Sexpionage

• Comment: Youtube is not an reliable reference. » Shadowowl | talk 14:15, 8 July 2017 (UTC)

• Comment: Ery interesting page. Is the title a widely used term? Legacypac (talk) 07:11, 8 July 2017 (UTC)

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Sexspionage is the involvement of sexual activity, or the possibility of sexual activity, intimacy, romance, or seduction to conduct espionage.  Sex or possibility of sex can function as a distraction, incentive, cover story, or unintended part of any intelligence operation. Sexspionage is a historically documented phenomenon and even the CIA has previously added Nigel West's work Historical Dictionary of Sexspionage to its proposed intelligence officer's bookshelf.

A commonly known type of sexpionage is a honey trap operation, which is designed to compromise an opponent sexually to elicit information from that person.  A man who is the seducer in a honey trap operation is known as a raven. A female seductress is known as a swallow.

Sexpionage for intelligence collection was a technique employed notably by the Soviets, specifically the KGB and GRU, during the Cold War. The Soviets made use of both ravens and swallows, and it was common for male foreigners in Moscow with access to classified material to be targeted for a honey trap operation, which, in this case, most often involved a male foreigner having sexual relations with a Soviet woman while KGB photographers captured photographs of the victim from another room. Then the victim would be blackmailed into spying for the Soviet Union.

Heterosexual Sexspionage

Ravens

Frederick the Great's Strategy

“For strategic intelligence acquisition, Frederick employed well-placed informants and deep cover agents….Deep cover agents, literally ‘sleepers,’ described as ‘personable and resourceful young men,’ were sent to merge with the local society in Vienna with instructions to seduce chambermaids to betray the confidence of their employers.  These agents, one writer claimed, ‘often provided information more valuable than the dispatches of the envoys.’  While this seems a bit fanciful, by 1775 Frederick’s strategic intelligence had alerted him that a hostile alliance was coalescing and enabled him to prepare a preemptive strike.”

Case of Barbara Fell

Barbara Fell’s case serves as a generic model of a basic raven operation.  As Volkman, author of Spies: The Secret Agents Who Changed the Course of History, writes:

”There is no shortage of professional women who have ruined their careers through infatuation with foreign spies. Barbara Fell, who was the Controller of Overseas Services at the Central Office of Information, had an affair with Smiljan Pecjak, press counsellor [sic] at the Yugoslav Embassy in London.  She was foolish enough to show her lover confidential documents.  Although when questioned she admitted her fault, and although the prosecution admitted that she had betrayed no secrets prejudicial to British security, she was sentenced to two years.  When her appeal was rejected Lord Justice Parker even went so far as to add to it a further six weeks.”

Don Juan of The Nile

Rhona Janet Ritchie, the First Secretary at the British Embassy in Tel Aviv, violated the Official Secrets Act for wrongful communication of classified information when she fell for an Egyptian raven, Rafaat El-Ansary, otherwise known as the “Don Juan of the Nile” for his seduction skills.  El-Ansary built his career on seduction and sexspionage, and he received a promotion and a post in Vienna following his elicitation of classified information from Ritchie.

The Sutterlins

The KGB tasked a German agent, Heinz Sutterlin, with wooing and marrying a 35-year old secretary in the West German Foreign Ministry in Bonn, by the name of Leonore.  To please her attractive husband, Leonore brought him home secret documents for him to duplicate and deliver at his request. Overall, she delivered him over 2,900 documents, which all ended up with the KGB.  In 1968, a defector gave away the Sutterlins, and Leonore hanged herself in her cell when she found out that Heinz only married her under KGB orders.

Immediate Post-WWII KGB Raven Strategy

Ronald Payne and Christopher Dobson, authors of Who's Who In Intelligence, describe the strategy of the KGB in deploying Ravens in Germany thusly:

“This was just one of the sad cases in which the KGB deliberately exploited the fact that as a result of the world war there were in Germany very many lonely, unmarried women often with responsible jobs. From 1954 until his arrest four years later they employed a German named Carl Helmers, a sixty-year-old businessman who came to be known as the ‘Red Casanova,’ for his skill at luring such women simultaneously into bed and espionage.”

Common Misconceptions of a Raven

One must take care not to associate a male spy who has a promiscuous lifestyle with a professional raven. For example, Dusko Popov was a key double agent working for MI5 and feeding carefully cooked information to the Abwehr in World War II.  He came from a moderately wealthy Yugoslavian family, and had a taste for expensive restaurants, women, and nightclubs.  MI5 code-named him TRICYCLE for his habit of taking two women to bed at the same time.  Despite being seen as an inspiration for James Bond, Popov was never a raven, but instead used supposed commercial connections to feed faked intelligence to the Nazis.

Swallows

Kursk Nightingale

 Nadjeda Vassilievna, a former opera singer known as the “Kursk Nightingale” before the Russian Civil War, found herself living without her former luxuries following the Bolshevik Revolution.  The Cheka recruited Vassilievna through her lust for money.  “Traveling throughout the white-held areas, she entertained the troops at free concerts, at the same time ingratiating herself with anti-Bolshevik leaders who had long admired the ‘Kursk nightingale.’  In the process, she began to collect interesting intelligence tidbits from some of the more indiscreet Whites (including those she slept with to pry even more information)."  However, Vassilievna was captured by the Whites after intercepting some of her messages to the Cheka and ordered to be executed by firing squad.  Nikolai Skoblin, then a young White cavalry officer and a megalomaniac obsessed with the idea of recreating the “Holy Russia,” a mythical land that existed before the time of the tsars, saw Vassilievna refuse a blindfold before her execution.  Motivated by her beauty and courage, Skoblin rode up, ordered the firing squad not to fire, and released her in his custody.  Then the Cheka used Vassilievna to recruit Skoblin, and both got married (with Vassileivna’s then-husband understandingly serving as Best Man in the wedding) and moved to Paris, working for the Cheka among the Russian Exile Movement.

Cynthia

Amy Thorpe Pack was a beautiful American who married a senior British diplomat and began extramarital affairs upon finding her marriage passionless.  She volunteered her services to MI6 while with living with her husband in Warsaw in 1937.  In Warsaw, she seduced a Polish Foreign Ministry Official eliciting from him Poland’s plans regarding how to deal with Hitler and Stalin.  Following this, she learned from another Polish official that some Polish mathematicians had started cracking the German Enigma ciphers. Later, in Czechoslovakia, she discovered the German plans to invade Czechoslovakia.  After a colorless stint of boredom at a posting in Santiago, Chile, Pack separated from her husband and went to New York in 1941, when William Stephenson, then an MI6 Chief of Station, contacted her and asked her to infiltrate embassies in Washington, D.C.  Realizing her motivation was a lust for danger and excitement, Stephenson gave her the code name Cynthia, after a long-lost love.  Pack then seduced the chief of station for Italian military intelligence and acquired the Italian navy cipher. Beginning in early 1942, Pack posed as a pro-Vichy journalist and got Charles Brousse, the Vichy French embassy’s press attaché and a Vichy politician, to fall in love with her and agree to work as an OSS asset.  In a near six-hour night burglary operation, Pack and Brousse let an OSS safecracker into the embassy to carry away the Vichy code books for photographing, and at one point Pack undressed to cover for the operation by deceiving a suspicious night guard.  After the operation for the Vichy codes, Pack retired from espionage because she fell in love with Brousse.

Commander Courtney Affair

Commander Anthony Courtney was a “tough and opinionated former naval officer and Member of Parliament who denounced the government of the day and the Foreign Office for softness in permitting Soviet and Iron Curtain diplomats to abuse their privileges for espionage purposes.”  The Commander spoke fluent Russian and in 1961 he went to bed with his Intourist guide, Zinaida Grigorievna Volkova, who was in fact a regular KGB seductress, and KGB photographers captured it.  The KGB tried to blackmail Courtney into ending his Parliamentary tirades, though he refused, and they circulated the pictures to other Members of Parliament and business associates.  Furthermore, Private Eye, a London satirical journal, obtained the photos and published them.  Courtney lost his seat in the following election.

Ambassador Dejean Affair

Maurice Dejean, the former French ambassador to the Soviet Union, was an old friend with close connections to President De Gaulle, and he had a fondness for women.  The KGB took advantage of this and set up Dejean first with Lydia Khovanskaya, a divorcee who spoke French, and later Larissa Kronberg-Sobolevskaya, an actress.  While Dejean was with Larissa, her pretend husband returned home, as staged, from a geological expedition in Siberia, and beat Dejean, but allowed him to leave upon Larissa’s pleading.  Dejean went to a Soviet friend, who unbeknownst to him worked for the KGB, to quiet the affair.  The Soviets took no immediate action, but preferred to hold their operation as leverage just in case to keep the French ambassador within their sway.  Similar KGB honey traps on Dejean’s wife, Marie-Claire, were unsuccessful.  President De Gaulle and the French found out about the affair from British intelligence, who in turn learned of it from Yuri Krotkov, a defector.  Krotkov defected in 1963 after a French air force attaché, Colonel Louis Guibard, shot himself when the KGB showed him pictures they took of his affair with a Russian woman and presented him with the choice of either exposure or collaboration.

Sir Geoffrey and Galya

Sir Geoffrey Harrison, British Ambassador to Moscow, was the target of a KGB blackmail attempt in 1968, when they placed an attractive maid named Galya in the diplomatic mission. Sir Geoffrey fell for the honey trap, and Galya told him that pictures had been taken and that he would be exposed unless he provided information to the KGB.  The scandal broke, but Sir Geoffrey had no action taken against him and he retired on full pension.

KGB Break-In at Swedish Embassy in Moscow

Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko, a Soviet defector to the West, detailed the use of a honey trap when the KGB launched a big night operation to raid the Swedish Embassy in Moscow with a twelve-strong crew of safe-pickers and break-in experts.  According to Nosenko, a female KGB seductress lured away the embassy’s night watchman and another agent distracted a guard dog by feeding it meat.

Careless Naivete

Hans Joachim Geyer was a spy-thriller author from West Berlin who registered in 1951 to work for the Gehlen intelligence organization, but failed miserably when he went to East Berlin and was turned by East German SSD security service officers through blackmail and cash offers, giving the SSD the names of as many West German agents as he could.  Geyer was a womanizer, and in trying to impress a certain girl, he boasted of his dangerous activities, but the girl called her cousin, a detective, who then called at Geyer’s house, causing Geyer to flee to East Berlin, where he turned against Gehlen for good.

Leonard Michael Hinchcliffe was an archivist in the British Embassy in Khartoum, who, depressed about the death of his ten-month old baby and the distance from his wife, who was then having a baby in London, spent a lot of time with a woman from the English community, though they did not have an affair.  Hinchcliffe’s wife returned to Sudan, and shortly afterward he received a phone call from a Russian called Andrei, who asked simply, “Does your wife know about your mistress?”  Despite Hinchcliffe’s innocence of the affair, he agreed to give the Soviets the embassy cypher key and several documents out of fear of creating a scandal and upsetting his wife.  Hinchcliffe confessed in total to the Foreign Office out of guilt.

Counter-Sexspionage

Occasionally, when one notices an adversary's honey trap, it is possible to play the honey trap against the adversary. For example, Maria Knuth was an attractive German actress who joined the Kolberg Ring of Soviet spies in Berlin in 1951. Her lover, Heinko Kunze, an art historian, got her into espionage, and her initial task was seducing British and American officers who visited Heinko’s antique shop.  Later, the ring established a villa near Cologne and an apartment in Frankfurt for lovemaking, after which Western officers would be blackmailed. The Western German Gehlen intelligence organization heard of this ring, and dispatched a double agent to feed bogus information to Maria Knuth while her activities were monitored.  Finally, MI5 arrested her as collected a letter from her Polish handler.

Falling for One's Mission Partner

One instance of sex or intimacy which can happen during espionage is when an agent falls for his or her partner, particularly when two agents have intimate roles with each other as cover. In one example, an Israeli “champagne spy,” Wolfgang Lotz, who pretended to be a former Afrika Corps vet, covered himself deep in German social circles in Egypt prior to the Six Day War, and fell in love with his fake “German” wife, who converted to Judaism.  Lotz divorced his real wife, who was very Israeli, for his partner.

Faked Affairs

It is possible to fake an affair to create a scandal. In one historical example which did not go forward, the CIA framed a pornographic video of a foreign leader. Robert Maheu was a former G-man who the CIA employed for occasional covert, dirty tasks.  Maheu once produced a pornographic film of President Sukarno of Indonesia in which a stand-in actor impersonated the Indonesian President.  However, Sukarno had a famed reputation as a womanizer, which most Indonesians had some pride in, which would have made the film’s use unproductive.

Homosexual Sexspionage

Donald Maclean

Donald Duart Maclean was a British diplomat who spied for the Soviet Union mostly out of love for it, and he never received pay, although did get a KGB pension.  However, to make sure that Maclean would not so easily double-cross the Soviets, they had Guy Burgess, another homosexual Brit spying for the Soviets, take photos of Maclean in bed with another man during an orgy.

William Vassall

William John Vassall was a blatantly gay man who boasted that men said he had “come to bed eyes,” and in 1954, as a clerk in the office of the British naval attaché, Vassall went to Moscow.  A Polish clerk from the embassy took Vassall to a party with lots of alcohol and soon Vassall became involved in “homosexual capers.”  Soon, Vassall had been blackmailed and was stealing classified information for the Soviets.

Anthony Blunt

Anthony Blunt was the first recruited member of the Cambridge “ring of five,” who spied for the Soviet Union.  According to Volkman:

“Blunt’s first recruit was Guy Burgess, a flamboyant homosexual (Blunt, also homosexual, was his lover), followed by others, notably Donald Maclean, and Michael Straight, an American student who would turn out to be a much more significant recruit than Blunt could have imagined.  There was an ugly edge to Blunt’s role as a talent spotter: he often used sexual blackmail to keep new recruits in line, threatening to expose their homosexuality. In the days when homosexuality was a serious crime in Britain, this was no idle threat." 

“There was another reason for recruiting Blunt.  He was an important figure in the British homosexual demimonde, giving him a priceless network of contacts that extended up and down the entire British ruling establishment.  As the KGB was aware, one of Blunt’s close friends—and presumed lover—was a man named Guy Liddell, a top official in MI5, who actively worked to recruit and protect fellow homosexuals.  The KGB was patient enough not to bother to blackmail Liddell, for he would serve more important functions: easing the entry of homosexual assets into British intelligence, while protecting such men from any awkward questions about their Marxist pasts or sexual proclivities." 

At the outbreak of the second World War, Blunt could not get a job with Field Security of army intelligence due to his Communist background, so he appealed to Liddell, who got Blunt a job in MI5.  For MI5 (although he passed the same information to the Soviets), he headed an operation that surreptitiously examined the contents of diplomatic bags from neutral countries’ embassies in London.  In carrying out this operation, Blunt mostly employed ravens and swallows to seduce the bag couriers.

Historical Biases

Discrimination and cultural attitudes toward homosexuals have pressured them into spying or not spying for a certain entity, sometimes with drastic consequences. For example, Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, former director of the NSA, decided to not fire openly gay employees in exchange for each employee’s written promise not to give in to blackmail and that each gay employee would inform his family, eliminating any further potential for blackmail.  This was a serious issue, as two NSA analysts defected to Moscow in 1960 following a purge of homosexuals from the agency.

Popular Culture

James Bond is a fictional character depicted as a raven. Also, Austin Powers uses sexspionage to elicit information in that movies series. In the 2014 film The Interview, use of a swallow is somewhat colloquially referred to as "honeypotting," and use of a raven is referred to as "honeydicking."

Amidst rumors, Saturday Night Live released a video in 2017 which purported that Donald Trump works as a lackey for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who blackmailed Trump with a "golden showers" video featuring President Trump living out a fetish involving urination with a Russian prostitute. Interestingly, such blackmail was a common KGB sexspionage technique.

References

Reviewer rechecked Youtube, sees it as acceptable non-primary source in the context.