Foreign “honeytrap” spies are a serious blind spot in the US’s national security defenses — as the case of Jensen Huang highlights.
The Nvidia CEO admitted an affair with suspected Chinese spy Alice Huang (no relation) this weekend — who is also suspected of manipulating her mark to get banned high-powered processing chips into her home country for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
His case is not an anomaly, as spies from Russia, Iran, North Korea and especially China find infiltrating the US and either getting elected to positions of responsibility or seducing those in power one of the best ways to extract data or influence policy.
China’s Ministry of State Security comes from a tradition which “celebrates getting inside the adversary’s decision making and shaping what they do,” Peter Mattis, a former CIA counterintelligence analyst and president of the Jamestown Foundation, told The Post.
“Intelligence is not about the collection of classified information. Intelligence is about supporting decisions, supporting decision makers and policymakers.”
In today’s climate, there is no business more cutting edge and competitive and AI, which is why computer geeks in all positions at tech companies everywhere are constantly being warned to be on the lookout.
Or, as Elon Musk once pointed out in a cheeky reply to a story about so-called sex warfare waged by rogue nations, “If she’s a 10, you’re an asset.”
The same applies in politics. Ex-California congressman Eric Swalwell had a strong campaign to become the next governor of the state until it emerged he’d had a sexual relationship with suspected Chinese spy Christine Fang, known as “Fang Fang,” who had infiltrated his office while under FBI surveillance, it emerged earlier this year.
Once Fang realized she was being watched she fled back to China. She had originally come to the US on a student visa and has been accused of seducing two mayors in the Midwest — whose names have never been revealed —before Swalwell, FBI reports claimed.
It was later determined Swalwell, who was also accused of sexual harassment by other women, had broken no laws in his relationship with Fang.
Not all alleged infiltrations are sexual. Linda Sun, a former Aide to New York Governors Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul was put on trial for allegedly using her official state position to advance Beijing’s interests, such as blocking Taiwanese officials from leadership and forging signatures. Her case ended in a mistrial.
Meanwhile, the mayor of Arcadia in California, Eileen Wang, 56, stepped down from her position days before being charged with acting as an illegal agent of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in May. She has yet to face trial.
Mattis warned that not everyone starts out as a spy, and in many cases foreign governments seek to exploit relationships which have already been established.
In the case of Huang — who worked for tech firms which imported Nvidia chips, but not to China — the precise sequence is yet to be determined.
“It’s not clear whether they saw the relationship [Jensen and Alice] and then tried to exploit it,” Mattis said.
An alternative, he said, was Chinese intelligence already having a relationship with Alice Huang and seeking to exploit her business contacts.
“If you trust someone, you talk to them about things that you might not talk about with other people,” Mattis said.
Shared professional interests can also make probing questions about supply, customers and policy sound perfectly ordinary.
Mattis said foreign nations are interested in supply chains and commercial pressure points — but also shaping what their honeytraps tell others in power.
“The mission would be to exploit someone who can shape an executive’s view of things so that they will make particular recommendations,” he said.
The scale of operations is very hard to gauge.
In January 2022, then-FBI director Christopher Wray said more than 2,000 investigations concerned Chinese government efforts to steal American information or technology.
The bureau was opening a new China-related counterintelligence case roughly every 12 hours. Those figures counted investigations, not individual spies or honeytraps.
Mattis described China’s Ministry of State Security as a “vast sprawling apparatus,” encompassing the central ministry, 34 provincial departments and bureaus, and hundreds of local offices.
He estimated its overall workforce could reach “600,000, 700,000” officers, but stressed they most focus on activity inside China.
Partly for this reason and because of suspicions over honeytrapping, the Biden administration prevented any US government officials in China from having sex with Chinese women. Trump has continued the same prohibition.
Still, operations outside of the mainland from China and Russia range from the most sophisticated to the quite brazen.
“I’m getting an enormous number of very sophisticated LinkedIn requests from the same type of attractive young Chinese woman,” James Mulvenon, chief intelligence officer at risk-assessment firm Pamir Consulting, noted to The Times last year.
Many suspected spies are willing to be deep undercover and play the long game too.
“Showing up, marrying a target, having kids with a target — and conducting a lifelong collection operation, it’s very uncomfortable to think about but it’s so prevalent,” one former counterespionage official noted in the same report.
Having used this model but been busted, ten Russian agents pleaded guilty in 2010 to conspiring to operate unlawfully in the US. Some used stolen identities while building ordinary-looking lives and relationships, according to the FBI.
Russian national Maria Butina later admitted conspiring to act as an agent of Russia after cultivating politically influential Americans and organizations to establish unofficial communication channels. She was sentenced to 18 months in 2019.
Foreign adversaries often infiltrate and exploit communities already in the US as the first step into the US.
“A key way they will conduct espionage is through Chinese-American communities and groups which are sympathetic to the state … this is just the start. Stealing trade secrets and academic research are all part of the Chinese playbook.
“It is a whole party effort by the CCP to undermine the American way of life and threaten American innovation and dominance,” Andrew Harding of The Heritage Foundation recently told The Post.
For example, Chinese intelligence officer, Yanjun Xu, helped lure a GE Aviation employee into delivering a presentation at a Chinese university as part of an effort to obtain aviation trade secrets. Xu was convicted and sentenced in 2022. He was later pardoned Biden.
Most worryingly, those who do not comply or their families can be threatened, even if they abscond from their duties.
Mattis said Chinese authorities do not hesitate to exploit genuine relationships by threatening a partner or their family.
“They’ll say: ‘We’ll harm this person and their family if you don’t cooperate with us’,” he added.
