History Detectives poison pin episode. This one is a treasure. The man who made poison pins died and the son or grandson found some hollow pins and brought them to the History Detectives.
Stop asking Lust4Life questions, or he’ll kill himself with a poison pin.
Aww come on. at least give us some service dates to work with.
No my chosen methods are either sex or drinking(Though obviously it might take a little longer)
Got a deck of cards? http://www.snopes.com/horrors/freakish/kogut.asp
The 2009 answer: the enemy will already know everything they need about you from your blog, vlog, twitter, facebook and high school reunion page.
The flip side of this is the unthinkable to under 40s: maybe the enemy doesn’t care, and you’re just not that interesting to them. Here’s your shovel, a potato and shoes made of old newspapers. Get cracking on that new Kabardino-Balkaria highway.
[right]-- Ronin[/right]
Stranger
Can I at least get your name, rank, serial number and DOB? 
Wait, what does “Big Bear came over the hill” mean?
I’m guessing the Russkies (aka Red Bear) going across the East German border.
OK, I take it that the radio codes change every three days, or would be changed immediately in the event of someone being captured, so someone who knew the current codes would be useless after three days.
No wonder he was captured. :rolleyes:
Memo to self: If you must crash enemy territory, do it very privately.
I had to google because I couldn’t remember his name, but Doug Hegdahl had an interesting way of avoiding being tortured and forced to give information in the Vietnam war. He just acted like an idiot. After a few days his captors were convinced he was stupid and they stopped torturing him because they were convinced he couldn’t possibly know anything useful.
So, forget the cyanide. Act stupid.
It worked so well that the Vietnamese called him “the incredibly stupid one” and basically let him roam freely around the camp. He ended up being able to sabotage a lot of things, including five trucks that he completely disabled by putting dirt in their gas tanks.
Hegdahl also memorized names and information about everyone he was imprisoned with, using a little song that he made up to remember the names. When he was released, he sang the song to his superiors so that they would know who was in the prison camp. I remember in a TV interview Hegdahl said as he started singing it, they told him to slow down, and he was like I can’t slow down, this is how I memorized it.
Hegdahl also convinced his captors that he needed new glasses and memorized the route from the prison into the city of Hanoi.
Not bad for an idiot. 
Here’s wikipedia’s page on Hegdahl:
Outstanding!
This seems a peculiarly German way to screw up, and a stereotypically British way of detecting the error.
Why do I suddenly imagine Rowan Atkinson playing Heinrich Himmler?
British Officer: Are your papers in order, sir?
Rowan/Himmler: I think you’ll find they’re rather more than just “in order,” sir. You are looking at the most authentic papers in all of England.
Another more recent cyanide example: serial killer Leonard Lake killed himself with a cyanide capsule hidden in his shirt upon his 1985 arrest in San Francisco, California.
This is of course fiction, but I recently re-read John Le Carre’s The Honourable Schoolboy, in which a British banker in Hong Kong, who has helped (under duress) the British Secret Service, is brutally tortured by the criminals whose secret bank account he divulged information on. The banker dies from the torture.
In the novel, one of the secret service agents tells the chief (Smiley) that “usually we gave them something to betray, some piece of news they could reveal under torture. The problem with Frost (the banker) is that he didn’t have anything to give them.”
Lust, if your don’t pony up your Mama’s PIN, I’ll have to smack your pinky with this ruler.