Mr. Dulles. Yes.
Mr. Chayes. Now the travel restrictions, the area restrictions are under attack in a number of other cases, that come up in different procedural ways. But we have in the past, and will continue to do so until we are told otherwise, withdrawn passports under 51.136 from people who have violated travel restrictions.
The next category is fugitives from justice. There if a person is under indictment or even if there is a warrant for his arrest, certainly if he has been convicted, we will not issue a passport to him to permit him to depart. In the Kent case, the Supreme Court recognized this as one of the well-defined categories in which the Secretary's discretion to withhold a passport was confirmed by practice and experience.
As I say, the fugitive from justice category is one that operates on the whole within the United States. If a man is abroad and is indicted, we will not ordinarily withdraw his passport abroad or mark his passport good only for direct return to the United States. We never articulated the rationale for that, but essentially it doesn't really fall within our notion of (a), (b), or (c) of 51.136, and our motion is that the remedy against persons abroad who are charged with crime is extradition rather than the use of the passport power to get them returned.
Now, a third category is passport fraud, where someone has in fact acted in one way or another to make fraudulent use of the passport itself. We have withdrawn passports under those circumstances.
Then there is a miscellaneous category, which doesn't include too many. For instance, in one case a man was convicted in the Federal Republic of Germany for attempting to acquire knowledge of state secrets. Another man had been involved in a number of fraudulent schemes in various countries, issued worthless checks. He was arrested in Australia for fraud and subsequently convicted and sentenced to jail there.
Another one paid for his passport renewal with a worthless check. That in itself is perhaps in the passport fraud category. Left the United States paying for his passage with a worthless check. He represented himself to be an employee of the U.S. Government on leave and continued to put out worthless checks, using his passport for identification. We have summarized these actions under these categories in a letter which I sent to Mr. Rankin, on June 6. It contains a list of the actions in these categories in the years 1962–64—through March of 1964.
Mr. Coleman. Can the record note that the original of that letter has been given Commission Exhibit No. 949?
Mr. Chayes. Very good. Now it should be said that there is one category here that does not appear in the list that we have attached to the letter, although it is explained in a paragraph, the third paragraph of the letter, and that is in fact the category that Oswald himself was in, in 1961, when he wanted to come back. That is where there is a person abroad who is in some kind of trouble at the time, or who is anxious to leave where he is and come right back to the United States, as Oswald did.
We issue a passport as the regulation says, for direct and immediate return to the United States. And that action is taken under section 136. But since it is taken abroad, heretofore there has been no central list of the actions of that kind in the Department's files. As a result of the Commission's inquiry a list is being maintained from here on out, but it is not possible without going through a million passport files, to find when action of that kind was taken in the past. I know of a number of cases of my own knowledge where this happened.