Sexpionage and Honeytraps

Sexpionage: Intelligence services have long used seduction, romance and compromising situations to recruit sources, extract secrets or blackmail targets. From ancient tales to Stasi Romeo agents and Soviet files, documented cases show it is less about glamour than patient manipulation of loneliness, ego and fear of exposure.

Delilah: In the biblical Book of Judges, Philistine rulers each offer her 1,100 pieces of silver to discover the secret of Samson's strength. It is one of the oldest recorded stories of intimacy used as an intelligence tool.

Xi Shi: Chinese tradition says the king of Yue sent this famed beauty to the court of Wu to distract its ruler in the fifth century BCE. Wu was later conquered, and the tale became a model for beauty as strategy.

Mata Hari: The Dutch dancer Margaretha Zelle was shot by a French firing squad in October 1917 as a German spy. German cables labeled her agent H21, but historians have long argued the case against her was thin and shaped by wartime panic.

Elsbeth Schragmuller: Nicknamed Fraulein Doktor, she ran a German intelligence school in Antwerp during World War I. She trained agents, including women, in observation and cultivating contacts.

Alfred Redl: Austria Hungary's counterintelligence chief was exposed in 1913 as a Russian spy. He had been vulnerable to blackmail over his secret private life and sold war plans for money.

Salon Kitty: In 1939 the Nazi security service took over this high end Berlin brothel and bugged its rooms. Women were recruited and trained to report on diplomats and officials who visited.

Mathilde Carre: Known as La Chatte, this French agent was arrested in 1941 by the German Abwehr's Hugo Bleicher. She became his lover and double agent, and helped destroy parts of the Interallie resistance network.

Betty Pack: The American codenamed Cynthia worked for British intelligence in World War II. In 1941 she cultivated a Vichy French press attache and helped obtain naval codes from the Vichy embassy in Washington.

Operation Midnight Climax: From 1953 to 1965, a CIA program ran safe houses in San Francisco and New York with one way mirrors. Prostitutes were paid to bring in unwitting men who were secretly dosed with LSD, as revealed in later investigations.

Mitrokhin Archive: KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin smuggled out thousands of notes from the agency's archive in the 1990s. They describe the use of so called Swallows and Ravens, female and male seducers, to compromise foreign targets.

Profumo Affair: In 1961 British War Minister John Profumo had an affair with Christine Keeler, who was also seeing Soviet naval attache Yevgeny Ivanov. When Profumo lied to Parliament in 1963, his resignation brought down public trust in Harold Macmillan's government.

John Vassall: A British Admiralty clerk posted in Moscow was compromised in the mid 1950s after being drugged and photographed at a party. He passed naval secrets to the Soviets until his 1962 arrest and received an 18 year sentence.

Clayton Lonetree: A US Marine embassy guard in Moscow became involved with a Soviet employee named Violetta Seina in 1985. He was convicted of espionage in 1987 in one of the first major Marine spy cases.

Markus Wolf: East Germany's foreign intelligence chief from 1952 to 1986 became known as the man without a face. His service sent Romeo agents to woo lonely secretaries in West German government offices.

Gabriele Gast: A West German intelligence analyst for the BND rose to lead a section on Soviet affairs while secretly working for East Germany. Her handlers cultivated her through a romantic relationship, and she was arrested in 1990.

Margret Hoke: The secretary to West German President Heinrich Lubke was exposed in 1967 as a Stasi spy. Her case showed how romance could reach the highest offices.

Shi Pei Pu: A Chinese opera singer convinced French diplomat Bernard Boursicot for years that he was a woman. Boursicot passed documents to Chinese intelligence, and both were convicted in France in 1986 and pardoned a year later.

Sharon Scranage: A CIA clerk stationed in Ghana passed secrets to a Ghanaian man she was romantically involved with in 1985. She was convicted, and he was later swapped for agents held by Ghana.

Katrina Leung: Codenamed Parlor Maid, she was a Chinese American FBI informant in Los Angeles from the 1980s. She had affairs with her FBI handler, and was arrested in 2003 on suspicion of passing secrets to China, though charges were later dropped.

Mordechai Vanunu: In 1986 a Mossad agent calling herself Cindy befriended the Israeli nuclear technician in London. She lured him to Rome, where he was seized, taken to Israel and later imprisoned for 18 years.

Katia Zatuliveter: A Russian aide to British MP Mike Hancock was arrested in 2010 on suspicion of being a Russian intelligence officer. A tribunal in 2011 rejected the deportation case, and she denied being a spy.

Christine Fang: A 2020 report said this Chinese national, known as Fang Fang, cultivated California politicians and students, with some relationships reportedly intimate. She left the United States in 2015 after the FBI alerted a target.

COINTELPRO and Martin Luther King Jr.: In 1964 the FBI bugged hotel rooms used by King and later sent him an anonymous package with a tape and a threatening letter. The operation was revealed by the Church Committee in the 1970s.

Judith: The Book of Judith tells how a widow gains the trust of the Assyrian general Holofernes and kills him in his tent. Most scholars view it as a work of historical fiction, but it reflects how long this theme has fascinated storytellers.