On an ordinary evening in early January, Judge Radhi Hamza al-Radhi shuffles through the tile-and-glass canyons of the Springfield Mall in Northern Virginia. No one notices him. He doesn't exactly look like a wanted man. He is a bespectacled 63-year-old Iraqi with receding white hair, a clipped mustache, a burn scar from childhood on his crooked nose, and distinctive black eyebrows. Smelling faintly of Aramis cologne, he shambles along, searching for something to do. In his tweed coat and brown shoes, he looks more like a college chemistry professor than the hardened crime fighter he was before everything went wrong and he had to run. (View slideshow.)

The judge comes here daily, sometimes twice a day—it's a three-minute walk from his new suburban hideout. He spends the time walking, gazing into the storefronts, observing faces, but mostly he's lost in thought. Occasionally, his eyes flicker up to the mall's second floor, as if he's looking for his enemies. But they are not there.

We stop at a western-wear shop, where he likes a tall, black Stetson hat, and stroll through Target, his favorite store because it has what he needs for his new life and, as he says, "there are so much sales." We stand near a blinking carousel and watch it turn.

After an hour or so, he enters a Brookstone store and falls into a massage chair. As the mechanical nubs knead his back, he recalls the way his life was in Iraq, 6,300 miles away, where he mingled with world leaders and fought the most important battle of his life. "It seems so long ago," he says. "I never thought it would end this way."

Before he fled Iraq, Radhi was the head of Iraq's Commission on Public Integrity, where he policed the country's government and investigated its biggest cases of bribery and financial chicanery. Set up and paid for, in part, by the United States, the agency was Iraq's F.B.I., and Radhi was compared to Eliot Ness, who took down the Chicago Mob in the 1930s. Stuart Bowen, the U.S. special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, described Radhi as his "most reliable partner...in Iraq," and Chuck Grinnell, a senior C.P.I. adviser, remembers, "He was one of the good guys, one of the few in Iraq."

The judge was appointed to the post by Ambassador Paul Bremer in the summer of 2004, almost a year after the U.S.-led invasion. At the time, Iraq was a free-for-all, with competing gangs and criminals gunning for a seemingly endless flow of reconstruction cash. The prevailing view held that the C.P.I. was vital to the advancement of the near-broke country, a sentiment reflected by President Bush in a 2005 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. "Listen," he told a crowded ballroom at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, "the Iraqi people expect money to be spent openly and honestly, and so do the American people." He would tout the C.P.I. again a month later, in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

The judge's job was, simply put, to figure out where the money was going. Billions of dollars were being wasted or stolen outright in Iraq, including $8.8 billion that went unaccounted for in 2003 and 2004. Many of Iraq's leaders were either directly participating in the thievery or quietly supporting it through hired guns, who later waged sectarian wars in the streets. Radhi was supposed to track down the criminals, stanch the hemorrhaging of money, and put an end to the corruption that was dubbed the "second insurgency" by Bowen and considered a principal source of funding for the terrorist groups that the U.S. military was trying to crush.

The Ministry of Interior, for instance, resembled a Mafia organization. Instead of working to guarantee the country's security, many of its officials, the judge discovered, were engaged in bribery, contract killing, and kidnapping. Hundreds of ghost workers collected wages that totaled more than $1 million a month. Meanwhile, the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia devoted to cleric Moktada al-Sadr, had fully commandeered the ministries of health, trade, and transportation. Its soldiers, with the tacit approval of ministry employees, stole food and medical supplies, among other things, and resold them to fund the insurgency against the Americans and the Sunnis, the minority that still held power after Saddam Hussein's ouster. Over time, ambulances ferried weapons and mercenaries, while hospitals became integral to the militia's sectarian killing machine. Shiite soldiers executed Sunni patients and then killed family members listed in their medical files.

The Oil Ministry had many of the same problems. After the invasion, President Bush claimed that oil revenues would pay for most of Iraq's reconstruction. But even with the U.S. investing huge sums in oil projects, revenues weren't and still aren't covering costs, though $3 billion has been spent to date. Aging infrastructure and insurgents' attacks on pipelines were part of the trouble. But the biggest challenge was that criminal groups were stealing from depots and hijacking transport trucks, sometimes in collusion with ministry officials. Monthly, the state oil industry lost up to $90 million, and the judge claims that more than half of the smuggling profits went straight into local terrorism.

Although Radhi was officially in charge of investigating how the Iraqi government spent its budget, his work also uncovered how millions of American tax dollars were being diverted and used to bolster militia groups. The most visible way those American tax dollars ended up in the hands of the bad guys in Iraq was through U.S. capacity-building programs meant to help train ministry officials in everything from budgeting to delivering basic government services.

A recent Government Accountability Office report shows that the U.S. invested $169 million in these programs at about half a dozen of the most critical ministries in 2005 and 2006. Because the militias infiltrated most, if not all, of these ministries, the capacity-building money is, by extension, helping build the militias. In other words, by funding ministries, we are working against ourselves.

The amount of American tax money that has gone to the Iraqi militias is impossible to nail down, though Radhi says it could be tens, if not hundreds, of millions. So far, the U.S. has spent about $48 billion on Iraq reconstruction, with a notable chunk of that money passing through the agencies Radhi was investigating. Chris King, a former adviser to the judge at the State Department, says, "The worst elements in Iraq smile at us and take our money, but we're getting played. I went to the Justice Department guys and said, 'You are funding and training death squads. You can't say no one told you. I told you. You are funding death squads.' I have no doubt that U.S. reconstruction cash is funding militias."

Those death squads eventually targeted the judge. As his team built cases against some of the country's most powerful people—businessmen, clerics, politicians, warlords—threats came back. Grim voices muttered over cell phones, "Stop your investigations now" and "Do you know who you are messing with?" Soon his investigators and their families were dying: one body full of bullets, another hung on a meat hook, another disfigured with a power drill. There were sniper attacks and suicide bombers. Government officials blocked his investigations. Sometimes he spent the night at safe houses with friends, who increasingly worried that he would be killed.

The U.S., strangely enough, did not step in. Some said the U.S. was afraid to take sides, wary of alienating its allies in the Shiite-dominated government. Others suggested that Radhi's probes were becoming an embarrassment to the Bush administration, highlighting yet more trouble for a U.S. war effort that was already under siege. "There was a lack of due attention, political will, and support in the senior levels of the U.S. government," King says.

Still, the judge didn't waver. He worked through the interim and transitional Iraqi governments and through the rise of a newly sovereign Iraq. By the summer of 2007, even as his close advisers "focused solely on his survival," as one says, Radhi had launched almost 3,000 corruption cases. The accused included shady American companies and entrepreneurs, Iraqi ministers, and at least one member of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's family. The total haul: $18 billion—a number as mind-boggling and damning to Iraqi politicians as it was to the Bush administration.

It was around this time that the missile came for Radhi.

It came hurtling out of the still-dim morning sky as the judge stood in a bath towel on the first floor of his walled compound at the edge of Baghdad's Green Zone. Around 6 a.m., the scorching late-July sun was just creeping over the mortar-scarred city's horizon. His family and bodyguards were still asleep in the two-story house. Everything was silent, except for some birds singing in the garden's olive trees.

When it hit, the missile made a huge thump that obliterated the morning quiet and convulsed the house like an earthquake. The memory of it still consumes the judge. He closes his eyes and tells me, "I thought I was dead." The missile, launched from a truck and believed to be about nine feet long, was meant to kill him and end his investigations. Most everyone agreed on this point. Yet somehow he survived. As the noise of the blast diminished, he stood in the hall, unshaven and barefoot, shards of glass and debris on the floor. The missile had hit an empty house across the street, now a smoldering pile of rubble. There were prayers of thanks to a gracious God, but the near-hit made the judge wonder if he had pressed things too far. The missile strike wasn't the last; a few weeks later, another arrived, destroying the empty house behind his, signaling to him that it was only a matter of time before the next rocket would hit its mark.

He decided he couldn't go back. He had a family—a wife and a daughter, who was eight months pregnant. The idea of being driven away by his enemies ate at him, but he felt he had no choice. "Radhi didn't leave for himself," Grinnell, the C.P.I. adviser, says. "He would have died in Iraq. But it became too much, and he left so that his family could survive."

After a trip to Washington last summer, Radhi resigned his C.P.I. job and asked the U.S. government for asylum. He had a couple of bags, a small amount of cash, and no idea where he would go.

In October, the judge began his move from a world he knew into much more uncertain terrain. Appearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Capitol Hill, he testified about his findings of corruption that reached all the way to the prime minister's office.

It was a huge story. Many people called the judge a hero, but others—particularly officials in the State Department, which had helped create him—distanced themselves. Documents detailing Iraqi corruption were retroactively classified, and staff members were instructed not to talk about the judge's allegations against the Maliki government. According to people involved in his case, the administration didn't know what to do with a man who was painting a negative picture of its efforts in Iraq, where it wanted people to believe that the situation was improving.

Things only got worse for Radhi. Soon after his arrival in the U.S., the Iraqi government called for his arrest and prosecution, citing smuggled documents, corruption, and libel, and his pension was cut off. He shacked up in a budget hotel in a Virginia suburb but ran out of money after two weeks. An acquaintance kindly lent him an unfurnished townhouse. After his family and that of his security chief—11 people in all—were evacuated from Iraq, they joined him in Virginia. They shared three queen-size mattresses on the floor and coexisted amid a sad shipwreck scene of plastic lawn furniture, TV tables, pillows that served as couches, secondhand clothes, and donated food, most of which was shipped in by local Quakers, who had taken an interest in the refugees.

His asylum proceedings stalled as the State Department instructed employees not to support the judge in his flight from Iraq. "Team, I have ordered our current C.P.I. staff not to write any letters in support of Judge Radhi," one email read. When I called the State Department, no one wanted to comment on the judge. Once a key U.S. partner in rebuilding Iraq, Radhi had implausibly become both a wanted man and a castaway.

At night, he lay awake next to his wife on a mattress on the floor wondering what had gone wrong. He had suddenly become a man without a country.

I first meet the judge a couple of weeks after his congressional hearing. He sits upright in a white plastic lawn chair with a cardboard box of old personal documents next to him. Except for the two bags of clothes, the box was nearly all he'd carried with him from Baghdad. It contains just about the only items that testify to his existence—family photo albums, résumés, diplomas, and report cards from as far back as grade school. As Radhi pages through the files, he speaks through a translator, sometimes pausing to put a finger to his forehead as if in search of a distant memory. He wears a desert-brown suit with a yellow tie, and dark rings sag around his hard brown eyes. Though he looks as if he hasn't slept in weeks, he is surprisingly upbeat. "Things will get better," he tells me. "I'm hopeful."

This says a lot.

The judge, a secular Shiite, was born in 1945, the second-youngest of 10. Hamza Radhi al-Ketany, his father, was a successful seed merchant; his mother, a homemaker. The family lived in a cramped house in downtown Kut, a river city of about a half-million in eastern Iraq. After high school, he traveled to Beirut, Lebanon, for college, then returned to Iraq for law school at Baghdad University.

It was there, in the summer of 1968, that he caught his first glimpse of Saddam Hussein, a rising force in the Baath Party, which had recently seized power in a bloodless coup. Standing in front of about 1,000 law students in an auditorium, Hussein pulled out a pistol and began firing. Windows shattered and students ran.

Although some at the time hailed the Baath Party—baath is Arabic for renaissance—as the future of Arab unity and socialism, people who didn't join began to disappear, and fear infected the country. Intelligence agents were everywhere, and one night in 1970, at around midnight, they arrived at the 25-year-old Radhi's house in Kut, where he had a private law firm.

Radhi says that he was forced into a black Volkswagen sedan, blindfolded, and transported to the Palace of the End prison in Baghdad. There, he was asked why he had not joined the party. Radhi replied that he was not political. He was tied up, beaten with bats, hung upside down from a steel ceiling fan, given electric shocks, and thrown into a cell the size of a coffin. All night, he heard screams and moans emanating from prisoners in the hundreds or thousands of other cells around him.

After 100 days, he was released. His keepers told him not to speak of the place, though he would always have jagged white scars on his arms and back, as well as a soft spot about the size of a quarter on his skull, where the bats had done their work. He attempted to return to his life. Marriage helped to some extent. He wedded his cousin, a pretty brown-haired woman with whom he had grown up in Kut, and they had three children.

Later, Radhi joined the Ministry of Labor, where he inspected working conditions at regional factories and gained a reputation as a diligent and honest investigator. Seven years later, in 1977, he enrolled in the prestigious Judicial Institute, a two-year training program for the country's top judges and attorneys general.

Most of the students there were aligned with the Baath Party. Radhi still wasn't, which was why police returned when he was a year into the program, arrested him again, and interrogated him for another 10 days.

Hussein officially came to power in the summer of 1979. The next year, the country went to war with Iran. Radhi was appointed to a social post, where he spent the next eight years finding housing and schooling for children whose parents were battlefield casualties. In 1984, two of the judge's cousins disappeared after they were deemed to be communists; a third cousin, who refused to serve in the army, was executed by firing squad.

Despite being on the political and social fringe, the judge was eventually hired by the Ministry of Justice as an attorney for a job handling mainly civil cases.

As most of his colleagues were Baath Party members, Radhi says the position began to wear on him. He heard about disappearances and deaths of "traitors." After three years, he quit, and for the next decade, he disappeared from the public sector.

During the next few years, Radhi kept a small law practice and lived as if politics didn't exist. He traveled to Yemen and Jordan searching for work, spending months at a time away. Nothing panned out, and his family struggled to get by. But then American soldiers arrived in March 2003, and after almost two decades, his hope returned. "I believed things were about to change," he says. "The bombing happened, and Saddam was gone. And I thought that I could help rebuild. I dreamed of a different place."

In November 2003, Bremer and his team devised the C.P.I. and began searching for the right person to fill its top post. Grinnell, the C.P.I. adviser, interviewed more than a dozen Iraqi candidates. With so much money at stake, the Americans knew it would probably be the most dangerous job in Iraq, pitting an unelected official earning $5,000 a month against the country's strongest political players—some of whom commanded death squads.

Many candidates dropped out, but Radhi was undeterred. "When we told him about the danger, he said to me—and I remember this vividly—'God will not take me one second before he is ready to see me,'" Grinnell says. Even though what Radhi said was a common phrase in Arabic, Grinnell says, "that shocked me about Radhi, because when you look at him, he doesn't look physically strong. But he has a presence that is felt."

The C.P.I. was charged with tracking Iraq's $30 billion to $40 billion annual budget through the murky channels of government and determining how much of it went into reconstruction and how much was wasted or stolen. To get the agency off the ground, the U.S. invested between $7 million and $12 million in it. As with most of Iraq's burgeoning institutions, a handful of adventurous Americans served as advisers. In this case, they came from the Coalition Provisional Authority and later the State Department. At first, the C.P.I. had only a few investigators, but its team in Baghdad eventually expanded to include 180 employees, with about 700 supplemental workers and several offices sprinkled around the country.

And so it began. After a three-week training session, which took Radhi to the U.S. for the first time, he and his family moved into a protected house in Baghdad's Green Zone, and an office was assembled in a crumbling concrete building. Almost immediately, people began referring to the office as the Zoo, because it and five other C.P.I. properties occupied the city's former zoo grounds, now devoid of animals and overgrown with weeds. On the border with the Red Zone, as the rest of the city is ominously known, the Zoo was so far removed from the other buildings in the Green Zone that one American adviser, former New Hampshire Superior Court judge Arthur Brennan, described it as a "lonely outpost" suffused with a "Doctor Zhivago sense of bleakness and tragedy and inexplicable hope."

The days were long, starting at 6 a.m. and sometimes stretching well past midnight. Radhi would head home just as the Army snipers up in a nearby roost began burning their nightly fire to stay warm in the desert chill. The judge says he drank a lot of tea to stay alert, and the TV in his office, always tuned to CNN, supplied a constant soundtrack. The work was immensely complicated and was focused on Iraq's ministries, staffed for the most part by people who had never run a government agency.

It's difficult to investigate financial corruption under the best circumstances. But in Iraq, where some ministries were armed to the teeth and potential witnesses were either complicit, beholden to someone, or too terrified to speak, the investigations took on another layer of difficulty. Expectations of basic investigative work didn't take into account the ugly reality on the ground: armed bandits prowling the streets, sectarian militias battling for territory, insurgent warfare coming alive, droves of people disappearing daily, and most forms of trust nonexistent.

Almost immediately, the responsibilities of the detective job sucked up most of Radhi's time. He moved slowly, telling his men, "Shway, shway" (Step by step). Through interviews, audits, and official documents, the judge and his staff uncovered an anarchic and opaque world. Contracts were vague; nepotism and bribery abounded; budgets were filed the old-fashioned way, on paper; and cash by the truckload was vanishing abroad into private bank accounts or being funneled to militias. If you had a brain and some political connections, you could walk away from Iraq a millionaire. "Corruption was everywhere," the judge says. "Everywhere."

It took about a year for Radhi to collect enough evidence to begin passing his cases to the investigative court. And then rulings and a slew of arrest warrants put criminals on notice. Among the most stunning of the cases was a billion-dollar heist from the Ministry of Defense, where the Americans had handpicked the leaders, Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan and his deputy, Ziad Tariq Cattan. Before the U.S.-led invasion, the two men had been exiles from Hussein's Iraq: Shaalan was a real estate agent in London; Cattan lived in Poland and sold used cars. Following Hussein's ouster, the men returned to their homeland and became high-ranking officials, commanding large budgets and charged with equipping the new Iraqi army.

Months into their appointments, according to official documents, the men asked the Iraqi interim government, led by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a Shiite, for $1.2 billion. They claimed it was for new military equipment. But the equipment that eventually arrived, the judge says, was cheap, old, and mostly unusable: run-down helicopters, knockoff machine guns, defective bulletproof vests, and ammunition that was on the verge of self-detonating. The judge found nebulous contracts with fake companies, with money flowing from the ministry into secret bank accounts abroad. More than $360 million worth of Polish-made Sokol helicopters, contracted through a "storefront company," were not delivered at all.

In September 2005, arrest warrants were issued for Shaalan and Cattan, but the men had already vanished with an alleged $850 million. Although both were later convicted of corruption and sentenced to dozens of years in prison (21 others were eventually charged in the case), they remain abroad, beyond the reach of Iraqi courts. Both Shaalan and Cattan have denied any wrongdoing. Cattan has even put up a website in hopes of clearing his name. But no money has yet been recovered.

The judge kept digging. By December 2005, months after a transitional Iraqi government led by Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari took over for Allawi, Radhi and his investigators had opened 800 cases, with more than 30 senior government officers appearing in criminal court and 91 cases scheduled to be brought before a judge.

Around this time, the backlash against the C.P.I. began. There were threats against Radhi and his crusaders, and in March, a suicide bomber strolled into the C.P.I.'s Mosul office and set off his device, killing himself and one of the agency's lead investigators, who had been looking into oil theft. Not long after, a C.P.I. security chief was executed on a Baghdad street along with his wife, who was seven months pregnant.

Iraqi ministries, meanwhile, started to shut their doors to Radhi's probes. It didn't help that the Jaafari government, following Allawi's lead, had restored a Hussein-era law that empowered the prime minister to exempt his cabinet from prosecution and gave ministers the authority to exempt their employees as well. Although Bremer had suspended the law when he created the C.P.I., the interim Iraqi government now claimed that the judge's cases were becoming politically motivated and had to be stopped.

When I ask Radhi about it, he laughs. "No one wanted us to investigate. If I investigated Kurds, the Kurds would say, 'You are biased. You are Arab.' If it was a Shia case, they would say, 'It's political.' If Sunni, they would say, 'You are Shia. You don't like us.' The people we were chasing wanted to stop us."

Amid this mayhem, investigators occasionally ran into Americans who sought to make dirty deals with Iraqi opportunists. The judge's lead investigator, Salam Jaddoa Adhoob, describes them as cowboys. "These guys operated with no rules. They came to Iraq to make fast money, and then they left with their pockets full," Adhoob tells me one night at his own safe house in a remote Virginia town, where he's lived since fleeing death threats more than six months ago.

According to Adhoob, one American business, the Hummer manufacturer AM General, signed a $59 million contract with the Iraqi Defense Ministry to provide the army with 500 armor-plated trucks. (General Motors bought the Hummer name in 1999, though AM General continues to manufacture the vehicle.) However, only 167 trucks arrived. Later, the AM General case and others involving Americans were, in accordance with a new policy, handed over to the inspector general's office. A government official concedes that a number of investigations are under way but wouldn't comment about AM General specifically except to say that "they are on everyone's radar." When I ask AM General about the allegations, Craig MacNab, a company spokesman, claims that he hasn't heard anything about them but cites a complex production process, made more difficult by turnover within the Iraqi Ministry of Defense. The remaining trucks are due to begin arriving in the spring of 2008—more than three years after the initial contract was signed.

In May 2006, following the country's parliamentary elections, Maliki became prime minister of the newly sovereign and Shiite-dominated Iraq. After two transitional governments and a lot of violence and lost money, Maliki promised transformation, though Radhi would come to see the ensuing months as particularly troublesome.

While Maliki spoke publicly about eradicating corruption, privately he began lobbying to bring Radhi's agency under his command. Maliki reenacted the controversial get-out-of-jail-free law. As a result, between September 2006 and February 2007, various ministers blocked at least 48 corruption cases involving a total of $35 million—not that the judge had the firepower to enter the ministries anyway. For those two years, Transparency International, the Berlin-based anticorruption watchdog, listed Iraq as the most corrupt country in the Middle East. Meanwhile, more suspected criminals fled, including 15 ministers, while more than 20 corruption-case judges were assassinated.

The tipping point for Radhi came when the imam who led the Iraqi Parliament's Shiite coalition demanded a meeting a few days after Saddam Hussein was executed, at the end of 2006. His name is Jala Alsaghir, but some call him the Lion. "He was the Lion because of his jaw that juts out," Radhi says, "and he is a very dangerous man."

In a dimly lit room, the Lion, surrounded by a dozen or so bodyguards, told Radhi, "Your cases are touching high-level Shia people. It is time for you to stop your job," Radhi recalls. The judge took Alsaghir's words as a threat on his life.

A week or so later, Alsaghir stood in front of Parliament and accused Radhi of corruption. Though nothing was officially done about the allegations, Radhi says that Alsaghir's words opened the floodgates of violence. "The people I was investigating realized that I was determined to keep investigating them and pursuing the rule of law," he explains.

By the end of 2006, 18 of Radhi's men were dead, and by the middle of 2007, another 10 were gone. The Maliki government, which had shored up power over the minority Sunnis, moved to further diminish Radhi's independence.

First, the prime minister summoned the judge to his office to talk about his investigations of the oil and defense ministers and demanded that he fire Adhoob. After Radhi refused to comply with Maliki's demand, an order was issued directing the judge to "stop the pursuit of previous and current ministers, unless done through the prime minister's office." Another official letter dismissed a corruption case against Maliki's cousin, Salam al-Maliki, the transportation minister.

It appeared that Maliki, whose party now dominated the country's most moneyed and powerful ministries, was squeezing out the judge. Vance Jochim, an American adviser to the C.P.I., urged the U.S. to intervene. "I kept bringing this up to the embassy," Jochim says. "Tell the Iraqis we won't give them something. Take away the free gasoline in the Green Zone. But the embassy would never do that."

That's because the State Department itself appeared to be backing away from the judge. "Judge Radhi went where angels feared to tread and thought he would be protected, but he wasn't," explains Ali Allawi, the Iraqi finance minister at the time. "The U.S. decided to abandon him once his gangbusting began to affect a large number of people who were U.S. allies—all the ministers and top-level Iraqi players. He was a very courageous man, but he went after too many friends of the U.S., and that got him in trouble."

Allawi said that if Radhi was intent on cracking down on the kingpins, "he should have built some political support around him. But he did not do that. He went after everyone at once, and that got him bombed."

Late in the spring of 2007, charges ranging from petty corruption to complicity in murder were leveled against Radhi in criminal court. Although the cases were ultimately dismissed, a radical Shiite cleric named Sheik Sabah al-Saadi, who had political ties to Prime Minister Maliki and oil-smuggling rings, pushed for a vote in Parliament to impeach Radhi.

In July, the U.S. embassy circulated a sensitive but unclassified report detailing the judge's alarming accounts of Iraqi corruption and greed, giving credence to his tale of the country's meltdown. By late summer, talk of his impeachment grew louder, and then the missile came gunning for him.

At the end of August, Radhi headed to Washington for training at the Justice Department. When he left for the airport, he kissed his wife and told her that things would be okay, though he feared that they would only get worse. As summer heat pummeled Baghdad, a missile struck the house behind his, nearly killing his family.

On October 4, Radhi testified in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Sitting at a long table, behind microphones and bottles of water, he recounted the story of the crimes his team had uncovered to members of the investigative committee. He told them about the rampant corruption among U.S. allies, including the Maliki government, and the theft of billions of dollars. He explained that reconstruction had almost stopped, that the lost money was propping up a terrorist movement that was ripping his country apart, and that the current government could not be trusted. "I have led my life governed by these few words: 'Law is above all. No one is above the law,' " he declared.

Comptroller General David Walker, Bowen, and Larry Butler, a deputy assistant secretary of state, also testified. Although Butler refused to discuss much of anything related to the judge's findings, Walker and Bowen spoke openly about Iraq's corruption problem. During his testimony, Bowen explained to the packed chamber that the loss of the judge was "a real blow to anticorruption efforts in Iraq. He was the most prominent corruption enforcer." Christopher Griffith, a C.P.I. adviser at the Zoo, echoed this during a prehearing interview, calling the judge "the most honest government-of-Iraq official that I have met in my 21 months in the country."

There was some antagonism in the room when Republican representative Dan Burton, of Indiana, questioned Radhi's authenticity. Referring to the "Saddam Hussein regime," under which the judge worked as a state lawyer, Burton wondered, "How did you get those jobs?" The judge, who spoke calmly through several hours of testimony, replied that he had been given the job based on his "hard work" but that he'd refused to follow orders and then quit. He reminded Burton that the Baath regime put him in prison and, as he put it, "broke my head."

The testimony was a blow to General David Petraeus, the commander of the multinational forces in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, who had testified three weeks earlier about signs of progress in the current military surge, which began in January 2007 with an infusion of 30,000 troops. Following Radhi's testimony, there was a lot of talk in Washington about what the death of 3,800 U.S. soldiers and the spending of $450 billion had actually accomplished in Iraq. Alluding to the judge's testimony in a Los Angeles Times editorial, Representative Henry Waxman, of California, the Democratic chairman of the House Oversight Committee, wondered, "Is Maliki's corruption worth American lives?"

And even when the violence in Iraq began to ebb—which the judge warns is only a strategic pause—the biggest question remained: Considering Radhi's evidence, can we really trust the people in power in Iraq?

When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was pressed in a subsequent oversight hearing about Iraq, she evaded numerous questions about the judge's testimony. For instance, she declined to comment on the specific allegation that the prime minister had obstructed a probe into a cousin's business dealings and claimed that she didn't know about Maliki's secret immunity order, which had been circulated in Rice's office weeks before her testimony, though she admitted that such an order would be "deeply concerning."

Asylum for Radhi could come through in six weeks or six months. It is hard to know, especially considering the order prohibiting State Department employees from supporting the judge's efforts. In a further twist, Bowen's Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, one of the judge's most prominent supporters, is now under investigation for overspending and mismanagement.

In the meantime, the judge and his family can't work or apply for benefits and must rely on others for almost everything—money, food, and transportation.

Shortly after the judge's testimony, the Iraqi government gave his old job to a Maliki crony, a man alleged to be an oil mobster, who immediately began an investigation into Radhi's work. Since then, many say that the C.P.I. has fallen into disarray, with no clear mandate.

The judge, for now, remains a wanted man in Iraq.

I visit Radhi for the last time in early January, just after his relocation to a new two-bedroom condominium. His daughter and son-in-law also have their own place, right down the hall, as does his security chief's family.

Today, his life has slowed down, almost to a glacial pace. He spends stretches of the day watching a flat-screen TV, seeking news from Iraq. He also reads from a dictionary to improve his English and emails friends back home.

His new existence is hard on him. He doesn't enjoy depending on the $2,000 a month donated to him and his family by friends. His life has always been one of independence and dignity. As the months pass, a creeping feeling of isolation swells in his mind, though he doesn't complain. Sitting in his living room, which is outfitted with secondhand furniture and items from Target, he mostly talks about how grateful he is that his family got out of Iraq alive. Asked if he is angry about anything that happened, he shakes his head. "I believe I did the right thing," he tells me.

Next to asylum, his biggest concern for the future is finding work. When I speak to Ali Allawi, Iraq's former finance minister, he says that this is exactly why the judge's case is tragic. A great and courageous man in his home country, Radhi is now a foreigner whose inability to speak English fluently renders his skills virtually useless. "It's sad," Allawi says. "He could end up sweeping floors on the late shift at a place like Wal-Mart."

During one of my conversations with the judge, I can't resist asking a dumb question: "Did you ever think about stealing just a little bit of money for yourself?"

He looks at me funny, like I've made a bad joke. There was so much money floating around over there, I say. Wasn't he at all tempted to reach into the pot and take a little for himself?

At first, he's not sure if he heard me correctly. So I ask him again, and he sort of smiles before he becomes serious and says, "The temptation was there. Lots of money was offered to forget cases. But I am not that man."

This is the point. If he were that man, he would be somewhere else. Baathists wouldn't have tortured him, and he wouldn't have been forced out of his country. That man wouldn't be sitting on a donated brown couch.

So what about the $18 billion? I wonder if any of it will be recovered. The judge says no. It is lost. He says militias are still active in many Iraqi ministries, which continue to receive millions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer money.

As he sits here, he knows he still has many enemies. But he is safe now, he believes. "I don't think there will be rockets coming for me."

Later, we go to the mall. It's my last night with him. He takes me on a tour of his daily haunts. When we exit, it is late and dark. As we walk toward his apartment, through a nearly empty and silent parking lot, a low-flying helicopter suddenly and violently disrupts the suburban quiet.

For a moment, the judge's head angles skyward, his eyes opening wider than I've seen them. "That is the sound of Iraq," he says over the noise. He nods happily.

I ask him, "Do you ever miss it, Iraq?"

"Sometimes," he responds, as he watches the helicopter pass overhead before it disappears, leaving silence again. "I miss my country. I miss my work of helping my country. But this is home now."