EXCLUSIVE: PLANE? FOUND. CASH? STILL MISSING.

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By Mark Hosenball

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Before the first bomb fell on Baghdad, the Bush administration announced it was launching a campaign to find and seize what were believed to be billions of dollars squirreled away by Saddam Hussein and his cronies. But tracing and repatriating the clan's stolen assets is proving a more daunting task than U.S. officials anticipated.

Take the case of a private jet that investigators now believe was used before the war by Saddam and his entourage. Months ago the United States got a tip that the jet, a Falcon 50, had turned up on the ground in Amman, Jordan. A check of the plane's tail number, HB-IES, showed it was registered in the Alpine tax haven of Liechtenstein to a company called Aviatrans, whose director was a Swiss lawyer who for years had been on the radar of investigators tracking Saddam's assets. The lawyer, Jacques Buchi of Fribourg, did not respond to requests for comment from NEWSWEEK. But he recently told Swiss journalist Martin Stoll that he had been asked to take over the management of Aviatrans by a diplomat from Iraq's Mission to the United Nations in Geneva, which used to be headed by Saddam's half brother, Barzan al-Tikriti, now a prisoner of U.S. forces. (Sources say Buchi, who denies any wrongdoing, has also acknowledged that he managed a Swiss company that held title to a villa near Cannes, which French authorities believe also was owned by Saddam.) Investigators say the United States recently got in touch with witnesses who have firsthand knowledge of how the plane was used to fly members of Saddam's inner circle around the world. Liechtenstein authorities, whose efforts to seize the plane are praised by Washington, have started proceedings to liquidate the company that owns the plane. U.S. officials are debating whether the plane should be turned over to Baghdad for use by officials in a new Iraqi government or be sold on the open market, with the proceeds to go to reconstruction in Iraq.

Investigators say other "hard" assets belonging to Saddam have been located outside Iraq and about $4.5 billion worth of Iraqi assets and pilfered funds have been frozen worldwide. The freezing of an additional $1 billion is in the works. But officials acknowledge that ultimately the hunt for Saddam's treasure may turn up less than the tens of billions of dollars that some prewar estimates claimed he had stolen. Hundreds of millions in suspect Iraqi cash are held by financial institutions in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey--governments that are reluctant to turn the money over to Iraq's provisional government. U.S. officials say they still believe they have not discovered a number of large stashes of cash that Saddam and his retinue hid around Iraq before the war, and fear that money drawn out of these caches may now be playing a key role in financing the continuing campaign of deadly attacks on U.S. and other Coalition troops.

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