In China's Spy Operations, Romance Can Be a Long Game

In April 1960, a senior official in China's Central Investigation Department stood before a class of intelligence agents in training and made a promise. Kong Yuan told them that seduction was a tool for the C.I.A. or the K.G.B., not for a country guided by principles. According to a 2010 memoir by a former Chinese diplomat, he looked at the few women in the room and said they would not be asked to run beauty traps.

The pledge has not aged well. China's intelligence services have for decades used romantic entanglements to compromise prominent people or draw information out of them. The latest case to draw attention involves Jensen Huang, who resigned on Thursday as chief executive of Nvidia and has been one of the most powerful figures in the artificial intelligence boom. American officials say China's Ministry of State Security recruited a Chinese businesswoman, Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, to collect intelligence on him.

Much about the case is unclear. It is not known what role Ms. Huang had with the spy agency, or when the two met, or under what circumstances she may have begun gathering information for Beijing. She was a top executive at a Singapore company that runs data centers in Southeast Asia using Nvidia chips and rents their computing power to Chinese firms. Mr. Huang has acknowledged the affair. President Trump has said Mr. Huang told him he did not know the woman was a spy. China rejects the allegations as smears against the country. U.S. officials have not provided evidence, and Ms. Huang has not responded to requests for comment.

Using intimacy as a lever is neither new nor uniquely Chinese. East Germany sent its "Romeos," male Stasi agents who seduced the clerks of Western officials, and the Soviet Union long relied on sexual blackmail. What sets China apart, says Nicholas Eftimiades, a retired senior American intelligence officer who writes about Chinese espionage, is patience. "They play this long term," he said. "These are long-term relationships, sometimes marriages."

The most famous example is Shi Peipu, a Peking Opera singer whose two-decade relationship with Bernard Boursicot, who worked on French diplomatic missions in Beijing and Ulan Bator, drew the Frenchman into spying for China. After both were arrested in France, Boursicot learned his lover was a man. They were convicted of espionage in 1986, and the story inspired David Henry Hwang's play "M. Butterfly." More recent cases include Christine Fang, believed by counterintelligence officials to be a Chinese spy, who had a physical relationship with then-Representative Eric Swalwell from 2012 to 2015. In 2014, a retired Army officer working as a contractor for U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii was sentenced to prison for emailing defense secrets, including details of joint U.S.-South Korea exercises, to a 27-year-old Chinese woman he had been involved with for nearly two years. And in 2003, F.B.I. agent James J. Smith, who worked in Chinese counterintelligence, admitted to a nearly 20-year affair with a Chinese American businesswoman he had recruited as an asset; she was found to have passed classified information to Beijing.

Both governments appear wary of manipulation. Last year the U.S. government barred American personnel in China from romantic or sexual relationships with Chinese citizens, according to The Associated Press. In May, China's Ministry of State Security posted on WeChat urging residents to be wary of sudden advances from seemingly perfect people of the opposite sex and to avoid the "gentle trap." Alex Joske of the advisory firm Garnaut Global says such warnings usually reflect what China itself does rather than what others do. He argues Beijing is more willing than Western agencies to use blackmail and coercion, which Western governments see as an unreliable way to motivate a source.

The crude version exists too. "A diplomat walks into his hotel room, and there's a girl in his bed. I mean, that stuff happens," Eftimiades said. Dennis Wilder, a former senior China director at the National Security Council, recalls women waiting in the elevator of his Beijing hotel offering to come to his room, repeatedly. Any public accusation, he noted, could be met with the claim that they were independent sex workers. "It's totally deniable."

But more often, Eftimiades says, Beijing looks for people whose lives already give them access to a target, drawing on a diaspora of executives and students in what he calls a "whole of society" approach. Only a handful of Chinese spying cases involve romance; money is usually the best motivator, Joske says, but it works less well on wealthy elites, so handlers co-opt someone in their circle. Closeness also serves influence. "Once you become emotionally involved with somebody, your base line judgment changes," said Matthew Brazil of The Jamestown Foundation. "People want to please their lovers."

What to watch now is whether U.S. officials make public any evidence for their claims, and whether Washington tightens its rules on personal relationships further.