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Here is a more detailed article from the San Francisco Chronicle about it:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/05/08/MN252517.DTL

Secret vaults yield Iraqi artifacts
Museum staff hid them for safety, but some antiquities still missing

Philip Shenon, New York Times Thursday, May 8, 2003

Washington -- U.S. investigators searching in Iraq have recovered more than 700 artifacts and tens of thousands of ancient manuscripts that had been missing from the collection of the National Museum in Baghdad, some of them stored in underground vaults before the U.S.-led invasion, American officials said Wednesday.

The investigators located the vaults in Baghdad over the past week, including five within the museum complex, and forced them open, revealing hundreds of artifacts that apparently had been stored to protect them from damage in the war. The finds included ancient jewelry, pottery and sarcophaguses, officials said.

The discovery of so many valuable artifacts would support the view of Iraqi museum officials and U.S. investigators who have said that while many irreplaceable antiquities were looted from the museum during the fall of Baghdad last month, the losses were less severe than thought.

SECURE HIDING PLACES
Earlier this week, a top official of the British Museum, John Curtis, disclosed that his Iraqi counterparts had told him they had largely emptied display cases at the National Museum in the months before the start of the war,

storing many of the most precious artifacts in secure hiding places.

The teams of investigators -- U.S. Customs agents working with American soldiers -- did not provide a detailed inventory of the items found in the underground vaults this week, nor would they say if the artifacts included any of the 38 high-value items that had been confirmed missing by museum administrators.

But they did offer a partial list of the items recovered by investigators before the vaults were forced opened this week, including a vase reported to date from the fifth century B.C. and a broken statue of an Assyrian king from around 900 B.C. Both were handed over to U.S. forces by Iraqi citizens in the last month.

The United States has offered amnesty to Iraqis who turn in looted objects from the museum and other archaeological collections.

The officials offered few details on the 39,400 ancient manuscripts from the museum collection that were also reported found. Officials said the U.S. investigators have been uncovering the artifacts and manuscripts so quickly in recent days that there has been no time to try to determine exactly what much of the material is, or its value.

"The recovery of these items was the direct result of a superb, cooperative effort between U.S. law enforcement, the U.S. military and the Iraqi people," said Michael Garcia, acting assistant secretary of the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security.

The department said in a statement that investigators had found evidence in some of the vaults that "certain select high-value pieces" had been stolen from the storage sites.

Officials said that an Iraqi museum curator who was taken to one of the vaults in Baghdad in recent days had fainted on discovering that some of the most valuable items stored there before the war had vanished, apparently stolen by someone with access to the vault.

U.S. officials said the new Homeland Security Department, which took control of the Customs Service earlier this year, dispatched several agents to the Middle East in the weeks before the war, in the hope that their expertise would be valuable in searching for Iraq's chemical and biological weapons and in tracking down assets of Saddam Hussein and his family and associates.

MISSION SHIFTED TO ARTIFACTS
After the first reports of looting at the museum, long recognized as possessing one of the Middle East's largest and most valuable archaeological collections, the customs agents shifted their focus to the hunt for those artifacts.

U.S. investigators have complained that their work has been hindered by a lack of cooperation from museum workers, who have been unable to provide a full inventory of the museum's collection, and by uncertainty over how many objects were on open display when the looting began. U.S. officials say there is a growing suspicion that insiders within the museum's administration were to blame for much of the thefts.

The Homeland Security Department said that its teams in Iraq had recently identified other storage areas in the vicinity of Baghdad that are believed to contain artifacts from the museum. Officials said the investigators are following up on reports that many artifacts are stored in several vaults beneath the headquarters of the Iraqi Central Bank in Baghdad.

In his comments earlier this week in New York, Curtis, the British Museum official, who is the curator of its Near East collection, said it appeared that the vast majority of the looting at the National Museum in Baghdad had not taken place in its display halls but rather in its basement storage rooms, where more commonplace objects were kept.