EDITOR'S NOTE: When her ex-husband spirited their 2 1/2-year-old daughter to the Middle East, Maureen Dabbagh could find no one to help her — until she discovered the secret world of the child recovery industry. Part one appeared in Sunday's Star.
At the time of little Nadia Dabbagh's abduction in early 1993, her Syrian father couldn't be charged with international child kidnapping.
There was no such law on the books in America.
Later that year, on Dec. 2, 1993, the U.S. Congress did pass a law that made international child kidnapping by parents a felony.
But Florida authorities didn't act because an Ohio court had not settled the custody dispute of Nadia's parents, Maureen and her ex-husband, Hisham Dabbagh. (Not until October 1994 did the judge in Medina County, Ohio, where Maureen lived, grant her full custody of her daughter.)
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Finally, on Nov. 16, 1994 — 21 months after Nadia's kidnapping — a federal prosecutor in Florida issued a warrant for Hisham's arrest.
And that happened only after Mitch Rogovin pulled strings.
Rogovin had introduced himself to Maureen as an attorney in the shadowy subculture known as the "snatchback industry," in which former military commandos, spies and bounty hunters are hired to recover parentally abducted children from hostile foreign countries.
Through Rogovin, Maureen had also met a man he identified as Bill Colby — the former director of the CIA.
"We're going to get your daughter back," Rogovin had told her then.
Through official channels, meanwhile, it took months for authorities to alert Interpol about the arrest warrant for Hisham. Interpol subsequently asked immigration officials in Syria, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait whether Hisham and Nadia had entered those countries, and how.
Saudi Arabia responded affirmatively. Jim Prietsch, a special agent for Interpol in Washington, D.C., called Maureen. They've found my baby, she thought. It's almost over …
"Maureen?"
She stiffened.
"Yes?"
Prietsch sighed. "We don't have an extradition treaty with Saudi Arabia. Even if we did, it would only allow us to ask the Saudis to return a criminal, a fugitive. Nadia is neither."
Besides, her exact whereabouts were still unknown.
Warrant issued in Syria
By Nadia's fifth birthday, Feb. 3, 1995, Maureen was living near her brother in Virginia Beach, Va., working at a Chrysler-Plymouth dealership and pushing the FBI, Interpol and the State Department to find Nadia.
Rogovin, for his part, had arranged legal counsel for Maureen in Syria — a Lebanese native, Mounir Al-Amoudi, who had worked on the case of another abducted American child, Jasmine Piper.
Amoudi filed a custody claim on Maureen's behalf with the Islamic court of Damascus, then pulled strings to have a warrant issued for Hisham's arrest in Syria on the charge of kidnapping. (Hisham had failed to register Nadia as his daughter in Damascus, so he was not lawfully her father under Syrian law.)
Now they needed to find a way to lure Hisham to Syria.
Back in Virginia, Maureen drafted a presentation for the United Nations on international parental kidnapping. She founded PARENT, a worldwide network for left-behinds whose children had been kidnapped by ex-spouses. She gave interviews to journalists from around the world, and eventually more than 500 Web sites carried her story.
None of this made her a favorite at the State Department's Office for Children's Issues; one memo-writer called her a "would-be do-gooder." Maureen knew that the bureaucrats weren't acting aggressively on her case.
Which only fed her anger.
Stepping up in other cases
Rogovin and Colby, she later realized, must have sensed that anger — sensed that Maureen was a woman with nothing to lose, that all she needed was a nudge in the right direction.
That nudge came with her first assignment — a support role in the recovery of two Louisiana teenagers who'd been kidnapped by their Syrian father and whisked off to Damascus.
The American mother had gone to Damascus, located her son and daughter, and fled with them by bus into the interior. Still, the kids had no passports, and the authorities had locked down all borders. (A week earlier, a French team had snatched a child from Syria, and the government had heightened security.)
While Rogovin dispatched a team to Syria, Maureen told the mother by phone how to stay hidden, how to get travel papers for her kids and how to rendezvous with the recovery team.
She didn't leave Virginia, but once that case was over, Maureen felt a surge of hope that Nadia might be rescued the same way.
At that point, she began prepping for field work.
Maureen learned how to slip across borders undetected. She learned to make it appear as though she was in several places at once. She trained to use knives, automatic weapons and "improvised devices." (Beyond the barest details, Maureen would say no more.)
She learned how to mine data from computers, plant misinformation and send classified transmissions. She became acquainted with night-vision goggles, Taser devices and Global Positioning System tracking technology.
Recovering kidnapped American children from North Africa and the Middle East was dangerous; there were no laws or oversight. Some agents had no compunction about using extreme violence. Many just took money from left-behinds with no intention of attempting a recovery.
Maureen wouldn't let any of this faze her. Her own daughter would one day be the target.
On that day she would need to be strong.
