CIA sexpionage
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CIA sexpionage is John Kiriakou's term for the agency's use of sex in intelligence, which he says it has practised since its inception, a documented part of MK-Ultra and of honey-pot operations that ran routinely into the early 1980s. His mentor Gus Avrakotos told him the CIA "used sex all the time until Ronald Reagan became president", and stopped not for morality but because it did not work: a source who commits espionage for years must be held by trust, not coercion.

The honey trap

The mechanism, as Kiriakou defines it, is among the oldest in the trade: a service sends an officer, "usually it's usually a beautiful woman", to charm, seduce and romance a target, normally another intelligence officer, "until they start giving up secrets that they never intended to share."

He is careful to separate the general from the particular before going on, stating that he is not accusing anyone of having been caught in one. But the practice itself he treats as settled fact: the CIA used honey traps in the past and does not now, "because most of the time they don't work." The list of services that never stopped is long, "the KGB uses them. The Chinese use them. The Israelis use them. The French use them. The old East German Stasi used to use them." His summary of why: "frankly, they work."

The colleague who was targeted

The clearest case Kiriakou witnessed involved an older colleague, divorced several times, twenty or thirty pounds overweight, a chain smoker with yellowed teeth and thinning hair, "like a typical 50-year-old guy." A strikingly beautiful woman began paying him attention.

Kiriakou allows the ordinary Washington explanation first, men who "look like trolls" often have beautiful women beside them, because "oftentimes women are attracted to power", and then rejects it on the specifics: "why would a woman who's, you know, 25 years old and good enough to be Miss America be attracted to a 55-year-old diplomat who's fat, balding, and has rotten teeth? That doesn't make any sense."

The detection came through procedure rather than instinct. Officers are required to report any ongoing sexual relationship with a foreign national to headquarters by cable; when he finally did, the reaction was immediate, "Whoa, wait a minute. What are you doing? Are you that blind to not see that this is a honeypot operation?" The woman was Russian. He cut her off before handing over anything.

The case officer who married her source

The second story runs the other way, and ends worse. A female case officer recruited a foreign national and, against CIA regulations, immediately began sleeping with him. She reported herself to agency security, which moved her from operations to analysis rather than firing her. Kiriakou calls that "very generous," since "the protocol should have been that they fire her."

She then married the man and brought him back to the United States, where he divorced her on arrival, he had been sleeping with her to obtain citizenship papers. Kiriakou is precise that this was not quite a honey trap, because the man was not reporting to a foreign service: "he used the CIA to essentially get American citizenship." She was ultimately fired. His verdict is unsparing, that life "was not for her if she couldn't keep a secret and couldn't stop sleeping with her sources, and then was so stupid as to bring a guy who was faking his way through the relationship back to the United States."

The bar at the top of the Address

Kiriakou says he has never been honeypotted, but believes one attempt was made. He was in Dubai at the Address, "the tallest hotel in the world," directly across from the Burj Khalifa, at the bar on the top floor. He was about fifty, fifteen years past joining the CIA and by then working for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "clearly an American" and plainly not a businessman.

"The most beautiful woman I've ever seen comes over to me." He never resolved which it was, "was she a thousand-a-night prostitute, or was she targeted against me? I have no idea. I don't care. I told her to go fly a kite."

Why the training doesn't take

Officers are trained to spot and avoid honey traps. Kiriakou's doubt is about vanity rather than curriculum: "at the CIA, most men are a horny lot and they all think they're Don Juan, Casanova types that would naturally attract the most beautiful women in the world." He remembers arguing it in training itself, "I'm like, 'You guys think you're that good-looking?'", and being told, in earnest, "No, no, I'm that good-looking." The training exists; the question is "is the officer going to pay attention to the training."

Why the CIA stopped

The reasoning Kiriakou gives is operational before it is ethical. Sex produces compliance, not partnership: the question is whether it is better "to develop a source as a partner where there's mutual trust," or through coercion, "we honeypotted you and we have these photos... and if you don't give us the information we want, we're going to tell your wife, we're going to tell your boss." That approach "doesn't work. That just breeds resentment."

The mullah who asked for wallet-sized

The story his instructor told him, which Kiriakou flags as possibly invented, "but it's a good story", is set in the 1970s. The CIA targeted an Iranian mullah, ran a prostitute against him, and filled the hotel room with hidden cameras, photographing "the deed from every angle."

Laid out before him afterwards and told he would now work for the agency, the mullah went through the photographs like a catalogue: "I'll take an 8x10 of that one and two 5x7s of that one, and do you have wallets of this one?" Then: "Get out of here. What's the matter with you guys?" From that, Kiriakou says, "a determination was made that this honeypotting just doesn't work."

The recruiting problem

Beyond effectiveness there is a staffing question Kiriakou puts as a reductio. Imagine the pitch at a university: "Hey, come and work with the CIA, see the world, and we're going to make you into a prostitute." His point is that no one completing an advanced degree in international affairs is going to accept that as a career, "because that's really what it comes down to."

The operational risks compound it. The target may panic and go to the police or the FBI, "making this major international incident." Or the opposite failure, the target genuinely falls in love with the officer sent against him, "and then you just wreck the person, and that's not going to be a cooperative agent."

The tennis-club line (Austin and Matt)

Kiriakou cites a scenario from James Olson's ethics book Fair Play: a CIA officer befriends a suspected Russian sleeper at a tennis club, assesses him as lonely and recruitable, and asks her boss whether she may sleep with him to double him back. Everyone in Kiriakou's class said yes, but Olson's answer, and Kiriakou's, is "absolutely not," the line the agency draws in sexpionage.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Gust Avrakotos
- Operation Midnight Climax
- MK-Ultra
