It’s not just Nvidia. Spies, sex: the most famous honey trap cases in history

On 18 October 1963, in London, the then Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was forced to resign due to the scandal that followed the revelation of the relationships that Christine Keeler, a 19-year-old escort, was simultaneously having with the Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, and the Soviet naval attaché Yevgeni Ivanov. Today, it is the turn of Nvidia’s CEO to face the consequences of a seductive spy (Chinese in this case), after falling into a honey trap – the use of sex for intelligence purposes – even if the exact boundaries of this term are somewhat vague.

Virginia Oldoini, Countess of Castiglione, earned a reputation as the ‘mother of the nation’ for having been sent by her cousin Camillo Benso di Cavour to seduce the French Emperor Napoleon III, with a view to influencing him in favour of the Italian Risorgimento. Her role, however, was precisely one of ‘persuasion’, and not espionage in the strict sense. It should also be noted that both the case of Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, and the Profumo affair demonstrate how honey traps aimed too high risk being exposed, as they attract too much attention. It is far more effective, however, to use traps at mid-level or lower-mid-level targets. This was the approach taken by Markus Wolf, the feared founder of the East German secret services, in his highly effective honey traps: his ‘Romeo agents’ would seduce unmarried secretaries working for politicians and bureaucrats in West Germany – at least forty of them.

In the Soviet Union, there was even a ‘State School No. 4’ in Kazan where both ‘sparrows’ (women) and ‘crows’ (men) were trained in espionage through seduction. Many victims were uncovered: John Vassall, a gay British naval attaché, was photographed drunk in Moscow in 1954 in a compromising position; he was blackmailed and passed several hundred secret documents to the Soviets; Clayton Lonetree, a Marine sergeant posted to the embassy in Moscow, was persuaded to work for the KGB after being seduced by a Russian woman, and was subsequently sentenced in 1987 to nine years’ imprisonment; Geoffrey Harrison, the British ambassador to Moscow, was recalled in 1968 after admitting to an affair with a Soviet spy; Colonel Louis Guibaud, a French military attaché, committed suicide after being exposed. However, in the case of the photographs which, in 1964, revealed a relationship between the British MP Anthony Courtney and an alleged Soviet agent, this was presumably a hoax staged by the KGB to cause him to lose his seat.

In China, there was the case of Bernard Boursicot, a French diplomat, who in 1964 began a relationship with the opera singer Shi Pei Pu: after the birth of a son, he passed 150 secret French documents to the Beijing authorities. However, in 1983 Shi Pei Pu was arrested, and it emerged that he was in fact a man, and that the so-called son had been bought from a Chinese peasant couple. “She was actually rather shy about undressing,” Boursicot admitted. In 2008, an aide to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown had his BlackBerry stolen by a woman who had picked him up in a Shanghai nightclub. The Third Reich’s secret services had even set up Salon Kitty, a brothel in Berlin staffed by devoted Nazi women, dedicated to extracting secrets from diplomats accredited to the Third Reich – a story which Tinto Brass made into a film.

The honey trap can be used not only for espionage but also to strike a blow. Mossad agent Cheryl Bentov, posing as an American tourist, made Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli nuclear technician who, out of pro-Palestinian sympathies, had in 1986 in London revealed to the world the secret of the Jewish state’s atomic weapon, fall in love with her. Lured to Rome by her, he was arrested there and sent to Israel, where he was sentenced to 18 years for treason and espionage. A former member of the Marine Corps intelligence unit and later head of the UN inspectors in Iraq, Scott Ritter launched a direct attack on the Bush administration from 2003 onwards, arguing that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s arsenal. He was subsequently charged in court on several occasions with the sexual exploitation of minors, following various provocations by agents who had posed as underage girls. Suspicions of a honey trap also hang over the case of Julian Assange: accused of rape in Sweden for having unprotected sexual intercourse without consent with two activists who had invited him to give a lecture.