Interesting fact

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Monopoly - I Did Not Know This!


(You'll never look at the game the same way again!)


Starting in 1941, an increasing number of British Airmen found themselves as the involuntary guests of the Third Reich, and the Crown was casting about for ways and means to facilitate their escape...

Now obviously, one of the most helpful aids to that end is a useful and accurate map, one showing not only where stuff was, but also showing the locations of 'safe houses' where a POW on-the-lam could go for food and shelter.

Paper maps had some real drawbacks -- they make a lot of noise when you open and fold them, they wear out rapidly, and if they get wet, they turn into mush.

Someone in MI-5 (similar to America 's OSS ) got the idea of printing escape maps on silk. It's durable, can be scrunched-up into tiny wads, and unfolded as many times as needed, and makes no noise whatsoever.


At that time, there was only one manufacturer in Great Britain that had perfected the technology of printing on silk, and that was John Waddington, Ltd. When approached by the government, the firm was only too happy to do its bit for the war effort.


By pure coincidence, Waddington was also the U.K. Licensee for the popular American board game, Monopoly. As it happened, 'games and pastimes' was a category of item qualified for insertion into 'CARE packages', dispatched by the International Red Cross to prisoners of war.


Under the strictest of secrecy, in a securely guarded and inaccessible old workshop on the grounds of Waddington's, a group of sworn-to-secrecy employees began mass-producing escape maps, keyed to each region of Germany or Italy where Allied POW camps were regional system). When processed, these maps could be folded into such tiny dots that they would actually fit inside a Monopoly playing piece.


As long as they were at it, the clever workmen at Waddington's also managed to add :
1. A playing token, containing a small magnetic compass
2. A two-part metal file that could easily be screwed together
3. Useful amounts of genuine high-denomination German, Italian, and French currency, hidden within the piles of Monopoly money!


British and American air crews were advised, before taking off on their first mission, how to identify a 'rigged' Monopoly set -- by means of a tiny red dot, one cleverly rigged to look like an ordinary printing glitch, located in the corner of the Free Parking square.


Of the estimated 35,000 Allied POWS who successfully escaped, an estimated one-third were aided in their flight by the rigged Monopoly sets. Everyone who did so was sworn to secrecy indefinitely, since the British Government might want to use this highly successful ruse in still another, future war.

The story wasn't declassified until 2007, when the surviving craftsmen from Waddington's, as well as the firm itself, were finally honored in a public ceremony.

It's always nice when you can play that 'Get Out of Jail' Free' card!

[GJO]

What a lovely story and I am sure that many similar stories abound. There can be no doubt that the British services dedicated to intelligence and covert operations did sterling work and were probably the hidden aces in the pack of the nation's war effort. In The Golden Horshoe, Otto Kretschmer writes that after being captured, he was just amazed at how much his captors seemed to already know about him (and his crew) and that he couldn't imagine that the German intelligence service would even know the names of the officers in charge of Royal Navy vessels.

[Jimbuna]

^
^
And that sir...is a fact.

[Aktungbby]

INDEED!http://www.artofmanliness.com/2011/11/15/man-knowledge-15-cool-spy-concealments/

[Aktungbby]

My favorite!
Dead Animals


The “dead drop” method was used when secret agents wished to exchange information without ever meeting in person. One agent would drop off a concealment device on the side of the road or in a public park, and another agent would come by later and casually pick it up. Because they were left in public places, dead drop concealments had to be made from things that would fit into the area and wouldn’t entice other people to take or even touch them. Thus, the more repulsive a dead drop concealment, the better. So while hollowed out bricks, tree limbs, and soda cans were sometimes used, animal carcasses were the most popular vehicle for this espionage tactic.
The animals were killed, gutted, and sometimes freeze-dried. A cavity was prepared and closed up with velcro. The animal could be placed in a can and given to the agent to be used at the appropriate time. When that time came, the animals were stuffed with anything from code books to cameras, velcroed shut, and dropped off. The agent might also add some realistic-looking OTS-crafted rodent guts to the scene to up the yuck factor. THIS 'MATA HARI' got caught!>

[VONHARRIS]

Very interesting!