China and Russia are using female spies to seduce Silicon Valley professionals and gain access to US tech secrets, industry insiders have said.
How China and Russia are using spies to steal Silicon Valley tech secrets
James Mulvenon, the chief intelligence officer of Pamir Consulting, told The Times that he was recently targeted by ‘foreign seductresses’. Pamir Consulting provides risk assessment to US companies investing in China.
“I’m getting an enormous number of very sophisticated LinkedIn requests from the same type of attractive young Chinese woman,” said Mulvenon. “It really seems to have ramped up recently.”
Honeytrapping Silicon Valley execs
Mulvenon said he was recently at a business conference in Virginia where two “attractive Chinese women” showed up and tried to gain entry. We didn’t let them in,” he said. “But they had all the information [about the event] and everything else.”
The industry veteran, who has investigated espionage in the US for over 30 years, said that the honeytrap tactic presents “a real vulnerability” for the US “because we, by statute and by culture, do not do that. So they have an asymmetric advantage when it comes to sex warfare”.
Spies that marry Americans
Some female spies are not stopping at seduction – some experts say they even marry and have children with Americans.
A former counterintelligence officer, who now helps Silicon Valley founders sell off their foreign investments, said he recently looked into the case of a “beautiful” Russian woman who worked at an aerospace company. This woman ended up marrying an American colleague.
He found that she had gone to a modelling school in her twenties and later studied at a “Russian soft-power school.” After that, she disappeared for ten years and then showed up in the US as a cryptocurrency expert.
“But she doesn’t stay in crypto,” the ex-official said. “She is trying to get to the heights of the military-space innovation community. The husband’s totally oblivious.” “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,” he continued. “If I wanted to be out of the shadows, I’d write a book on it.”
Other forms of corporate espionage
Five counterintelligence experts who spoke to The Times said honeytrapping is just one of many ways that foreign spies are trying to steal US secrets.
China, for example, is organizing competitions for startups in America to steal business plans.
Both Russia and China are also using ordinary citizens to target American professionals rather than trained spies, making them harder to spot. Everyone from academics to businessmen and crypto analysts have been roped in to spy on the US.
“We’re not chasing a KGB agent in a smoky guesthouse in Germany anymore,” said one senior US counterintelligence official. “Our adversaries — particularly the Chinese — are using a whole-of-society approach to exploit all aspects of our technology and Western talent.”