Imagine you are on a plane that’s been hijacked. It’s the mid 1980s and the world is trying recover from the oil crisis, a period of economic stagflation and military tensions. One of the hijackers walks over to you and demands to see your passport. “Are you deaf?” she asks, when you seem to be unable to open your briefcase. Would you lie? Would you want to pretend you’re someone else, a citizen from a nation against which the hijacker does not hold any animosity?
In the 1980’s, some Americans, were buying fake passports from a company that uses non-existent countries. With the “camouflage passports” they hoped to avoid being singled out by terrorists while being abroad. Created by Donna Walker, the passport was not meant to be shown at passport control or border crossing, it was just meant to be used in an extreme situation: hijacking or kidnapping.
Walker came up with the idea when seeing the large number of international incidents where US citizens were being held as hostages. The camouflage passport used the name of a former country, since changed for political reasons. For instance Ceylon instead of Sri Lanka. According to the LA Times, the passports used to sell for $135 and came complete with fake entry and exit stamps. Military personnel could buy the same artificial passports for $95 to use as a subterfuge, since they often traveled with only military identification cards.
CNN reports that other types of camouflage passports had existed before. The “Schutz-Passes” were Swedish passports issued to Hungarians by the diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. Though more or less invalid as passports, the documents were accepted by Nazi officials. Thousands of Hungarians Jews were able to escape deportation thanks to these camouflage passports.
In a 1987 interview with the LA Times, Walker said that before she made any documents, she would talk to federal officials. “They said they didn’t think I could do it, but didn’t say I couldn’t do it. All the printers I talked to were scared to death to print the passports because they thought it was illegal.” Walker went on to say that she has sold more than 100 of the passports to people across the country.
I usually try to match people’s racial type to the ‘country’ on their passport and tell them to memorize information on the document because sometimes we’ll include an artificial biography of their family and list their occupation.
Donna Walker
According to CNN, Barney Brantingham of the Santa Barbara Independent was claiming in 2007 that camouflage passports kits could be found on the internet for $400 to $1,000. These days, it’s not so easy to find them anymore.
