Suspicious foreigners

July 5, 2009 9:07 AM

Imagine you are a suspicious foreigner in another country...

...and everyday you are blatantly followed by undercover police. Eventually this starts to get to you and you begin playing mind games with them. E.g. you walk into a bar, the undercover officer follows you in, you deliberately delay your order and wait until the officer has placed his. Just when the officer gets given his beer you walk out again, thus forcing the officer to give up his beer.

I'm trying to think of some other examples of mind games. This is for a book. Thanks in advance!

posted by thesailor to writing & language (26 comments total)

At home: gather together a clipboard, paper/pens, and print off some questionnaires. Bonus points for having them political, or questioning the support of the military.

Head to a public park, start surveying people. Include the undercover officer. Get into an argument with him. Walk away.

If he starts following you, tell him you don't wish to speak to him further about the topic. Walk away. If he continues to follow, call the cops and state that you're being followed home by a man you had an argument with. Cue benny hill.
posted by Lemurrhea at 9:12 AM on July 5 [3 favorites has favorites]

Well, I personally would go to the consulate/embassy of my home country and report that I was scared for my safety because someone was following me.

Or, perhaps more along the lines of what you are looking for, when I returned to my hotel I would tell the Concierge that someone was following me all day and ask them to call the police and the consulate/embassy.

On preview, I would first do as Lemurrhea suggests, that's hysterical.
posted by bunnycup at 9:15 AM on July 5

you keep going round and round in a revolving door or escalator forcing him to follow you ?

start talking to random strangers so they think you have a huge amount of contacts and waste resouces tracking the connections?

deliberately drive down one way streets?

walk into strip bars and buy him lapdances, then duck out?
posted by alchemist at 9:15 AM on July 5

You buy a newspaper and leave sections of it in certain places every day.

You visit every phonebook you can find ripping out random pages.

You routinely take public transportation and enter and exit the train multiple times.
posted by iamabot at 9:27 AM on July 5

The classic way to shake a tail in an urban environment is to get on public transport and make abrupt transitions between trains/busses.
posted by phrontist at 9:37 AM on July 5

Follow one back. Go to a park, and just sit. For hours. Eventually that one guy is going to get relieved by someone else so the first guy can go home. When he goes home, follow him there, and everywhere else he goes until he's back at work, following you following him.
posted by ctmf at 9:46 AM on July 5 [8 favorites has favorites]

Hmm, make him follow you into a gay bar and then start hitting on him?
posted by losvedir at 10:00 AM on July 5

I would make several dead drops. They'll want to see who picks them up.

Bicycle around town. It's very easy to follow someone who's in a car or on foot, but bikes can't be followed as easily, except by others on bikes.

If you have money, pay a bunch of people to dress up as you, as in the Thomas Crown Affair, or, to a lesser extent, episode 9 of Castle.
posted by mohrr at 10:27 AM on July 5 [1 favorite has favorites]

Buy stuff and return it the next day. Different stores, every day.

Take long walks that if drawn on a map spell meaningless words.

Flag taxis for all of his very short journeys.
posted by itsjustanalias at 10:36 AM on July 5

He could break into a run at random making the officer have to do so to keep up with him.

He could ride lots of elevators and get off on random floors forcing the officer to check all the floors or enter the elevators with him blowing his cover.

Enter a bathhouse and bribe someone to steal the officers clothes if he follows him in. Or, if a bathhouse seems unlikely, he could wear swim trunks under his clothes and go to a pool or beach forcing the officer to try and fit in in street clothes, perhaps he could even start a rumor amongst the other swimmers about the strange man in street clothes staring at them.

He could sit very still for long long periods of time in places without any cover, if the officer is trying to stay hidden, or in a place wear it would be extremely uncomfortable for the officer to have to wait.

He could take up kayaking, mountain biking, parachuting, hang gliding or any of a number of other extreme sports forcing the officer to follow his lead.

He could visit a lot of foreign embassies.


He could join a renaissance fair.
posted by mr.grum at 11:29 AM on July 5

Walk around pretending to take photos of government buildings with a camera. Accidentally leave the camera behind on a park bench. The cop will take the camera, which actually contains shot after shot of your naked butt.
posted by orme at 11:32 AM on July 5 [6 favorites has favorites]

Try to walk through as many cafés/bars as possible, while cheerfully greeting the servers - lots of them have a back door near the restroom. Doing it every day will make other people take notice of not just one guy, but two that walk through the bar/café every morning, blowing the tailing spies cover.
posted by dabitch at 11:35 AM on July 5

Buy a movie ticket, go in and sit down. Fifteen minutes into the movie, change seats. Repeat every fifteen minutes, then leave right before the big reveal/climax.
posted by Captain Cardanthian! at 11:39 AM on July 5

Bonus of following one of the followers: Maybe tomorrow he'll get assigned to follow someone else (not you.) Then you'd be following him, following someone else, with someone following you.

Then you could introduce yourself to the other follow-ee and go to lunch together, which should cause a panic of WTF by the undercover police.
posted by ctmf at 11:51 AM on July 5 [1 favorite has favorites]

These answers are all great. I especially love the public transport, escalator and movie ideas. Thanks everyone for giving me something to work with.
posted by thesailor at 12:31 PM on July 5

If there were a body of water to swim across, I'd send a package to myself c/o a business on one side. Then I'd go jogging through town up to the water, strip down, swim across, and walk in to pick up my package of a towel and dry clothes before going about my day. If that city's body of water were too big, I might order a self-inflating raft to be delivered to a waterside business and row across.
posted by K.P. at 12:34 PM on July 5 [1 favorite has favorites]

This reminds me of an old joke that I've always enjoyed, which may be relevant here!

Dmitry, imprisoned by the secret police for political activism, receives a letter from his forlorn mother. "Dear Dima," it reads. "With your father dead and you in jail, life is extremely hard. In fact, the ground is so frozen that I cannot even plant my potatoes in our yard. I do not know how I shall survive this winter."

Dmitry writes back a short note: "Dear Mother, Whatever you do, do NOT dig in the back yard. I have hidden all my manifestos and political literature there."

A few weeks later, Dmitry gets another letter from his mother. "Dear Dima, The secret police were here again! It was terrifying - they tore up our yard in a fury. They left a few hours later, though, angry and empty-handed.

"But now the ground is so soft...."
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 12:37 PM on July 5 [7 favorites has favorites]

Buy newspapers, partially do the crossword, throw it in the least convenient receptacle you can find. If you're being bugged, carry on half a conversation in your empty room. Let them go crazy trying to find the transceiver. Employ linguistic ambiguity to mess with the translators. Tell anyone you talk to from outside that you got the package, whether they sent one or not. Take up jogging.
posted by Wrinkled Stumpskin at 12:39 PM on July 5

If you haven't read The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, start there. He has some rather odd bits about following people and observing people who know they're being observed and are actually observing each other.
posted by booknerd at 12:51 PM on July 5

I'd get a camera with a very long lens and take pictures of the people following me. Then I'd print posters with their photos--"Have you seen this person? Missing since 19 May!" or "Have you seen this person? Wanted in connection with an assault 19 May" and put them up all over town.

If one of them were ever close enough when I was walking past a uniformed cop, I'd pull a poster off the telephone pole (or whatever) and say to the cop "Look! Look! It's him!"
posted by K.P. at 1:04 PM on July 5

Something like this actually happened to a friend of mine - or rather to his parents, since he was just a kid when his family moved from a certain Western European country into a small town somewhere in Scandinavia during the cold war years, and got tailed by undercover law enforcement (they were never exactly sure who) for the first few months. God knows why.

Reality seldom makes for great plot lines, and I'm afraid that's how it was in this case, too.

The family felt extremely invaded, in a way that I suppose is hard to imagine for someone who hasn't experienced it. It was insulting, nerve-wrecking, enfuriating, exhausting. After a while they started to avoid doing even the most normal things, such as hiking outside the town or sightseeing, for fear of appearing "suspicious", growing gradually more and more paranoid, eventually finding themselves reluctant to even leave the house. Simple things such as shopping for groceries became a nightmare, with those ghostly Saabs constantly appearing in the rear view mirror. They grew to hate them. Really, really hate them with that impotent, nauseating fury you get from being treated unfairly by an omnipresent, faceless System with absolutely nothing you can do about it. They tried to ignore the whole thing but it was impossible - whenever the spooks weren't there, they kept looking for them, and even had a weird feeling of relief when they finally spotted them. A visible follower is so much easier to handle than an invisible (and maybe even an internalized) one: when they didn't see who was observing them, they started to observe themselves through the imaginary eyes of an antagonistic stranger.

All this resulted in a nearly claustrophobic sense of being in a hostile environment, of not belonging, of being aggressively rejected by their new country of residence. It soon got extremely depressing. After a while they spent most of their time holed up at home, bickering with each other about what to do and whose fault it all was.

Now... prepare for the anti-climax. The situation got resolved when they finally just went to the police station for a friendly WTF chat. I guess someone came to their senses (or who knows, maybe even got their butt kicked by their supervisors for wasting a hell of a lot of money tailing an innocent little family... or so I'd like to imagine). No more Saabs, no more familiar looking strangers hovering about, end of story.

I know, no clever stunts, no cool mind games - not the kind of material you were looking for, but I thought of sharing anyway, for what it's worth.

(Unless your character could go to report stalking or harassment to the local cops, too, to mix things up a bit? With pics of the stalkers and detailed reports of their activities as evidence, maybe? Or why not just chatting the spooks up - say, stopping them for directions, hollering a friendly and very loud HELLO every time they're there, that sort of thing?)
posted by sively at 2:25 PM on July 5 [3 favorites has favorites]

Rent a bike.
Ride like a bike messenger.
posted by cmfletcher at 3:35 PM on July 5

Some variations on the ideas above; He could enter a mosque and then, as he exits, steal the shoes of the person following him and then go for a long long walk. An ice arena may also work for this.

He could join an amateur theatrical group that rehearses in a closed space forcing the follower to also join or loose track of his activities.

He could take up cosplay or join a group of furries causing a confusion of identities and/or making the follower stand out from the crowd or be forced to join in as well.

He could secretly wear earplugs and go to the loudest places he can find.

He could take a small gondola lift (cable car) like they have at many amusement parks or ski areas. If there is a queue it could force the follower into a different car creating a lag in his pursuit and giving the man being followed a chance to evade him for a while.

He could set up a cab pick-up at an out of the way location, walk there, and take the cab leaving with pursuer without an easy means to follow him.

All right, I'm done now...
posted by mr.grum at 3:36 PM on July 5

Do what iamabot say, but circle just one word out of the entire newspaper.
posted by mysterious1der at 5:04 PM on July 5

Of course, this depends entirely on why he thinks he's being followed. If he thinks that they're waiting for him to do something suspicious enough to warrant an arrest, then a lot of what's suggested would probably just get him arrested more quickly. But in any case, whatever he thinks they expect him to do, he should start doing that, only stopping just before the punch line, or doing it so often in different circumstances that they have too many leads to follow.

If he thinks they think he's conspiring with others, he should have short, bizarre conversations with as many people as possible. Especially people who will cause difficulties on the follow-ups (people who speak the local language very poorly, people already very suspicious of local authority, other non-undercover police officers or government workers, one of the people who is tailing him (especially if there's more than one), etc.)

If he thinks that they think he's going to be leaving a message/package, then there are a lot of good suggestions above. Put items into places that are hard to get to (dropped down sewer drains, tossed over fences onto private or government property, flushed down toilets, etc.) Hand out pamphlets to everyone that will accept one.

If he's got lots of disposable income, he can wander into places with a big cover charge.

He could stop and ask one of the people tailing him advice on where the best place to go for food/entertainment/whatever is.

He could go into a small area where they're not likely to follow and spend way more time than is reasonable in there, so that they are forced eventually to go inside. Take a book and go sit on the can for a couple hours or ride the elevator up and down all day long.
posted by ErWenn at 8:09 PM on July 5

Circle one word in each newspaper. Slowly spell out an insulting message.
posted by Pronoiac at 11:40 PM on July 8