MEA staffer ‘honey trapped’: What’s the role of sex in spying?

What does ‘honey trap’ mean?

The practice of ‘honey trapping’ refers to the use of romantic or sexual relationships to get information out of a target. The information can be used for monetary advancement or to achieve political ends, such as in the case of state espionage. Sometimes, honey traps are also laid for extortion or blackmail purposes.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term first entered the English language through Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the 1974 spy novel by John le Carré. “You see, long ago when I was a little boy I made a mistake and walked into a honeytrap,” confesses one of the more decrepit characters in the novel. Other terms used in the novel have also entered espionage jargon.

Honey trapping in espionage

One of the most famous cases of honey trapping is the Mata Hari case from World War I. Margaretha Geertruida MacLeod, was a Dutch exotic dancer and courtesan, who became popular as Mata Hari, her stage name. She was convicted of being a German spy based on intercepted telegrams which showed that she was receiving money from a German attache in Spain, and eventually executed by a firing squad in France in 1917.

Her biographer, Professor Pat Shipman, has said in his book Femme Fatale: Love, Lies and the Unknown Life of Mata Hari, that Mata Hari was innocent and was only convicted because of the French Army’s need then for a scapegoat. After the war, the French had themselves said that they had no real evidence against her.

The Soviet Union’s security agency KGB used ‘honey trapping’ extensively. In his book Spyclopedia: The Comprehensive Handbook of Espionage, British journalist and historian Donald McCormick writes that during the Cold War, female agents called “Mozhno girls” or simply “Mozhnos” were assigned to spy on foreign officials by seducing them.

The term ‘Mozhno’ was derived from the Russian word “можно”, or “it is permitted”– the agents were named so because they were allowed to breach regulations restricting Russian contact with foreigners.

In 2009, MI5, the British counter-intelligence and security agency, distributed a 14-page document to various financial institutions, banks, and businesses in the country, called “The Threat from Chinese Espionage”. The London Times had reported then that the document explicitly warned of Chinese intelligence services’ attempts to cultivate “long-term relationships”.

The British agency also said in the document that the Chinese have been known to “exploit vulnerabilities such as sexual relationships … to pressurise individuals to co-operate with them.”

In India, K V Unnikrishnan, a Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) officer was allegedly honey trapped in the 1980s, by a woman suspected of being a CIA (Central Intelligence Agency, the foreign intelligence agency of the United States). She was working as an air hostess with the now-defunct Pan Am Airlines, while Unnikrishnan was working as the head of the Chennai division of RAW and dealing with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

Unnikrishnan was arrested in 1987 for leaking information through the woman. His arrest came just before the signing of a peace accord between India and Sri Lanka.

A famous example of a non-heterosexual honey trap case is that of the British journalist Jeremy Wolfenden, who was a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph in Moscow in the 1960s. He was allegedly seduced by the Ministry of Foreign Trade’s barber on the KGB’s orders– along with this, the security agency had also put a man with a camera in his closet to take compromising photos.

The photos were then used by KGB to blackmail Wolfenden, threatening him with exposure if he didn’t spy on the Western community in Moscow for them. The journalist reported this incident to the British embassy– on his next visit to London, he met with an officer from the Secret Intelligence Services (SIS) and was allegedly asked to work as a double agent.

This stressful situation is said to have led him to alcoholism, and even though he tried to quit espionage, circumstances forced him otherwise. He died at the age of 31, apparently from a cerebral hemorrhage caused by a fall in the bathroom. However, his friends were convinced that the two security agencies had taken away his will to live.