Think “honey trap” and you might imagine something out of a James Bond movie: a beautiful, mysterious woman who uses her allure to get close to an unsuspecting target, feigning affection while extracting valuable information.
But this ploy isn’t just a spy thriller trope; it has a long history and continues to be used by spies across the world. The fallout for the companies and individuals ensnared in them can be spectacular.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang may have just learned that the hard way. He resigned Thursday after a week of turmoil surrounding his company, the world’s biggest AI chipmaker, sparked initially by reports that he’d had an affair with a woman who US officials believe was passing information to the Chinese government.
Many details are still unclear, like how and when Alice Huang (of no relation) may have been recruited by Chinese spymasters and what, if any, information was leaked. Beijing has called the allegations of her spying for China “groundless speculation.” But the affair has serious implications beyond just Nvidia and Jensen Huang, not least between the US and China, major rivals in the race to dominate AI.
“The lack of judgment of a CEO of one of the most important companies in the world having an affair with someone who is allegedly an agent of the Communist Party is very striking,” said Isaac Stone Fish, founder of business intelligence company Strategy Risks.
“Perhaps he never shared any important information with her at all. But it’s the existence of (that relationship) that is a problem in itself.”
Plenty of high-profile figures have fallen prey to “honey trap” intelligence operations in the past. Honey trapping is “one of the oldest tricks” in espionage and continues to be “incredibly common,” especially by Chinese and Russian agents, said Stone Fish.
Every country’s intelligence service targets individuals who may have access to important information, said John Sipher, a former CIA intelligence officer who served in Asia and Europe and now senior fellow at the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy and International Security.
But authoritarian governments are often better placed to push agents into demanding missions involving sex and romance.
“What the Chinese and Russians and others can do is, they can use much more manipulation and pressure (to recruit a spy),” Sipher said. “They can say, ‘Listen, we won’t let you return home, or you won’t be able to see your family, unless you work with us.’”
There are many ways to lay a honey trap.
One method is to lure the target into a compromising position, then blackmail or threaten them. For instance, if they visit a brothel or sleep with a sex worker, an intelligence agency then “sweeps in and says, ‘Well, we can arrest you or you can help us out,’” said Peter Mattis, president of Jamestown Foundation, a Washington-based defense policy think tank.
Another way – the most frequently depicted in film and media, but less common in real life – is for a trained foreign agent to approach the target directly, with the intention of seducing and exploiting them from the start, said Sipher. One example of this was when a female Mossad agent posing as American tourist “Cindy” seduced, then abducted former nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu, who had explosively leaked secrets of Israel’s still undeclared nuclear program to the British press.
However, the more likely scenario is this: A man or woman organically develops a relationship with someone who’s of interest to an intelligence service. The agency becomes aware of that relationship, then recruits the person – either through incentive or coercion – to collect information from the target.
These tactics go back a long way – East Germany famously trained handsome, charming men to become “Romeo spies” during the Cold War.
Russians did it “all the time” during that period, sending both male and female agents to knock on the hotel doors of Western diplomats or journalists, said Sipher.
In one particularly lurid example that lasted from the 1960s to 1980s, a male Peking opera singer convinced Beijing-based French diplomat Bernard Boursicot he was a woman, and a clandestine romance ensued. The singer, Shi Pei Pu, managed to keep up the deception for nearly two decades, even claiming to have had Boursicot’s son – a young boy who, in reality, belonged to China’s Uyghur minority and had been sold by his poverty-stricken mother, according to archival New York Times reports .
At one point, the Chinese secret service approached Boursicot, saying he could only continue seeing Shi if he provided them information from the French embassy. Fearing for Shi’s safety, Boursicot complied – passing them documents for years until he eventually managed to bring Shi and the boy to France. There, the lovers were arrested, jailed, and eventually pardoned – and Shi’s true gender was revealed, to Boursicot’s devastation.
Another famous case in the early 2000s involved Chinese-American Katrina Leung , who the FBI had been paying handsomely to spy on China. In reality, she was a double agent feeding classified information to Beijing – while also being romantically involved with two FBI agents, including her longtime handler. She and her handler were arrested in 2003; under a plea deal, she spent no more than three months in jail.
Chinese spies “go after everybody,” Sipher said. “They’re going after Australians. They’re going after Vietnamese. They’re going after Singaporeans … Whatever the Communist Party says is of interest to them, they’re going to find ways to go after it.” Stone Fish agreed, saying there are likely similar tactics being employed on Japanese, Korean and European targets – and that Chinese companies will even use honeypot tactics on other domestic rivals in corporate espionage.
China, meanwhile, has cautioned its own people to avoid becoming victims – with the State Security Ministry saying in 2024 it had detected cases of “foreign espionage (using) online romance and dating as a point of entry.”
“By carefully disguising their identities, engineering seemingly ‘fateful encounters’ and weaving seductive traps, they seek to win over and recruit individuals within China, steal state secrets and endanger China’s national security,” it warned.
Sipher estimates that honey traps only succeed about 10% of the time – but “in the spy business, you only need to get a couple key people in key places,” he said. Even one successful traps out of 1,00 attempts could be considered a big win if those targets had access to important secrets.
And there are plenty of secrets to steal in the current geopolitical and technological landscape.
“Artificial intelligence has been identified as one of those key technologies that is crucial to everything else. It enables manufacturing and enables scientific discovery, it enables social control, it enables military targeting,” Mattis said. “You could go across the industry and realize that any of the leadership of these companies, anyone in the C-suite of these companies is likely to be an intelligence target.”
What we know about Alice Huang, the alleged spy at the center of the Nvidia scandal
The fraught US-China relationship adds an extra layer of risk, with the Nvidia fallout threatening to deepen mutual mistrust, said Stone Fish. For the US, this alleged targeting of Jensen Huang represents a “very bald example of espionage,” while China might fear that Nvidia – a powerful player in the world of AI – could act against Beijing’s interests.
But at the end of the day, both Stone Fish and Mattis said, we’re all human. We all have relationships that could be exploited – romantic, platonic, professional or otherwise. The only foolproof way to avoid being targeted is to become a hermit, so the best thing companies and individuals can do is to stay vigilant.
Or, as Mattis put it: “You’re a target. Don’t be foolish. And be sure to ask questions.”
CNN’s Wayne Chang, Will Ripley and Sylvie Zhuang contributed to this report.
