George W. Bush's administration wants any genuine US currency found in Iraq to be used to help the people of the country, US Treasury Department officials said.
Tracing the movement of cash is difficult. Serial numbers on US currency are sometimes useful, but their help is limited, experts said. Information is kept allowing people to track bills' movements from the Federal Reserve to their first destination point, but not beyond that, a Treasury official explained.
Separately, roughly US$1.2 billion in illicit Iraqi assets have been recently uncovered abroad, said Treasury Department officials, who would not disclose details.
US officials believe there is more Iraqi money that hasn't been found, a major focus of investigators.
A General Accounting Office report last year said that Iraq generated US$6.6 billion in illegal revenue from oil smuggling and other schemes from 1997 to 2001.
Following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, former US President George H.W. Bush imposed an embargo on Iraq in August of 1990, essentially banning business and trade with the country and ordering banks to block any assets belonging to the Iraqi government that were found in the US.
The embargo, among other things, also forbade US banks to transfer funds to Iraq.
Around the same time, the UN put economic sanctions on Iraq. But in 1995, the UN approved an "oil-for-food" program in which a certain amount of Iraqi oil was allowed to be sold and the proceeds were to be used to buy food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies.
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