The CIA and honey-trapping is John Kiriakou’s answer to the recurring question about why the CIA, unlike its counterparts in Moscow, Beijing, Tel Aviv and Paris, does not run sexual-compromise recruitment operations.
Why the CIA does not do it
Kiriakou’s argument is operational. “The CIA does not do it, and it does not do it because in most cases it just simply doesn’t work. And what I mean is sure people are going to get laid. But that’s not the point. The point is, is it better, is it easier, to develop a source as a partner where there’s mutual trust, or is it better to develop the source through coercion, saying, ‘Well, we honeypotted you and we have these photos of you with this prostitute or with this woman or whomever, 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 doesn’t work. That just breeds resentment.”[1][2]
The Iranian mulla anecdote
The story Kiriakou uses to date the conclusion came from one of his own instructors in training. “He said that in the 1970s the CIA targeted an Iranian mulla and they honeypotted him and they ran a prostitute against him and he went back to a hotel with a prostitute and they had sex and of course the CIA had the whole room filled with cameras, hidden cameras. They took pictures of them doing the deed from every angle. And afterwards they laid out the pictures in front of him and they said, ‘You’re going to work for us now.’ And this mulla said, ‘Ooh, I’ll take an 8-by-10 of that one and two 5-by-7s of that one, and do you have wallets of this one?’”[3][4]
Kiriakou allows that “he may have made up. It may be apocryphal, but it’s a good story”, and treats the underlying determination as institutional: “a determination was made that this honeypotting just doesn’t work. It didn’t work for us.”[3][4]
Who does do it
“It apparently works for the Russians, the Chinese, the Israelis, the French, and others who continue to use it.”[5]
The recruitment problem
Kiriakou piles on a second reason. “Can you imagine going to a college and you’re a CIA recruiter and you’re like, ‘Hey, come and work with the CIA, see the world, and we’re going to make you into a prostitute.’ What woman in her right mind would say, ‘I’d like to be, when I graduate with my advanced degree in international affairs, a prostitute.’ Because that’s really what it comes down to.”[5][6]
And the two operational failure modes
Two more risks Kiriakou lists: the target panicking and running to the police or the FBI “making this major international incident”, and the operation flipping in the opposite direction: “the target actually falling in love with the woman that’s been sent against him, because then you just wreck the person personally and that’s not going to be a cooperative agent.”[6][7]