Meaning

(idiomatic) One who remains when expected to leave or after others have left..

Definitions by Sense

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

Example Sentences

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.

Word Forms

• stay-behinds
• stay behind

Related Words

When Should You Use Stay-behind?

Use stay-behind when its meaning, tone and grammar fit the full sentence. A synonym is not always a direct replacement.

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