(Testimony of Abram Chayes Resumed)
Mr. Chayes.
It is my judgment that the passport was properly issued in June of 1963; yes, sir.
Mr. Coleman.
You know that in October 1963, the Passport Office received information that Mr. Oswald had been at the Russian Embassy in Mexico. Would that information have changed the result at all, in your Judgment?
Mr. Chayes.
No, sir; that information by itself could not have' affected the result. As a matter of fact, as you know, the passport application itself indicated that Oswald wanted to travel to Russia, and the mere fact that he had gone to the Russian Embassy in Mexico, would not of itself have been a disqualifying event.
Representative Ford.
Even despite the past history?
Mr. Chayes.
I think that is correct. In other words, by itself it doesn't disqualify the applicant because there is no suggestion here that even--first of all could I review the message that came in on October 16, to the Department. I think I may have it in my own document here.
(Discussion off the record.)
Mr. Chayes.
All that is suggested here is that he was in the Embassy and he contacted the Soviet Embassy about a telegram which had been sent. Now, there is nothing from that, I don't think, that adds anything or permits us to infer in any way that his travel abroad would be inimical to the foreign policy of the United States or otherwise harmful to the national interest, or that he was going abroad to violate U.S. law.
I think this can be said, and I don't thing it should be said in criticism of the people who made the decision at the time, because I think the decision at the time and on the basis of our procedures and on the basis of our experience was proper.
Mr. Dulles.
May I ask at that point----
The Chairman.
May he finish? He hadn't finished that statement.
Mr. Chayes.
I was going to say looking at it in retrospect and knowing what we now know, it seems to me it would have been desirable to have had some means for triggering off a further investigation of this kind, of a passport applicant, or a passport holder, on the basis of that kind of information. If the further investigation had turned nothing else up, it seems to me clear that he was entitled to a passport on the state of the file as it then existed.
The only issue is whether the state of the file showed enough to start or to instigate a further investigation of the purpose and plans for his travel abroad. What you could have done is hard to speculate about. You might have called him in and asked him about his travel plans. You might have made inquiries among friends and relatives about his plans, and so on, and that might have turned up evidence that would have suggested that his proposed travel abroad fell within one of these categories and it would have warranted the withdrawal of his passport.
Because of our review of these procedures, in the-light of what happened, as we said yesterday, we now have established a defector category in the lookout card file, and people of this kind who apply for passports now won't get them routinely, even though the state of the file as it then exists would warrant the issuance of a passport. But there will be a review of the file and any necessary further or any indicated further investigatory steps, if a defector does apply for a passport. You say why didn't you have those procedures before? Why did it take this kind of a thing to do it? To stimulate a new procedure? The answer is simply that nothing in our past experience at all suggested anything like this kind of trouble. Of course the ultimate result, the ultimate assassination wasn't related in any way to the passport decisions. But it has drawn our attention more closely to the problem of defectors in this connection.
I should add one general point, and that is when we talk about passports in this context, we tend to emphasize the very, very few bad apples of one kind or another, and they are very few, who are not entitled to passports. But the fact is that the function of the Passport Office is not to deny passports to people. It is to get passports to people. The Passport Office puts out 1 million passports a year. The great overwhelming majority of those people are ordinary American citizens who want to get abroad for business or pleasure, and the
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