It is a practice as old as time.
Way back in the Babylonian exile era, the Hebrew Bible told the story of Delilah, bribed by the rulers of the Philistines to entrap Samson to 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-elaborate intelligence operations to deploy and train women to beguile the opposite sex and uncover secrets. And to this day, the strategy can prove difficult to resist.
The downfall of Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang amid allegations he had an 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 spycraft has endured and evolved in the modern era.
After intelligence services built organized programs during World War II and the Cold War and women adopted the role of highly trained agents, some experts say they are shocked every time they learn another high-ranking figure has fallen victim.
“It beggars belief that these people fall for the oldest trick in the book,” said Nigel West, a British military historian and author of the “Historical Dictionary of Sexspionage.” “You don’t have to be manipulative. The men just have to be men.”
Few details are known about Huang’s relationship with Alice Huang, a former executive with the firm Megaspeed. The New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence had determined she was feeding information to Beijing, but the Chinese government has denied this.
Nvidia said earlier this week that it found no information suggesting company secrets were shared with the Chinese. Jensen Huang acknowledged the relationship, but has said little since he was ousted.
Intelligence experts note this is not the first time the Chinese government has used honey trap tactics in California. From 2012 to 2015, U.S. counterintelligence experts say, China organized the honey trapping of former U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell before he was elected to Congress and sat on the House Intelligence Committee.
Some also note that an affair, in itself, does not establish espionage.
“We need evidence of who was directing whom, what access was gained and what information was passed,” said Calder Walton, a historian at 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 are susceptible to spies, he said, we do not necessarily recognize our own weakness.
“A target may understand perfectly well that honey traps exist while believing that this particular relationship is genuine,” he said. “Desire, loneliness, vanity and the wish to be understood can all overcome professional judgment.”
The reason the practice of honey trapping continues to work is simple, said Horace Frank, former assistant chief of the Los Angeles Police Department.
“Human beings, including people in power, have vulnerabilities,” he said. “There are folks who make a living out of identifying the people that they want to target, engaging in due diligence to identify what their weaknesses are and then going to work to exploit those weaknesses.”
Walton, however, questioned the assumption that honey traps are invariably effective.
“Spectacular cases tell us little about the approaches that failed,” he said. “Getting someone into bed and running them as a dependable intelligence source are different achievements. A relationship may yield useful gossip without producing classified documents; blackmail may generate fear without producing reliable cooperation.”
Sometimes it is hard to imagine why a man would not question a beautiful young woman’s interest in him, said Julie Wheelwright, a British author who specializes in military history and female espionage. But female agents are probably well versed in how to appeal to vanity, she said. And men are often incredibly lonely.
The idea of pillow talk, Wheelwright said, might sound ridiculous: “When we’re thinking about the first World War, are they really talking about troop movements and ammunition when they’re in bed?”
But a spy who practices honey trapping is not just trying to get their target to talk to them, Wheelwright said. They are also obtaining access to their private offices and rooms and witnessing up close their vulnerabilities and foibles.
“These women can report to their controllers about personality, about weaknesses — all of those things that we think about in terms of compromise,” she said.
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One of the most famous 20th-century practitioners of honey trapping 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 of high treason, she was executed by a 12-man French firing squad.
After death, Mata Hari was portrayed on film by Greta Garbo and Jeanne Moreau, but Walton said her case illustrates the danger of confusing a seductive story with effective espionage.
“Her legend has proved far more durable than the evidence for her intelligence achievements,” he said.
Wheelwright, who wrote a book on Mata Hari, said she was cast negatively as a foreigner, divorcee and autonomous woman who traveled alone and her story was elevated at a time of anxiety over women’s changing social roles.
Ultimately, the popular narrative of Mata Hari, she said, undermined the women’s role in intelligence.
“This idea that women are going to sleep with men and betray their secrets is something which has been very damaging for the history of women in the intelligence services,” she said. “Their real accomplishments in intelligence history have been sort of ignored, overlooked or trivialized.”
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During the Cold War, nations expanded on old methods of honey trapping and poured lots of resources into massive intelligence bureaucracies.
They adopted two broad approaches, Walton said: “Sexual compromise followed by blackmail, and prolonged romantic cultivation.”
John Vassall, a British Admiralty clerk posted to Moscow, became a victim of the first approach: After he was photographed in 1954 having sexual encounters with several men, Soviet intelligence used the photographs to blackmail him into passing on naval secrets.
East Germany’s Stasi developed the second approach through its extensive and highly organized “Romeo” operation, a rare example of a honey-trapping program deploying men. After East Germany built the Berlin War in 1961 to stop East Germans escaping to the West, its Ministry for State Security used undercover male intelligence operatives to extract classified state secrets from female civil servants, secretaries and interpreters who had access to highly classified government information.
In one case, a female civil servant was seduced by an East German spy, Roland Gandt, who pretended to be a Danish intelligence officer. Over 12 years, she handed over the highest-level NATO policy documents. When the woman got cold feet and wanted to consult a priest, West said, he arranged for somebody to pretend to be a Roman Catholic priest and take her confession.
“They told her that what she was doing was in the best interests of NATO and she should continue spying,” West said.
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As California’s vast technological innovation on aerospace, semiconductors and artificial intelligence makes it a valuable target of spies, intelligence experts say honey trapping is just one method they use and it is difficult to measure how widespread it actually is.
Even if governments, corporations and research institutions 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 ward against honey trapping, Walton said, organizations should make it easier to report an approach or mistake early, before fear of exposure becomes leverage. They should also establish sensible access controls, rather than rely on every employee to exercise perfect judgment in private.
“Professional brilliance does not confer immunity from ordinary human frailties,” Walton said. “The old warning remains relevant: If something seems too good to be true, it may be.”
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