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.