Meaning of stay-behind | Babel Free

Definitions

1. One who remains when expected to leave or after others have left.
   idiomatic
2. An agent who resides in a foreign country, and can be activated in certain circumstances.

Examples

“In areas where stay-behinds could be a threat, however, motion detectors should be used.”

“The stay-behinds then tend⟳ to move⟳ out of the house into a tent. This might have⟳ been the case at IT.”

“But the image to remember⟳ is of a few families enjoying a day within the forest steppe - away from the barking dogs, the smelly rubbish heaps, the grumpy stay-behinds of their village.”

“a. 2000, Sam Halpern, Quoted in 2000, James Srodes, Allen Dulles: Master of Spies, page 545, Bobby Kennedy believed the Mafia had lots of interests in and people in Cuba; he was absolutely convinced that they had left stay-behinds in Cuba and all they had to do was tap into those stay-behinds.”

“Diem chose instead to use⟳ his military forces and police to capture⟳ and kill⟳ the Viet Minh “stay-behinds,” even though these actually posed little or no threat to the country, since a good share⟳ of them were simply not Communists and those that had been had either recanted in favor of the Diem government or returned to the north.”

“Ganser closely documents activities of “stay-behinds” in 14 western nations — spies and agents with Nazi and Fascist backgrounds, secretly installed by NATO following the Second World War to counter a supposed Soviet threat.”

CEFR level