CIA sexpionage is John Kiriakou’s term for the agency’s use of sex in intelligence, which he says it has practiced since its inception — a documented part of MK-Ultra and of honey-pot operations that ran routinely into the early 1980s.[1][2] 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.[3][4] Kiriakou relays a possibly apocryphal story of an Ayatollah, targeted before the Iranian Revolution, who laughed at the compromising photos and asked for one “in an 8-by-10 and give me two 5-by-7s” — the episode around which, he says, the agency decided the tactic “just isn’t working.”[5][6]
The tennis-club line (Austin and Matt)
John 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.[7][8][9]