The honeypot scandals that went down in the history books

This week’s biggest news story reads like a spy thriller. Jensen Huang, the CEO of one of the world’s most powerful companies in the AI boom, resigned on Thursday after admitting to an extramarital affair with a suspected Chinese spy whom American officials say was recruited to collect information on him and influence his feelings about selling Nvidia’s AI chips to China.

It has all the makings of a honeypot operation: a covert scheme that uses romantic entanglements to extract intel on or compromise a target. Good ol’ fashion sexpionage, if you will. The term, originally “honeytrap,” was coined by British author John le Carré’s in his 1974 spy thriller “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” In a 1976 BBC interview, le Carré described the tactic as “where you put a girl in a chap’s way; it’s a sexual enticement operation.”

But the tactic is far older than the term. In the Bible, Samson falls for Delilah, who the Philistines bribed to figure out the source of Samson’s superhuman strength. During World War I, Dutch dancer and seductress Mata Hari was executed for allegedly spying on behalf of Germany. Huang is hardly the first to get stuck in a honeypot – including ones orchestrated by China.

The art of the “kompromat.” The Soviet Union had a long history of using sexual blackmail to target foreigners. Under Joseph Stalin, Soviet intelligence recruited sex workers to entrap visiting politicians and businessmen through Intourist, the state agency that managed foreign travel. The KGB equipped hotels across the Soviet Union with bugging devices and cameras to gather “kompromat,” which literally translates to “compromising material.”

One famous target was Joseph Alsop, an influential American journalist whose career nearly unraveled after a 1957 visit to Moscow. The night of his interview with Nikita Khrushchev, then on his way to becoming the leader of the Soviet Union, Alsop attended a dinner at Moscow’s Grand Hotel. There, he met what he later described as “an athletic blonde, pleasant-faced, pleasant-mannered fellow.”

The two later slept together that night, and KGB agents secretly photographed the encounter. The next day, Alsop said KGB officers stormed into his room brandishing the photos and tried to blackmail him into being a spy. He refused. Though distraught, Alsop informed the American Embassy and quickly left (and never returned to) the Soviet Union.

The Romeos. Women were also targets of honeypot operations. After the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, East Germany’s Ministry for State Security, the Stasi, developed an elaborate scheme to seduce women in West Germany who had access to government secrets.

World War II had left Germany with a shortage of young men, while women of marrying age held positions in government, the military, and intelligence services. The Stasi saw an opportunity. It recruited men between the ages of 25 and 35 and sent them to the West. These agents, called “Romeos,” often claimed to be employees at humanitarian organizations and propositioned women to pass along secrets. It’s unknown how many women were duped by the scheme, but roughly 40 were prosecuted for espionage in West Germany over the course of four decades after becoming romantically involved with undercover Stasi officers.

Markus Wolf, the former head of East Germany’s spymaster who built the Romeo network, later mused during his retirement: “If I go down in espionage history, it may well be for perfecting the use of sex in spying.”

China’s honeypots. Beijing is no stranger to the tactic either. Former CIA officers and US officials say China’s Ministry of State Security has long recruited women – and occasionally men – to cultivate romantic relationships with targets.

The most well-known case dates back to the 1960s, when French diplomat BernardBoursicotbegan an affair with Shi Peipu, a Peking Opera singer. Over their two-decade relationship, Boursicot passed Shi roughly 150 documents, which he relayed to China. In 1983, French authorities arrested them for espionage. Boursicot said he only learned then that Shi was a man. Both were convicted and pardoned four years later in an effort to diffuse tensions between France and China. Their story inspired David Henry Hwang’s play “M. Butterfly.”

More recent examples of possible honeypots from China also exist. In 2003, an FBI agent, James Smith, who worked in Chinese counterintelligence, admitted to a nearly 20-year affair with a Chinese American businesswoman suspected of being a Chinese double agent. And this summer, declassified FBI files showed former US Representative Eric Swalwell acknowledged having a romantic relationship between 2012 and 2015 with Christine Fang, or Fang Fang, whom US officials believed to be a Chinese spy.

The threat appears to still worry both Washington and Beijing. This spring, China announced it had foiled three spying plots, including one in which a public servant was lured by the “seductive beauty” of a foreign agent. China then warned government workers to remain vigilant against overseas threats. Last year, the US banned American government personnel in China from having romantic or sexual relationships with Chinese citizens. And in February, the US Army posted an AI-generated image on social media of a soldier sitting next to a blushing woman at a bar asking, “Are you a spy? Because you’re way too cute to be talking to me!”

The irony, of course, is that Jensen Huang is at the center of the most advanced industry in the world, but may have fallen for one of the oldest tricks in the book.