A short history of the honey trap

We have ourselves a good old fashioned spy scandal. Tabloids around the world are filled with salacious stories, with headlines such as the never-to-disappoint New York Post’s ‘Huang For Her Buck’ and ‘Huang Huang Bang Bang’ running this week. Readers have been transfixed, as two of the oldest professions – sex and espionage – collide.

The practitioners of espionage – the second oldest profession – always seek to take advantage of a target’s vulnerabilities. An intelligence service seeks to recruit targets based on the ‘MICE’ principle, which includes Money, Ideology, Coercion and Ego as key motivating factors.

So let’s go back to the basic concept of the honey trap. And the history of such honey traps is rich indeed. Mata Hari, a Dutch exotic dancer who was convicted of spying for Germany during the First World War and accused of seducing the French elite, always comes to mind, as her name is synonymous with such techniques. And the famous East German spymaster Markus Wolf used male ‘Romeos’ to entrap West German secretaries during the Cold War. Honey traps are not solely carried out by female ‘sparrows’, but by males as well. The CIA website in fact has many accounts of such cases from the notorious East German Stasi. ‘Felix’ was one of the first ‘Romeos’, who moved to West Germany in the 1950s, and recruited ‘Norma’, a West German government employee, who passed him secrets from the West German chancellery. According to the CIA, 40 women were prosecuted in West Germany during the Cold War for espionage.

The history of honey traps has all sorts of different flavours. The Soviet KGB in the 1950s recruited John Vassall, an employee at the British embassy in Moscow, photographing him in compromising circumstances with men – by later accounts, after drugging him. They threatened him with exposure, and he ended up passing a great many documents to the KGB. And in the 1980s, a US Marine Security Guard at the embassy in Moscow, Clayton Lonetree, fell for a KGB honey trap. He was recruited by the Soviets and passed sensitive information to the KGB.

Do all honey traps work on all targets? Well, not really. Culture matters. The French are a perfect example. In the French documentary ‘The Making of Secret Agents’, a French intelligence officer known as Nicolas states that the paradox for many French is that extramarital affairs are so commonplace that they provide a hostile service little if any leverage. It is slightly amusing that the threat of telling one’s spouse would result in a simple shrug. The French being the French, maybe other elements of MICE are more appropriate for them.

Here’s a small nugget for intelligence aficionados to chew on: as per opensource reporting, US intelligence is not fond of utilising such honey-trap tactics. No, it’s not because my old colleagues were ‘too woke’ to stoop to such unsavoury measures, a charge I saw recently bandied about on social media. Instead, there reportedly are practical reasons for this. Blackmail doesn’t make for productive long-term agents, many former case officers say. It is far preferable to gain an agent’s trust if they believe they are doing it for the right reasons, for example. Think back to the ‘MICE’ principle. An agent who hated communism, or an agent who needed money for one of his children’s medical bills, is always going to be more productive, more trustworthy, and more likely to remain in place for an extended period of time, rather than someone who is being blackmailed because of sexual proclivities.

Finally, every piece like this needs not just historical context, but a personal story. In the 1990s I was sent to the Balkans on behalf of the US government to help a friendly government in the counter-terrorism arena. This country had a communist past, and thus there were likely several holdovers from the old pro-Soviet era in their intelligence services. Well, leaving my hotel room one day, I walked down the hallway of a five-storey hotel, and lo and behold a door opened to the side of me. In the dead of winter, two young ladies in bikinis asked me by name to come into their room and ‘fix their broken minibar’. I laughed and, while I was impressed by their moxie to take a run at me, their crooked teeth (and my counterintelligence training) gave me enough of a pause to keep on walking. Later on, playing pool with a very senior member of that intelligence service which had just taken a shot at me, I asked what the hell had just happened. My counterpart smiled and said: ‘it’s the old guard, what can we do?’ as he calmly sank the eight ball in the side pocket.