ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Sleeper agent

A sleeper agent is like a spy who goes to sleep and doesn't wake up for a while. Imagine you have a toy that looks like any other toy on the outside, but it can do secret spy things like listen to secret conversations or steal secret documents. You don't want anybody else to find out what that toy can do, so you don't use it right away.

Instead, you put it on a shelf or in a toybox for a while, and you forget about it. It's just a regular toy, and nobody suspects that it's secretly a spy toy. But when the time comes and you need the secret spy toy to do its job, you wake it up, and it starts doing its secret spy things.

A sleeper agent is a bit like that secret spy toy. It's a person who looks like any other person in the country where they live, but they secretly work for a different country or organization. They might not do anything active for years until they're woken up and told to start doing their secret spy things.

They might be given specific instructions, like gathering information or carrying out a mission. They might be trained to blend in with the locals and live a normal life for a while, so nobody suspects that they're anything other than an ordinary person.

Sleeper agents are often used in espionage to gather information or carry out secret missions without being detected by authorities. They're often carefully selected, trained, and placed in their target country years in advance, so they can operate covertly without attracting suspicion.

Overall, a sleeper agent is a person who looks like an ordinary citizen but secretly works for another country or organization and carries out their secret missions only when they're instructed to do so.
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