Fulla, the Muslim Barbie.

After spending five anxious days in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, hanging out in a Bedouin tent with an international fugitive who’s wanted as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist”—a character who figured prominently in a story I was reporting about a Muslim charity in southern Oregon with purported links to al Qaeda—I was relieved to finally be en route to Portland, albeit standing at the tail end of a line that was advancing glacially toward a distant security checkpoint at Frankfurt Main Airport.

As the final boarding call for my connecting flight home echoed through the cavernous hall, I thrust the shopping bag that I’d been lugging onto the conveyor, and waited anxiously at the end of the X-ray machine for my bag, growing increasingly agitated the longer it failed to appear. The scanner technician motioned for his superior, and then a security guard, toting my bag, asked me to follow him into another room, where he asked me to empty the contents of the bag onto a table. First I pulled out a silk black abaya and boshiya (traditional Saudi dress and veil) for my six-year-old daughter, then a white thobe and red checkered ghutra (robe and headdress) for my eight-year-old son.

No problem there. Then I remembered the toys.

On the way to King Khalid International Airport, my Saudi host made a detour at a toy store, and had picked out two dolls for my kids that he insisted were all the rage in Riyadh. So out came “Fulla,” the Saudi version of Barbie, robed and veiled in black, accessorized with a prayer rug. The guard pressed the button on Fulla’s back and looked at me quizzically when the doll called out to Allah, praying in Arabic. He stiffened when I presented him with a Saudi G.I. Joe, a bearded, chamo-clad airborne ranger toting an automatic rifle, bandolier, grenades and dagger. “Fur die kinder!” I said lamely, as the guard, registering his disapproval, swabbed the toys and ran the sample through a mobile mass spectrometer.

For a few tense seconds that ticked like minutes, I wondered if I’d been set up by my host. Then the explosives detector spat out its reading: Negative. And I was on my way. My daughter has never played with Fulla, whose muffled prayers sometimes sound when she’s jostled in her resting place at the bottom of the toybox. But that plastic Saudi warrior stands at attention on a prominent shelf in my son’s room. A gift that traveled all the way from Arabia.

He calls it his “Jihad Joe.” —Ted Katauskas is a former magazine writer currently based in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

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Business meetings ought to be a bit more exciting.

Here’s the last of three tales from Greg Dobbs, an Emmy-winning producer and correspondent for 23 years with ABC, taken from his new book, Life in the Wrong Lane - Why Journalists Go In When Everyone Else Wants Out.

From the chapter I WAS ONLY DRIVING AN AMBULANCE ON THE RUSSIAN FRONT

(On Dobbs’ meeting with an arms dealer in Beirut)

Just as quickly as my contact had appeared out of nowhere, two more guys did the same. But they didn’t sit down at the table. They towered over it.

My tablemate started shaking. Not a single word from our visitors, but he seemed to know who they were and why they were there, and he was shaking, and starting to mutter, and then squeal, “No, not me, no, not me, nooo  …”

It didn’t really seem like a party where I wanted to stay. But it didn’t seem like I could just get up and leave, either.

It felt like they stood there for a minute or so, just staring down at this guy next to me. But there was a message in their eyes: “Come peacefully, or not. Up to you.”

Not.

I don’t think the shaking man at my side actually made some kind of conscious decision to hold his ground. I think he was just too scared to move. So they moved first. These two thugs reached over the table, each grabbing this guy under one arm, and pulled him across. Coffee cups and cream and sugar bowls went flying, but hey, the owner can always buy more.

My contact wasn’t just squealing anymore, he was screaming. “Noo, nooo, pleeeese, noooo, nooooo, noooooo!”

Three things flew through my mind: 1) Live by the sword, die by the sword; 2) Maybe instead of journalism school, I should have gone to law school; 3) I was really glad I never learned the guy’s name.

Now let me tell you what happened with our eyes: mine never met his. The abductors were bad guys, but he was too, and I didn’t want any part of his problem.

And their eyes never met mine. They were about as interested in me as they were in the porcelain now shattered on the floor. Thank goodness!

The other customers, veterans of life in Beirut, never looked up. Well, maybe once, but then they quickly resumed the appearance of non-involvement that had kept them alive so far through all the years of Lebanon’s civil war.

That was the last time I saw the guy who sent me a message to meet him at the Alexander. The last time I even heard about him. His abductors had to drag him, kicking uselessly, all the way to a car. My hearing’s not so hot, but I could hear him screaming ’til they slammed the door on their way out. I don’t suppose he screamed much longer.

That might have been the end of it. But I couldn’t be sure. Some mysterious American arms dealer had just been dragged kicking and screaming from a hotel coffee shop by a couple of mysterious Arab thugs, and I was the other guy at the table. Worse still, he had left the briefcase.

—Greg Dobbs

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