Black-bag
adj, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 To break in to a place without authorization as part of a clandestine operation.
"He'd been tapped, bugged, and black-bagged under Nixon and Clinton, and under the present conditions all the cops needed to listen in was a thumbs-up from an Eagle Scout or better."
- 2 To kidnap in order to make someone disappear (as opposed to kidnapping for ransom).
"When witches and demons caused enough trouble, the Union had a tendency to black-bag the baddies and toss them into a detention center."
- 1 Involving sophisticated clandestine methods for gaining unauthorized entry and obtaining information. not-comparable
"Watergate turned out to be a black-bag operation by former CIA employees."
Example
More examples"Watergate turned out to be a black-bag operation by former CIA employees."
Etymology
From the term black bag meaning a case containing burglary tools. Sense 2 refers to the practice of blindfolding a detainee with a bag or sack.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.