Sexpionage is the involvement of sexual activity (or the possibility of sexual activity), intimacy, romance, or seduction in espionage. Sex, or the possibility of sex, can function as a distraction, incentive, cover story, or unintended part of any intelligence operation.
In the Soviet Union, female agents assigned to use such tactics were referred to as "sparrows", while male agents were known as "ravens". 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.
Sexpionage is a historically documented phenomenon, though a 2008 CIA review of intelligence in public literature called The Intelligence Officer’s Bookshelf, compiled and reviewed by Hayden B. Peake, noted that then-recent books on the subject suffered from factual errors and a lack of supporting documentation.
Homosexual entrapment with the NSA 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. Earlier in 1960, two NSA analysts had defected to Moscow following a purge of homosexuals from the agency.
Soviet and Russian examples Yakov Agranov, deputy of the NKVD, known as one of main organizers of Soviet political repressions and Stalinist show trials in 1920s and 1930s, was responsible for sex spy operations among creative-class intelligentsia. He used Bolshoi ballerinas, as well as cinema and theater actresses. Agranov created a school named the Lenin Technical School (Ленинская техническая школа). The school was opened in 1931 by Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, who was the head of the Joint State Political Directorate. According to legend, Richard Sorge and Nikolai Kuznetsov studied at a Moscow Sexpionage school.
Kazan, Tatarstan sexpionage school According to former CIA officer Jason Matthews, the Soviet Union had a sexpionage school called "State School 4" in Kazan, Tatarstan, southeast of Moscow, on the banks of the Volga river. The school trained female agents to be "swallows". This school was depicted in Matthews' 2013 novel Red Sparrow. In 2018, a film of the same name was adapted from it.
Matthews believes the Kazan school has been closed, but that Russia now uses independent contractors as honey traps. Matthews has said, "If a human target with access to classified information went to Moscow [today], he’d probably see a modern-day Swallow at one of the bars of the five-star hotels in Moscow."
Specific examples In a 2015 lecture, former CIA officer Jonna Mendez explained how Czechoslovak husband and wife KGB spies Karl and Hana Koecher used sex to infiltrate the CIA and gather top-secret information. One popular Washington, D.C., swinger club frequented by the couple counted at least 10 CIA staffers and a United States senator as members.
In 2018, Mendez told The New York Times that an American Marine stationed at the American embassy in Moscow was seduced by a sparrow, and subsequently allowed Russian agents onto the property. Mendez said China and other countries also had such programs.
In 1963, the playwright and screenwriter Yuri Krotkov defected to the West. He revealed that he had been told by the KGB to seek out attractive young women who could be used to seduce men. He would recruit actresses while doing film work, promising better film roles, money and clothes.
Trapped targets during the Soviet Union period included: Sukarno, President of Indonesia; , French ambassador in the 1950s; Clayton J. Lonetree, a Marine guarding the US embassy; Roy Guindon, a Canadian diplomat; Col. Louis Guibaud, a French military attache who committed suicide; Jeremy Wolfenden, a homosexual British journalist in Moscow in the early 1960s; John Watkins, homosexual Canadian ambassador in Moscow in 1954; Geoffrey Harrison, British ambassador; U.S. Army Major James R. Holbrook; William John Vassall, a homosexual British navy clerk; British MP Anthony Courtney;
The Washington Post reported in 1987 that "most westerners who have spent any length of time in Moscow have their favorite tale of an attempted seduction by a KGB swallow or raven."
Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, Robert Maxwell, was engaged with both MI6 and the KGB. Ghislaine Maxwell was later alleged to have been involved with a group of young women who were, perhaps, over the UK age of consent, but who were under the age of consent in the USA. Coincidental or otherwise, the interaction between these facts and the timing of legal action against HRH Queen Elizabeth II's son Andrew very close to the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee (and to the death of her husband, HRH Prince Philip) largely remains subject to significant debate.
East German spies In East Germany from the late 1960s onwards, the Ministry of State Security (Stasi) recruited call girls, nicknamed "Mielke's Maidens" after the Stasi chief Erich Mielke, to perform a number of sexpionage functions. The women met up with western diplomats and businessmen in order to compromise them, and reported back on their attitudes to East Germany. They also identified lesbians and homosexuals who might be susceptible to blackmail, as well as East Germans who were seeking to escape to the west and had made contact with western businessmen. The Stasi used specific hotels in East Germany as places for these women to take their customers. The hotels were often bugged and some had full-time Stasi employees working there.
A network of male East German spies, called "Romeos", was created by Markus Wolf, the head of East Germany's foreign intelligence service. These agents were assigned to develop long-term relationships with sources in West Germany. The sources were usually women, often secretaries in the ministries and government offices of the West German capital Bonn. Around 40 women were prosecuted for espionage in West Germany as a result of romantic relationships with undercover East German agents.
Notable people and events Kursk Nightingale – Russia Nadezhda Plevitskaya, 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 Plevitskaya 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, Plevitskaya 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 Plevitskaya 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 Plevitskaya to recruit Skoblin, and both got married (with Nadezhda'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 – Britain Amy Thorpe Pack was an American who married a senior British diplomat and began extramarital affairs upon finding her marriage passionless. She volunteered her services to MI6 while 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 City 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 – Soviet Union 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 their intimate activity. 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 – Soviet Union Maurice Dejean, the former French ambassador to the Soviet Union, was an old friend with close connections to President De Gaulle, who 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 Larisa Kronberg-Sobolevskaya, an actress. While Dejean was with Kronberg-Sobolevskaya, her pretend husband returned home, as staged, from a geological expedition in Siberia, and beat Dejean, but allowed him to leave upon Larisa'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 – Soviet Union 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.