Indifference Adds To Parents' Horror

By Cindy Loose
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 24, 2000 ; Page A01

The FBI agents -- five of them -- left to meet the plane, and Mary Hamouda paced. Up and down she went in the windowless room at Dulles International Airport, waiting to see her daughters.

Ashley, 10. Alexandra, 5. Amanda, 4. What had they been through in the two months since her estranged husband had abducted them to Lebanon? Now that he had brought them back, under pressure, how would they react when they saw her again?

The door opened, and she ran to them. The two little girls jumped into her arms. But the oldest one held back.

Ashley had just seen her father taken away in handcuffs. Out in the airport corridor, her father's relatives surrounded her, pleading with her to go home with them to Rockville. Mary Hamouda was weeping. A lawyer was yelling. The agents were elbowing a path to waiting cars.

It was hardly a storybook ending. Six months later, Ashley, traumatized, continues to be angry and withdrawn. Her father, Mohamad Salah Hamouda, is on house detention awaiting sentencing on charges of international parental kidnapping. Mary Hamouda, a registered nurse in Rockville, struggles to reestablish trust with her daughter.

Nevertheless, in the universe of parental child abductions, this outcome is considered an unusual triumph. The intense law enforcement and diplomatic efforts that led to the Hamouda girls' return are rare. The vast majority of children abducted abroad never come back.

Although the U.S. government -- specifically the Justice and State departments -- can assist parents in retrieving abducted children, their efforts are uneven at best. Parents complain that the Justice Department has little interest in their cases and that the State Department is unwilling to disrupt diplomatic relations over abducted children. Written policy directs consular officials to remain neutral, no matter the circumstances.

A recent General Accounting Office report criticized both departments, noting, for example, that the FBI has made limited use of the 1993 International Parental Kidnapping Crime Act. Despite at least 1,000 international parental abductions from the United States each year, the bureau has prosecuted just 62 cases in seven years.

"We all recognize we need to do better," said Andreas Stephens, chief of the FBI's Violent Crimes and Major Offenders Section. The agency, he said, is stretched thin. "I think [parental child abduction] should get high priority, but a lot of things we consider high priority. In the scheme of things, it fits in where it fits in."

The GAO criticized the State Department for its weakness in acting to retrieve abducted children. "Without a more aggressive and systematic diplomatic approach," the report said, ". . . the return of these children may not be realized." And while State and Justice have recently identified additional actions that need to be taken, "we question whether these actions will be implemented because the departments have no comprehensive plan for moving forward."

State Department officials, meanwhile, say that the return of abducted children is a top priority, and that they are improving.

Last summer, the case of Danny and Michelle Cooke -- two American-born children taken by their mother to Germany and left in foster care when she checked into a mental institution -- raised the issue of international child abduction to unprecedented visibility.

After a story in The Washington Post detailed the father's unsuccessful attempts to reunite with his children, President Clinton discussed the matter with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright intervened personally and German officials pledged reforms. But the Cooke case is only one example of a much broader problem.

Folders and Outrage A sad, cold feeling permeates the room in Northwest D.C.'s Hilton Garden Inn at the annual meeting of PARENT International, an organization of parents whose children have been taken abroad by their spouses. Carrying old grief, the parents sit quietly on folding chairs beneath fluorescent lights, scribbling notes.

Adrianne Delgardo, whose child was abducted to the Bahamas, takes the podium and recounts the U.S. government's extraordinary efforts to return Elian Gonzales to his father in Cuba.

An air of anger and excitement fills the room as she shouts, "How can our government tell us now there is nothing they can do? How can the State Department tell us now that the Hague treaty cannot be enforced?"

The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction is the source of much of the anger.

Designed to reduce international abductions by insisting that custody cases be decided in the child's country of "habitual residence," the treaty is easily circumvented by signatory countries that suffer no repercussions for violating its terms. The GAO report in March said that parents either get their children back or are granted visitation rights, at least on paper, in only 24 percent of cases.

Ed Troxel, one of about 200 parents and grandparents at the meeting, raises his hand to speak. The crowd nods knowingly as Troxel, a truck driver, says he, his parents and his sisters all went broke, losing their homes and cars, to pay translators and lawyers pursuing a Hague case. But Troxel lost.

An exception to the treaty allows children to stay with an abducting parent if a return would result in "severe physical or psychological harm." A German court, citing the exception, ruled that Jessica and Sarah Troxel, now ages 8 and 5, would suffer by returning to a country where German was not spoken, Troxel says.

"They didn't speak German when they left," says Troxel. "They're American children. Why do they have to speak German?"

But once the German court had ruled, the State Department stamped Troxel's case "resolved." He has not seen his children for nearly four years.

An FBI spokesman, Bill Hagemeier, is at the conference, and Troxel asks the questions he's been trying to ask for months. He had legal custody of his children from an American court. Why couldn't his wife, an American, be extradited? Why couldn't a warrant for her arrest be issued?

Hagemeier tells Troxel that these are difficult issues, then adds, "But it also hurts me to say I've seen reluctance with some of these cases on the part of FBI agents. . . . They think if the child is with a parent, they're okay."

Troxel and his family are so desperate for information that his parents have pawned their wedding rings to send him from Pennsylvania to the PARENT conference in the District. It's worth it, he says, for the information he's getting, and the comfort of being with people who understand. But it's also disconcerting.

"The lady behind me lost her kids 26 years ago," he says. "The guy in front of me -- his Hague case was frozen in a Mexican court for years, and he finally paid $50,000 to a mercenary to recover his son. The guy took the money and then said, 'Sorry, I couldn't find him.' "

Limited Options When a country is deemed "noncompliant," or when children are taken to countries that have not signed the Hague treaty, parents are left with few options. The most help that many get is a "welfare check," which means an embassy employee tries to visit the child and report the findings to the parent who is left behind.

But these parents also know that the United States has leverage over many governments, and they are furious that no one will use it on their behalf.

All the parents at the conference carry files and folders stuffed with information about their cases. Mike Jordan, of Edgefield, S.C., flips to news clippings about a pending U.S. trade deal with Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean where his two daughters have been taken by his ex-wife. The multimillion-dollar deal, which since has become law, gives favored status to the country and eliminates tariffs on textile exports.

"Why can't we make this contingent on their abiding by the treaty they signed?" asks Jordan. He said he had met with the Mauritian ambassador to the United States and "he laughed at me. He said, 'Your State Department will do nothing; why should I?' "

A former official in the State Department's Office of Children's Issues, who still works for the department and spoke on condition of anonymity, said that "top officials see[parental demands to retrieve children] as a needless irritant in bilateral relations."

Children can't be put first in high-stakes relations with other countries, he said. "But no one is even considering them in the mix. No one is saying, 'What is the balance here?' They simply are not on the table."

Pat Roush can attest to that. In 1986, she brokered a deal to have her two daughters returned from Saudi Arabia, where their father had taken them. Her own country unraveled the deal, she said.

Cables between the embassy in Riyadh and State Department offices in Washington seem to support her conclusion. Roush had gained the help of Alan Dixon, then a powerful Democratic senator from Illinois. He helped secure the children's return with Saudi officials, who were anxious to seal an arms deal with the United States.

The Saudis asked that an embassy official be present at a meeting called to move the exchange forward, but Washington objected. It would be improper, a cable from Washington said, to allow the United States to be represented in legal proceedings in "this private legal matter."

But it is not a legal proceeding and the lawyer is simply volunteering to help Mrs. Roush and her children, a U.S. Embassy official cabled back.

Washington was firm. The cable quoted the department's Foreign Affairs Manual:

"At all times, consular officers must attempt to maintain impartiality, regardless of the perceived relative merits of the case, and should avoid attempting to influence either parent in a child custody case."

The deal collapsed. Fourteen years later, Roush's daughters are adults but they remain in Saudi Arabia. Even though they are American citizens, as women they cannot leave the country without a male relative's permission.

Guiding Principles The Roush incident more than a decade ago should not be used to judge today's Department of State, said Maura A. Harty, principal deputy assistant secretary for consular affairs. The department, she said, is "exponentially better" now. Consular officials know that they are supposed to help the American parent return the child to the United States.

Yet the manual directing officials to remain neutral remains unchanged. "The role of the consular official," it reads, "is largely that of a sympathetic listener who can explain the legal and practical limits on available local assistance."

Harty said that is not the department's policy.

"Return to the place of habitual residence is the guiding principle," she said. Consular officials, she said, know they are supposed to call the Office of Children's Issues directly.

Returning abducted American children to the United States is the department's "highest priority," Assistant Secretary of State Mary Ryan said.

But Dixon, who still gets calls from parents seeking his help, said that was not his impression while he was in office, or now.

"They will make inquiries and do reports and basically cover themselves, but would never do anything that could offend the host country," he said. "They said it's their highest priority? Nuts."

In 1995, Roy Mabus, who was ambassador to Saudi Arabia, arranged for Roush to visit her children for the first time in 10 years. He said his ultimately unsuccessful efforts to return the girls to the United States had support among embassy personnel, but not among high officials in Washington.

"Washington doesn't pay much attention to people in this predicament; it's not something that interests them," he said recently from his home in Mississippi. "The Saudis were willing to bargain if someone was willing to make it an issue. Our government, understandably perhaps, tends to focus on larger government-to-government issues."

The Files Speak The department's files in many cases seem to bear that out.

Consider the case of Tom Sylvester, of Cincinnati, whose daughter, Carina, was abducted to Austria when she was 13 months old, nearly four years ago.

He'd won his Hague case; Carina was ordered returned. The girl's mother appealed it to the highest court in Austria, and lost. Yet Carina never came home. A lower court in Austria simply refused to enforce the return order and gave custody to the mother. Sylvester's ex-wife has allowed him a few short visits, he said.

Sylvester enlisted members of Congress and others to press the State Department for help. He and his supporters were continually assured that a vigorous effort was underway. But since there was no action, Sylvester wondered how vigorous the attempt really was.

His State Department files, which he sued to obtain, show that U.S. Embassy officials actually stymied the ambassador's attempts to send even a letter of protest.

On May 23, 1997, an embassy official e-mailed his colleagues that a letter had been sent once before, to no avail, so sending another "will make our principals looks foolish, or worse, ignorant."

Five months passed. A State Department legal official wrote back that everyone agreed Sylvester's daughter wasn't coming back, so the department should move on. "I agree that this letter, and nothing similar to it, should be sent at this time," this official wrote.

"If [outgoing] Ambassador [Swanee] Hunt wants to send it, we should inform her that we will characterize it to the Austrians as her parting shot but not expressing the view of the Department or the U.S. government. Perhaps that will give her pause."

Apparently so. According to correspondence weeks later, the ambassador had left without sending the letter.

But Sylvester was fighting hard and enlisting powerful allies in Congress. Soon the debate shifted to how strongly a letter should be worded.

"The last sentence (My government awaits your report.) is pretty outrageous," one official protested in a cable in October 1997. "Sounds like what the Austrians sent the Serbs after the unfortunate demise of the archduke. What are we going to do, sail gunboats up the Danube?"

Sylvester turned to the press and, with strong support from Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio), a member of the House International Relations Committee, raised his case with Albright, who discussed it last month with the Austrian foreign minister and chancellor. So far, however, he has seen "no concrete results."

Other parents who have managed to see their files have confirmed suspicions that they were regarded with disdain.

"Dad's name is Bubba. That should tell you something about him," read one of the cables about Roy Smith of Texas.

Smith's daughter was taken to Honduras by her American mother in 1994. Although Honduras signed the Hague treaty, it has yet to set up a Central Authority -- an office to process applications -- and remains on the State Department's list of noncompliant countries.

Smith hired a lawyer and filed a treaty application for the return of his daughter, unaware it could not go anywhere.

"By the way," read a State Department cable sent in 1995, "we are still trying to figure out who the Central Authority is. The cable that was sent about a year ago asking us to figure out who the Central Authority is was filed. No action was taken."

Smith has not seen his daughter since 1996, when he sold everything he had and cashed in his retirement fund to go pick up his daughter, a U.S. custody order in hand. He was in a private plane ready to leave when Honduran police took her from his arms and detained him, his sister and the pilot for 10 days.Consular officials who visited him on the fourth day said they had to remain neutral, said Smith.

Maureen Dabbaugh's daughter has been shuttled around the Mideast by her ex-husband since the girl's abduction in 1992 when she was 2. Dabbaugh works full time, without pay, as head of PARENT International, and claims to have helped about 60 children come home.

A 1998 State Department cable calls her a "would-be do-gooder." It continues, "her remarks on the Maury Povich show and her newfound publicity suggest caution in dealing with her and her case in general."

Such attitudes and communications, said the State Department's Harty, are "horrifying." Her office's single goal, she said, "is to get [the children] home."

As evidence of improvement, she cited increasing resources: Staff has been added to the Office of Children's Issues to reduce caseloads from 150 per worker to 80; employees are meeting with officials from other countries to improve compliance; the office is working to increase coordination of efforts with the Justice Department and FBI. When a child is lost, she said, "that is our heartbreak as well."

The State Department gets a bad rap, Harty said, because only disgruntled parents talk to the media. She offered to contact satisfied clients willing to speak to The Washington Post. Four did so.

Among them was Kristine Uhlman, of Oregon, whose children were abducted to Saudi Arabia in 1981 by a mercenary dressed as Santa Claus. She said the State Department was "very supportive and helpful," and among other things helped to free her from a Saudi prison when she went to the country to try to visit her children.

But the FBI, she said, hung up on her when she called for help. "The FBI was horrible and continues to be so," said Uhlman, who has become a well-known advocate for an estimated 2,000 American-born children taken to Saudi Arabia.

When Uhlman's son turned 18, he returned to the United States. But she said her daughter, 24, is still in Saudi Arabia and being pressured to accept an arranged marriage.

Another mother who praised the State Department was Angela Wacker, of Lawrenceville, Ga., who said her caseworker was knowledgeable, caring and hardworking and made herself available any time of day or night. She worked hard to arrange a deal with Mexico, where Wacker's German ex-husband was an illegal alien. Last year, 21/2 years after the children disappeared, they were returned to her.

But much time was wasted before she even knew she should call the State Department, Wacker said, because the FBI and local police kept sending her from office to office, insisting that the other party had jurisdiction.

While the FBI's Stephens said he had no direct knowledge of specific cases, he acknowledged that some agents may be unaware of their responsibilities in child abductions. "I'm disappointed to hear these stories but not surprised," he said. "I'd be foolish if I denied that of all 11,000 agents, some didn't know what to do. . . . In an ideal world everyone would know, but when a problem comes to the attention of responsible people, it gets fixed."

And that's what happened for Jeff Waymire, of Indianapolis, who initially had trouble raising any interest from the FBI. When he was unable to retrieve his daughter from Mexico through the Hague treaty, however, a staffer connected him with an FBI agent who is "relentless." U.S. officials at one point located the girl and her mother, an American who was once an exchange student in Mexico. But by the time Mexican officials acted on a request to pick them up, they were gone. He has not seen his daughter since 1996.

Finally, Tim Masters, of Austin, had high praise for one consular official in the United Arab Emirates but said that another seemed intent on keeping his son with his Iranian-born mother.

Masters, a financially successful computer expert, tracked his son and ex-wife to the UAE earlier this year through his own detective work.

A U.S. consular official recommended a local lawyer and gave him advice in almost daily conversations. Eventually, Masters' ex-wife agreed to give him the boy in exchange for a "dowry" payment. He agreed to take the child to the UAE to visit once a year and to allow her to visit him in the United States.

But once he and his ex-wife met at the embassy to sign the deal, another consular official intervened. According to Masters, she repeatedly questioned his wife about whether the arrangement was satisfactory, urged her to get a lawyer, and even insisted on calling one for her.

She kept asking her, " 'Do you understand the agreement? Are you sure?' I asked her about the passport we'd come to get and she said, 'Excuse me, we have other issues here.' "

Masters said he spent at least $100,000 recovering his son.

"If I was Joe Blow, I wouldn't have gotten my son back," he said. "For sure, he'd be gone, and I'd just have to accept it."

Nowhere to Turn Under such circumstances, some parents wind up taking action on their own.

Last spring, 6-year-old Avalon Phillips disappeared from her home in Alexandria. Mark Phillips, the girl's father, who had primary custody of Avalon, came to pick up the child from a visit with her mother and found that his ex-wife had quit her job, sold her furniture and headed to the airport with their daughter, lots of baggage and an Argentinian-born boyfriend.

Phillips, a Porsche salesman, tried to get assistance from the government, both local and federal. But the police in Alexandria, busy working on the murder case of 8-year-old Kevin Shifflett, didn't return phone calls for days, and then seemed to be at a loss over what to do. The FBI told him he needed proof his daughter had crossed state lines before it could get involved. And the State Department told Phillips that its role was confined to helping file treaty applications if the child was found in a country that had signed the Hague pact.

So Phillips and a friend took time from off work and concentrated full time on their own investigation. They traveled to Miami, where the mother, Amy Boggio, had once lived. They tracked down her friends in the United States and England and learned that she had fled to the Spanish island of Ibiza, where she had once been an exchange student.

Phillips flew to Ibiza and walked the streets for nine days, handing out fliers, visiting McDonalds restaurants, playgrounds and schools. At 9:30 one night, he spotted Avalon in a phone booth with her mother's boyfriend.

He screeched his rental car to a halt, ran to the booth and pulled Avalon into his arms. As the boyfriend tried to tackle him, Phillips began yelling in Spanish for passers-by to call police.

The boyfriend ran away, and Phillips, who had a U.S. passport for Avalon, brought her home. He wishes, he said, that he could have worked out a less traumatic recovery with government help.

He's heard from his ex-wife's relatives that they think she's now in Switzerland. Months after Phillips recovered Avalon, the FBI issued a warrant for her mother's arrest.

The experience gives Phillips new perspective on all the posters he's seen over the years with pictures of missing children, aged to show how they might look five or 10 years after their abduction.

"I'm horrified when I look at those walls of pictures," he said. "I realize now that officials have to age the photos because no one is looking for the children. As a parent you are alone. If you can't find them yourself, they are gone forever."

© 2000 The Washington Post