Is the Bailout Manager Kashkari CIA or Intel?

He certainly has an odd background, and suspicious switches in career paths:

Neel Kashkari: Space engineer to `bailout czar'

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Today he's known as the 35-year-old whiz kid appointed czar of the Treasury Department's $700 billion financial bailout. But in a past life, he was a young engineer working on the James Webb Space Telescope, planned as the even-more-intricate successor to the iconic Hubble.

Even then, Kashkari's job was about maintaining stability and confidence.

His work for NASA contractor TRW Inc. — helping create a key latch — was meant to keep the telescope from shaking apart in the "mini-earthquakes" it would endure in orbit, said his former supervisor, Scott Texter. Using pioneering techniques, Kashkari rigged up devices in the company's Smart Structures Lab that measured distances to a precision of "an atom or two" and proved that the telescope could remain steady.

"He's a guy who tries to prevent dynamical disturbances, whether they were structural or financial," said Texter, manager of the telescope portion of the project for Northrop Grumman Corp., which acquired the division of TRW that was working on the NASA contract. "I'm not at all surprised that the skills that Neel had ... as an engineer could be well brought to bear. I wish we had more engineers in Congress."

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Neel Kashkari — his first name can be translated as "blue" but is also an ancient Indian mathematical term for the number 10 trillion — was born in Akron, Ohio, and grew up in Stow, south of Cleveland.

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With bachelor's and master's degrees from Illinois — and a future wife, Minal, also an engineer — Kashkari went to work in 1998 for TRW in Redondo Beach, Calif., where he was a principal investigator in research and development.

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Kashkari shaved his head even back then, prompting colleagues to tease that he looked like a character from the Brendan Fraser "Mummy" movies. Watching him tool around in his prized Corvette, it seemed to Texter that Kashkari was "the sort of person who wanted a more high-profile, affluent sort of existence than being what an engineer would generally afford."

So, his co-workers were caught off-guard when Kashkari sold the black sports car and signed up for an MBA course at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

"We never talked about money," said Allen Bronowicki, who shared lab space with Kashkari at TRW's Building R4.

While at Wharton, Kashkari volunteered for a rigorous "leadership venture experience" at the U.S. Army's battle simulation lab at Fort Dix, N.J. The exercise involved a mock cease-fire in Bosnia, and the students were broken up into teams representing NATO, the Red Cross, the Army and other organizations coordinating to get relief to 300 refugees.

Professor Michael Useem ran the exercise and said Kashkari's willingness to put himself through the Army simulation revealed his drive and his abilities to function under "trying and, sometimes, even hostile conditions."

"He's been invested with enormous authority ... at one of the most critical junctures of our generation," said Useem, director of Wharton's Center for Leadership and Change Management, adding that he understood why someone with Kashkari's qualities was chosen.

It was during a summer internship at the investment bank and securities firm Goldman Sachs Group Inc. that Kashkari "really got that passion" for high finance, his sister said. In 2002, he joined Goldman Sachs in San Francisco, where he headed the information technology security investment banking practice.

In February 2006, Kashkari had a meeting in New York with Paulson, then the firm's chairman and chief executive officer, to talk about his interest in public service. When he heard of Paulson's nomination in July, he called him back.

"`Hank,'" he recalled saying. "`Do you remember that conversation we had a few months ago? If you're putting a team together, I want to come with you.'"

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Kashkari was sworn in as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for International Economics and Development in July, but his immediate boss, Under Secretary for International Affairs David H. McCormick, has had to share him with Paulson quite a bit as Kashkari has attended to "Job 1 for the Treasury — for the country."

Skepticism of the government's ability to steer us out of this crisis is high — a wag commenting on a Wall Street Journal story jokingly dubbed the new bailout czar Neel "Cashandcarry" — but McCormick cautions anyone thinking Kashkari is too young and too inexperienced to shoulder such a monumental load.

"He's very analytic. He's very fact-based. He's very unemotional," said McCormick, sitting in the office suite from which Andrew Johnson ran the country in the wake of another national crisis — the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. "I don't mean lacking emotion toward the toll these housing market challenges are having on everyday Americans, the impact of the financial market situation on families. ..."