Did you ever hit a wall and think the story wasn't going to work? Or did it take any turns you didn't expect? Sounds like you kept unfolding one thing into another.

Barlett: That's basically the way we work at it. Sometimes it takes a little longer than other times. You just keep unraveling. This was clearly going to be a story from day one.

Steele: If the Pentagon had not come through with [the NorthStar] contract, there might've been a complication, but when it finally arrived, and we did some initial checks on NorthStar, we knew then that we had something. We didn't know what it was, but our instincts right away told us that this one was going to be good. Particularly since their mailing address was in the Bahamas.

Did you just plug that address into Google?

Barlett: Well, we don't like to talk about the secret methods of our investigations [laughter]. Our high-tech methods. That's the kind of thing that just destroys all the mystique.

Steele: One of the things that just absolutely amazed us when we got the contract for NorthStar Consultants was that they blacked out all kinds of pertinent data—part of the phone number, the name of the officer who signed the contract, whatever his operating address was—but they left on the contract this post-office box in Nassau, which turns out to be a focal point of an awful lot of offshore tax activity. Was this ineptitude? It just boggles the mind why they just did not redact that. But they didn't. And that was key toward unraveling an awful lot of the story.

Barlett: As it turned out, the post-office box—during the same period it was set up for the company that ultimately was supposed to track money in Iraq—was also used for one of the largest stock swindles in history. Over $200 million disappeared. And this is at the same time the company was being set up that would eventually get the Iraqi contract.

Steele: When we first got the contract, the last four digits of [NorthStar's] phone number were redacted, so when you plugged in the area code and the first three digits, you could figure out that this was somewhere in north San Diego or the La Jolla area. It occurred to us to do the same thing with the post-office box. The fact that anything at all turned up just amazed us. We try so many things just to see what's there, and that's just part of the process. And lo and behold, there were several hits on that post-office box, and one of them showed up this company, Lions Gate Management, which was [run by] this fellow Patrick Thomson, who, we found out later, actually set NorthStar up for [Thomas] Howell, the guy who actually ran NorthStar. Or "had" NorthStar would be a better term—it's not much of a company.

The two of you have been an investigative team for a long time now. How have the Internet and other technologies helped you to investigate stories like this?

Steele: The post-office box is the best example. Technically you could find that, but in reality you couldn't, because how would you know to look at a court case somewhere that would show that post-office box? The Internet was tremendously powerful and influential in helping us get to the heart of this thing. In the case of the post-office box, there was probably no other way to get it.

Barlett: There's a flip side to this. In this case the Internet was helpful, but you can also see and envision cases in which the Internet won't do you any good. There's a growing tendency to destroy court files. Under the old system, the record of a case was entered in ledgers, and it was basically impossible to destroy any evidence that the case existed. That's not true with the Internet. Now, with the flick of a switch, a case can disappear—and it does. So it cuts both ways.