Compton Mackenzie
T. DAVID'S day was celebrated in the House of Commons with the glad news that passports are to be retained as a binding medicine for travellers and that thereby another threat to bureaucracy has been averted.
Once upon a time passports were recommended for three countries in Europe—Russia, Spain and Turkey, and the advisability of the traveller's arming himself with a passport was thought to imply a reflection on the internal administration of such countries. These passports were beautifully engraved folio sheets of crackling five-pound note paper : I acquired one in 1901 to travel in Spain and Morocco. They were issued by the Foreign Office without any questions being asked and without any safeguards in the shape of unrecognisable photo- graphs for the identification of the person who held such a passport.
After the outbreak of the First World War it became increas- ingly more apparent that some kind of check would have to be kept on travellers round Europe. It was not merely a question of enemy officers moving about all over the place : it was becoming equally important to prevent junior officers who had been eliminated from training battalions at home from , . appearing as colonels and brigadier-generals in neutral towns and cities. However, no steps were taken to get passports put on a practical basis until 1916.
In Athens the British Legation as early as the summer of 1915 had devised a means of making indiscriminate travel to Egypt difficult by insisting on a certain delay before a visa was granted, and when in the autumn of that year I started a counter-espionage bureau in Athens we gradually extended our control of passports in an attempt to check German influence. In May, 1916, we were notified from London of new passport arrangements and the appointment of control officers attached to embassies and legations, and when we asked what were the new arrangements and who was the control officer in Athens the British Minister was told that we should hear in due course but that inasmuch as passport arrangements in Athens had been taken as the model we should find little or no change in our arrangements. This proved to be correct, and since it was I who had drawn up our rules it is I who have been haunted now for nearly forty years by that Frankenstein monster I created.
When the war came to an end the passport control system remained as a ` cover' for intelligence work all over the world. Every other nation copied our ' cover' and therefore it was (and is) the behaviour of an ostrich for our intelligence people to pretend that passport control is secret service. Nevertheless, as late as 1932 1 was prosecuted for revealing this ` secret' in a volume of war memories.
Let me. assert now without fear either of contradiction or prosecution that the main reason why every nation adheres to passports is the cover they think that the regulation of them provides for espionage, propaganda and sabotage. passport by forging the name of a J.P., a minister of religion, a bank-manager, or a barrister-at-law on his application form. No attempt is made to check the bona fides of the sponsor, That murderous ruffian Chesney-Merrett is said to have been in possession of four passports under different names. I need not give a list of people who have successfully left this country, and vanished in spite of passport control: their names are well known to everybody.
A favourite cliché of the moment for politicians is to talk about the free world as an imaginary paradise on this side of the Iron Curtain. So long as we maintain the passport nuisance it is ludicrous to talk about the free world, even it there were not some dozens of other forms of bureaucratic inter ference with human freedom to make the expression absurd, Man may be less free under Communism, but he cannot bo called free anywhere in the world today. If everybody now occupied with passport control were compulsorily directed into the police fewer elderly women would be_robbed with violence because such officials could occupy themselves with illegal betting, parking offences and homosexuals, thus giving the understaffed police proper an opportunity to concentrate upon the protection of the public. The very word spy' has lost its meaning. A spy is defined by the Concise Oxford Dictionary as a " person who goes, especially in disguise, into enemy's camp or territory to inspect works, watch movements, etc., and report the result." It is now coming to be used for anybody who indulges in propa- ganda for a political theory in a country where that political theory is opposed to the political ideas in favour, and not merely for a propagandist, but in the United States and behind the Iron.Curtain for anybody who is even suspected of believing in a political theory opposed to the existing regime, whether he advocate it or not.
We have a great opportunity in this country of setting an example by abolishing any passport control in use. If our nationals desire to travel in countries which refuse to follow our example let them take out a passport as they did once upon a time and if they are refused entry let us refuse entry, to any nationals from that country, until the obstructive country agrees to, admit our nationals with or without a passport.
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