Matthew Bogdanos, the man charged with recovering stolen artefacts from Iraq's national museum, won't rest until everything is returned, he tells Sean O'Driscollin New York.
Before I ever met Matthew Bogdanos, I was told he was the type of person who might answer his phone with a surname. Sure enough, he snaps up the receiver with a dramatic flourish: "Bogdanos!" Within seconds, he arranges to do the interview, but I'm not allowed to say where it took place or at what time.
At an undisclosed location, he talks on his mobile phone as he shakes my hand. When he finishes his call, he makes it clear that I should not have taken a recorder to the interview. "Nobody has ever recorded me," he says bluntly. "Not Jim Lehrer, not the Boston Globe, nobody." (As it turns out, PBS's The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer did record the interview and it's available online.) I switch off the recorder. "Could you remove it, please," he says tensely, but begins to warm up when we start to talk about his life.
As a US Marine Corps captain, a middle-weight boxer and a high-profile prosecutor with a master's degree in classical studies, Bogdanos has led an exhaustingly varied life. While working as a New York assistant district attorney, he had earned the title of "the pit bull" for his intense, finger-pointing courtroom style that channelled Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men. P Diddy, formerly Puff Daddy, was found not guilty of involvement in a nightclub shooting in one famous case. In an emotionally charged battle of words, Diddy's lawyer warned Bogdanos that he was "in a courtroom, not a revival meeting".
He had better success with tabloid sensation Christopher "Baby-faced Butcher" Vasquez, who was convicted of manslaughter for stabbing a real-estate agent to death in Central Park.
His success in the military and in the prosecutor's office led naturally to his role as Assistant US Attorney in charge of investigating thefts from the Iraqi National Museum in the aftermath of the US-led invasion.
The losses have been catastrophic - priceless ornamental vases; some of the world's oldest gold jewellery; a golden harp from the city of Ur in Sumer, the first known civilisation of the ancient Near East.
Bogdanos and his team have had some dramatic success in cutting off the supply routes through Damascus, Beirut and Amman. One raid in Iraq recovered the mask of Warka - the oldest known realistic sculpture of a human face, found in the backyard of a house near Baghdad. The copper-cast Bassetki Statue, dating from 2250 BC, was found submerged in a cesspool behind a trader's warehouse.
Bogdanos also set up a successful amnesty programme, which allegedly recovered some of the greatest treasures, including the world's oldest-known, carved-stone ritual vessel, the Sacred Vase of Warka, which was returned to the museum in the trunk of a car along with 95 other stolen museum pieces.
The well-publicised amnesty also recovered from western art dealers. In 2003, the 4,000-year-old Akkadian piece was returned to him at a Manhattan cafe.
Bogdanos has written a fast-paced book, The Thieves of Baghdad, which has been optioned by Warner Brothers and chronicles his success in having some of the best pieces returned. The book cover features a photograph of the Lioness Attacking a Nubian, a 2,800-year-old ivory and gold plaque, to remind readers that priceless works of art are still missing.
"People say to me: 'Congratulations! You've done a great job.' I say: 'No, don't congratulate me, not until Lioness Attacking a Nubian and all pieces like it are returned. Then our work is done. Then you can congratulate me."
However, some people have accused Bogdanos of greatly exaggerating his role in the riskier side of the investigation. One former army reservist, now working for the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, denounced a heliographic portrayal on ABC's Nightline last year, claiming its portrayal of Bogdanos as "the Indiana Jones of Baghdad" was misleading, and that he had little to do with some of the greatest recoveries.
Separately, Sarah Collins, a curator at the British Museum, wrote a furious online posting about his portrayal of her in his book as arrogant and condescending. She accused Bogdanos of hyping his own swashbuckling image and trying to gatecrash a Royal Anthropological Institute event in London. Bogdanos strongly rejects both portrayals and posted his own angry online response to Collins, in which he stood by claims about her and added a few more.
"My book is a work of non-fiction. I don't know how else to respond," he now says of Sarah Collins, and he roundly rejects claims in the Boston Globe that he has made generous amounts of money on the lecture circuit.
Before I get to ask about his upcoming lecture for the Royal Irish Academy, he talks to a police investigator for 15 minutes as I sit and wait.
One of the problems in recovering some of the stolen art, he says, as the investigator leaves, is that many Iraqis do not fully appreciate the importance of pre-Islamic art, which, for many, symbolises the primitive superstition before Allah revealed his word to Muhammad.
"On many occasions I felt there was a complete lack of respect for pre-Islamic art or for anything before Islam. I noticed even in the museum, the art was classified into Islamic and pre-Islamic." Nevertheless, he found every Sheik and Imam along the way willing to talk to him, and many offered valuable clues to recovering stolen works. It is a contradictory society, he finds, but he says the daily carnage is no worse than the US experienced in its own fight to define itself.
"Iraq is just 80 years old as a country. Do you know where America was 80 years after independence?" Civil War? "Bingo, buddy. People talk about the harshness of Iraq, well they have an awful lot of catching up to do with us when you look at over 10,000 Americans killed on one day of the Civil War at Antietam. A lot of people don't understand the continuity of history."
He recalls overly eager young members on his investigating team who wanted to go in fast and recover the stolen art. "I'd remind them of a quote: 'In the Middle East you find nothing but cut-throats and murderers who would as soon kill you as do business with you.' Most people guess that's from Cheney or Rumsfeld - it actually comes from the Roman consul in AD 79." He cites an example from his Greek-American background - the Peloponnesian War - in which Athens opened up a second front in its war with Sparta, just as the US opened a second front in its war against al-Qaeda. "[ For Athens] it led to a disaster, so perhaps the analogy is better than many people want to believe."
So he is opposed to the war in Iraq? "I share everyone's frustration," he says with a sigh. "Those of us who served there for years are more frustrated than you are. I'm not pleased with the way things have been handled, but what's the alternative?" To withdraw? "But that would lead to a bloodbath. There was a bloodbath before we got there - 290,000 dead [ in sectarian violence and government repression] before we went in there. I have thought long and hard on this issue. People think if you're a Marine you just 'salute sharply and move out', but that's just a stereotype. If you're looking for anti-war activists, you're looking at one right here. Sign me up if you're taking names."
Bogdanos is a committed Christian, and I am curious how his study of Sumerian art has affected his religious beliefs, given that the Sumerians most likely supplied the folk myths that defined the Christian, Judaic and Muslim God. Their writing depicts God as punishing humanity with a great flood and instructing a wise man to build a huge ark to save the species.
"Absolutely, absolutely," says Bogdanos enthusiastically. "The Epic of Gilgamesh predates the Old Testament flood by about 1,000 years and the wording is almost identical in places. But what is wrong with God communicating through the time-honoured tradition of folk myth? If anything, it's made my belief stronger."
For Bogdanos, it's the unified history of religious myth that makes the recovery of Sumerian art so vitally important to world culture. "These pieces predate Sunni and Shia, they predate Islam and Christianity. That's what makes this mission to exciting. Who wouldn't want to take a piece of that?"
Col Bogdanos addresses the Royal Irish Academy at the Burke Theatre in Trinity College Dublin tomorrow at 6.30pm. Free tickets can be booked online at www.ria.ie
