Marine Col. Matthew Bogdanos breathed evenly and tried to keep his voice from rising. Yes, he told his informant, some of that stuff looks as though it came from the museum. He handed the photographs back. Why not bring it around, so the staff can look it over?

The next day the informant drove to the museum and opened the trunk of his car. Inside -- in pieces -- was the exquisitely carved, 5,000-year-old Sacred Vase of Warka, the oldest known depiction of a ritual in the world, and one of the priceless centerpieces of Iraq's National Museum.

Last week Bogdanos, a reservist who works as a Manhattan prosecutor in civilian life, briefed reporters on his recently concluded stay in Baghdad as head of the U.S. Central Command's investigation into the looting and theft of artifacts from the National Museum, the central repository for the heritage of Mesopotamia since the dawn of human civilization.

He said more than 10,000 items are still missing, but 3,411 have been recovered -- seized in raids or searches or received, no questions asked, under an amnesty program that yielded 1,731 items, including the Warka Vase, one of the most famous artifacts in the world.

In a telephone interview, Bogdanos cautioned that loss estimates change daily as staffers plod through reams of printed records that were ruined, damaged or strewn about the museum's corridors: "The reality is that we still do not have a complete inventory of precisely what is missing," he told reporters at the briefing.

Still at large are 30 objects from the display collection, among them the world's earliest known representational sculpture, the so-called Warka Mask, of a Sumerian goddess, dated at 3,500 B.C.

Also missing is the Akkadian Bassetki Statue, dated at 2,300 B.C., a copper casting weighing 330 pounds. Looters dragged it across the display hall and down the museum's main staircase, deeply gouging the floor, Bogdanos said.

Besides the looters, Bogdanos said, thieves with inside knowledge of the museum broke into a basement storeroom and stole more than 10,000 pieces of jewelry and cylinder seals, carved cylindrical bits of stone that imprint a scene or symbol when rolled across a flat surface.

"The majority of the work remaining, that of tracking down the missing pieces, will likely take years," Bogdanos said. "It will require the cooperative efforts of all nations." Already , he said, 750 stolen objects have been recovered in Great Britain, Italy, Jordan and the United States.

Mobs ransacked the downtown museum between April 9 and April 12 as U.S. forces entered Baghdad in the waning days of the war against the government of Saddam Hussein. The looting was a public relations disaster for the United States, which was sharply criticized for ignoring the pillagers as they charged through the museum.

Bogdanos, however, defended U.S. actions, saying the soldiers were being attacked even as mobs breached the museum's gates. He said his team found an Iraqi sniper position in a second-floor museum storeroom, as well as two firing positions in the front and back of the main building and a rocket mount -- along with two boxes of unexpended rocket-propelled grenades -- atop the nearby children's museum.

"This was combat," Bogdanos said in an interview. "It's remarkable that 19-, 20- and 21-year-old young men exercised such restraint in not returning fire."

Critics of U.S. handling of the looting as well as reporters who covered it at the time, however, have said that the museum area was clearly under U.S. control when the looting took place. "Absolutely, they could have stopped it," said McGuire Gibson, an Iraq specialist at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, who visited Baghdad in early May to help with the investigation.

Gibson did not fault the soldiers, however, but the high command, which had been warned before the war that the museum would probably be a prime looting target. "The people doing the fighting had another task," Gibson said. "They didn't know about the museum."

Bogdanos's team, composed of four military members and nine U.S. Customs agents, arrived in Baghdad on April 21. Museum staff members, still incensed at the initial military response to the looting, were standoffish, he said.

"There wasn't antagonism; there was a lack of trust," he said. "You have to let people know you're conducting an investigation and you're in control, but you have to do it slowly, because this isn't your culture."

Gibson said that by the time he arrived, the staffers knew Bogdanos "was an honest guy," and they had started to come clean. It was not as bad as it looked, they said. Weeks before the war, the staff had emptied the display cases of 8,366 mostly priceless artifacts and had taken them to a "secret place."

It took the staff another month to tell Bogdanos where the cache was and take him for a visit. The material was intact. Instead of thousands of items missing from the display collection, there were 40. Also intact were the museum's 39,453 manuscripts, stashed in a bomb shelter in western Baghdad.

Bogdanos and the team got all the information they could from the staff and visiting volunteers such as Gibson, but the rest was police work. The Warka Vase was returned after step-by-step negotiations with a "friend of a friend" of its possessor, Bogdanos said.

"You're sitting there, trying not to let on that you know what he's got, and you can hear the museum folks breathing next to you," he said. Although the vase was returned in pieces -- as it had been discovered in the 1880s -- Bogdanos said it can be fully restored.

Ninety items were recovered when "an informant told us he knew a house where a guy's selling antiquities along with weapons," Bogdanos said. "We did a drive-by, checked it out, picked a time when there was nobody on the street and hit the building from all four sides."

The greatest piece of luck, and the greatest misfortune, occurred when thieves with knowledge of the museum's catacombs broke into a basement storeroom during the looting and went straight to a line of cabinets filled with cylinder seals and the world's finest collection of Greek, Roman, Islamic and Arabic gold and silver coins.

They had a set of keys they had stolen from elsewhere in the museum, "but they dropped them" in the dark , Bogdanos said: "It's the Keystone Cops. Boxes are thrown in every direction. They lit the foam padding so they could see. Can't you imagine two or three of them screaming at each other, 'Where are the keys?' "

The cabinets were intact, but the thieves emptied 103 plastic boxes containing beads, pieces of jewelry, cylinder seals and glass bottles worth a fortune -- and, unlike the world-famous artifacts from upstairs, almost impossible to trace.

"It would all fit in a large backpack," Bogdanos said.

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Direct Link:
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