The History of the Honey Trap
March 16th, 2010Via: Foreign Policy:
MI5 is worried about sex. In a 14-page document distributed last year to hundreds of British banks, businesses, and financial institutions, titled “The Threat from Chinese Espionage,” the famed British security service described a wide-ranging Chinese effort to blackmail Western businesspeople over sexual relationships. The document, as the London Times reported in January, explicitly warns that Chinese intelligence services are trying to cultivate “long-term relationships” and have been known to “exploit vulnerabilities such as sexual relationships … to pressurise individuals to co-operate with them.”
This latest report on Chinese corporate espionage tactics is only the most recent installment in a long and sordid history of spies and sex. For millennia, spymasters of all sorts have trained their spies to use the amorous arts to obtain secret information.
The trade name for this type of spying is the “honey trap.” And it turns out that both men and women are equally adept at setting one — and equally vulnerable to tumbling in. Spies use sex, intelligence, and the thrill of a secret life as bait. Cleverness, training, character, and patriotism are often no defense against a well-set honey trap. And as in normal life, no planning can take into account that a romance begun in deceit might actually turn into a genuine, passionate affair. In fact, when an East German honey trap was exposed in 1997, one of the women involved refused to believe she had been deceived, even when presented with the evidence. “No, that’s not true,” she insisted. “He really loved me.”
Those who aim to perfect the art of the honey trap in the future, as well as those who seek to insulate themselves, would do well to learn from honey trap history. Of course, there are far too many stories — too many dramas, too many rumpled bedsheets, rattled spouses, purloined letters, and ruined lives — to do that history justice here. Yet one could begin with five famous stories and the lessons they offer for honey-trappers, and honey-trappees, everywhere.
Research Credit: ltcolonelnemo
Oh yes, those nasty Chinese are the source of all our troubles here in the West, where our own proliferating cadre of alphabet agencies would NEVER dream of resorting to such tactics…
…cough, snort.
The taste of CFR-flavored Kool-Aid is just as unpalatable as all the rest. Perhaps even more so. To my mind, the real tragedy is that so many actually believe retarded reportage such as this and take it all so seriously, when to anyone with a lick of sense and sense of history, it’s quite clearly just a modern crack of those old favorites Goebbels Grape and Orwell Orange.
I didn’t see it as implying that this was some kind of exclusively Chinese thing at all. The article mentions a variety operations that different states carried out.
From the piece:
“…one could begin with five famous stories and the lessons they offer for honey-trappers, and honey-trappees, everywhere.”
Everywhere.
So, no, it’s not just the Chinese. Also, Phillip Knightley has been writing volumes on these topics for, shit I don’t know, multiple decades, so….. yeah. I don’t see what you think is retarded. All states use honey traps and run agents. Hell, “human intelligence sources and methods” was covered in a few different International Relations classes that I took, and those were pretty much taught by the tenured milquetoast and Metamucil brigade.
Whether or not you want to believe that these types of operations happen, they happen. Money, however, is the main inducement used to get people to commit treason/give up trade secrets, not sex. But intelligence agencies will use any weakness a person might have in order to compromise them.
Exposure of infedilities, etc. is often used as a means of political assassination (Eliot Spitzer). Having once visited the Scientologist’s castle in L.A. after a friend who was hoping to crack Hollywood joined them (She said they looked after their aspiring stars, driving them to auditions, helping them out with a bit of cash when needed, etc.) I’ve come to strongly suspect it’s part of how they keep some of their high-profile celebs in line. I remember reading something once about politicians visiting Israel being particularly at risk of this kind of set-up.
The Economist (March 13 2010 p40) had a good one liner on this The US drug trade is moving from a gold or lead offer below the US Mex side to a more gold or sex based idea at the crossing point. As long as a truck is let past into the USA, why not try a sexy trap too? As long as inspection is passed over on a set number of trucks, nothing will be noticed. The rest of the trucks are feel good loss or testers.