Description
During the Cold War, collaboration between the US Passport Office and US intelligence organisations was a recurring sensational topic in the popular press. In particular, reporting speculated on the relationship between Passport Office Director Frances Knight and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, between whom there was reported to be a direct ‘hotline’.
This paper takes the security imaginaries constructed in such reportage as its starting point, contrasting these with the more mundane - but also more total - practices of surveillance reported by contemporary Passport Office workers. Considering state archives alongside oral history interviews with State Department workers produces a fuller picture of the US Passport Office’s importance for state security, and its role in broader surveillance infrastructures. I consider how the Passport Office not only accumulated an unprecedented repository of American citizen data, but actively worked to facilitate broader state use of this data in line with Cold War security concerns.
