The foreign woman was attractive, well-dressed and confidently at ease.

She struck up a conversation in person with the former American soldier – at the time a senior defense contractor – answering his questions about the company she said she worked for and the job she claimed to do. By the end of the day, her interest had taken a sharper turn, her phone lighting up his with a stream of sexually suggestive text messages.

“What are you doing tonight?” read one. “Come for a drink," said another.

It was a trap.

One that has quietly played out for as long as nations have used intelligence services to pry state secrets from rivals, a tactic fueled by myth, dubious accounts and flights of imagination.

"Authoritative governments will do anything they can to win. Anything,” said Robin Dreeke, a former FBI special agent who worked in counterintelligence.

Dreeke helped catch foreign spies operating on American soil.

One American intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it isn’t the Cold War anymore and that KGB agents aren’t being tailed across Eastern Europe like in a spy novel or Hollywood movie.

But officials and experts warn that America’s chief adversaries China and Russia and enemies like North Korea, are deploying every espionage tactic imaginable to gain diplomatic, military, technological and scientific advantage. They are infiltrating U.S. colleges and think tanks as students and researchers, recruiting insiders, engaging in corporate espionage and cyber intrusions, and, perhaps most luridly of all, availing themselves of old-school “honeypots,” using attractive agents armed with flattery and seduction, like the one aimed at the former American soldier.

The concept is simple, transactional, salacious: the promise of sex for secrets. It can also be illegal and prosecutable under the Espionage Act of 1917 that prohibits the unauthorized transmission of national defense information that might aid foreign powers.

A woman suspected of working for an Asian government approached the former soldier turned defense contractor while he was attending the 2024 Association of the United States Army (AUSA) event as a vendor, according to a senior U.S. Army counterintelligence official. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to speak frankly about intelligence work. Held annually in Washington, D.C., AUSA brings together Army leaders, defense industry professionals, policymakers and the public for weapons expositions, panels and networking.

AUSA is no arms industry sideshow.

It hosts North America’s largest annual showcase of cutting-edge U.S. Army land power. It is exactly the kind of forum that draws foreign intelligence operatives eager to peer under the hood of the latest American technology and report back to Beijing, Moscow or Pyongyang, according to the counterintelligence official. The official said that every year at AUSA, known and suspected foreign intelligence officers arrive to collect, copy or steal information.

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Others evade intelligence detection entirely.

The suspected Asian national who unsuccessfully attempted to extract information from the former soldier also approached an extremely senior U.S. Army officer at the 2024 AUSA conference in what appeared to be a seduction effort, according to a second U.S. Army counterintelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The identities of the soldier turned defense contractor, the high-ranking Army officer and the woman suspected of approaching them for another government have not been disclosed.

The FBI is investigating the incidents. The law enforcement agency declined to comment.

Attempts at “sexpionage” − using seduction to extract intelligence, gain leverage or access sensitive U.S. secrets − represent a niche area of intelligence collection, are relatively rare and are difficult to quantify, according to current and former security officials, lawmakers and national security experts. Many cases never become public because details are classified, shrouded in secrecy, carry criminal implications and can be deeply embarrassing for those involved.

The public typically learns about espionage failures; success typically remains secret.

The Defense Personnel Security Research Center, part of the U.S. Department of Defense, found that between 1985 and 2017 most of the perpetrators in the cases it reviewed − those who leaked secrets to foreign governments − were motivated by money rather than a desire to be intimate with a partner later confirmed or assumed to be a honeypot.

But there is little doubt, officials and experts say, that spying efforts are intensifying as the world’s two dominant superpowers, the United States and China, battle for superiority across economic, technological, military and ideological fronts. China and Russia have spent decades using espionage, influence campaigns and increasingly artificial intelligence tools to steal American intellectual property, trade secrets and advanced technologies, according to David Shedd, a former acting director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and author of the recently published book, The Great Heist: China’s Epic Campaign to Steal America’s Secrets.

Shedd said this runs the gamut from pilfering proprietary technology from the U.S. military and American companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin to wholly legal talent recruitment at Silicon Valley “start-up” fairs. He said this activity amounts to “weaponizing the openness of the capitalist system” through a sustained campaign of human recruitment, legal manipulation and investment front operations.

"We’re giving them the rope to hang the capitalist system in the sense that our system is set up to be really transparent,” he said. “We report out enormous amounts of business data associated with what a company must do that’s registered on the SEC or on a stock exchange, for example.”

And, unlike Western intelligence services, which Shedd said are constrained by legal standards and ethical considerations, China and Russia are also willing to deploy honeypots.

Some incidents that have come to light are outrageously brazen while appearing mundane.

An intelligence official, speaking anonymously on a sensitive security matter, said that at the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense − the Pentagon in Washington − it’s possible to see attractive Asian women posing as lost tourists trying to enter the building.

The intelligence official, who helps train America’s newest generation of overseas intelligence officers, said these pretend tourists feign a lack of English, adopt a coquettish manner and play dumb to probe the area’s perimeter and identify its weak and strong points.

In this context, weak and strong points can include drawing basic conclusions about who is coming and going from the Pentagon, the official said. The popular image of intelligence work is that it is all rooftop chases, solo missions where entire armies are outshot and coded whispers, but the reality is way more spreadsheets than spycraft: collecting reports, validating data, writing cautious assessments. Real intelligence-collection work is usually team-based, bureaucratic and slow. While seemingly humdrum, seemingly insignificant activity like that which the intelligence officer said is taking place outside the Pentagon can yield valuable information.

For instance, a theoretical visit by a Taiwanese military official to the Pentagon could interest China, given its longstanding vow to reunite Taiwan with the mainland.

Dreeke, the former FBI special agent who worked in counterintelligence, said of this alleged activity outside the Pentagon: “They are probably observing patterns of behavior and when you're observing patterns of behavior it becomes easy to recognize when someone's having a bad day and may be more vulnerable to an approach."

Suspected Chinese spies. Disguised as tourists, they tried to infiltrate Alaskan military bases

In a statement, the Pentagon Force Protection Agency, which protects Pentagon employees, visitors and infrastructure, said it "is not aware of any groups near the entrance of the Pentagon attempting to gather intelligence from people entering and exiting." However, the intelligence official who regularly observes the pattern said that the agency’s officers do know about it, see it frequently and have intelligence plans in place to counter it. Recently, the official said, an Asian national pretending to be tourist showed up outside the Pentagon in what the official described as extremely close-fitting, inappropriate clothing: white spandex shorts.

USA TODAY reported in 2023 that Chinese citizens posing as tourists but suspected of being spies have made several attempts in recent years to gain access to military facilities in Alaska, a vast state studded with sensitive bases. In one incident, a vehicle with Chinese citizens blew past a security checkpoint at Fort Wainwright in Fairbanks, AK. Many of the encounters have been chalked up to innocent mistakes by foreign visitors intent on viewing the northern lights and other attractions in Alaska. Other attempts to enter U.S. military bases, however, seem to be probes to learn information, no matter how small or basic, about U.S. military capabilities.

Still, over the course of several visits to the Pentagon, a USA TODAY reporter failed to observe this activity and some current and former intelligence officials were skeptical of the idea that China or another country would deploy such a crude information-gathering tactic. Representatives for the Chinese embassy in Washington did not respond to a comment request about the allegations.

Some who have fallen prey to sexpionage appear shockingly naive.

In July 2025, a U.S. Air Force employee at U.S. Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, pleaded guilty to conspiring to transmit classified information about the early stages of Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. David Franklin Slater, 64, a retired Army lieutenant colonel working in a civilian role, was sentenced to 70 months in federal prison, one year of supervised release and a $25,000 fine for disclosing the top-secret information via a foreign online dating platform, according to court records.

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Prosecutors concluded that Slater relayed details of Russian military targets, capabilities and U.S. officials’ travel plans to Ukraine, believing he was sharing them with a woman he hoped to date. Message exchanges frequently probed U.S. national defense secrets in a manner resembling a classic honeypot, the transcripts from the legal proceedings reveal.

"Dear, what is shown on the screens in the special room?? It is very interesting," said one of the messages sent to Slater, on March 11, 2022. The "special room" was a reference to Offutt Air Force Base’s operations center, a classified space, to which Slater had access.

"You are my secret agent. With love," the contact wrote about 10 days later.

On or about April 14, 2022, the contact wrote to Slater yet again: "My sweet Dave, thanks for the valuable information, it's great that two officials from the USA are going to Kyiv."

Prosecutors did not identity the person Slater exchanged messages with.

In a similar case, retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Benjamin Bishop was sentenced in 2014 to seven years in a federal prison for passing American national defense secrets to his Chinese girlfriend and illegally keeping classified documents at his home while stationed at U.S. Pacific Command in Oahu, Hawaii, according to court records.

Bishop, 60 at the time of his sentencing, had top-secret security clearance.

He emailed the secrets, about U.S.-South Korea joint military training and planning, to his girlfriend. Bishop also kept classified materials at his home about U.S. Armed Forces defense planning guides and the Department of Defense’s China strategy.

The emails were sent to a 27-year-old Chinese woman living in the U.S. as a graduate student on a J1 visa, who was secretly romantically involved with Bishop, according to federal investigators. The FBI said the pair met at an international military conference in Hawaii and that the woman, whose identity was withheld, was likely targeting individuals with access to classified information. Bishop was lured into something tempting that turned out to be a setup.

He was honeypotted.

Other examples of attempted sexpionage are far more shocking and sordid.

A senior defense industry professional within the last year traveled to a major European city to meet a Chinese government delegation about a private corporate contract. According to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the defense industry professional was repeatedly propositioned in his hotel room by multiple sex workers he believed had been sent by the Chinese delegation to secure his compliance for the contract.

Each time the defense industry professional returned to his hotel room, he found either a different sex worker or one he had previously rejected, disguised with a wig and altered hairstyle. After this occurred multiple times, the defense contractor alerted the hotel’s management, who, according to the person familiar with the matter, appeared complicit.

Fearing blackmail, the defense industry professional ultimately chose to sleep in the hotel’s gym, in full view of a surveillance camera, to avoid any appearance of impropriety. USA TODAY is not releasing additional details about the incident, including its exact location, to protect the identities of those involved. Chinese officials did not respond to a comment request about the allegations.

Benjamin Qiu is a Chinese-born, U.S.-based lawyer who tracks legal and political developments in China and Hong Kong and their impact on international business. He previously helped manage a high-profile technology investment fund in China but was later ostracized by the country’s officials for criticizing the government.

“The essence of the Chinese government is that it is a kleptocracy," Qiu said. "They are a bunch of thugs and bullies. Blackmailing is a feature of what they do, whether it's gutter-level honeypots, industrial corporate espionage or coercing smaller, less powerful countries at the diplomatic level. There's endless blackmailing going on all the time."

Chinese authorities declined to comment on the allegations when asked for a response.

One former U.S. intelligence official said that in his experience Chinese operatives were more focused on eliciting and collecting information through informal approaches in commercial, and where possible, military settings. Russian operatives, the official said, were more aggressive when it came to honeypot operations, which they sought to use primarily on American diplomats overseas and not to steal information, but to obtain or acquire potentially damaging information on an individual such that they could be blackmailed. The former official spoke on condition of anonymity.

"Most Westerners who have spent enough time in Moscow have their favorite story of an attempt at seduction by a ‘swallow’ (as the women of the KGB were called)," The Washington Post reported in 1987, noting it was “the stuff of spy novels.”

Aliia Roza knows something about that.

She said that Russian authorities trained her in the dark art of seduction, influence and manipulation to infiltrate high‑profile drug gangs, political operations and people‑trafficking networks as part of a Moscow‑run sexpionage program.

Her work took her all over Russia and parts of the Middle East.

Roza, 41, now lives in California and said she has not been an active spy since 2004.

She also said she was never deployed to the United States to undertake covert intelligence work. In recent years, Roza has spoken increasingly openly about how Russian female agents use a playbook that exploits human vulnerabilities to steal secrets from the West.

"People think this only happens in the movies,” she said of using intimacy as a tactic in intelligence gathering. "That's not true. It used to be that governments mainly targeted military people, officials, senior ministers. Now it's CEOs and senior executives, particularly in Silicon Valley, and dating sites. You wouldn't believe how many men are being targeted through dating sites," she said. Men who are online talking to women should be thinking, ‘Is she really interested in me? Or my benefits, my status, my job, my information.'"

Roza provided military IDs and photographs confirming her time as a Russian intelligence operative. She said that the specific Russian military academy where she trained has since closed. She enrolled at age 18 in 2002 and left two years later.

She estimated that the training cohort she was part of had about 350 recruits, roughly 10% female, and said five, including herself, were selected for a sexpionage program. She understood that Russia had around 10 military academies for training intelligence operatives at the time. USA TODAY could not independently verify many aspects of Roza's account. However, one former security official corroborated some details of her story.

Russian officials in Washington and Moscow did not respond to a request for comment.

To be sure, sexpionage is not a new phenomenon.

America's first commander-in-chief, George Washington, suggested that "lewd women" influenced an Irish soldier in the Continental Army, effectively the first formal American military unit, to join an assassination plot against him in 1776. After Thomas Hickey was hanged that year for mutiny, sedition and treachery, Washington warned that his fate should serve as a caution to all soldiers.

Mata Hari, born “Margaretha Geertruida Zelle” in the Netherlands, was a dancer-turned-suspected spy executed by a French firing squad in 1917 for allegedly spying for Germany during World War I. Famous for seducing soldiers and selling secrets − a reputation some historians now consider exaggerated − Hari became the archetypal femme fatale. French prosecutors dubbed her the “greatest woman spy of the century.”

In 2019, French counterintelligence officers spotted what they believed to be a disproportionate number of marriages between female Chinese students and French sailors at naval bases, according to a book published that year. Lawmakers questioned whether this reflected Chinese efforts to cultivate intelligence networks by embedding operatives in “normal” domestic settings, minimizing detection while allowing periodic activation.

Perhaps the most astonishing honeypot story of all is the "M. Butterfly" affair: the 20-year romance between French diplomat Bernard Boursicot and Shi Pei Pu, a male Chinese opera singer and intelligence officer. Boursicot not only passed classified secrets to Shi. He also believed for two decades that Shi was a woman and that the child they “had together” was his, when in fact the child had been procured by Chinese authorities as part of the deception. Both men were eventually imprisoned for espionage in France in 1986.

“It was a classic [honeypot] story," said Joyce Wadler, who wrote Liaison: The True Story of the M. Butterfly Affair, a book about the episode, published in 1993. "You go after the person who was a lonely guy. You don't try and turn the top diplomat or head of the embassy.”

Russian intelligence case officers appear to know this.

In 1987, a 25-year-old U.S. Marine, Sgt. Clayton Lonetree, learned that the hard way. He first encountered the woman on the subway, then recognized her as someone who worked at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. She was a Soviet citizen and translator named Violetta Seina: 28-years-old, 5 foot 7, with brown hair, an attractive figure and a fondness for push-up bras, according to newspaper reports from the time.

Lonetree walked her home that day.

They continued seeing each other in secret, since regulations prohibited fraternization, and eventually became romantically involved. Later, Violetta introduced Lonetree to a man she called "Uncle Sasha." His real name was Aleksei Yefimov, a KGB agent.

Uncle Sasha, suffice to say, was eager to obtain a great deal of information.

American intelligence officials insist that sexpionage is not something Western governments use in their spycraft, certainly not on domestic soil. U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that it doesn’t produce durable relationships and sustained intelligence cooperation. They are also, they say, bound by long-standing norms and legal frameworks that China and Russia seem willing to bypass, though both countries dispute this.

Internationally, the CIA does not confirm “honeypot” as a formal label and there are few publicly confirmed, named CIA cases where the agency has acknowledged running a honeytrap operation using an attractive operative at a reception, cocktail party or conference.

However, one former American intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, pointed to a Cold War-era case involving the CIA’s recruitment of Soviet diplomat Aleksandr Ogorodnik, a known womanizer.

Code-named “TRIGON,” Ogorodnik was a Soviet diplomat in Bogotá, Colombia, in the 1970s who was tasked with gathering intelligence. The official CIA narrative is that Ogorodnik agreed to spy for the CIA out of ideological motivation and personal disillusionment with the Soviet Union. Other accounts suggest he may have been lured by the CIA into a sexual relationship with a Spanish woman. Ogorodnik later killed himself with a CIA-supplied suicide pill after the KGB arrested him based on information provided by a mole within the agency.

Today, intelligence officials say the true scale of sexpionage is difficult to estimate. There are no official tallies.

But they believe that spying more generally is on the rise.

In February 2025, the House Committee on Homeland Security warned that the Chinese Communist Party had, in the prior four years, conducted more than 60 cases of espionage on American soil that it had information about. Probably more. These cases included what the committee described as "the transmission of sensitive military information, theft of trade secrets, use of transnational repression operations and obstruction of justice.”

One senior U.S. counterintelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic the number of reports of potential espionage activity in the U.S. has skyrocketed.

In fact, spying may be getting harder to spot because it's increasingly happening in plain sight.

Shedd, the former acting head of the DIA, said that as social media use has grown, the amount of publicly available data has “ballooned.” According to the FBI, China is sending roughly 30,000 messages per hour to users on LinkedIn, targeting researchers and subject-matter experts.

These individuals are often lured to conferences with generous payments, but with an ulterior motive: to extract their knowledge and encourage them to share sensitive or privileged information.

Iain Duncan Smith is a British lawmaker who is a former leader of the Conservative Party and co-founded the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), an organization with hundreds of lawmaker-members across dozens of countries including the United States.

IPAC advocates for a tougher approach to China, which adopted a national intelligence law in 2017 that mandates Chinese citizens hand over sensitive information − corporate, academic or military − if asked to do so by the government under penalty of prosecution.

Duncan Smith said Chinese operatives are using a whole-of-society approach to exploit Western technology and talent by brazenly targeting professionals including engineers, investors, officials, businessmen, academics, and ordinary citizens, sometimes harvesting data from social media or approaching them directly via fake profiles on sites like LinkedIn.

He said he knows this partly because he himself has been targeted. MI5, Britain’s domestic counterintelligence and security agency, has also warned British politicians that China is trying to recruit spies through the professional networking site, according to an official sensitive espionage alert obtained by USA TODAY.

"Everything is thought through,” said Duncan Smith. He argues that governments must take stronger action to prevent China from effectively acquiring or appropriating Western intellectual property, scientific breakthroughs, military technologies and cutting-edge innovations spanning fields from artificial intelligence to biotechnology. “China is desperate to get influence and to understand better the thinking of the West and what we're doing.”

Dreeke, the former FBI agent who worked in counterintelligence, said "China loves using LinkedIn and especially female personas. They throw out huge nets and try to grab anyone.”

One example: Student reporters at the Stanford Review, a newspaper that serves Stanford University, documented how during the summer of 2025 a suspected Chinese intelligence operative using the alias “Charles Chen” approached several students through social media.

Initially, the outreach appeared harmless, framed as a request for networking advice. Over time, however, the messages became increasingly frequent and personal. He shared videos of Americans who had achieved fame in China and urged a Stanford student, identified only as “Anna,” to travel to Beijing, even offering to pay for her trip.

Investigators determined that in fact Charles Chen had no affiliation with Stanford. Instead, he spent years posing as a Stanford student, making minor adjustments to his name and online persona as he reached out to multiple students, almost all of them women studying China-related subjects as he sought to infiltrate the Stanford campus.

According to Shedd, China's Ministry of State Security − Beijing’s umbrella organization encompassing functions comparable to the FBI, CIA, NSA and other security and intelligence bodies − has doubled in size since 2015 to an estimated 300,000 personnel. That expansion would make it the largest, and likely most active, intelligence service in the world.

By comparison, Russian intelligence services collectively number about 200,000 personnel, according to a 2018 British parliamentary assessment. The U.S. intelligence community, spanning 18 agencies, employs roughly 85,000 people based on declassified figures.

Although, with sexpionage, it’s not just China and Russia. And it’s not just women who use charm and sensuality to target men. There are also cases involving so-called Romeos.

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In 2021, Miriam Taffa Thomson, 62, a contract linguist at an overseas U.S. military base, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 23 years in prison for sharing classified American national defense information to aid a foreign government, according to court records.

Thomson used a secure messaging app’s video-chat feature to hand over information to someone who she evidently liked the look of and eventually developed a romantic interest in.

The person she video-chatted with was seeking information on the U.S. airstrikes in Iraq in 2019 that killed Iranian Revolutionary Guard Quds Force leader Qasem Suleimani.

Thomson fell hard for a senior Lebanese Hezbollah commander.

Current and former American intelligence officials and national security experts agree: If you're a five and the person interested in you is a 10, you may want to reconsider.

Kim Hjelmgaard is an investigative journalist covering global stories for USA TODAY, from living rooms to conflict zones. He is based in London.

Contributing: Cybele Mayes-Osterman

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How foreign spies use sex to infiltrate the US