The story was pretty good, but at the very end there seemed to be this plot hole.
Place, UK and Cyprus. Time, 1971.
In order to convince the authorities that person A, a Turkish Cypriot (who is actually dead) has fled back to Cyprus, another person B, who bears a passing resemblance to A, travels to Cyprus on A’s passport. Then, a day or two later, B flies back to the UK on his own passport.
Wouldn’t immigration at the UK point of entry be looking for the immigration entry stamp from wherever he had been? B’s passport won’t have any immigration entry stamp from anywhere because he didn’t use his own passport to go there. I mean, a sloppy official might miss that, but it’s not something you could plan on, is it?
Frankly, I hope I’m wrong, because this was a pretty tightly plotted book by someone who seems very likeable, and I would hate to think he made such a boner at such a critical point.
Nobody at inbound immigration in any country I’ve ever visited cares in the slightest whether you have stamps from where you came from. Heck, a lot of countries don’t stamp passports at all.
Now how much of my experience is relevant only to the 2020s where all the “stamping” is happening in computers instead of in silly anachronistic books I can’t say. In 1971 maybe inbound British immigration would worry about such stuff, but I strongly doubt it.
What LSLGuy said. Can’t see why the UK immigration authorities would care, now or then, where a traveller has been. The only question that interests them is whether the traveller is entitled to enter the UK, and I can’t think of circumstances in which the answer to that question would depend on what countries he had visited outside the UK.
Many countries ask inbound travelers to fill out a form (nowadays often a web form, but if not, it’s on paper just like in 1971) with name, address, passport#, etc. They all ask what flight or ship you arrived on and what city & country you came from. So they have that info available. Whether they’d bother back then to cross check that with passport stamps is an open question, but I doubt it.
Many of those forms ask questions like “Name all the countries you’ve visited in the last 3 months.” Which is tough when you sometimes visit (briefly) 4 countries in a week like I do. I’ve never had anyone query further no matter what I’ve put or not put in that box.
Well, all right then, good news for my author expectations.
The first time I went to Japan in 1980 (on a student visa, for 10 months) Japan immigration put a sticker in my passport, which they then did something to (tore off a piece of it?) when I left. That has stuck in my memory. Other times I went as a tourist, I had an Admitted stamp and then a Departed stamp. Same with other (Asian) countries and the one time I went to Europe in 2018. When I came back, every time the inbound immigration agent would leaf through the passport looking at stuff. I assumed that’s what they were looking at. Was I wrong?
Immigration agents are mostly concerned to know whether you are entitled to enter their country. If they leaf through your passport they are looking for (a) a visa or other relevant permission that you may need to enter their country; or (b) an endorsement stamped in it that restricts a right of entry you would otherwise have had — e.g. you might have a right as a tourist to enter for up to 90 days in any 365; they are checking to see how much time (if any) you spent in their country in the past 12 months.
They generally don’t care where you were at any time when you were not in their country. There are a few exceptions; some countries used to deny entry to anyone who has an Israeli entry stamp; I don’t know whether any still do. And sometimes there may be sanctions which restrict their own citizens from visiting foreign countries; if you’re re-entering your home country they may check to see that you didn’t, while abroad, visit Teapotistan. Or there may be security considerations which lead them to be interested in anybody, local citizen or not, who has visted, e.g., Somalia or North Korea. But these are fairly marginal cases.
The sticker on entry with tear-off section recovered on departure is something I experienced when entering the US in the early 1980s. Obviously, the idea is that by reconciling the sections they tear off with the original entry records they know who has left within the time allowed, who overstayed and then left, and who never left at all. Whether they actually did the reconciliation I cannot stay; the rumour at the time was that they did not.
I know I did 7 countries in a month once, Mom and I got bored and started with my school trip [a week in France] and when they went home we kept touring around until I had to go back to school after vacation. I would have gone nuts if it had been a whole month of organized trip, we had way more fun traveling alone. Found her German and my French as useful as trying to find people who spoke English. Now if it was something like having a private translator/driver, that might have been as fun as traveling by train sort of randomly [Belgium was fun, I would love to visit Bruges again.]
International relations were not great between Turkey and Greece implicating Cyprus* in that era. It was common practice for travellers to request their passport not to be stamped on entry or exit to Turkey if they anticipated future travel to Greece and vice versa, for fear that one nation’s stamp in their passport might impede their entry to the other.
*In 1971, Cyprus was independent, but culturally Greek-Cypriot in the majority’; in 1974, Turkey invaded and took control of the northern half of the island.
So the writer of the OP’s book might actually have done something quite clever.
Except neither country penalised people for having entered Cyprus, since both countries had many citizens with family and other reasons for wishing to visit Cyprus.
As an American (USA) of German-English descent who has passed through customs/border control in Cyrpus at least six times, I can assure you that they are prompt, courteous, and don’t give flip about other stamps in your passport. Indeed, after following the signs to have my baggage examined, I found it sitting outside the carousel area at the door to the taxi stand. I never even had to point out which bags were mine and didn’t even slow from a walk on my way to grab a cab.
YMMV based on country of origin…especially Turkey.
I’ve never seen any immigration officials ever go that far.
My kids have two passports, and need to use their Taiwanese ones to leave or enter Taiwan. From there, we’ve gone to a number of countries and used their US passports, so they don’t have a history of being in Taiwan and the dates wouldn’t match.
IME when they leaf through your passport they’re about to stamp something in it and they’re looking for an open space to do so. The stamps are applied pretty haphazardly, with lots of gaps left between one and the next. So they can’t assume the physical order of stamps is chrono order, nor can they assume there are no open spaces on page e.g. 3 of 12.
For all of us including me who are relating current anecdote we need to bear in mind that the 1970s was a much less computerized era, and passports were much more bearer documents where the only evidence available to any country’s immigration, emigration, or in-country law enforcement was what it said in the book. Hence the importance of keeping it on your person every second of every day and not losing it. Nowadays a random cop in some random country probably has access directly, or via a radio call to his HQ, to the records needed to establish whether this foreigner they’re talking to is in the country legally or not.
“Switzerland … er … No! No! Not Switzerland! … er … not Switzerland, it began with S but it wasn’t Switzerland… oh what could it be? Terribly bad memory for names … what’s the name of that country where they don’t make watches at all?”
