Buying fake

passports

By David North

You too can buy a passport from Eastern Samoa or from the New Hebrides. It will be part of the “most authentic looking identity package available”, and will cost you SUS 399 or £249. You can get a matching driver’s licence too.

You might point out that there has been no Eastern Samoa’ and that for approximately 100 yeas it has been American Samoa, and that Vanuatu took the place of New Hebrides more than a dozen years ago. Why would you want to pay good money for a passport from a

non-existent country?

The British firm that sells these “cam ouflage passports” says that it might save your life in a terrorist situation; your plane has been hijacked, the theory goes, and the gunmen are intent to kill or at least harm all Americans, Brits, Australians, whatever. But you pull out your passport from the New Hebrides, for example, and they ignore you as they give a hard time to others who carry US or UK documents. That’s the pitch. It assumes that the terrorists will not only believe the camouflage passports, they will not search you for other, more genuine travel documents. I found out about this when I opened my mail recently, and (always a sucker to open envelopes from overseas) found a slick brochure with such phrases as: “Looks exactly like the real thing”; “Can you afford not to have a

Camouflage Passport?”; “The cheapest

life insurance you can buy!” You get to choose your name, address and country of passport. (They suggest that you do not use a US address). Other ‘nations’ avail able include Rhodesia, Burma, Zanzibar and Netherlands East Indies - all ex- European colonies which have long since secured new names. “It is,” the brochure explains, “unlikely that a terrorist knows that the name of your country has changed.” The sellers of these documents claim that they have been useful to some

(unnamed) individuals.

“During the Gulf War, several oil field engineers were able to exit Kuwait on camouflage passports we sent them. By appearing to come from some innocuous country not involved with the war, the

Iraqi aggressors let them pass freely. A few who were not so prudent found them selves strapped to oil tanks and commu nication towers. Not so lucky!”

It struck me some people might buy these documents for different purposes than fooling hijackers. I raised that issue with both a senior American intelligence officer and with the purveyors of the doc uments. “It is not illegal to manufacture, buy or sell these ‘fantasy passports’,” the intelligence officer told me. “But it is ille gal to use them at a border crossing or at a bank. Such documents have been around for a while, but the use of Eastern Samoa and the New Hebrides for these purposes is news to me.” As to penalties for their misuse: “Probably the worst that could happen to you is that you would be turned away by the inspector at the air port and forced to fly back to where you started.”

On stationery with a wonderfully British address - Forestside House, Rowlands Castle, Hants, PO9 6EE, England, UK - Richard Cawte of Scope International replied to my question as to how they know that crooks and criminals are not using their products: “To answer your question about possible checks made on clients, we have no way of veri fying all potential customer details, and this would probably be contradictory for a privacy-oriented company. We do, how ever, warn all people that these items are strictly for novelty use 0n1y... With regard to the proportion of our clients who opted for Eastern Samoa and New Hebrides, these are both ‘countries’ having been available for a few weeks. So, the take-up is obviously much smaller than for other countries - as yet!” He also sent along a few media clips on these documents. In one, the US News and World Report wrote: “‘But we don’t encourage people to use false certificates,’ says a State Department official. ‘lt sets a bad prece dent.’” But the rival Time wrote; “Their rival in the passport business, the State Department, professes no objection to US citizens holding the bogus papers - as long as they present their genuine pass ports when they enter or leave the coun

try.”

Internal consistency is often hard to find in large organisations. ■