Camouflage passport

A camouflage passport is a document, designed to look like a real passport, issued in the name of a non-existent country or entity. It may be sold with matching documents, such as an international driver's license, club membership card, insurance documents or similar supporting identity papers. A camouflage passport is not a real, valid passport and is to be distinguished from a valid second passport, which an individual with dual citizenship may be eligible to hold, a novelty fantasy passport, or a fake of a real passport.

False identity documents have a long history, but in 1998, the idea of the camouflage passport was credited by The Financial Times to Donna Walker of Houston, who said she had got the idea ten years earlier when after an American on a hijacked aircraft was shot because of his nationality.

Walker said that she started by asking the Sri Lankan embassy whether they still had rights over the name Ceylon and, finding they did not, went on to ask the U.S. State Department whether producing a passport in that name would be illegal, they "couldn't show me it wasn't". Walker went on to produce hundreds of passports in different country names, trading as International Documents Service, and described her "finest hour" as being during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait when a group of European oil executives were able to use her documents to pass through Iraqi checkpoints and escape to Jordan.

She said the basic idea was to look like "a not very interesting man from a not very interesting country".

Camouflage passports are generally produced in the name of countries that no longer exist or have changed their name.

Often these are former colonies that changed their name on independence, or use the names of places or political subdivisions that exist within a real country but have never issued or cannot issue passports (for instance, the British Hebrides which are islands off the west coast of Scotland that have never been separately independent).

Usually, the names chosen have a plausible or familiar ring to them. Names that have been used include:

According to sellers, the purpose of a true camouflage passport, rather than a novelty fantasy passport, is to provide false identification to be used in an emergency to protect the bearer from unwelcome attention at border crossings or anywhere that they might be asked to produce their documents and could be at risk. The camouflage passport, they say, is therefore intended primarily to deceive a customs, immigration or police officer into believing that the bearer is a person from a small, unimportant, and far away country that is not an enemy, or, in a terrorist situation, that the bearer is not a potentially high value hostage.

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Wikipedia