WASHINGTON — As he prepared to sign a five-year contract as World Bank president in the spring of 2005, Paul Wolfowitz sent his personal lawyer, Robert Barnett, to negotiate the terms. Mr. Barnett, whose high-profile clients have included some of Washington’s biggest political and press figures, did not mince words in his meetings with the bank’s legal team.

Mr. Wolfowitz wanted more than a dozen amendments to the standard contract that had served the institution for decades, Mr. Barnett told them, including special dispensation for the books he would write and the paid speeches he planned to deliver, and a salary on par with that of the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, who was traditionally more highly paid.

A final sticking point, conveyed in all capital letters in an e-mail to then-general counsel Roberto Danino, was Mr. Wolfowitz’s insistence that, while he had earlier offered to recuse himself from all office matters involving bank employee and his girlfriend Shaha Riza, he insisted on retaining “professional contact” with her — something that the executive board later determined was a clear conflict of interest under personnel rules.

The Riza issue has come back to haunt Mr. Wolfowitz, as the bank’s executive board is now considering what to do about disclosures — contained in documents it released Friday — that Mr. Wolfowitz resolved the issue by personally arranging a bank salary and promotions for her in a temporary State Department post.

Testy exchanges and peremptory demands, similar to those made on his behalf by Mr. Barnett early in his tenure, quickly came to characterize Mr. Wolfowitz’s dealings with the institution’s staff and governors on a range of issues during his presidency, according to current and former senior bank officials and representatives of the bank’s member governments interviewed for this article, several of whom have worked closely with Mr. Wolfowitz. None would speak on the record, out of either fear of retribution or reluctance to become involved in the increasingly public controversy.

Mr. Wolfowitz has clashed with the staff over pay packages and authority he gave to aides Robin Cleveland and Kevin Kellems, whom he brought to the bank from the White House, installed in senior positions and rewarded with open-ended contracts and quarter-million-dollar, tax-free salaries, despite their lack of development experience.

Both staff and management also have raised concerns over what several described as Mr. Wolfowitz’s insistence that the bank accelerate its lending to Iraq and open an office there.

A principal architect of the Iraq war as deputy defense secretary during President Bush’s first term, Mr. Wolfowitz has pressed the issue in the bank against strong concerns about security and poor governance in Iraq. “He was pretty aggressive about it, given that he’s generally a mild-mannered person. He was really quite hard,” said one source with first-hand knowledge of internal bank discussions on Iraq. “I don’t know how much of it was flogging for the [Bush] administration rather than his own ghosts and convictions.”

Although the bank eventually opened a $500 million loan program for Baghdad, the board took the unusual step of asking to be “regularly updated” on developments, according to internal documents obtained by the Government Accountability Project, a Washington-based whistle-blower group that tracks World Bank activities.