Spotting the Thread: Difference between revisions

* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth Shibboleths] are words that rely heavily on language-specific pronunciation. These have often been used to distinguish infiltrators from native speakers. (of course, they are still useless against traitors):

** The Dutch used the name of the port town Scheveningen to unmask Germans.

* Another WWII story tells of a soldier who tried very hard to pass as a civilian while in Europe: got new clothes, new hairstyle, learned the local language, etc. One day, while waiting on the curb with two bags of groceries in his hand, a German walks up and basically greets him with "Hi, Soldier!" The reason? He had two bags of groceries in one hand, because the military ingrains the habit of keeping your other hand free to salute.

* In WWII German spies would often try to infiltrate Britain via neutral Spain, posing as Swiss businessmen in order to travel to Spain. The problem was, German standards of discipline were ''too'' high; German spies were under standing orders to stay sober, not frequent brothels, and absolutely not to deal on the black market, whereas given how expensive and heavily taxed cigarettes, saccharine and other luxuries had become in Switzerland during world war two, [[MI 6]] could tell with a good degree of accuracy who were real Swiss businessmen and who were spies simply by offering to sell them some cigarettes or nylons on the sly. At one point the German intelligence services were receiving hundreds of reports from agents “in london” per month, all coming from agents caught and turned in Spain, writing fake reports from Barcelona using the A-Z of London and copies of ''the times'' to keep their fake reports realistic. All because the spies were ''more honest'' in their dealing than the civilians.