(CNN) — “He has pulled a hand-grenade pin and he is ready to blow up the aircraft if he has to. We must, I repeat, we must land at Beirut.”
The hijacking of TWA Flight 847 on June 14, 1985 sent the world reeling.
It was a drawn-out horror show lasting a fraught 17 days, which saw Americans singled out for beatings by their Hezbollah kidnappers, and the cold-blooded murder of United States Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem.
Like millions of others, Donna Walker, a former travel agent from Houston, Texas, watched as the scenes played out on rolling news coverage. As she did, Walker realized it was finally time to act on an idea she’d had a few years back.
“It’s not counterfeit; it’s camouflage”
The 1980s was a troubling era for American travelers. Increasingly, civilians found themselves the target of terrorism. The New York Times somberly summed up 1985 as “a year of hijackings, kidnappings, car bombings and murder”. But things had been getting bad before then.
Six years previous to TWA Flight 847, the American Embassy in Tehran had succumbed to a 444-day detainment of over 50 Americans by militarized students. It was during this episode that Walker first hit on the concept of a ‘camouflage passport’.
A counterfeit passport falsely claims the bearer is from a certain country, in order to get them through borders illegally.
The camouflage passport, however, used the name of a former country, since changed for political reasons. It wasn’t for crossing borders, either.
Walker…
