Legal Eagle

Heading up the legal office at the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, Christina Sanford helped craft a plan for replacing Iraq's interim government.

When Christina Sanford turned 30 in August 2004, she celebrated the milestone by going out with friends and colleagues. The gathering was far from your typical birthday party, though. Sanford had arrived in Baghdad a month earlier to head the U.S. Embassy's legal office in Iraq, and she toasted her new decade at the Green Zone's finest establishment, the famous Al-Rashid Hotel.

Sanford's position normally would have been filled by someone with much more experience. But not many people were jumping at the chance to spend time in Iraq, and Sanford had earned the respect of her superiors early on at the State Department. She started her career there on Sept. 10, 2001. When terrorists attacked New York and Washington the next day, she threw herself into helping facilitate evacuations of embassies in countries where Americans might be in danger. "Immediately, I felt like I was working on something important," she says. Her efforts didn't go unnoticed; Sanford was asked to serve as special assistant to the department's chief legal adviser.

In Baghdad, Ambassador James Jeffrey, the State Department's coordinator for Iraq policy, was prepared to intervene if Sanford got in over her head. Instead, she exceeded everyone's expectations-taking a lead role in Iraq's transition from an appointed government to an elected one, and in securing property for a new U.S. embassy in Baghdad. "I know of nobody who, in such a junior position, did so extraordinarily well at the highest levels of the U.S. government," Jeffrey says.

Sanford's "shining moment," says Jeffrey, occurred after the Iraqi elections in January 2005, when she helped craft a plan for replacing the interim government. She reviewed other countries' constitutions and parliamentary systems, then worked with Iraq's deputy prime minister to develop several options-including a rolling transition, in which elected officials would gradually replace the interim government, and a "big bang" transition, in which the transfer of power would occur all at once.

Sanford then sat down with Iraq's chief justice and reviewed the relevant legal and political factors. She had favored the big bang approach, but together they crafted a two-part plan where the legislative branch would take power before the executive arm. "We had an idea, and the Iraqis took it as their own and shaped it to fit their political means," she says.

Sanford also served as the lead U.S. attorney in negotiations for a new embassy in Baghdad-a process complicated by a typographical error that raised questions about whether the interim government had authority to assign property to foreign governments. Sanford had to convince the attorney for the prime minister that the Iraqis could come to the table. "Here's this 30-year-old lawyer saying 'No, no, your government does have the authority to do this,' " she says.

The security situation didn't make her work any easier. Sanford often had to travel outside the Green Zone, and yet even within its relative protection, the area where she lived was shelled regularly-at 6:30 in the morning and 8:30 at night. On many days, she and her team had to put on flak vests and helmets while working at their desks as mortars landed nearby. "You just keep working because there's a lot to do," Sanford says. "We felt like we had a purpose."