All Roads Lead to Iran

But that wasn’t the end of the story, because in 2013, the collection was to be returned to the Iraqi government. Dr. Rhode, who said the return would be like giving the personal effects of Jews killed in the Holocaust back to Germany, launched a campaign to halt the transfer. Earlier this year, an Iraqi delegation was still petitioning senior US State Department officials for the collection’s return to Iraq.

Dr. Rhode, who was one of the architects of the US-led invasion of Iraq from his desk at the Pentagon, learned of the Jewish archive from his friend and Iraqi opposition leader Ahmad Chalabi, who had ties with the Bush administration. Rhode took a team of US soldiers who were on a search for weapons of mass destruction, to help him search the headquarters. The WMD team descended down a flooded basement staircase where they found the Jewish treasures. Rhode then persuaded Chalabi to provide small pumps to drain the water from the basement and hurriedly got money from a Wall Street executive to pay Iraqis to carefully remove the papers and lay them in the sunlight to dry.

“I ordered a few locals to start bailing out the water. Then, with permission of rabbanim, we spread everything out on the ground, the sifrei Torha and the megillos, seforim and documents. We worked on it for six weeks, but I realized that in order to salvage the treasure. I’d need to find other ways,” Dr. Rhode relates.

Dr. Rhode’s efforts to get the Pentagon and the State Department to help salvage the documents were ignored until he enlisted the help of some of his former Pentagon bosses who contacted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, as well as his personal friend Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident who was then an Israeli government minister. Sharansky asked Vice President Dick Cheney to help the project.