Keith Riggin, a former CIA station chief in Beijing who later advised U.S. companies on the Chinese intelligence threat, says he gave American executives a simple warning about beautiful women who might approach them in Beijing: “You don’t get any better-looking when you go to a place like China.”
But top American executives and government officials are often arrogant, says Riggin. They overlook warnings, and they sometimes think security rules don’t apply to them. That can make them easy marks for the increasingly sophisticated tradecraft of China’s spy service, the Ministry of State Security.
Jensen Huang, co-founder of the multitrillion-dollar chipmaker Nvidia, appears to be the most prominent American yet to fall into an MSS honey trap. At least two years ago, he was drawn into what became a sexual relationship with an alleged MSS contact named Alice Huang. But he’s hardly the first. Riggin told me that he knows of at least 20 others who were victims of similar operations.
The Nvidia case has rocked the intelligence world for several reasons. U.S. officials have been investigating Chinese dealings with the company for at least two years, according to an official who has been briefed on the case. President Donald Trump was personally advised about Jensen Huang’s vulnerability about a year ago, according to the New York Times. And Secretary of State Marco Rubio helped circulate an interagency warning about the case this past spring.
Why the slow roll? That’s the haunting question. Why wasn’t more done sooner to check what intelligence veterans tell me appears to have been a double-barreled Chinese intelligence exploitation of Alice Huang’s involvement with Jensen Huang? The evidence suggests the MSS was running both a supply-chain operation to obtain precious Nvidia chips and an influence operation to shape administration tech policy.
The closer you examine the case, the more puzzling the riddles become. Why did Trump continue his close relationship with Huang even after he was warned? Why wasn’t Huang given an FBI “defensive briefing” about his girlfriend’s intelligence ties if, as published reports say, he didn’t know about her MSS connection? Was Kash Patel’s FBI so busy with Trump’s political agenda that it failed to pursue Chinese spy operations aggressively?
Here’s the question that vexes CIA and FBI China hands: An intelligence investigation gathered information that a powerful friend of Trump was having an affair with a suspected Chinese agent, but the probe stalled. Why?
Huang seemed to imagine that he was untouchable. More than a year ago, the New York Times published a photo of him with Alice Huang in a Taipei, Taiwan, bar in June 2024 and another of them together the following May at a Taipei trade show. Both photos had been posted on the internet. Nvidia was then selling advanced chips to a Singapore-based company named Megaspeed, where Alice Huang worked and which had been spun off from a Chinese gaming firm. But the alarm bells apparently didn’t ring in the Nvidia executive suite.
The public loves a good spy scandal, especially when it’s linked with sex. “Huang Huang Bang Bang” headlined the New York Post on Monday, after the Nvidia chief issued a public apology to his wife, family and company. But this one goes much deeper, because it involves artificial intelligence technology that is among America’s most precious national-security secrets, and a president who has pushed for closer ties with Chinese President Xi Jinping, whom he habitually describes as “my friend,” at a time when China poses a growing military and intelligence threat.
Trump has brushed off Jensen Huang’s role in the scandal. “I just think he’s a very honorable man. I mean, he’s a great. He built a great company, American company. … And I feel very confident that he’ll be in good shape,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday.
Trump said he didn’t remember being briefed about the case a year ago, as reports say, or when he took Huang with him to Beijing for a summit with Xi in May. But he said that recently “I asked him that question: ‘Did you have any idea that she was a spy?’ He said, ‘I had no idea that she was a spy,’ and I really believe him.” Case closed, it seems, for Trump.
Nvidia’s encounter with an alleged MSS operative shows that after nearly two decades of increasingly aggressive Chinese intelligence operations against America, many top U.S. government and business officials still misunderstand the MSS. I’ve been immersed in that history while researching a forthcoming novel, “Burning Red,” that’s inspired by an MSS operation in 2010 and 2011 that shattered the CIA’s network of spies in China. One former official told me that by the end, China had arrested and killed more than 80 Chinese citizens who were working for the CIA.
The MSS has grown from a cautious agency, known for sifting what its officials called “a thousand grains of sand” for small bits of information, to an aggressive, risk-taking service that mounted operations as flashy as anything the Soviet KGB ever attempted. Its targeting of America increased after 2005 when, former U.S. officials tell me, the MSS secretly designated the United States as its main enemy.
Honey traps have been a favorite Chinese tactic. In a 1990s case code-named “Parlor Maid,” the FBI thought it had recruited a Chinese agent named Katrina Leung. But Leung seduced two of her FBI handlers and secretly passed agency secrets to the Chinese, according to a 2011 book called “Tiger Trap: America’s Secret Spy War with China” by David Wise.
Former intelligence officers have warned of the danger. After leaving the CIA, Riggin and Rudy Guerin, former chief of FBI China counterintelligence, co-founded a consulting firm called Pamir that advised U.S. companies about corporate espionage threats in China. “We have briefed many executives,” Guerin told me. “The majority didn’t take the threat seriously.”
Guerin recalls how the Chinese seemed to target one American executive during a visit to Beijing. When the man went to his hotel’s fitness center, an attractive young Chinese woman on the next exercise bike began talking to him in fluent English. She was back the next day, still eager for conversation. The third day the person on the nearby exercise bike was an attractive young man. The Chinese try every angle, says Guerin.
“Before a top executive like Jensen Huang enters a city, the Chinese will have a game plan in the works for how they will attack him,” he explains. If a human agent can gain close access, that helps the Chinese signals intelligence service, known as 3PLA, plant devices that can capture data from mobile phones or laptop computers.
Spying rivals prostitution for the title of world’s oldest profession. Spy agencies sometimes try to bribe or blackmail their targets. But with billionaire executives, it seems, they can just rely on the eternal human traits of lust, vanity and blind arrogance.
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