The Straight Dope is a nifty question-and-answer column, and I was reading a column about diplomatic bags, which are bags countries can send to their ambassdors that don't get inspected at border crossings. Here's what a typical bag looks like. They're supposed to contain documents and other official items, and they were officialy codified in the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.
This part of the article greatly amused me:
Any container can be a diplomatic bag--there are no limitations on size or shape. The Soviet Union tested the limits of this rule in 1984 when it claimed that a nine-ton tractor trailer was a diplomatic bag. As Chuck Ashman and Pamela Trescott tell the story in their book, Diplomatic Crime: "The white Mercedes truck bearing the blue Cyrillic letters reading Sovtransavto across its side tried to cross into Switzerland . . . The three Soviets driving the truck put off a request for inspection." The Swiss were not amused. "Though the Vienna Convention does not specify any size limitation for the bag, Swiss officials said they considered 450 pounds to be the maximum allowable size." The truck wound up in West Germany where Soviet officials permitted West German authorities to inspect the truck's contents: 207 crates, which themselves constituted diplomatic bags and weren't inspected.
:D