Stop, Thieves

The Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad, after being looted in 2003. Photo Cris Bouroncle/AFP/Getty Images.

Matthew Bogdanos is one American soldier who wants to be shipped back to Iraq. Bogdanos, currently an assistant prosecutor for the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, was in the southern Iraqi city of Basra in late April 2003, working counterterrorism as a colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps. He heard reports that looters had trashed and pillaged the Iraqi National Museum during the U.S. invasion of Baghdad, and immediately headed north to assemble a team and investigate what proved to be one of the largest art thefts in world history. But what Bogdanos assumed would be a straightforward search twisted into a meandering, epic journey that the marine recounts in his new memoir (written with William Patrick), Thieves of Baghdad.

On April 8, 2003, the National Museum’s staff fled amidst Baghdad’s escalating battles, leaving its entire collection unguarded. Assorted thieves prowled the building’s galleries and underground chambers for just over 48 hours between April 10 and 12, according to U.S. military reports. The interlopers ranged from mercenaries with assigned shopping lists to random frustrated citizens. Together they stole thousands of ancient Assyrian and Babylonian sculptures, jewels and artifacts: treasures from the cradle of human civilization, some of them preserved for more than 5,000 years. Much of the plunder was smuggled through Jordan, Lebanon and Israel en route to London, Paris and New York City. “It’s as if the entire Mall — the National Archives and the Smithsonian — had been looted, along with the Library of Congress,” lamented the Washington Post.

According to Bogdanos, just a few of the museum’s many stolen items could form the curriculum of “a year’s course in art history, but now they were history — vanished.” Prized pieces among the missing included the Gold of Nimrud, a 1,000-piece collection of gold jewelry and precious stones dating to the eighth and ninth centuries BC; the Sacred Vase of Warka, humanity’s oldest carved-stone ritual vessel (c. 3100 BC); and the Mask of Warka, the first naturalistic sculpture of a face (c. 3100 BC). The museum also held the world’s finest collection of gold and silver coins.

U.S. Colonel Matthew Bogdanos presents retrieved treasures stolen from the Museum. Photo Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty Images.

After assembling an elite special-forces team of 13 members, Bogdanos actually moved into the abandoned Iraqi museum. The cultural institution was a ruin, with about half of its staff returned in tears. But that was just the beginning. Over the course of what became his six-month residency, Bogdanos had to contend with an international press prone to sensationalism (170,000 pieces initially reported missing, though his team calculated 14,000), sinister UN officials (“I’m here to watch you fail”), furious Japanese diplomats (“Do you have any idea who I am? I’ll have you thrown out of the country!”), and U.S. soldiers who were jealous of his team’s mission (“Who the f--- are you? How come you assholes get to go wherever you want?”). And then there were the myriad and muddy logistics of the actual job — securing a crime scene smack in the middle of a combat zone, in a foreign language, with dwindling political support, an insurgency about to explode and no accurate catalogue of the museum’s inventory.

“I thought it would be linear. I thought it would be sequential,” Bogdanos tells me over the phone from his home in New York City. “I can do a crime scene investigation in my sleep, I’ve done thousands. I thought the mission would take three to five days. Obviously I was exactly wrong. The investigation still isn’t done. Maybe Thomas Aquinas is right, maybe some questions don’t have answers, but that’s hard for me to swallow. What I really desperately want is another bite at the apple. I want to go back to Baghdad. I want to pick up the investigation.”

Thieves escorts us to Baghdad circuitously, with Bogdanos’s narrative opening in the broken-down Iraqi museum but quickly winding backwards to a New York City boxing gym where, as a scrawny 5’7” teenager, he decides to become a marine. The military supports his way through law school, and after completing his service Bogdanos is working in the Manhattan D.A.’s office on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. His apartment, located in the smouldering shadows of the twin towers, is blown apart. Raring for action, Bogdanos jumps back into active military duty — beginning with counterterrorism in Afghanistan, then on to Iraq and his hunt for the treasures of Mesopotamia. All the while he drops bookish quotes like smart bombs, slipping into the pose of the literary detective: “I never went anywhere, however, without my 9-mm Beretta, concealed if possible. It is ‘not always easy to put abstractions before necessity,’ F. Scott Fitzgerald said.”

Bogdanos writes with swagger and a sense of humour coated with searing wit. About securing a crime scene in the basement of the museum, he writes, “Iraq is hotter than hell, but underground it’s hotter than the hinges of hell, specifically the hinges of Dante’s eighth circle, the one he reserved for thieves and hypocrites to suffer for eternity.” Without irony, he refers to Iraqi insurgents as “bad guys,” while Baghdad “on its best days” is described as having “the look of an East L.A. strip mall in the middle of summer.” Plus, there’s plenty of danger to keep the adrenaline pumping. “It wasn’t until I came to Baghdad,” Bogdanos writes, “that I got to see the real knife work.”

Courtesy Raincoast Books.

Thieves of Baghdad has Bogdanos constantly regrouping, retracing his steps, reexamining clues and re-interrogating witnesses as he whips around the war zone like he’s on a sand-clogged roller coaster through, well, a war zone. But he always keeps his eyes on the prize at the end of the ride — the oldest, most sacred remnants of human civilization. His team recovered more than 5,000 of the 14,000 missing pieces by declaring a period of amnesty to any citizen who returned hot antiquities, by pitting marketplace sellers against each other, and by sheer military stubbornness. But the ratio of recovered-to-missing goods isn’t good enough for Bogdanos.

“I consider the mission a failure. And I don’t use the word failure lightly. Name someone who could be wrong, more often than I am?” he says to me, alluding to a list of assumptions he made during his mission. “I thought the investigation would be relatively easy and the recovery would take years. In fact, the recovery was immediate and the investigation will take years more. I thought the international community, who were the loudest in condemning the losses, would be the first to line up to do something. Oops. UN? UNESCO? I thought those countries that had a love and appreciation for the past would jump on board. France?  Zero recoveries or personnel sent to Iraq to help. Switzerland? Zero recoveries or personnel sent to Iraq to help. Germany? Zero recoveries or personnel sent to Iraq to help. Turkey? Ditto. Iran? Ditto. I thought antiquities transcended politics. Big oops.”

Back in New York, Bogdanos has traded his desert camo and Beretta for the familiar prosecutor’s suit and briefcase, which he intends to use like a sniper’s rifle in the ever-growing but scattered war on illicit cultural property. “Right now there is no single coordinated investigation into the trafficking of Iraqi antiquities. I want to prosecute,” he says. He refers to the picture on his book jacket, a bronze relief plaque called The Lioness Attacking the Nubian Boy, still AWOL from the National Museum. “The cover image is a personal message to me. It is the single most important piece [that was stolen from the museum]. And that piece is still out there.”

All proceeds from sales of Thieves of Baghdad are being donated to hire a team of investigators in Baghdad and, Bogdanos hopes, recover the rest of the missing pieces. “There’s no one at the museum right now. It’s frozen in time, locked down,” he says. And though his ambition is to return to Iraq, the marine-cum-lawyer may be most effective right where he is, in Gotham. One of the great ironies of the U.S. invasion of Iraq is that much of the loot has come clanking to American soil, pulled to New York by big money, by art dealers willing to look the other way and by a cabal of obsessive collectors who stalk the boutique windows of Manhattan, the capital of the global art market.

The prosecutor certainly sounds like a spirit of vengeance sent by the ancient gods of Mesopotamia to haunt Madison Avenue. Asked what he has in mind for crooked antique dealers profiting from smuggled Iraqi loot, Bogdanos answers with bravado: “Somebody needs to get spanked in order for everyone [in the art world] to stand up and pay attention.”

Joshua Knelman is the associate editor of The Walrus. This is his first piece for CBC.ca.