Experts in counterintelligence and others who work in the industry are warning about advanced spying methods. They say that China and Russia are sending female spies to Silicon Valley to seduce professionals and get their hands on very important US technical secrets. According to reports, this “honeytrapping” is just one aspect of a larger, more complex plan for corporate spying.
The Honeypot Strategy in Silicon Valley
James Mulvenon, the Chief Intelligence Officer of Pamir Consulting (which helps US companies who want to invest in China figure out how risky it is), said that he has recently been the target of what he called “foreign seductresses.”
Mulvenon said that activity had recently picked up in a big way: “I’m getting a huge number of very sophisticated LinkedIn requests from the same type of attractive young Chinese woman.”
He also talked of an event at a business conference in Virginia where two “attractive Chinese women” tried to get in and knew a lot about the private event. The veteran of the sector, who has looked into spying for more than 30 years, said that this honey trap approach makes the US “really vulnerable.”
Mulvenon said, “We don’t do that because of the law and our culture.” “So they have an unfair advantage when it comes to sex warfare.”
Spies did secret work for a long time.
The plan doesn’t just involve short-term seduction. Some experts say that female spies are doing long-term secret missions, like as marrying and having kids with American targets.
One former counterintelligence officer talked about looking into a case involving a “beautiful” Russian woman who married an American coworker at an aerospace business. The woman’s past was complicated: she went to modeling school in her twenties and then went to a “Russian soft-power school.” She came back to the US after a ten-year break in her records as a “cryptocurrency expert.”
“She is trying to get to the top of the military-space innovation community,” the former official said, adding that the woman’s spouse has no idea what is going on.
He was worried about how common this deep-cover technique is: “Showing up, marrying a target, having kids with a target, and running a lifelong collection operation. It’s very uncomfortable to think about, but it’s so common.”
An “All-of-Society” Approach
Five counterintelligence experts who talked to The Times said that honey trapping is just one way that foreign spies are trying to gain US secrets:
Corporate Competitions: Reports say that China is setting up startup competitions in the US to steal business strategies from companies who are competing with them.
Citizen Agents: Russia and China are utilizing more and more regular people, such academics, businesspeople, and crypto analysts, to go after American professionals. This makes them much harder to find than traditional spies who have been trained by the government.
A high-ranking US counterintelligence officer said, “We’re not chasing a KGB agent in a smoky guesthouse in Germany anymore.” Our enemies, especially the Chinese, are taking a whole-of-society approach to take advantage of all of our technology and Western expertise.