cloak-and-dagger

Calque of French de cape et d'épée (“of the cloak and the sword”); first attested 1840. The French term referred to a genre of drama in which the main characters wore cloaks and had swords. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow used the “cloak and sword” term in 1840, whereas Charles Dickens preferred “cloak and dagger” a year later.

cloak-and-dagger

1. Marked by menacing furtive secrecy, often with a melodramatic tint or espionage involved.

   Synonyms: covert, clandestine, undercover; see also Thesaurus:covert

   • 2009 February 18, Philip Sherwell, Dina Kraft, “Israel wages cloak-and-dagger war on Iran”, in The Age‎^[1]:

     Israel wages cloak-and-dagger war on Iran [headline]

   • 2021 May 9, Andrew Gumbel, “Raid on Dieppe masked secret mission to steal Nazis’ Enigma machine”, in The Guardian‎^[2], →ISSN:

     Two years after ordering the mass internment of German refugees at the start of the second world war, the British government put a small, elite group of them in military uniforms and sent them on a secret cloak-and-dagger mission to occupied Dieppe to snatch an Enigma coding machine from under the Nazis’ noses.

• cloak-and-daggery

• cloak-and-sworder