Female spies are waging sex warfare to steal Silicon Valley secrets

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Chinese and Russian operatives are using “sex warfare” to seduce and spy on Silicon Valley professionals, industry insiders have told The Times.

James Mulvenon, the chief intelligence officer of Pamir Consulting, which provides risk assessments for American companies investing in China, said he was one of the many men recently targeted by foreign seductresses hoping to gain access to US tech secrets. “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.”

Mulvenon also described how, at a business conference on Chinese investment risks hosted last week in Virginia, two attractive Chinese women showed up and attempted to gain entry. “We didn’t let them in,” he said. “But they had all the information [about the event] and everything else.”

He added: “It is a phenomenon. And I will tell you: it is weird.”

Mulvenon, who has investigated espionage in the US for 30 years, said the honeytrap tactic was “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”.

Sex warfare is just one way American tech workers are being played, according to five counterintelligence experts who spoke to The Times. China is also hosting competitions for startups on US soil to steal sensitive business plans, and even trying to sabotage American tech companies, sources said. In February, the House committee on homeland security warned that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has conducted more than 60 cases of espionage in the US over the past four years — though a former counterintelligence source fears this “only scratches the surface”.

Both Russia and the CCP are using ordinary citizens — investors, crypto analysts, businessmen and academics — to target their American counterparts, rather than trained agents, making the espionage harder to spot. “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.”

One former counterintelligence official, who now helps Silicon Valley founders divest their foreign investments, said he recently investigated the case of one “beautiful” Russian woman who worked at an aerospace company and married an American colleague. He discovered that she had gone to a modelling academy in her twenties but later attended a “Russian soft-power school” before disappearing for a decade and re-emerging 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.”

The theft of trade secrets is estimated to cost the American taxpayer up to $600 billion a year, with China identified as the principal source of this loss, according to the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property.

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