This is The Guardian.

When Britain imprisoned its wartime refugees by Simon Parkin,

read by Andrew McGregor and produced by Hattie Moyer.

Hilder Marchant, star reporter for The Daily Express,

heard the story from a sailor. At first she didn't believe it.

Two nights earlier the sailor explained, he had been standing on the deck of a ship

loaded with British nationals heading to England

and watched as a confetti of parachutes drifted into Rotterdam harbour.

Dangling from each silhouetted disc the sailor insisted were German soldiers dressed not in Nazi uniforms,

but skirts and blouses. Each carried a submachine gun.

When the disguised paratroopers landed, another witness claimed,

men and women working as cleaners and servants emerged from basements and back doors wearing German uniforms.

These traitorous individuals, the witness said,

had come to Holland claiming to be refugees from Nazi oppression,

sleeper agents posing as asylum seekers.

On the 13th of May 1940, three days after the invasion of the Netherlands began,

The Daily Express published Marchant's story under the headline,

Germans dropped women parachutists as decoys.

Peppard throughout Marchant's story was the term fifth columnist,

one that a short time before would have been unrecognizable to most readers.

Marchant was one of the first people to adopt the phrase,

coined during the 1936 Spanish Civil War as,

...