Thursday, September 18, 2003 Museum Looting in Baghdad
Inside job. Here's the report from our investigators. More at the link.
DOD Interim Briefing
Years before Iraqi freedom, most of the gold and jewelry that was kept at the museum was removed to the Central Bank of Iraq. It was moved in 21 separate boxes. Sixteen of those boxes contained the royal family collection of gold and jewelry, approximately 6,744 pieces, placed in one of the underground vaults of the central bank. A second set of five boxes contained the fabled Treasure of Nimrud and the original golden bull's head from the Golden Harp of Ur.
The vaults themselves were flooded prior to the team's arrival in Baghdad, but with the assistance of Mr. Jason Williams and his National Geographic crew, we pumped out the water -- took three weeks to pump out the water from the underground vaults -- and ultimately were able to gain entry into the vaults. And in a moment that can only be characterized as sheer joy, we opened each of those boxes and found the treasure of Nimrud completely there, intact. And ultimately it was able to be displayed at the one-day opening we had on the 3rd of July.
Months before the war, the staff moved all of the manuscripts from the museum in 337 boxes, totalling 39,453 manuscripts, parchment, vellum and the like. They moved it to a bomb shelter in western Baghdad. On the 26th of April, we located that bomb shelter and began to arrange for the return of those items to the museum.
The members of the community, when we went there, grew concerned about returning those items of the museum, again, because of the identification with the Ba'ath Party. And they asked us to allow them, as a matter of honor, to keep those items in the bomb shelter, with their promise that they would provide a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week neighborhood community watch. To this day, they do that, and to this day, those items are safely kept in that bomb shelter, under the watchful protection of that community watch.
Weeks before the war, the staff moved 179 boxes containing 8,366 of the more priceless artifacts from the display cases in the museum itself. They moved those items to a secret place, and you will recall that on May 16th, when I last spoke to you, we had not learned the location of this secret place, because the senior museum -- five senior museum staff members had sworn on the Koran not to reveal the location of the secret place.
After weeks and months of developing and building a trust with the museum staff, we were able to gain access to the secret place on the 4th of June. And when we did, we found that all 179 boxes were present and all of their contents accounted for. Those items have been returned to that secret place and will be placed on display in the museum once the security is sufficient.
As for the looting period itself, the evidence shows the following:
On the 8th of April, the last of the museum staff left the museum. U.S. forces then became engaged in intense combat with Iraqi forces that fought from the museum grounds and from a nearby Special Republican Guard compound across the street. It was during this period that the looting took place, between the 9th of April and the 12th of April. It ended on the 12th of April when several museum staff returned to the museum. The keys to the museum, that had previously been locked away in the director's safe in the administrative offices, were gone and they've never been found since.
U.S. forces entered the compound, as I said, on the 16th of April, and we began the investigation on the 22nd of April.
Turning now to the losses. I stress, as I have for the last five months, that the loss of a single piece of our shared heritage is an absolute tragedy. But it is abundantly clear that the original number of 170,000 missing artifacts was simply wrong. But again I stress, numbers simply cannot tell the whole story, nor should they be the sole determinant used to assess the extent of the damage or of the recovery itself.
For example, it is simply impossible to quantify the loss of the world's first known Samarian mask of a female deity. That's one number; you cannot possibly quantify it, and it is irreplaceable. On the other hand, a single clay pot recovered at an archeological site in 25 separate pieces, depending on the circumstances under which it is recovered, counts as 25 separate pieces -- each bead, each pin, each amulet, each pendant counts as a separate piece. So numbers simply cannot tell the whole story. They do, however, offer, used appropriately, a metric with which we can assess what indeed has been done, and what so far is being recovered.
And this is what we found. In the administrative area, all of the offices were ransacked. All of the equipment was stolen or destroyed. All of the safes were emptied or destroyed. Fires were lit throughout the museum. We saw the same level of destruction in the administrative offices that we saw in presidential palaces and buildings identified with the former regime throughout Iraq.
Turning to the public galleries, however, you don't see anywhere near that level of destruction. The staff, as I mentioned, had previously emptied all of the display cases. So, of the 451 display cases, only 28 of them were damaged. All of them had been emptied. Those items that were too large to be moved by the museum staff were covered with foam padding and laid on their sides in order to prevent any damage.
From the galleries themselves, 40 pieces or 40 exhibits were stolen, most notably among those, the famous Bassetki Statue from approximately 2300 B.C., and the Roman heads of Poseidon, Apollo, Nike and Eros.
Of the original 40 missing items, 10 have been recovered, including the Sacred Vase of Warka, an exquisite white limestone votive vase dating from approximately 3200 B.C., and arguably the most significant piece possessed by the museum. While it was damaged during the looting and during its theft, it should be noted that the vase was returned on 11 June, pursuant to the amnesty program. It was in exactly the same condition it was when it was found by German archeologists at Al Samawa in 1940. In other words, there's no additional damage, and this item, the sacred vase, can and will be restored by the museum staff.
Also recovered during the investigation is one of the oldest known bronze relief bulls, and my favorite, two pottery jars from the 6th millennium B.C. from Tell Hassuna.
Unfortunately, 30 exhibits from the main gallery, 30 display- quality, irreplaceable pieces, are still missing from the museum. Another 16 pieces were damaged, most notably, the Golden Harp of Ur, although its golden bull's head, as I mentioned, had previously been removed. And you can see the harp on the left there in three pieces, and then you can see the golden bull's head. That photograph was taken when we uncovered the Treasure of Nimrud in the underground vaults of the Central Bank of Iraq. The Golden Harp itself can also be restored.
In turning to the Heritage Room, consisting of more recent scrolls and Islamic antique furniture and fine porcelain, 236 pieces were originally stolen. We've recovered 164, which leaves 72 still missing.
Turning then to the restoration and registration rooms, which were temporary storage areas -- (to staff) next side please Senior -- temporary storage areas, we found 199 pieces originally missing, of which we've recovered 118, leaving 81 still missing. It was in this room that the Golden Harp of Ur and several delicate ivories were kept and subsequently damaged during the looting.
The museum also, in additional to the public galleries themselves, had eight storage rooms. Of the eight, only five were entered, and only three had anything missing. Because these rooms contain tens of thousands of clay pots, pottery shards, copper and bronze weapons, tools, statuettes and pieces, as you're looking at now, the inventory is simply not complete. It contains items both from museum-sponsored excavations as well as from internationally sponsored excavations. The inventory in these rooms will take months to complete.
However, we can make several findings, based on what we know now. The first- and second-level storage rooms were looted but show no signs of entry on their -- forced -- on their shared exterior doors. And you see those doors before you. Either the door -- neither the door leading from the museum floor to the storage area nor the door leading from the storage area to the back alleyway were forced or showed any signs of forced opening. The keys to these doors were last seen in the director's safe and are now missing.
Some shelves were disturbed in the storage rooms. Boxes were turned upside down. Contents were emptied on the floor.
In the two storage rooms that I've just described, 2,703 excavation site pieces -- jars, vessels, pottery shards, statuettes and the like -- were stolen, of which 2,449 have been recovered, and -- (to staff) -- next please -- 254 remain missing.
It was in the second-floor storage room that the investigation discovered evidence of its use as a firing or sniper position. The team found a window slit broken open from the inside, with boxes pressed up against the wall, placing the window opening at shooter's height. This particular window is one of only two windows in the entire museum that offers a clear field of fire onto the street that runs along the western side of the museum and down which U.S. and coalition forces passed.
Found near this window were RPG parts, an ammunition box, an AK- 47 magazine, grenade pouch and a dud -- a grenade that turned out to be a dud.
This finding -- and you see in the far -- the photo -- of the position from the inside and then, in this next photo, the position from the outside -- this finding of a sniper position within the museum is consistent with the discovery of a box of RPGs on the roof of the museum library and another box of RPGs on the roof of the children's museum. This latter building, the children's museum, a separate building in the compound, was the building from which RPGs were fired at U.S. forces during the looting period. These findings are also supported by the team's discovery of more than 15 Iraqi Army uniforms and additional RPGs in the museum's garage.
I point out that the investigation has uncovered no evidence that any fighters entered the museum before the staff left on the 8th of April and no evidence that any member of the staff assisted Iraqi forces in entering the museum or in building the various fighting positions found inside and surrounding the museum. There are actually four additional fighting positions, two in front of the museum and two in the back.
Turning to the basement-level storage room, on the other hand, the evidence here strongly suggests not random looters, as in the other magazines, but rather the evidence here suggests thieves with an intimate knowledge of the museum and its storage procedures. I have a diagram of the basement up here for you.
It is here, in the basement magazine, that they attempted to steal the most traffickable and easily transportable items stored in the most remote corner of the most remote room in the basement of the museum. The front door of this basement room was intact and unforced, but its bricked rear doorway, accessed only through a remote, narrow and hidden stairwell, was broken and entered. This storage area actually has four rooms, three of which �(talking to himself) that doesn�t work, you can see the L-shaped rooms. (Showing slides.) On the far side, if you start from the far side and you count one, two, three, four, the L-shaped, it's the second room that was entered. The other three rooms, containing tens of thousands of priceless pieces, were simply not touched.
However, the fourth room was also virtually untouched, except for one remote corner where 103 small plastic boxes originally containing cylinder seals, loose beads, amulets, small glass bottles and jewelry had been emptied, while hundreds and hundreds of surrounding larger, but empty, cardboard boxes � (to staff) next, please -- as you see there, were completely untouched. The thieves here had keys that had previously been hidden elsewhere in the museum, not the keys that were in the museum director's safe; a separate set of keys that was established by the museum as a safety procedure to have a second set of keys for these cabinets. They were hidden elsewhere in the museum. That hiding place was known to only several people in the museum. Whoever did this had those keys.
These keys were to 30 storage cabinets that lined that particular corner of the room. It's the brown storage cabinets that you see before you. Those cabinets contained arguably the world's finest collection of absolutely exquisite cylinder seals and the world's finest collection of Greek, Roman, Islamic and Arabic gold and silver coins.
Ironically, the thieves here appeared to have lost the keys to those cabinets by dropping them in one of the plastic boxes that lined the floor. There was no electricity at the time in the museum during this period, so the thieves lit the foam padding for light. After frantically and unsuccessfully searching for the keys in the fire-lit room, breathing in the noxious fumes from the foam and throwing those boxes in every direction, they were unable to gain access to the storage cabinets.
We ultimately found the keys under the debris after a methodically, fully lit and hours-long search. Upon inspecting those cabinets, and opening each one with absolutely bated breath, we learned that not a single cabinet had been entered and a catastrophic loss narrowly averted.
However, the contents of the plastic boxes were taken by the thieves. Those boxes, while -- the contents, while not of the same caliber as the items in the storage cabinets, were nonetheless valuable in their own right. All together from those boxes, there were 4,997 pins, beads, amulets and pendants, and 4,795 cylinder seals. An additional 500 smaller pottery pieces and bronze weapons from the shelves were also taken. So, from this room alone, 10,337 pieces were stolen, of which, 667 have been recovered.
It is from this room we also recovered a set of readable fingerprints. Those fingerprints were sent to the FBI lab for comparison against all known databases, to include all U.S. military forces. There are no matches in the U.S. databases for those fingerprints. Members of the staff who had immediate access to that storage room were also fingerprinted and compared against those prints, and there are also no matches. Those prints remain on file for future use.
Thus, in viewing the evidence as a whole, the antiquities stolen from the museum appear to fall into three broad categories, strongly suggesting three different dynamics at work in the theft.
First are the 40 exhibits stolen from the public galleries. Here the thieves were clearly selective and discriminate in their choice of artifacts, stealing the most valuable items, while bypassing copies and less valuable items.
Second are the 3,138 pieces stolen from the storage rooms on the first and second floors. The pattern here was indiscriminate and random. Entire shelves were emptied, while adjacent shelves were untouched. Entire shelves that had priceless antiquities were untouched, while an adjacent shelf that had nothing but fakes were taken and emptied. We found entire shelves or partial shelves with arm sweeps through the dust on the shelf, as if they were sweeping the items into a bag, and then we would find that very bag at the end of the storage room, and the shelf next to that bag emptied, as if they had seen something they liked better.
Virtually all of the times returned under the amnesty program -- by the way, further indicating the random, indiscriminate nature of this looting in these two storage rooms, virtually all of the items returned under the amnesty program come from these rooms, come from neighborhood residents.
The third category, the third dynamic at play here are the over 10,000 pieces from the basement storage room. It is simply inconceivable that this area was found, breached and entered, or that the unmarked keys were found by anyone who did not have an intimate, insider's knowledge of the museum and its storage practices in general, and of that corner of the basement and the contents of those specific, unmarked, nondescript cabinets in particular. -- posted by Chuck at Thursday, September 18, 2003 | E-mail | Permalink | Main |
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