Looted Iraqi Relics Slow To Surface

And so it proved. As U.S. tanks entered Baghdad in April, mobs broke into the National Museum and stole, burned or destroyed everything they could find. It was not as bad as expected because staff members had spirited most of the famous exhibits out of the museum to secret hiding places. But it was bad enough.

No one has disputed Bogdanos's figures on museum losses, but he cautioned that the numbers of both missing and recovered pieces will rise as the staff continues to inventory pillaged storerooms.

Outside the capital, looting of known archaeological sites has proceeded unimpeded, and there is no end in sight as long as overburdened U.S. and Iraqi security forces remain preoccupied with battling insurgents.

"When Saddam found looters, he killed them," said Bogdanos, a reservist who works as a Manhattan prosecutor in civilian life and who has recounted his experiences in a new book, "Thieves of Baghdad." "We told the Iraqis right away that we weren't going to fly helicopters over the sites and start shooting people."

Bogdanos has compiled the accepted "top 40" list of the most famous pieces stolen from the National Museum. Fifteen have been recovered, including the Sumerian vase of Warka, the mask of Warka and an Assyrian wheeled firebox made of bronze. The Akkadian Bassetki statue, of a boy cast in copper, was found in November 2003 at the bottom of a Baghdad cesspool.

The 25 missing items include Bahrani's Sumerian statue, the gold-and-ivory carved plaque of a lioness attacking a Nubian, and the almost life-size head of the Goddess of Victory, from Hatra, made of copper.

"You're never going to see these in a gallery," Bahrani said. "No art dealer would ever touch them, because they're just too well known. We're talking about a black market. These pieces will never see the light of day."

The second category includes about 8,000 small items taken from the museum basement in what Bogdanos calls "clearly an inside job." Thieves with keys "cherry-picked" obscure storerooms for pendants, amulets, decorative pins and about 5,000 distinctively Mesopotamian "cylinder seals."

These carved finger-sized pieces of stone leave a distinctive design when rolled over soft clay. Each has a museum number written on it in nearly indelible India ink, and the whole collection, Bogdanos said, would fit in a backpack.

These are the most saleable of all the stolen items -- easy to hide and transport, distinctive and authenticated as museum pieces. Most of the high-profile items recovered outside Iraq are cylinder seals, including eight that were voluntarily handed over to the FBI by a returning Marine and three taken by customs agents from journalist Joseph Braude at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport. Bogdanos, lead investigator in the Braude case, was disappointed by the sentence of six months of house arrest and two years of probation.

Since Bogdanos departed Iraq, U.S. forces no longer have a systematic way to search for artifacts, and the effort has devolved upon an assortment of organizations, including, among many others, the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, Interpol, the FBI and cylinder-seal experts at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute. "There is no coordination," Bogdanos said. "It's based on personal relationships, and when it works, it's a surprise."

But there is little evidence that anyone in the United States or Europe is taking advantage. In fact, whatever market there was for Iraqi antiquities appears to be drying up. "The items that are coming to auction are much better provenanced [authenticated]," said William Weber of the London-based Art Loss Register. "Dealers have to be very careful with this material."