What's In The Cards?

With the surrender to U.S. authorities last week of Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, the Pentagon has nabbed at least a dozen of the 55 senior Iraqi officials in its most-wanted deck of cards. Soon after catching Aziz, the military scored again by seizing Farouk Hijazi, a former high-ranking Iraqi spy, at the Syrian border. Now that the big shots are in custody, what will the U.S. do with them? Although their final fate — including whether, and where, they will face trial — is still being debated, the Pentagon is hard at work on its first priority: getting the captives to talk. The hope is that Aziz and the rest will finally shed light on the war's lingering unknowns, including the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein, his two sons and any weapons of mass destruction.

Questioners will want to know where Saddam purportedly stashed away billions of dollars, much of it gleaned from illicit oil sales. A senior Bush Administration official tells TIME that the U.S. Treasury Department will soon send a team of experts to examine financial documents and interrogate Iraqi officials. Among those they wish to grill are former Finance Minister Hikmat Mizban Ibrahim al-Azzawi, who is expected to know about the flow of money through Iraqi banking networks into neighboring countries like Jordan and Syria, and Saddam's half brother Barzan al-Takriti, who is thought to have managed the family's fortune from Geneva. Treasury officials also have designs on Aziz, who, though principally a foreign-policy expert, may have helped place regime funds in financial centers like Liechtenstein and Austria.