IN LATE APRIL 2003, some two weeks after the world watched jubilant Iraqis and U.S. Marines topple the tall statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad's Firdos Square, a small group of American officials began the thankless and dangerous task of recreating the Iraqi Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The team, led by Ambassador David Dunford, had been eager to get into the ministry sooner. They were told, however, that there were not yet enough U.S. troops in the Iraqi capital to secure that neighborhood. So they waited.

When the Americans saw a BBC reporter broadcasting live from inside the ministry, or MoFA as it became known, they pushed to get a military escort so that they might begin their job. It worked.

This small team soon got bigger--adding a military civil affairs officer, Iraqi-Americans under contract with the Pentagon, a British foreign service officer, a Romanian diplomat, and several Iraqis who had worked for the MoFA under Saddam Hussein.

In interviews, several of them described the ministry when they arrived. The building had been looted, stripped of many fixtures and even some of its electrical wiring. Iraqis described as "militias" were living in makeshift barracks on the ground floor.

The looting was haphazard and opportunistic, but the destruction of documents and torching of offices appeared to be well-planned. Still, some important items survived. Among the papers the MoFA team discovered was a map of the ministry with names of ministry officials and the suites they occupied. Offices of several senior officials had been severely damaged by fire; in others the team found piles of papers sitting untouched in the middle of the rooms, apparently awaiting destruction.

Last summer, almost by accident, I spoke to an Iraqi who had been in the ministry in those early days. I had sought him out to discuss another subject when he rather casually mentioned two documents the Americans had recovered. One was a memo from the director of Iraqi Intelligence, the Mukhabarat, from February 2003, with instructions to senior regime and intelligence officials in anticipation of a U.S. invasion. The other was a long list of jihadists who had been brought to Iraq before the war. I called around to check on his claims and received only vague confirmations of the documents' existence. No one else I spoke with had seen the documents or could provide more specific information, so I didn't report on them.

Then I saw Paul Bremer, former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, interviewed about his new book My Year in Iraq on the January 15 Meet the Press. Host Tim Russert asked Bremer about a document he describes in the book.

Said Russert: "You went back to Iraq, and they found a memo which they presented to you about the insurgency and again, it's in your book and this is a very important document. It's quite interesting." Russert read Bremer's words: "The document . . . listed orders for point-by-point strategy to be implemented after the probable collapse of the regime beginning with the order of 'Burn this office.' I read the translation. It did indeed call for a strategy of organized resistance which included the classic pattern of forming cells and training combatants in insurgency. 'Operatives' were to engage in 'sabotage and looting.' Random sniper attacks, ambushes to be organized. The order continued, 'scatter agents to every town. Destroy electric power stations and water conduits. Infiltrate the mosques, the Shiite holy places.'"

The contents of the document were virtually identical to the one described to me by the Iraqi, but Bremer told me he didn't know where the Mukhabarat document was found. At the suggestion of an Iraqi source, I called Ambassador Dunford and asked him about the Mukhabarat document Bremer describes in his book.

Said Dunford: "We pulled stuff out of there very early on. We gave it to something they were calling the fusion cell in the palace [CPA headquarters], but those guys just couldn't handle it. We never got a good sense of what was in all of the documents other than what we translated on the spot."