[CPProt.net] On the trail of stolen Iraqi art

[Ellie Bruggeman]

On the trail of stolen Iraqi art

If truth is war's first casualty, the Iraq Museum in Baghdad has the 
scars to prove it.

History destroyed: ruined artifacts in Iraqi Museum
More than two years after the museum, home to the remains of mankind's 
most ancient cities, was pillaged by an army of looters, thousands of 
the stolen objects have yet to be recovered.
And it appears that civilian and military experts may never agree on 
exactly what happened at one of the world's most prized museums or on 
who should have protected these treasures.
Matthew Bogdanos, a Marine Reserve colonel and the U.S. military's lead 
investigator into the thefts, details the assault on the museum and its 
aftermath in his new book, Thieves of Baghdad (Bloomsbury, $25.95), 
written with thriller author William Patrick.
The book, released last week, is the civilian world's most detailed look 
at how the thefts unfolded and the behind-the-scenes efforts to recover 
the priceless antiquities.
The classics scholar-turned-attorney who has just returned to civilian 
life also describes the events in a report published in the current 
American Journal of Archaeology
In the book, Bogdanos, 48, tells the more personal story of the path he 
took to Baghdad from his family's lower Manhattan apartment after the 
World Trade Center fell on Sept. 11, 2001. A prosecutor in the Manhattan 
District Attorney's office — nicknamed "Pit Bull" because of his 
tenacity — he was best known for prosecuting Sean "Diddy" Combs on 
weapons charges stemming from a nightclub shooting. Combs was acquitted 
in March 2001.
All changed with 9/11. The four-year journey that followed took Bogdanos 
into active duty, through a stint tracking down Taliban records in 
Afghanistan and finally to his role as leader of the team investigating 
the museum thefts.

"We didn't have any expectations when we arrived at the museum. We just 
knew there was a problem to be fixed," he says.

*Cradle of civilization *

Iraq is one vast archaeological site, resting on the remains of some of 
the earliest human civilizations, says archaeologist Elizabeth Stone of 
Stony Brook University in New York. Empire-ruling cities such as Ur, 
Nineveh and Babylon lie beneath its soil.
The museum holds the fruits of a century of archaeological investigation 
into the uniquely preserved ancient cultures, captured in cuneiform 
tablets and seals, along with statuary, pottery and city walls, Stone says.
Exploring these civilizations only had scratched the surface when the 
war opened the door to thieves at the museum and at archaeological sites 
across the country, she says.
Following is Bogdanos' account of what happened, as set forth in his 
journal report and book:
U.S.-led forces entered Baghdad on April 5, 2003. At the museum, top 
officials, including research director Donny George Youkahanna, stayed 
until April 8, when Iraqi soldiers moved onto the grounds.
According to the dictates of the Hague Convention, it is a war crime to 
use a cultural site as a fighting position. There was evidence, however, 
that forces loyal to Saddam Hussein had long been preparing to use the 
museum, located across the street from an Iraqi Special Republican Guard 
compound and commanding a view of a Tigris bridge, as a stronghold. The 
11-acre compound had extensive sandbagged pits, walls and bunkers
The fighters fled as Baghdad fell on April 11, leaving behind uniforms, 
weapons, Baath Party cards and a bloodstained tank-shell hole next to a 
sniper position on the second floor of the Children's Museum.
Then 300 to 400 looters and thieves moved in, until they were chased 
away by returning museum workers. The sight that greeted the staff was grim:
• In the public galleries, 40 prominent objects were stolen by organized 
thieves. Only 15 have been recovered, including the 5,000-year-old 
limestone Sacred Vase of Warka, among the world's oldest carved-stone 
ritual vessels.
• Crowds looted two storage rooms, which were open with no signs of 
forced entry. The staff estimates 3,138 jars, pottery and other pieces 
were stolen. Many were returned by repentant looters; 101 items are 
still missing.
• In the basement, evidence "strongly suggests" an inside job. Thieves 
broke through a hidden back entrance whose metal door showed no signs of 
forced entry. Incredibly, the theft of the museum's most valuable coins 
and cylinder seals, whose impressions served as a signature on ancient 
cuneiform tablets, was botched. The thieves lost a set of keys to the 
container lockers in the choking darkness of the torch-lit basement.
Still, 5,144 cylinder seals, more than one-third of the museum's 
collection, and 5,542 decorative pins, beads, pendants and necklaces 
were stolen. About 2,300 of these objects have been recovered, 1,395 of 
which were in customs seizures outside Iraq.
In all, more than 13,864 objects were stolen, and at least 5,359 were 
recovered, say investigators.

*The detective work *

Moving into the museum's library on April 21, Bogdanos' team got to 
work. Investigating the basement robbery required a military crime scene 
team's help, a "CSI: Baghdad" moment that led museum director Nawala 
al-Mutwalli to shriek with joy when they discovered the thieves had 
missed more than 100,000 gold and silver coins.
The investigators began an amnesty program for returned objects, 
recorded losses, interviewed witnesses and chatted up informants over 
tea. A friendship with Youkahanna and al-Mutwalli blossomed, and the 
team made spectacular recoveries, most notably securing the Treasure of 
Nimrud.
The treasure — more than 1,000 pieces of golden jewelry from 800 B.C. 
uncovered in Assyrian royal tombs — had been stashed in a vault in 
Baghdad's Central Bank in 1990 before the Gulf War. U.S. forces 
discovered that the bank was flooded below ground level.
Bogdanos gave the National Geographic Channel permission to pump out the 
vault, which took three weeks. The treasure was unharmed, although the 
remains of a would-be looter were a few feet away from a vault door, 
apparently killed by the ricochet of a rocket-propelled grenade fired at 
the door.
"I don't see this as the final word on the Iraq museum," says Columbia 
University archaeologist Zainab Bahrani, who believes a final analysis 
will find that more than 20,000 items were stolen.
"The report is the perspective of Col. Bogdanos, who is a representative 
of the U.S. military, and that's important to consider," Bahrani adds, 
because of the negative public reaction to the looting and, by 
extension, to the war itself.
That reaction was triggered by early accounts that 170,000 items had 
been looted, reported in newspapers worldwide, including USA TODAY. A 
former museum employee supplied the excessively high number that 
"adversely impacted our investigation on a daily basis," Bogdanos' 
report says.
"Frankly, those who have argued that U.S. forces should have done more 
to protect the museum present a compelling argument," he acknowledges.
"The more pointed question, however, is why no unit before the battle 
had been given the specific mission of protecting the museum," Bogdanos 
says in the journal.

*Could take decades *

The answer in part is that the military did not expect that Iraqis would 
see the museum as part of the Saddam regime, he says. "Thus, despite the 
prior warnings, planners simply did not believe that the museum ... 
would be looted."
In World War II, by contrast, the U.S. Military's Monuments, Fine Arts 
and Archives section worked with art historians to preserve cultural 
treasures.
Archaeologists agree it will take decades to recover all the stolen 
treasures, and some of them may never be seen again.
Experts led by Bahrani and colleagues claimed a victory this month when 
the Iraqi constitution was amended to include protections for antiquities.
Bogdanos plans to start a task force to explore blocking trade in stolen 
Iraqi antiquities when he returns to the Manhattan District Attorney's 
office in December. "The cash crop now in Iraq is antiquities," he says. 
"That stolen items are funding the insurgency is clear, nor should it 
surprise anyone."
Says Bahrani: "It's a global market. I don't think it's going to be 
easy." But she believes a task force is needed. "It is all of our 
history, not just Iraqis but everyone. So that is the tragedy."
Says Bogdanos: "I want to take my children to the Iraq Museum someday 
and not have them look at empty pedestals."

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