EDITOR'S NOTE: Maureen Dabbagh's quest to bring her abducted daughter home hit one roadblock after another; she was stymied as her ex-husband took Nadia from Saudi Arabia to Syria. But if she couldn't rescue Nadia, she could use her training as a child recovery agent to help others, like a man who sought the return of his 3-year-old daughter from Egypt. Fourth of a five-part series; the first three parts appeared in the Star Sunday through Tuesday.
Customs was a snap — no questions, not even an unzipped duffel bag. She hurried down a stairway, stepped through some glass doors and was in Cairo.
Before Maureen Dabbagh had time to reset her watch, she spotted a dark man in a crowd. As he approached, she recognized the large mole on his forehead and the eyes, red-rimmed and glassy.
In his arms was a thin, grubby girl. Marching over, he held the child out.
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"Here."
No, this was not her own daughter, Nadia, who had been snatched away four years earlier. And this was a colleague — not the ex-husband, Hisham Dabbagh, who had taken their child to the Middle East.
Maureen had become a snatchback agent, parachuting into foreign countries to retrieve others' children — and eventually, she prayed, her own.
The story of the olive-skinned girl was one she would not forget.
"We've got to do some paperwork inside," said her fellow agent, motioning to a second man. This man was older, Egyptian, distinguished. This must be our fixer, Maureen thought. She handed him a passport.
"Wait here."
They waited, Maureen wilting in the heat, the girl needing a bath and a new diaper.
Then the door to the immigration office opened and the two men came out.
The fixer handed Maureen the passport. He said something in Arabic to the first man, chuckled, slapped him on the back. "All right," the first man said, "we're going."
Playing tourists
It was important to keep a low profile, to keep the kid under wraps. So they stayed at a hotel on the Nile River and pretended to be a carefree American couple, on a sightseeing trip.
Maureen ordered lots of room service. The girl's favorite was shish kebab dipped in yogurt.
For their stay in Cairo, Maureen bought the girl a toothbrush, some toothpaste (and taught her not to eat it). She gave her chocolates.
One night, while Maureen was standing out in the hotel's exterior hallway, her partner came out and cleared his throat.
"Relax," he said. "We're done." He looked at her. "This is a sexy job. This one puts us ahead of the pack in the industry. Just don't screw this up."
"The girl," he added, "has nothing to come back to. She's got no family anymore. Not here, anyway."
Egypt to Canada to U.S.
On the big day, Maureen dressed the girl in one of Nadia's sunsuits, then brushed her hair nice.
They had tickets on British Airways, business class, to Canada. There, they would hand the child off to her American father. He would take her into the United States.
By the time they touched down in Canada, the girl couldn't keep her head up. Maureen had her sit on the luggage while she pushed the cart toward immigration.
The immigration officer's eyes scanned her passport, then swept her face. She smiled. He looked beyond her and nodded once at a security officer.
The officer led the three of them away, for secondary screening. A supervisor joined them. "Are the three of you traveling together?" the officer asked, staring.
Each of them had passports issued in different states. Their home addresses, too, were in different states, and their last names were all different. But their plane tickets had been issued by the same travel agency in Florida. Why?
"He and I are married," Maureen said, trying to sound ashamed. "Only not to each other."
The officer was left to assume that he was questioning two lovers who'd sneaked off to Egypt together for five days — with their love child.
The supervisor glowered.
"Get out of here."
They cleared customs, retrieved their luggage.
When she saw a man in a sports coat with a ragged teddy bear, Maureen looked down at the child. The girl looked back and said, "Bubba?"
"Yes, bubba. Now go on."
The man was looking at them now, stone still.
"BUBBA!"
The man fell to his knees. One second he had his arms wide, the next, he was squeezing the girl close and sobbing.
Maureen looked away.
Losing help on her own case
Before the Egypt job, Maureen had made another trip to Washington to see Mitch Rogovin, the lawyer with the CIA contacts who had promised to help recover Nadia.
More than two years had gone by since her introduction to Rogovin. Maureen wanted to know why he hadn't delivered on his promise.
But when she walked into his office, he was bent over a cardboard box, packing. He was retiring.
She'd trusted Rogovin. But in the end, he was just another person who had failed her.
Syrian barriers set back goal
For more than a year, Nadia had stayed with Hisham's relatives in Damascus. Then, on Jan. 31, 1996, the Interpol post in Saudi Arabia messaged the U.S. Justice Department that Hisham and his daughter were in Riyadh.
Two weeks later, the Islamic court of Damascus granted Maureen sole custody of Nadia, according to State Department records. Because Hisham had not registered the child as his daughter at birth, the court had said, he was not legally her father — which meant that the child's removal from Syria, whether Nadia had a passport or not, was an act of kidnapping.
However, Syria set two conditions on Maureen's custody of Nadia.
First, she would have to live in Syria — once the child was brought back from Saudi Arabia, of course. And Maureen could not remove Nadia from Syria, even though Nadia was American-born and had been abducted in the United States.
In effect, Maureen was back to square one. But even as she failed to bring back her own child, she was an instrument of rescue for many others.
She met the best, and worst, agents: goons who kicked in doors and shot up households; agents who talked their way into and out of heavily armed, walled compounds; pilots who flew into countries without flight plans to rescue children and recovery teams.
Many times, it took bad guys to do good things.
So when a sympathizer of Hezbollah, the terrorist organization in southern Lebanon, called one autumn afternoon in 1997, Maureen didn't blink.
The caller, Ibrahim Saad, was a naturalized U.S. citizen, Lebanese-born. In Dearborn, Mich., he served as president of the Syrian-Arab Council. He was also, he added, a close friend of Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad.
They met. Saad's plan: They would fly to Beirut. They would dine with a group of people from Saad's inner circle. The next day, Saad would enter Syria.
After some days of surveillance, he would send for Maureen. They would stop Nadia on her way to school, get her in the car, and take her to a safehouse.
Later, they would slip back into Lebanon.
