FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. -- Two businessmen who specialize in teaching a variety of protection measures to people who need it also do a little child rescue work on the side in such danger spots as Jordan and Tunisia without blinking an eye.
Dave Chatellier and Don Feeney ordinarily run a business called Corporate Training Limited, training police and corporate security guards in hostage rescue, shooting, defensive driving and protection.
But they've been known to use their military training to use while rescuing American children from foreign countries.
Feeney, 35, learned hostage-rescuing techniques from the crack Delta Elite Force unit at nearby Fort Bragg, best known for its failed attempt to rescue U.S. hostages from Iran.
Chatelllier, 49, was in military intelligence for most of his 20 years in the Army. He lives with his school teacher wife, Diane, on a farm and raises goats.
'It's very appealing to us and we felt like we could do it and help the families out,' explains Chatellier of the rescue operations. 'But the bottom line is we're a security company and we train people in hostage rescue. We don't make a living going into foreign countries and rescuing people,' he told The Charlotte Observer.
In January 1988, the two men carried out the rescue of a 7-year-old girl who was in Jordan with her father despite a custody order calling for her to be with her mother in the United States.
Cathy Mahone's Jordanian-born husband snatched their daughter from Texas in October 1987 and fled to Jordan. The mother got nowhere through normal government and judicial channels to have her daughter returned.
In desperation, she turned to Chatellier and Feeney for help.
'Wouldn't you?', Chatellier asked. 'Here's an American mother, she's been to the government for help, she wasn't rich. We've been training people how to save everybody else. We could do it.'
The two men and two other former commandos spent more than a month in the Mideast planning what turned out to be a flawless exercise withno one getting hurt.
On Jan. 28, Feeney and J.D. Roberts, another commando, stopped the Mahone's child's school bus. Feeney grabbed the driver and Roberts burst through the door. Mahone snatched her daughter.
They took off in a white car. Chatellier waited down the road in a red car of identical make. He switched cars to fool police while his partners sped the mother and child into nearby Israel and sanctuary.
Jordanian police stopped Chatellier but he persuaded them he was a tourist. The bus driver could not identify the kidnapper and it was obvious that Chatellier was not the same man who took the child.
The State Department was angry and apologized to Jordan. Cathy Mahone was grateful.
Last November they were called on to carry out another rescue of a 2-year-old girl in Tunisia.
Linda Swint-Ghidaoui's family in Lansing, Mich., appealed to them to get her daughter and her out and away from an abusive husband.
Again the legal system worked against the mother. As a last resort she called on Feeney and Chatellier. Linda Swint-Ghidaoui's father paid the company $80,000 to pick up the little girl and her mother from a hiding place in Tunis.
Despite a couple of close calls with police and patrol boats, they made it to Sicily and safety.
Some accuse the men of asking for too much money, but Linda Swint-Ghidaoui disagrees. 'For what they do, I don't think they ask for enough.They did make some money, but they were putting their lives on the line for us.'
The commando team does not carry weapons.
'We don't go in with knives in our teeth and pistols in our jackets,' Feeney said. 'The trick is not to do anything illegal.'
The State Department investigators suggested the rescuers used military credentials in Jordan, but Feeney denied it. They may have broken Tunisian law by helping Swint-Ghidaoui escape, but they have no plans to go back to find out.
