At the height of the Cold War, a senior official of the Chinese intelligence agency stated that his country would never use seduction to compromise someone.
Tactics of this kind could be used by the CIA or the KGB, said the official Kong Yuan, from the Central Investigation Department, to a group of trainees in April 1960. But China was guided by principles. He looked at the few female comrades in the audience. “Stay calm, we won’t ask you to go out there setting amorous traps.”
Despite this promise, recorded in memoirs published in 2010 by a former Chinese diplomat, Chinese intelligence services have for decades used romantic relationships to compromise prominent people or obtain information from them.
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American authorities say that the Ministry of State Security of China, responsible for intelligence operations currently, recruited a Chinese businesswoman to collect information about Jensen Huang, now ex-chief executive of Nvidia and one of the most powerful figures in the AI boom.
It was not clear what role Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, would have with the espionage agency. Huang was one of the top executives of a Singaporean company that runs data centers in Southeast Asia using Nvidia chips and rents out its computing capacity to Chinese companies.
Jensen Huang admitted he had an affair with Alice Huang. President Donald Trump stated that Huang told him he did not know the woman was a spy. China rejected espionage accusations against Alice Huang, calling them smear campaigns against the country. American authorities did not present evidence of their claims. Alice Huang did not respond to comment requests.
“German Roméos,” M. Butterfly, and more
The use of relationships or seduction in espionage is neither new nor exclusive to China. The tactic became famous thanks to the East German “Romeos” — Stasi male agents tasked with seducing secretaries of Western authorities — and to the Soviet Union’s long-running use of sexual blackmail, among other examples.
What is unique about China’s use of this tactic is the amount of time invested, according to Nicholas Eftimiades, former senior U.S. intelligence official who writes about Chinese espionage operations.
“They do this with a long-term view,” he said. “They are long-lasting relationships, sometimes marriages.”
Perhaps the most famous example involves Shi Peipu, a Beijing opera singer whose two-decade relationship with Bernard Boursicot — who worked in French diplomatic missions in Beijing and Ulan Bator, in Mongolia — led Boursicot to spy for China. The two were arrested in France. It was then that Boursicot learned that his lover was a man. In 1986, they were convicted of espionage. The story inspired David Henry Hwang’s play “M. Butterfly.”
More recent cases include Christine Fang, also known as Fang Fang, who, according to counterintelligence authorities, was a Chinese spy and maintained a physical relationship with former U.S. representative Eric Swalwell between 2012 and 2015.
Separately, a retired U.S. Army officer who worked as a contractor for the U.S. Pacific Command, in Hawaii, was sentenced to prison in 2014 for emailing defense secrets — including details about joint U.S.-South Korea training exercises — to a 27-year-old Chinese woman with whom he had maintained a romantic relationship for nearly two years.
In 2003, FBI agent James J. Smith, who worked in the area of Chinese counterintelligence, admitted having a nearly 20-year affair with a Sino-American businesswoman suspected of being a Chinese double agent. It turned out the woman, recruited by him as a source, had passed confidential U.S. government information to Beijing.
Emotional Manipulation
Both the United States and China appear concerned about the possibility of emotional manipulation or other forms of coercion by the other country. Last year, the U.S. government barred U.S. officials in China from having romantic or sexual relationships with Chinese citizens, according to the Associated Press.
The Chinese intelligence agency itself often warns its citizens to be wary of foreign agents who try to compromise them. In May, the Ministry of State Security published an article on WeChat asking residents to “distrust sudden advances and ostentatious displays of affection by seemingly perfect opposite-sex individuals.”
“Avoid falling into the ‘soft trap’,” said the text.
Alex Joske, managing director of Garnaut Global, a consulting firm, stated that Chinese ministry alerts about espionage “usually rest on the kind of things they themselves do, and not on what other countries actually do.”
Compared with Western intelligence agencies, the Chinese government is more willing to use blackmail and coercion in its operations, including through romantic relationships and sexual activities, he argued. Western governments consider blackmail a less reliable way to motivate a source or collaborator, he said.
The Ministry of State Security of China, which oversees overseas operations and domestic security, is known for its highly coercive methods, including threats of arrest and detention.
The agency also explores other types 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 pled guilty in 2016.
“Sexual Trap”
China indeed resorts to the kind of sexual trap you might see in a spy drama, according to former American intelligence officials. “A diplomat enters a hotel room and there is a girl in bed. I mean, that happens. It’s just ridiculous,” said Eftimiades.
Dennis Wilder, who was the senior director for China at the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration and also held a high position in intelligence, described that when he traveled to Beijing, a woman would often wait for him in the elevator when he returned to the hotel.
“She would say: ‘You know, I can go to your room.’ And I would respond: ‘Well, why would you want to go to my room?’ And they repeated this several times to see if they could involve me,” he said. Wilder noted that if he publicly accused the Chinese of trying to compromise him, they could say the women were prostitutes acting on their own.
“That is the beauty of this kind of thing. It’s completely deniable,” Wilder said.
But, in most cases, according to Eftimiades, Beijing does not send agents to stage romantic encounters with the aim of blackmailing someone. Instead, it looks for people whose personal or professional lives give them access to potential targets, he said.
Many details of the relationship between Jensen Huang and Alice Huang remain uncertain, including when they met and under what circumstances Alice Huang may have begun collecting information for Beijing.
The large Chinese diaspora includes executives, students and other people who can be recruited in what Eftimiades calls the country’s all-society espionage approach.
Among the many cases of Chinese espionage that have come to light in recent years, only a few involve romantic relationships. In most cases, money is the best motive, Joske says. But when it comes to targeting members of wealthy elites, money is not always a powerful recruitment tool.
“Instead, you try to co-opt someone in that person’s circle,” he said. That includes someone with whom the target maintains a close relationship.
A close relationship also favors another important objective of Chinese intelligence operations: to influence key decision-makers or to gather information to persuade other prominent figures to support Beijing-favorable policies.
“When you become emotionally involved with someone, your decision-making pattern changes,” said Matthew Brazil, a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation who specializes in Chinese intelligence operations. “People want to please their lovers.”
This article was originally published in The New York Times.
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