Billions have gone missing, in one way or the other, in Afghanistan and Iraq—in overpriced private contracts, in missions started then abandoned, looking for W.M.D.s, frittered away on bribes or on whole delusional military campaigns. And sometimes bricks of shrink-wrapped hundred-dollar bills are just stolen from a plane. That, at any rate, is the current best guess as to what happened to $6.6 billion that went to Iraq in 2003 but that we just haven’t been able to find since. From a Los Angeles Times report:

For the first time, federal auditors are suggesting that some or all of the cash may have been stolen, not just mislaid in an accounting error. Stuart Bowen, special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an office created by Congress, said the missing $6.6 billion may be “the largest theft of funds in national history.”

It says a great deal abut the financial imprudence of this whole operation that, for years, auditors considered it plausible that the money might just be “mislaid” somewhere or the other, like a piece of paper on a very messy desk. This particular money came in on a few planes as part of a “cash airlift”; one of our lessons learned in Iraq, according to the L.A. Times, was that “one giant C-130 Hercules cargo plane could carry $2.4 billion.” (The paper measured the money another way: “enough to run the Los Angeles Unified School District” for a year.) After the planes landed in Baghdad, “millions of dollars were stuffed in gunnysacks and hauled on pickups to Iraqi agencies or contractors, officials have testified.”

How much effort, or lack of effort, would it take to steal billions of dollars in cash? To give a sense of the scale, the Lufthansa robbery, at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, in 1978, involved a van, several accomplices, about forty large parcels—and five million dollars in cash, a record-breaking heist but less than a thousandth of what looks to have been stolen in Iraq. Also: although we delivered the money, it was from an account of Iraqi funds accumulated during the years of sanctions. The Iraqi government would like us to pay it back.

The Baghdad airport job is not the only unresolved case from our war in Iraq, and money not the only thing lost; Time magazine reports that a grand jury is looking into the role of the C.I.A., and possible war crimes, in the death of a man photographed at Abu Ghraib, his body packed in ice.

Photograph of C-130 cargo plane by Master Sgt. Scott Wagers, U.S. Air Force, via Wikimedia Commons.