At the height of the Cold War, a senior official from China's intelligence agency once said that China would never use beauty to set traps for people.
In April 1960, when speaking to a group of trained agents, the Central Investigation Department official named Kong Yuan said that such tactics may be the style of the CIA or the KGB, but China is principled in doing things. He looked at the few lesbians in the audience and said, "Don't worry, we won't ask you to use honey traps."
Despite this assurance, documented in a 2010 memoir by a former Chinese diplomat, Chinese intelligence services have used romantic entanglements to contain high-profile figures or extract information from them for decades.
China's Ministry of State Security, now in charge of intelligence operations, recruited a Chinese businesswoman to gather intelligence on Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, one of the most powerful figures in the artificial intelligence boom, U.S. officials said.
It is unclear what relationship the woman, Alice Huang or Huang Le, has to Chinese spy agencies. She is an executive at a Singaporean company that uses Nvidia chips to operate data centers in Southeast Asia and leases its computing power to Chinese companies.
Jen-Hsun Huang has admitted that he had an affair with Le Huang. President Trump has said Huang told him he did not know the woman was a spy. China has denied the accusation that Huang Le was a spy, calling it a smear campaign against China. U.S. officials have provided no evidence to support their claims. Huang Le did not respond to a request for comment.
In the field of espionage, using interpersonal relationships or beauty is nothing new, nor is it unique to China. The tactic was famous for its "Romeos" (male Stasi agents ordered to seduce staff working around Western officials) in East Germany and the Soviet Union's longstanding use of sextortion.
Nicholas Eftimiades, a retired senior U.S. intelligence official who has written about Chinese espionage operations, said what is unique about China's use of this tactic is the time it devotes.
"They're playing the long game," he said. "These are long-term relationships and sometimes even marriages."
Perhaps the most famous example is Peking opera actor Shi Peipu. He maintained a two-decade relationship with Bernard Boursicot, who had worked in the French diplomatic missions in Beijing and Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, leading to Boursicot's espionage for China. The two were arrested in France, at which point Boursicot learned that his lover was a man. In 1986, they were convicted of espionage. Their story inspired the play "M. Butterfly" by David Henry Hwang.
More recent cases include Christine Fang, who counterintelligence officials believe was a Chinese spy and had a sexual relationship with former Congressman Eric Swalwell from 2012 to 2015.
In another case, a retired Army officer who worked as a contractor for the U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii was sentenced to prison in 2014 for sending defense secrets including details of joint U.S.-South Korea military exercises to a 27-year-old Chinese woman. He had been in a relationship with the woman for nearly two years.
In 2003, James J. Smith, an FBI agent working on Chinese counterintelligence, admitted that he had had an extramarital affair for nearly 20 years with a Chinese-American businesswoman suspected of being a double agent for China and the United States. The woman he recruited as an informant was found to have provided confidential U.S. government information to Beijing.
Both the United States and China appear concerned about the possibility of emotional or other manipulation by the other. Last year, the U.S. government banned American personnel in China from having romantic or sexual relationships with Chinese citizens, the Associated Press reported.
Chinese intelligence agencies themselves often warn its citizens to beware of foreign agents trying to seduce them. In May this year, China's Ministry of State Security published an article on WeChat, calling on the public to be wary of "the sudden approach and active overtures of the 'perfect opposite sex'."
“Avoid falling into the ‘gentleness trap,’” the article states.
Alex Joske, managing director of consultancy Garnot Global, said warnings from Chinese security services about espionage are "often based on what they themselves are doing rather than what other countries are actually doing."
He believes that the Chinese government is more willing to use blackmail and coercion in its operations than Western intelligence agencies, including romantic and sexual activities. Western governments view blackmail as a less reliable way to drive sources or intelligence assets, he said.
China’s Ministry of State Security, which is responsible for overseas operations and domestic security, is known for using heavy-handed tactics, including threats of arrest.
The agency also draws on other forms of relationships, such as family ties. A former FBI agent in New York was recruited with the help of his mother in China to pass information about the agency to Beijing. He pleaded guilty in 2016.
Former U.S. intelligence officials say China does use the kind of seduction traps you see in spy dramas. "A diplomat walks into his hotel room and there's a girl lying on the bed. I mean, that happens. It's just kind of ridiculous," Eftimiades said.
Dennis Wilder, a former senior intelligence official who served as the National Security Council's senior director for China in the George W. Bush administration, described how when he traveled to Beijing, a woman would often wait for him in the elevator when he returned to his hotel.
“She would say, ‘You know, I can go to your room.’ I would say, ‘Well why do you want to go to my room?’ They did it over and over again to see if they could catch me,” he said. He noted that if he publicly accused China of trying to seduce him, they could say the women were voluntarily engaging in prostitution.
"The beauty of this is that it's completely deniable," Wedening said.
