Hidden Treasures

It reads like a movie script: in the late 1980s, around the time the Soviet army was withdrawing from Afghanistan, a mysterious Afghan with the power to protect the fabled "Bactrian gold" decided it was in danger of being stolen or destroyed. The unidentified protector may have been the communist ruler of Afghanistan at the time, Mohammad Najibullah, or it may have been someone who worked for him. (The Taliban castrated and murdered Najibullah in 1996, before hanging his bloody corpse from a lamppost, so he can't comment.) The mystery man stashed 20,000 items—including a 2,000-year-old crown, a warrior's belt and carefully wrapped pieces of glistening jewelry—in an underground vault of the presidential compound. More than 20 other Afghan officials, including "keyholders" entrusted with individual museum collections, shared the secret. They maintained a code of silence through waves of war, looting and chaos.

By the time the Taliban was toppled in 2001, foreign archaeologists feared that the hoard of ancient golden artifacts had vanished forever. Kabul was rife with rumors: rebel leader Ahmed Shah Massoud had made off with it; the Soviets took it back to Moscow. Some of the original "keyholders" had by then disappeared, believed to be dead or in exile. Others maintained their silence, apparently waiting to evaluate the policies and stability of the new government of Hamid Karzai. Not until 2003 did officials of Karzai's government learn about the stash. The president then invited foreign and Afghan experts to help unseal several old safes in a nondescript building of the presidential palace in Kabul.

Fredrik T. Hiebert, an expert on trade along the ancient Silk Road and an archaeologist for the National Geographic Society, was present when officials used metal-cutting circular saws to open the safes. He watched in astonishment and wonder as the ancient gold spilled out. Now the Afghan treasure is on display through Sept. 7 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the first stop on a tour of four venues in the United States. Hiebert, the curator of the exhibition, spoke recently to NEWSWEEK's Jeffrey Bartholet about the tale of the treasure and some unresolved mysteries. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: When was the trove of antique Afghan gold, jewelry and other treasures stashed away?
Fredrik T. Hiebert: It's difficult to understand exactly when things were hidden in Afghanistan. That's because the veil of mystery about what happened is part of the reason they were kept safe. But as far as we know, it was 1988 when the majority of these items from the National Museum were taken to the presidential bank vault. Some brilliant person had the foresight to take the masterpieces of the Kabul museum off display and put them in safekeeping. We don't even know who it was.

You still don't know who did that?
Nope. And I have stopped pursuing that question. What is more important is the act of this group of people who knew about the objects that were hidden away—the act of heroism of a group of some 20 people, maybe 25 or 30 people, who knew that these treasures were there and kept this code of silence. That's the really important thing: that code of silence from 1988 through the civil war in the early '90s, through the development of the Taliban in '96, right up through 2001.

Who were those 20 to 30 people?
It was a group of people at the museum, some of them keyholders—