Could the Way You Hold a Fork Get You Caught as a Spy?

There’s a story about an American getting caught as a spy over dinner, and it’s been passed around for about eighty years.

During World War II, an American agent is deep in occupied Europe. Perfect papers. Perfect accent. Perfect cover story. He sits down at a café, orders dinner, cuts his meat, sets down his knife, and switches his fork to his right hand.

And that’s how they catch him.

Wait, Americans eat differently?

We do, and most of us have no idea.

Most Europeans keep the fork in the left hand and the knife in the right for the whole meal. Cut, eat, cut, eat. Americans do a little dance. Cut with the knife, put the knife down, move the fork to the right hand, take a bite, move the fork back. Some people call it the zig-zag.

Go watch your family at dinner tonight. I’ll wait.

So is the story true?

This is where my old job kicks in. A good story isn’t evidence. So I went looking for the actual case. The agent’s name. The date. The café.

I couldn’t find one I’d put my name on.

The story shows up everywhere. Sometimes it’s a spy. Sometimes it’s an escaped prisoner of war. Sometimes the Gestapo were supposedly trained to watch for it. What never shows up is a documented person it actually happened to.

What does seem real is the worry. People trained to blend in overseas were reportedly drilled on exactly this kind of thing, because everyone involved understood the principle. Your cover doesn’t break on the big stuff. It breaks on the small stuff you never thought to fake.

Body language writers have made the same argument about how men cross their legs. Lots of American men sit with one ankle resting on the other knee. Lots of European men cross knee over knee. If you were trying to pass as a local, that’s one more habit to unlearn.

The nose-picking defense

I was never a spy. But I spent plenty of hours following people who weren’t supposed to know I was there, and my training was full of small-habit tricks.

The one that came up the most was picking your nose.

Nobody would ever admit to starting this rumor, but everybody had heard it. If you think you’re being followed, pick your nose. It makes you look like a guy with no idea anyone is watching, so whoever’s tailing you decides they’ve got the wrong person and moves on.

There was one problem. Regular people pick their noses all the time. And when you catch somebody doing it, you don’t get suspicious. You look away, embarrassed for both of you.

Which, if you’re the one doing the following, is the exact opposite of your job.

Watch them harder

My old boss had the opposite advice. If you think somebody has spotted you watching them, don’t hide.

Stare.

It sounds backwards. But think about it from their side. They already suspect something. Looking away doesn’t erase that. You didn’t give them a clue. They already had the clue.

Staring does something else. It scrambles them. Their brain stops asking “Is that guy following me?” and starts asking “That guy is definitely staring at me. How do I make him stop?”

That came in handy in traffic. A lot of our work was tailing people by car. Sometimes you had a buffer car between you and them. Sometimes you didn’t. And if you lost the subject, you were done for the day.

So if somebody caught me in their mirror, I stared right back.

Almost every time, they did the same thing. They quit looking. Eyes forward. They worked very hard at not checking that mirror again. In their mind, they’d lost me.

They hadn’t. I was right there. They just refused to look.

The nose trick fails and the stare works for the same reason. People look away from whatever makes them uncomfortable. If you can be the uncomfortable thing, you can hide in plain sight.

And when that doesn’t work, there’s always a tree. People don’t look up.

Try it at home

Next time you’re out to eat, pick a table and guess who grew up where, just from how they hold their silverware. Your kids will think this is the greatest game ever invented. My wife thinks I should stop staring at strangers in restaurants.

Considering what I just told you about staring, she’s probably right.

More from the PI years: Excuse Me, Do You Know Where Foxfire Drive Is? and From Ninja to Private Investigator.