In Iraq, the Job Opportunity of a Lifetime

High Salaries

Working at the CPA was, as Ledeen described it, a bunch of "high highs" and "low lows."

They would get up at dawn, after a fitful night of sleep in the coed hallways of the palace where alarm clocks started going off at 4 a.m. They would spend the rest of the day shuttling back and forth between the CPA headquarters and the Ministry of Finance. Meals were cafeteria food devoured with plastic utensils.

The pay turned out to be good. Ledeen and her co-workers had agreed to come to Iraq without knowing their salaries. They ended up with standard government base salaries in the range of $30,000 to $75,000 a year, plus a 25 percent foreign differential, another 25 percent for a workplace "in imminent danger," and overtime pay. In the end, almost everyone was making the equivalent of six-figure salaries.

The group's primary responsibility was to hand out money. Each month, it sent out authorizations for the release of several hundred million dollars for government employees' salaries, reconstruction projects and sundry other expenses.

But they were also involved in higher-level policy decisions -- revising the 2004 budget, shifting around money as priorities changed and formulating plans for replacing the food baskets Iraqi families got each month with cash payments.

They also had to deal with teachers in Basra, police in Karbala and others who came to say they were not getting paid at all -- or that they wanted more. A justice official grumbled that the money for prisoners' food had not been released. Security guards at one ministry demanded to know why their friends at another ministry were earning more money than they.

Once, Ledeen remembered, a bank in Baghdad refused to release money to a U.S. military division even though it had the appropriate paperwork. That meant the commander couldn't pay his Iraqi workers, who couldn't feed their families, raising the public's anger at U.S. forces.

So Ledeen raced to the bank to plead with its officials. It didn't work. Then a woman from the Iraqi Ministry of Finance showed up. The bank manager took a look at the paperwork, nodded and released the money.

"It was the same damn letter" the Army captain had given them the week before, Ledeen said with a sigh.

That was one of a limited number of excursions she made into the streets. The budget team, which wielded so much power over Iraq, was isolated from regular Iraqi life. Among the team members' greatest frustrations was how difficult it was to leave the Green Zone. Still, members of the team became close to the three Iraqi translators who worked with the budget team: Nada, an older woman who fretted over everyone's well-being, and Raghad and Hadeel, both twenty-somethings who were best friends and always cracking jokes. The newcomers took comfort in the cross-cultural friendship with women their own age. Later, that would turn to anguish.

Just the Basics

The staffers' good will, hard work and willingness to stay in Iraq impressed CPA representatives from other ministries, but it did little to alter the reality that the budget office had become a bottleneck.