Mother recovers one child, but not her own

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.

Outside of an immigration office she put down her bags. 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.

“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, 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. She would share her story with The Associated Press; much could be corroborated by a variety of documents and by other people she encountered along the way.

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. The child smiled, showing a set of black baby teeth.

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. Maureen glared at them.

“All right,” the first man said. “We’re going.”

Keeping quiet

It was important to keep a low profile, to keep the child under wraps. So they stayed at a hotel on the Nile River and pretended to be a carefree American couple, on a five-day sightseeing trip in Egypt with their child.

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, watching the Nile turn a dusky blue, 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.”

Maureen turned to him.

“The girl,” he added, “has nothing to come back to. She’s got no family anymore.”

He spat.

“Not here, anyway.”

All in a day’s work

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 and retrieved their luggage. The girl curled up on the bags, chocolate all over her clothes. Maureen smiled at her and pushed the luggage cart along.

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 repeating, weakly, between sobs, “My baby, my baby, my

baby ... “

Maureen looked away.

A broken promise

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 his things.

He was retiring almost immediately, he said.

Rogovin wished her luck.

“Thanks,” she said.

She’d trusted Rogovin. But in the end, he was just an­-

other person who had failed her.

Hope from an unexpected ally

For more than a year, Nadia had stayed with Hisham’s relatives in Damascus. Then, on Jan. 31, 1996, the Interpol post in Saudi 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, had been abducted in the United States and taken illegally to the Middle East.

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 militant organization that operated in southern Lebanon, called one autumn afternoon in 1997, Maureen didn’t blink.

The caller, Ibrahim Saad, had read about her on the Internet and wanted to help.

Why, Maureen asked.

“Because,” Saad replied, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

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 together 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 until things quieted down.

Later, they would slip back into Lebanon.

TO BE CONTINUED