For example, one or two, a man and his wife, of the students who went to Cuba last year went on to Morocco, and got into trouble with the Moroccan police and so on, and we marked their passport for immediate return. I am told that the names of those two students are listed under category (a), in 1963 on the list. Their passports were withdrawn because they had violated the travel restrictions, but also, for most of the students we didn't do anything about the passports until they got back to the United States when we withdrew them, but in their particular case, because they got in trouble with the Moroccan authorities and were pretty obstreperous about it, we marked their passport good only for direct and immediate return.
Another case that I remember, in my own experience, was a case of a notorious gun runner in the Congo, who was running guns to the Katangese rebels during the Congo operation, and he was apprehended by the Congolese authorities. We didn't want him to be tried, and the Congolese didn't want to try him if we didn't want him to be tried. On the other hand they didn't want him around there either.
So we marked his passport good for direct and immediate return. In other words, those cases are cases where you can find either some form of trouble which makes the applicant, the passport holder want to go directly home, and us want to make him go directly home, or some very immediate and direct relation to our relations with that particular country. And as I said yesterday, we have taken the view that it can never be done solely, because of political activities or political associations or the exercise of speech. It has to be something beyond that.
Mr. Coleman. I take it that judgment is effected in part by the holding of the Supreme Court in the Kent v. Dulles case.
Mr. Chayes. Yes; it derives from that. The Kent case said that the Secretary was not entitled without statutory authorization, at least as we have read the case, was not entitled in the absence of statute, to withhold a passport on grounds related to political association and beliefs.
Mr. Coleman. Yesterday you testified that you had reviewed all of the State Department files dealing with Oswald, and you paid attention to those files as they existed as of June 1963, and that it was your judgment that the Passport Office could not have refused to issue a passport to Oswald in June 1963.
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?