Meaning:
Infiltrators or collaborators with the enemy.
Background:
In October 1936, in the hostilities of the Spanish Civil War, the nationalist
General Emilio Mola and his supporters besieged Madrid with four columns of
troops.
Mola claimed he had additional troops within the city. The claim was reported
in the New York Times like this:
Police last night began a house-to-house search for Rebels in Madrid...
Orders for these raids ... apparently were instigated by a recent broadcast
over the Rebel radio station by General Emilio Mola. He stated he was
counting on four columns of troops outside Madrid and another column of
persons hiding within the city who would join the invaders as soon as they
entered the capital."
Explicit mention of the hidden troops as the `fifth column' was reported in
the US newspaper the Fitchburg Sentinel newspaper, on 14th October 1936:
"Out of hiding came a few of the phantom `fifth column' - the fascist
auxiliary force dreaded by the loyalists."
The term has migrated in use over time and is now sometimes used more
generally, to mean traitor or spy.
Ernest Hemingway wrote a play called `The Fifth Column` in 1937, in which he
expressed his opposition to the Spanish fascist regime.
- www.phrases.org.uk [edited]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
At times of tension, we overseas Chinese found ourselves in an unenviable
position as the potential fifth column in both the adopted country and the
motherland. It's probably totally unrelated, as I told him, but my friend Bill
recently visited his birthplace, a city to the southwest of Beijing. The town
had expanded for decades and looked modern in every way, but three hotels in a
row told him the same thing: ``We are not qualified to take a foreign passport
as ID'' and he had no choice but to check in the only one owned by the
government in his side of the town.
