Assigned to the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), which later became the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), from March through September 2003, Major Thomas Verell Jr. served as the aide-de-camp to then Major General Carl Strock who, at the time, was the ORHA engineer and then the CPA's deputy director of operations. "As General Strock's aide," Verell said, "I and a bunch of other very key individuals integrated ourselves from the US Army Corps of Engineers into ORHA to try to build the staff and get into the mission analysis of what Phase IV was going to look like. The first meeting we had with Lieutenant General (Retired) Jay Garner was in January 2003." In this interview, Verell provides a wealth of unique insights into the early formation, structure and evolution of ORHA/CPA, and he particularly discusses efforts to get the Corps of Engineers plugged into the two organizations, as well as the maneuver units, in order to get reconstruction projects up and running as quickly as possible. Deploying initially to Kuwait with ORHA in March 2003, Verell was one of roughly 400 individuals; and during the course of the next six months, what became CPA had grown to anywhere between 1,500 and 2,000 personnel - and as he noted, "growing that entire organization, doing many re-organizations basically while you're doing the mission, I just couldn't imagine doing that as a [military] division. You wouldn't even go." Verell also discusses his visibility over the de-Ba'athification process, the use of forward engineer support teams (FESTs) and his work with General Strock in "leveraging USACE resources to help ORHA and even USAID in its reconstruction of Iraq." In addition, he comments on the often vast cultural differences between US brigade/division commanders and members of the US Department of State, and the impact these had on everyone being able to strive towards a common goal. "Ambassador Paul Bremer and his team definitely had their idea of what needed to happen and he was very focused on the governance side and establishing the Iraqi government, which is very important. But sometimes there were disconnects with how the military was leveraged to support that end state. Now, what's the military's end state?" Verell asked rhetorically. "I think I saw two different organizations moving towards two different end states." Verell closes by sharing a rather uncommonly positive assessment of General Jay Garner and ORHA.

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited