Shtupping with the enemy: the history of the honey trap
The man powering the AI revolution fell for one of the oldest intelligence tricks in the book.
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His company might be powering the march of artificial intelligence but some old-fashioned human brains might have saved Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang a lot of embarrassment. This week Huang was summoned to appear before congress following allegations that he had been lured into an affair by a suspected Chinese spy.
Alice Huang (no relation) is described as having had a “mysterious past” before setting up a tech company in Singapore and later embarking on a secret relationship with the Nvidia boss. While she has not responded to allegations that she worked for Beijing’s State Security Ministry, commentators have wasted no time characterising her as a classic honeytrap recruited to elicit the secrets of Nvidia’s most advanced chips, which the company is banned from selling to China.
Donald Trump said this week that the FBI was “looking into” the case. A personal guarantee by Jensen Huang that “he had absolutely no idea that the person in question was a spy” is probably not as reassuring as it was meant to be.
On Friday AEDT, Huang had resigned as president, chief executive and member of the Nvidia board, and the Wall Street Journal reported he was engaged in a second extramarital relationship with an employee at the company.
If the Nvidia boss has been caught in a Chinese honeytrap, it’s not a new one. Fifteen years ago, when Nvidia was capitalised at just $US9bn – as opposed to its current market value of $US4.3 trillion ($6.2 trillion) – Britain’s MI5 domestic security service warned that the Chinese were using “honeytrap methods” to entice business executives to co-operate.
An article in Britain’s Sunday Times, confirmed by The New York Times, cited a 14-page document compiled by MI5’s Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure, a restricted version of which was distributed to British financial institutions and businesses. The document, entitled The Threat from Chinese Espionage, listed a series of attacks on companies engaged in energy, communications, manufacturing and defence, and noted that Chinese spymasters had a penchant for honeytraps.
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According to the leaked document, Chinese agents were trying to cultivate “long-term relationships” with the employees of key British companies: “An undercover intelligence officer may try to develop a friendship or business relationship, often using lavish hospitality and flattery,” it said. “Chinese intelligence services have also been known to exploit vulnerabilities such as sexual relationships and illegal activities to pressurise individuals to co-operate with them.”
Hotel rooms frequented by foreign business executives in major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai were likely to be bugged, it warned. No surprises there, you might think. The risks were not confined to business. In January 2008 a senior adviser to Britain’s prime minister at the time, Gordon Brown, had his BlackBerry phone stolen after allegedly being “picked up” by a Chinese woman who had approached him in a Shanghai hotel disco. The pair reportedly danced together before going back to a hotel room, with the aide discovering only the morning after that his phone was missing.
Beijing denied that Chinese intelligence agents had stolen the phone, while Downing Street claimed – in words that echo, almost word for word, a statement issued this week by the Nvidia board in relation to Huang’s indiscretion – that there had been “no compromise to security”.
Huang and his board would not be the first to try to bluff it out. In 1959 the former Czechoslovak intelligence service, the StB, counterpart to the better known Soviet KGB, sprung a cunning honeytrap on Labour MP John Stonehouse.
The story was that while on holiday the perhaps not so happily married Stonehouse was approached by a mystery temptress. According to one account, Stonehouse later recalled the femme fatale sending “sensations of joy into every crevice of his brain”, spurring the Westminster stud on to “one last magnificent thrust” before he “rolled over, looked up and – to his horror – spied a camera in the ceiling that had filmed the whole encounter”.
From then on, Stonehouse was in the StB’s pocket. His treachery came to light only a decade later when a Czech agent with the improbable name Josef Frolik fled to the US, seeking asylum in return for information about British MPs on Prague’s payroll.
The first name on the list was that of Stonehouse, who refused to roll over to his MI5 interrogators the way he had to his sensational seducer, leaving them frustrated and unable to prove his guilt.
“I never thought he was a spy,” prime minister Harold Wilson said later, “but always thought he was a crook.”
Fleeing from a mountain of debts, Stonehouse faked his own death on a Miami beach before flying to Moscow and then on to Australia, where he was scooped up by police who suspected that he might be Lord Lucan, the runaway English peer. Forced to come clean, Stonehouse admitted his true identity and went home to face jail for fraud.
Wilson, however, was wrong. Declassified British cabinet papers show that a second Czech agent came forward in 1980, confirming Frolik’s assertion that the thrusting Labour member had been a “conscious paid agent” of Czech intelligence from about 1962. The new informant, who claimed to have been Stonehouse’s controller, said the MP had “provided information about government plans and policies and about technical subjects including aircraft” in return for a modest-sounding £5000.
For others, such as Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, the cost of falling for a honeytrap has been far higher. Vanunu, a former employee at Israel’s Dimona nuclear research complex who converted to Christianity, had passed the country’s nuclear secrets to London’s Sunday Times newspaper when he was befriended in Leicester Square by a woman calling herself Cindy.
Cindy, ungallantly described by one journalist as in her mid-20s, “about 5 foot 8 inches, plump, with bleached blonde hair, thick lips, a brown trilby-style hat”, was actually Cheryl, a Mossad agent and the wife of a major in Israeli military intelligence.
On September 29, 1986, Cindy persuaded the lonely, fearful and sexually inexperienced Vanunu to fly to Rome with her. There, she took him to an apartment just outside Rome, where he was jumped by Mossad agents and injected with a powerful sedative before being smuggled back to Israel.
By writing the details of his kidnapping on the palm of his hand and holding it up to a press photographer, Vanunu was able to circumvent Israel’s fierce security laws, but it didn’t save him from an 18-year jail sentence, much of it spent in solitary confinement to prevent him talking to other inmates.
Cindy, the plump, trilby-wearing Mata Hari, was reported later to be living in Florida with her husband and two daughters and working as a real estate agent. (The original Mata Hari was a Dutch exotic dancer convicted – probably unjustly – of spying for the Germans during World War I.) Cindy/Cheryl has never denied her role in the Vanunu affair.
According to British historian Ben Macintyre, it was the Soviets who perfected the art of the honeytrap as an intelligence tool. During the Cold War, the KGB entrapped gullible foreigners using so-called Mozhno girls. (Mozhno means “it is permitted”, since strict Soviet laws restricting contact with foreigners did not apply to them.)
It was Markus Wolf, the East German spymaster believed to have been the real-life inspiration for John le Carre’s Karla, who inverted the classic honeytrap model by recruiting a legion of “Romeo spies” to prey on West German women left without male partners by the war. Hungry for male companionship, these lonely hearts became easy targets for Wolf’s Romeo spies, who were interested in them only for the political, diplomatic and military secrets they could extract.
According to a CIA study, about 40 women were prosecuted in West Germany during the Cold War on charges of espionage. Wolf’s gigolos would sometimes be picked up by German intelligence, having been given away by their Stasi-approved buzzcuts when young dudes in the West were wearing their hair long.
“The ends did not always justify the means we chose to employ,” Wolf wrote in his autobiography, “but, as long as there is espionage, there will be Romeos seducing unsuspecting Juliets with access to secrets.” Wolf added defiantly that he was “running an intelligence service, not a lonely-hearts club”.
The internet has supercharged the risk of being caught in a honeytrap. Dating apps, as Macintyre put it, “are the spymaster’s dream, a way to approach strangers in the psychological soft spot where almost all humans are susceptible to manipulation: the hunger for sex and love”.
Following leaks of military communications to Russia, the German foreign ministry in 2024 warned tourists to steer clear of romantic dates in Russia with anyone they had met online. “Be careful on Tinder, Hinge, Bumble and co,” the statement declared. “Russia is not the best destination at the moment for a first date with your online flirt.”
Huang, meanwhile, would have done well to heed the lesson of Eric Swalwell, a US congressman who unsuccessfully sought the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. A month after the election that put Joe Biden in the White House, Swalwell was named in connection with a woman called Christine Fang, also known as Fang Fang, a suspected Chinese spy believed to have cultivated contacts with California politicians for nearly a decade.
Declassified documents released in August this year by the White House Government Transparency Task Force revealed that Swalwell had admitted to FBI investigators that he’d had “physical relations” with Fang. By then, Swalwell had been forced to resign from congress and drop out of the Californian gubernatorial race after a slew of lurid sexual misconduct allegations against him.
In a 2020 interview with CNN Swalwell claimed to have been “shocked” to learn that Fang was a Chinese spy. Her Chinese masters must have been equally shocked to learn the truth about Swalwell, a former member of the house intelligence committee whom they doubtless targeted because they believed he had a promising future in politics.
Peter Humphrey, a former Reuters correspondent turned fraud investigator, described the way Fang’s handlers ran the honeytrap against Swalwell as “pretty clumsy” but suggested that Chinese spymasters had since “upped their game”.
The Huang imbroglio, which wiped $US430bn off Nvidia’s share price and sent the West’s AI industry into a tailspin, looks like the proof.
Tom Gilling is a novelist and a nonfiction writer. He is co-author with Clive Small of the bestselling crime books Smack Express, Blood Money, Evil Life and Milat.
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