It’s a practice as old as time.
During the time of the Babylonian exile, the Hebrew Bible tells the story of Delilah, bribed by the Philistine leaders to trap Samson and discover the source of his strength.
Delilah offers an ancient archetype of the “honey trap,” the deceptive practice of using romantic or sexual relationships to extract confidential information or gain leverage. Over the years, powerful leaders and nations have developed ever more elaborate intelligence operations to deploy and train women to deceive the opposite sex and uncover secrets. And to this day, it may prove difficult to resist this strategy.
The fall of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang amid allegations that he had a affair with a Chinese spy has stunned the business world and could have major implications for the future of artificial intelligence. But the scandal also shows how one of the oldest tools of espionage has endured and evolved in the modern era.
After intelligence services established organized programs during World War II and the Cold War and women adopted the role of highly trained operatives, some experts say they are shocked every time they learn that another high-ranking figure has been a victim.
“It is unimaginable that these people would fall for the oldest trick in the world,” said Nigel West, a British military historian and author of “The Historical Dictionary of Sex Espionage.” “There’s no need to be manipulative. Men just have to be men.”
Few details are known about Huang’s relationship with Alice Huang, a former Megaspeed company executive. The New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence determined she was passing information to Beijing, but the Chinese government denied the information.
Nvidia said earlier this week it had found no information suggesting company secrets had been shared with the Chinese. Jensen Huang has acknowledged the relationship, but hasn’t said much since he was ousted.
Intelligence experts note that this is not the first time the Chinese government has used honey trap tactics in California. From 2012 to 2015, according to US counterintelligence experts, China organized the honey trap of former US Representative Eric Swalwell before he was elected to Congress and served on the House Intelligence Committee.
Some also note that an affair, in and of itself, does not constitute evidence of espionage.
“We need evidence of who was directing who, what access was gained and what information was passed on,” said Calder Walton, a historian at the Harvard Kennedy School and author of “Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West” and “Empire of Secrets.”
Even when we know that some people are susceptible to spies, he says, we don’t necessarily recognize our own weakness.
“A target may fully understand that honeytraps exist while still believing that this particular relationship is genuine,” he said. “Desire, loneliness, vanity, and the desire to be understood can all overcome professional judgment. »
The reason the practice of honey trapping continues to work is simple, said Horace Frank, former deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department.
“Human beings, including people in power, have vulnerabilities,” he said. “There are people who make a living by identifying people they want to target, doing their due diligence to identify their weaknesses, and then working to exploit those weaknesses. »
Walton, however, questioned the assumption that honey traps are invariably effective.
“Spectacular cases tell us little about which approaches have failed,” he said. “Getting someone into bed and managing them as a reliable intelligence source are different accomplishments. A relationship can result in useful gossip without producing classified documents; blackmail can generate fear without producing reliable cooperation.”
It’s sometimes hard to imagine why a man wouldn’t question a beautiful young woman’s interest in him, said Julie Wheelwright, a British author specializing in military history and female espionage. But female agents probably know very well how to appeal to vanity, she said. And men are often incredibly lonely.
The idea of pillow talk, Wheelwright said, may seem ridiculous: “When we think about World War I, do they really talk about troop movements and munitions when they’re in bed?”
But a spy who practices honey trapping isn’t just trying to get his target to talk to him, Wheelwright said. They also gain access to their private offices and rooms and witness their vulnerabilities and weaknesses up close.
“These women can point out to their controllers their personality, their weaknesses – all these things that we think about in terms of compromise,” she said.
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One of the most famous practitioners of honey trapping of the 20th century was Margaretha “Gretha” MacLeod, a Dutch exotic dancer known as Mata Hari. She was also one of the most inept.
During World War I, Mata Hari passed secrets to the Germans and was accused of sending thousands of Allied soldiers to their deaths. Convicted in Paris for high treason, she was executed by a French firing squad composed of 12 men.
After her death, Mata Hari was portrayed in cinema by Greta Garbo and Jeanne Moreau, but Walton said her case illustrates the danger of confusing a seductive story with effective espionage.
“His legend proved far more enduring than the evidence of his intelligence accomplishments,” he said.
Wheelwright, who wrote a book about Mata Hari, said she was portrayed negatively as an outsider, divorced and an independent woman who traveled alone and that her story was elevated at a time of anxiety about women’s changing social roles.
Ultimately, the popular narrative of Mata Hari, she said, undermined the role of women in intelligence.
“This idea that women are going to sleep with men and betray their secrets is something that is very damaging to the history of women in intelligence,” she said. “Their real achievements in intelligence history have somehow been ignored, overlooked or trivialized. »
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During the Cold War, countries developed ancient methods of honey trapping and invested many resources in huge intelligence bureaucracies.
They took two main approaches, Walton said: “Sexual compromise followed by blackmail and prolonged romantic cultivation.” »
John Vassall, a British Admiralty employee stationed in Moscow, fell victim to the first approach: after being photographed in 1954 having sex with several men, Soviet intelligence used the photographs to blackmail him into divulging naval secrets.
The East German Stasi developed the second approach through its large and highly organized Operation Romeo, a rare example of a honey trapping program employing men. After East Germany built the Berlin Wall in 1961 to prevent East Germans from fleeing to the West, its Ministry of State Security used undercover male intelligence agents to extract classified state secrets from officials, secretaries, and interpreters who had access to highly classified government information.
In one case, a civil servant was seduced by an East German spy, Roland Gandt, who posed as a Danish intelligence officer. For 12 years, she delivered NATO’s highest-level political documents. When the woman got cold feet and wanted to consult a priest, West said, he arranged for someone to pose as a Roman Catholic priest and take her confession.
“They told her that what she was doing was in the best interest of NATO and that she should continue spying,” West said.
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While California’s vast technological innovations in aerospace, semiconductors and artificial intelligence make it a valuable target for spies, intelligence experts say honey trapping is just one of the methods they use and that it is difficult to measure its true scale.
Even if governments, businesses and research institutes are aware of the risks, they cannot always prevent men, and sometimes women, from falling prey.
“A security briefing can explain an adversary’s methods; it cannot eliminate someone’s need for affection or approval,” Walton said.
To guard against honey trapping, Walton said, organizations should make it easier to report an approach or error early, before fear of exposure becomes leverage. They should also establish judicious access controls, rather than relying on each employee to exercise perfect judgment in private.
“Professional genius does not confer immunity from ordinary human frailties,” Walton said. “The old warning still stands: if something seems too good to be true, it might be. »
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