The shadowy world of camouflage passports

It was a drawn-out horror show lasting a fraught 17 days, which saw Americans singled out for beatings by their Hezbollah kidnappers, and the cold-blooded murder of United States Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem.

The 1980s was a troubling era for American travelers. Increasingly, civilians found themselves the target of terrorism. The New York Times somberly summed up 1985 as “a year of hijackings, kidnappings, car bombings and murder”. But things had been getting worse before then. Six years previous to TWA Flight 847, the American Embassy in Tehran had succumbed to militarized students’ 444-day detainment of over 50 Americans. It was during this episode that Walker first hit on the concept of a ‘camouflage passport’. A counterfeit passport falsely claims the bearer is from a particular country to get them through borders illegally. However, the camouflage passport used the name of a former government, since changed for political reasons. It wasn’t for crossing borders, either. Walker surmised that if someone found themselves in a life-threatening situation, they could present their aggressors with a genuine-looking document claiming they were from, say, Rhodesia rather than the US. The aggressors would be persuaded this captive was of little political heft and maybe afford them kinder treatment. The hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in 1985 is said to have inspired a former travel agent to manufacture legal, ‘camouflage’ passports.

In October 1987, Walker explained to Time magazine how she’d confirmed she could manufacture bogus passports from “Ceylon” because Sri Lanka — the country Ceylon became in 1972 — no longer had a claim to that name. The same rule applied to any erstwhile nation, from the British West Indies to Zaire. Walker began selling the passports through her company, International Documents Services, for $135 a pop (offering a 30% discount for armed forces members). The documents themselves, said Time, looked impressively authentic: “Its burgundy, textured-vinyl cover is stamped with gold lettering that reads, PASSPORT, REPUBLIC OF CEYLON.”

Walker’s phony passport concept wasn’t exactly original. Tom Topol, who runs the Passport Collector website, explains that documents that bend and break the rules have saved many lives over the years. “Schutz-Passes” are a good example; these were Swedish passports issued to Hungarians by the diplomat Raoul Wallenberg at a time when 10,000 Hungarian Jews were being sent to the gas chambers every day. Though more or less invalid as passports, the documents were widely accepted by Nazi officials, sparing the deportation of thousands of Hungarians to their potential deaths. Similar to the principle of camouflage passports, the “Schutz-Pass” used the guise of another nationality to help the bearer swerve immediate danger. Which begs the question: did any of Walker’s camouflage passports ever do what they were supposed to — save someone’s life? We know the concept took off, at least to some extent.
For one thing, Walker said she’d already sold around 350 camouflage passports in 1987 — many to US government officials. Look at the European Commission’s list of 180 “fictional” keys, and you’ll find a host of the camouflage variety, featuring Dutch Guiana, Eastern Samoa, Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Gilbert Islands, and many more. The UK’s HM Passport Office published a similar (now archived) list, confirming camouflage passports were at the least “occasionally encountered.” Jeffrey A. Schoenblum’s 2008 book “Multistate and Multinational Estate Planning” suggests that following the fall of the Berlin Wall, some German businesspeople — wary of the reception they’d receive in other countries — carried camouflage passports to “avoid unpleasantness… in certain parts of Europe with long memories.” There’s also a story claiming a group of European oil executives used camouflage passports during the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait to reach the safety of Jordan. Finding anything watertight, though, isn’t easy. A US State Department official tells CNN Travel: “We do not track any statistics on the attempted usage of camouflage and fantasy passports.” HM Passport Office is similarly guarded: “We don’t issue camouflage passports, so would not be able to provide comment.” One reason evidence is so thin on the ground, suggests Topol, is that where camouflage passports have worked, it hasn’t been reported for the safety and security of the individual in question.

That’s despite them being ostensibly legitimate. A representative of Personal Safety London — experts in global travel safety — tells CNN that it remains technically legal to possess a camouflage passport in countries including Australia, New Zealand, and all European Union nations, so long as it’s solely used for self-preservation in a life or death situation. The thing is, such documents may not be as convincing as they were 30 years ago. “With the advent of biometric documents and advances in document security measures such as watermarks and advanced holograms embedded in ID documents, it has become more difficult to portray a camouflage passport as a valid document,” says the Personal Safety London spokesperson.