Many years ago I worked for a branch of the National Archives and Records Administration (at a Federal Records Center). Each of these branches kept (keep) an incredible volume of material.
Each center would have a master record of where sets of documents were maintained—say a few cubic feet of records, or, in the case of tax records, thousands of cubic feet. Within each set would be documents kept in their original filing order (numeric or alphabetic).
If a request from some quarter was made to get one of those documents, a paper form was completed in duplicate, which included the row in the center where the document set was located. We would go to the row, identify the box containing the document, find the box, locate the individual document, and leave one copy of the form, attach the other copy of the request form to the requested document and send it on its way.
It was cumbersome and not simply a matter of randomly going to a row and a box to find what you wanted. There was a methodical system.
All of this to say, for someone to have found out about Stanley Anne’s original passport record and then to go to the actual location to remove the record, it could only have been done with intention, and with assistance of someone at the National Archives who would have knowledge where the records were held.
And for multiple records of differing types (passport, birth certificate, adoption, marriage licenses, etc.), held by different levels of government to all conveniently disappear suggests a very clear pattern of conspiracy to deceive.
Those documents disappeared with the help of a fair number of people.
One thing the researcher should seek is a master list of requests for documents for a given period. While the actual document (the passport application), might not still exist, the request to pull that document at the Federal Records Center may still exist. That was the audit control feature to make sure you could account for where documents were if not in the original set of archived materials.
The whole thing has to be looked at both ways, front to back, back to front, top to bottom, bottom to top, oldest to newest, newest to oldest.
Plenty of mysteries will arise ~ because, quite frankly, the CIA didn't put their best agents to work to deal with insertions into Indonesia ~ most of them were probably left-over Dutch Colonial administrative types with some deficiencies in their understanding of American records standards.
Do you know how many records were lost when the National Archives moved from DC to College Park, Maryland?
Important information - thanks for posting it.
It makes me more than half nuts thinking about the access these traitors have to so many important resources like this and what they could do to them. In fact, I usually try not to think about it.