COLUMN ONE : Kidnaping Kidnaped Children : Don and Judy Feeney use disguises, deceit and commando tactics to recover youngsters taken overseas by a parent. They may break the law, they say, but to them the end justifies the means.

Don Feeney had been out of prison only two weeks and all he wanted to do was spend time with his family and rebuild his business. If anyone had told him he would go right back off on another risky foreign mission, the kind of high-adrenaline project that had landed him in an Iceland hoosegow in the first place, the fast-talking, Brooklyn-born Feeney would’ve laughed in his face.

But when Connie Ghozzi walked through his door, neither Feeney nor his wife, Judy, could say no.

Ghozzi’s 4-year-old son, Elias, had been kidnaped, spirited away to Tunisia by her ex-husband the day before a custody hearing. For a year, she had tried everything to recover her son, even paying nearly $100,000 to men who promised they could snatch Elias back. She turned to the Feeneys in desperation, traveling from her home in Oklahoma to see them last February.

“You could tell by looking at her that her heart had been ripped away,” Judy Feeney said. So the Feeneys swung into action.

Corporate Training Unlimited, the company Don Feeney founded in 1985 with a team of former members of the anti-terrorist Delta Force, was designed to offer training and security services to executives working overseas. But retrieving kidnaped children has developed into a flashier, if controversial, sideline. The Feeneys say they have recovered 18 kidnaped children and adults--including the September return of Arcadia resident Michelle Neserri’s 2-year-old son from Iraq.

The State Department, which reports 1,200 active custody cases involving an American child abroad, tries to assist parents through legal channels. It frowns on the type of abductions the Feeneys engineer. “There is concern if a child is abducted once and then is abducted again, that it can keep the chain of abductions going,” said a State Department spokeswoman. “It doesn’t really resolve anything.”

Other concerns include the potential of physical danger to the children, and the myriad implications of breaking the laws of other countries.

The Feeneys themselves want their clients to exhaust legal remedies first. But only 37 countries have signed an international accord on custody issues. In the Middle East, where the Feeneys stage most of their recoveries, only Israel is a party to the accord.

The upshot is that custody orders issued by U.S. courts can be as meaningless as “potty paper” overseas, said Judy Feeney. The couple, and a small number of other similar firms, consider themselves “the court of last resort.”

To pull off their recoveries, CTU operatives have posed as movie makers, fought off angry mobs and snatched a child from a crowded school bus. It is an incongruous image: macho ex-Delta Force members applying the blunt skills of their trade to accomplish the most delicate of missions: extricating children from the embrace of a faraway parent.

It was in the middle of such a mission in 1993 that Don Feeney was arrested. CTU operatives flew to Reykjavik, Iceland, posing as location scouts for a film that would star Sylvester Stallone and Kim Basinger. In truth, CTU was working for James Grayson, a Florida resident who accused his ex-wife of snatching their daughter nine months earlier.

The CTU team befriended the ex-wife, Erna Eyjolfsdottir, convincing her that they would hire her as a production aide. Actually, two children were involved in the case. Eyjolfsdottir had fled with her two daughters just as a Florida judge was about to take them away from her and give custody to the fathers, the woman’s two ex-husbands.

After going out partying with Eyjolfsdottir one night, the operatives took the children while she slept. Waking up to find her daughters gone, she was able to get customs officials to stop Don Feeney, Grayson and Grayson’s daughter at the airport. Judy Feeney and another operative had boarded an earlier plane with the other girl but were intercepted in Luxembourg. The girl was returned to Iceland.

Feeney and Grayson were both sentenced to prison. Grayson was sentenced to three months. Feeney was sentenced to two years and served one year, including six months in isolation after he escaped and was recaptured.

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Mention the Feeneys and the tendency is to talk of the adventures, the close calls, the hair-raising escapes. But Judy Feeney complains that news stories have lavished too much attention on the derring-do and not enough on the tender objects of their mercy. The couple love children--that’s why they do what they do, she said.

Pictures of their own three children hang on a wall in her office located in a one-story building not far from Ft. Bragg, where the Army’s top-secret Delta Force operation is based.

The sign above the door is for a security-guard firm. That’s because, while Don, 41, was in prison, CTU languished and Judy Feeney, 38, focused her energies on the couple’s other, more mundane business of supplying guards to local companies.

The Feeneys are working to return CTU to profitability by focusing more on corporate security and crisis-management training, providing they get the time between retrieving children.

The expensive child-recovery operations that have gained the couple notoriety usually cost more than the client is able to pay, they said. Costs can vary widely, but expenses alone can run into the tens of thousands of dollars. On one of their early missions they went $36,000 into debt, said Judy Feeney.

“Of course we like to get a payday,” she said. “We finally made a mortgage payment on time. That’s a good feeling. . . . But a lot of times I don’t have the luxury of making good business decisions.”

A reminder of why they take on the unprofitable child rescues sits on a sideboard in Judy’s office--a color photograph of Brittney Chowdhury, a 5-year-old Oklahoma girl they recovered from Bangladesh, where she had been taken by her father in 1989, days before a scheduled divorce hearing.

For Judy Feeney it was a special case, the first in which she was a full participant, going undercover, hatching plots, exposing herself to the same dangers as her husband.

“We found her living like an animal,” she said of Brittney. “She couldn’t even eat with utensils. Her hair had lice in it. . . . We’ve pulled some kids out of some pretty hellacious situations.”

The first attempt to rescue Brittney failed. A CTU operative, using the firm’s favorite ruse, contacted the father, Mohammed Chowdhury, claiming to be a movie location scout in need of an English-speaking guide. But Chowdhury became suspicious and broke off contact.

When they tried again months later, the Feeneys used Terry Chowdhury, Mohammed’s estranged second wife, as bait. She had become friends with Keli Chowdhury, Brittney’s mother, and was willing to do anything--even fake a reconciliation with Mohammed--to help.

For a week, Mohammed virtually lived with Terry at her hotel. The Feeneys and Terry communicated through written notes, which they left taped beneath a sink in the women’s restroom. At first, Mohammed was suspicious of the Feeneys, the American couple he often saw around the hotel. But when he heard that Don Feeney was a New York investment consultant interested in opening a textile factory, he stunned the Feeneys by approaching him to discuss a job. The two couples ended up having dinner together.

Terry eventually learned of Brittney’s whereabouts. To get Mohammed out of the way, the Feeneys sent him to Bangkok, Thailand, on a ruse. There a CTU operative roughed him up and told him never to go near either Terry or Keli again.

Meanwhile, the Feeneys went to the home of Mohammed’s family to get Brittney. An angry crowd surrounded them when it became clear what they were doing. While Keli sang nursery rhymes to soothe the child, Don drove back the mob with a telescoping police baton and had to forcefully restrain Mohammed’s father, who tried to snatch the girl back.

A Bangladesh judge refused to grant Keli permanent custody unless Brittney’s father was present. But the Feeneys managed to elude armed guards who had been stationed outside their hotel and left the country with the child.

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If the Feeneys have an image problem, it is partly their own doing. Don, who grew up in a rough-and-tumble New York neighborhood, has the tough-guy moves and patter of a young James Cagney. He does not try to hide a hair-trigger temper.

He resigned from the Army in 1984 after 16 years of service rather than accept disciplinary action. He and other Delta Force members working undercover in Beirut were expected to live like Foreign Service personnel, but on a smaller Army per diem. A deal was worked out with hoteliers so that the Delta Force received cut rates and kickbacks. Feeney insists the arrangement was necessary for the successful fulfillment of the mission, but the Army says he and the other soldiers were guilty of financial irregularities.

Judy was never in the military, but she is an Army brat with a lifelong love of shooting. But, despite their image as weapon-slinging swashbucklers, Judy Feeney said they never carry guns on recovery missions, especially when children are involved.

The Neserri case was the first in which CTU worked in cooperation with government officials. After Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) took an interest in the case, the Los Angeles district attorney’s office and then the FBI got involved.

They enlisted Scotland Yard to help after the Feeneys concocted a plan to lure Neserri’s estranged Iraqi husband to London with the child. When he stepped off the plane at Heathrow Airport, he was immediately taken into custody and the child was taken away.

More typical was the operation to retrieve Connie Ghozzi’s son last spring.

She had been warned to stay away from CTU. “All I ever heard was negative things about them,” she said. The State Department, for example, contends that the Feeneys’ extralegal activities not only can cause diplomatic problems, but can put the children in physical danger and also cause them psychological damage.

People who knew of their exploits told her they were reckless and foolhardy. “I think some of the (Feeney recoveries) could very well put some of the children through trauma and danger,” said Judy Shretter, legal director of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

The center, like the State Department, prefers that parents pursue legal means of regaining custody of snatched children.

In Ghozzi’s case, though, the State Department said they couldn’t help. Under the Feeneys’ guidance, she persuaded her Tunisian husband in a series of telephone conversations that she wanted a reconciliation. During the year of separation from her son, she had in fact already tried moving to Tunisia to be with him. But she realized she couldn’t stay after a week in that country. The isolation--from her culture, her language, her friends--was too great. Also, she said, her husband’s family treated her “like dirt,” as if she were an outsider and Elias was their child.

She moved back to Tunisia early this year. At first, she said, she wasn’t allowed to be alone with Elias and was locked in her room at night. Eventually, as she won her estranged husband’s trust, she was allowed to take Elias on walks.

Enter the Feeneys, masquerading as Americans interested in importing Tunisian wine. They made the family’s acquaintance, which enabled them to observe close up. In telephone calls, Judy would advise Ghozzi on what to say and how to behave and learn more about the family’s routine.

Then came the time, on one of her walks with Elias, to make good her escape. Ghozzi arrived at the point where she was to meet a Feeney operative, only to find no one there. She panicked. Remembering other would-be rescuers, she thought: “It’s happened to me again. I’ve been duped again.”

As Ghozzi fretted about what to do, a hulking Irishman suddenly appeared in her path, pretending to tie his shoe. Without looking up, he told her in his Irish lilt to turn left and get in a gray Peugeot nearby. The man was the CTU operative. He had been delayed briefly checking on the boat they needed. Soon, Ghozzi and her son were on the high seas, speeding to Italy.

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If Don Feeney has to break the laws of foreign nations to accomplish his missions, he does it without a twinge of guilt. His philosophy now is the same as when he worked for the government: He doesn’t mind breaking rules if he feels he is justified.

He is an ex-Army sniper who survived the ill-fated government mission to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980. “When I became a sniper for the Army, they put you through a psychological test,” he said. The administrator of the test told him a sniper could not have a conscience.

Feeney disagreed. “You must have a conscience to be a sniper.” A good soldier trusts his superiors, “but I’m not a blind sheep. If they told me Ronald Reagan had become a communist and must be killed, I’m not going to do it. It’ll be a cold day in hell before I kill the President because you tell me to.”

He passed the test.

Recalling his Beirut financial hijinks, Feeney said: “Was it wrong what we did? Yes, but it was justified.”

Similarly, recovering snatched children might be sneered at by U.S. officials and might break the laws of the countries where the recoveries are staged, but the Feeneys keep on doing it.

They feel they are justified.