They stole a billion dollars, they only needed one letter.

When American troops first entered Baghdad in early April 2003, robbers had already entered the Iraqi Central Bank. There they could find most of the national currency reserves, but they failed to break the safes where most of the money was hidden.

However, just before there was one of the biggest bank robberies in history. About $1 billion overnight were extracted from bank vaults.

In fact, on the early morning of March 18, in the same year, three large trucks approached the bank. One man showed a piece of paper with a signature, and the robbery could begin. It takes several hours to carry over $900m and 100m euros, regularly packed in metal boxes. The man with the letter was Queen Hussein, and on paper was the inscription of Saddam Hussein, the father of Qusay and the then former dictator.

The letter simply stated that it was necessary to withdraw so much money that they did not fall into the hands of foreign invaders.

“Once you get a command from Saddam, don't talk any more,” had later described one of the senior officials for the New York Times, writes Ozzy.

As the Americans learned that a quarter of the cash reserves had disappeared from the central bank, they rightly began asking how Saddam would spend that money. The biggest fear was that he would finance the commander-in-chief against the Americans. However, when 650 million dollars in cash were found at Saddam's second son's palace, Uday, they believed they found most of that money. Later the money turned out to be Uday's private reserves.

Money did not disappear without a trace, and several hundred million dollars were soon discovered in one of Saddam's palaces. Americans sent the money for counting to Kuwait, and here history takes an anticipated turn.

Official Washington demanded the return of the money to the central bank from which they were taken, but the American authorities in Iraq decided to seize the money and share it with their discretion.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars appeared in the accounts of Richard Fuller, who was responsible for counting US dollars in Fallujah. Captain Michael Ngyuen “lost” about $700, and authorities suspected when he paid for the purchase of BMW and Hummer after returning to his home in Oregon. Nobody knows how much money from the Iraqi central bank ended up in someone's pockets.