Foreign spies use sex and ‘gutter-level’ tactics to infiltrate the US

The foreign woman was attractive, well-dressed and confidently at ease.

She struck up a conversation in person with the former American soldier – at the time a senior defense contractor – answering his questions about the company she said she worked for and the job she claimed to do. By the end of the day, her interest had taken a sharper turn, her phone lighting up his with a stream of sexually suggestive text messages.

“What are you doing tonight?” read one. “Come for a drink,” said another.

It was a trap.

One that has quietly played out for as long as nations have used intelligence services to pry state secrets from rivals, a tactic fueled by myth, dubious accounts and flights of imagination.

“Authoritative governments will do anything they can to win. Anything,” said Robin Dreeke, a former FBI special agent who worked in counterintelligence.

Dreeke helped catch foreign spies operating on American soil.

One American intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it isn’t the Cold War anymore and that KGB agents aren’t being tailed across Eastern Europe like in a spy novel or Hollywood movie.

But officials and experts warn that America’s chief adversaries China and Russia and enemies like North Korea, are deploying every espionage tactic imaginable to gain diplomatic, military, technological and scientific advantage. They are infiltrating U.S. colleges and think tanks as students and researchers, recruiting insiders, engaging in corporate espionage and cyber intrusions, and, perhaps most luridly of all, availing themselves of old-school “honeypots,” using attractive agents armed with flattery and seduction, like the one aimed at the former American soldier.

The concept is simple, transactional, salacious: the promise of sex for secrets. It can also be illegal and prosecutable under the Espionage Act of 1917 that prohibits the unauthorized transmission of national defense information that might aid foreign powers.

A woman suspected of working for an Asian government approached the former soldier turned defense contractor while he was attending the 2024 Association of the United States Army (AUSA) event as a vendor, according to a senior U.S. Army counterintelligence official. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to speak frankly about intelligence work. Held annually in Washington, D.C., AUSA brings together Army leaders, defense industry professionals, policymakers and the public for weapons expositions, panels and networking.

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