Sexpionage and how foreign spies use intimacy to steal secrets | The Excerpt
Sexpionage and how foreign spies use intimacy to steal secrets | The Excerpt
Dana Taylor, USA TODAYThu, February 26, 2026 at 10:09 AM UTC
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On the Thursday, February 26, 2026, episode of The Excerpt podcast: How do nations defend secrets when intimacy is still used as a spy tool? USA TODAY World Affairs Correspondent Kim Hjelmgaard.joins The Excerpt to discuss modern sexpionage, its risks and why even trained officials remain vulnerable.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Dana Taylor:
Sex for secrets. In an age dominated by digital surveillance, human desire remains a vulnerability. Foreign intelligence agencies are still using intimacy as a tool for gathering information. Is there a way to protect national security secrets from sexpionage?
Hello and welcome to USA TODAY's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Thursday, February 26th, 2026. If trained officials with security clearances can be compromised in this way, how safe are our secrets? With more on that. I'm now joined by USA TODAY World Affairs Correspondent Kim Hjelmgaard. It's good to speak with you, Kim.
Kim Hjelmgaard:
Thanks for having me.
Dana Taylor:
Can we live in an era of spy satellites, facial recognition tools, AI surveillance, and the ability to track billions of personal devices? With all that tech, why is something as old school and low tech as a honey trap still being deployed, and what kinds of national secrets are our adversaries trying to gain access to through these relationships?
Kim Hjelmgaard:
Yes, you're absolutely correct. I mean, the kind of mixture of secret and open source intelligence that you mentioned is definitely at the sharp end of intelligence work, I would say. Current and former intelligence officers and spy chiefs say that as important as that stuff is, the satellite stuff, the AI stuff, the human aspect of this work, interpreting the data, forming relationships on the ground, all that is equally important and necessary.
I think in the sort of public imagination, spy work is all kind of rooftop chases, a man or a woman with a gun defeating an entire army. But the reality of it is that it's quite processy, slow and bureaucratic, and you do need humans in the mix there to consolidate and interpret data and see where that all can go.
I think the thing to note, we're talking about honey traps. These do represent a relatively niche or small subset of the kind of total spying that countries like China and Russia do, and we don't have a lot of... There's no official statistics or numbers. The intelligence agencies keep all this stuff classified, so we don't know the precise scale of it.
In general, what spies who are targeting the US are hoping to do, and this applies especially to China, is they're trying to do what's called technology transfer, and this is essentially where their intelligence officers infiltrate American universities, research centers, think tanks, corporations, and they try to acquire or obtain a mixture of proprietary information and open source information that they then push back to their spymasters in Beijing or wherever they might be located.
Dana Taylor:
Are we talking about American soldiers and officers being duped here or these people engaging in transactional sex? Do they know what they're doing or are some underestimating the security risk?
Kim Hjelmgaard:
I think it's fair that it runs the gamut. Our reporting has surfaced some never-before-seen examples of failed honeypots. This is largely where suspected intelligence officers have approached members of the US military and defense contractors to try to lure them into relationships where over time they could divulge secrets. We've also located examples of the US military being duped. This mostly comes to us through court cases and prosecutions.
My overall sense is that the US government is well aware of these risks and kind of consistently communicates them to the 18 different intelligence agencies that exist across the space. In fact, it's kind of funny, I noticed that on Valentine's Day that's just gone past, the U.S. Army's counterintelligence unit actually published a social media post about this topic, and it kind of essentially said, without putting too fine a point on the matter, that if you're a 5 and the person that you're interested in is a 10, you may want to reflect seriously on that. So a lot of the counterintelligence training that's given to the troops, the officers, the defense contractors, a lot of it is kind of like, don't be naive, don't be a dolt, in short.
Dana Taylor:
For transaction this up close and personal, how difficult is it to track attempts to extract intelligence through sex?
Kim Hjelmgaard:
Well, it's very difficult actually. It took us a couple of months to find and vet examples for this story. Generally speaking, honey traps are classified, so they never hit the news, and the amount of detail that has been declassified is fairly sparse. But nevertheless, we persevere and we found some. I will say as I mentioned at the top, that what we hear about typically is the failures, not the successes, and most of the failures we do hear about come about through prosecutions and court cases and the US Justice Department getting involved. Nevertheless, for this story, we have managed to dig up some other examples that have never hit the news.
Dana Taylor:
Kim, how do honey traps compare to money traps? Do they go hand in hand or does money offer a spy more leverage?
Kim Hjelmgaard:
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So motivations have shifted over time. During the Cold War, I think the consensus was that ideology, capitalism versus socialism versus communism was the key driver in this kind of activity. However, there's been studies by the US Defense Department that essentially show that overall financial reward comes up more than any other factor. We're in the realm of informed speculation here, but what the experts say is that money can offer more leverage because it's a little bit more traceable and it opens up people to bribery, corruption, blackmail. So with seduction or intimacy, there's also concern that the quality of the information that comes out of these sort of attempts is not necessarily as robust.
Dana Taylor:
Are these tactics primarily confined to diplomatic circles or soldiers deployed overseas? Are we seeing cases of sexpionage happening here in the US or even within the Pentagon itself?
Kim Hjelmgaard:
So most of the examples that we've looked at, look at the US military and defense contractors. The general perception is that most of this activity probably takes place overseas and the targets are typically not top-level people, to put it that way. It's not ambassadors, it's not a foreign minister, it's not the CEO of a company. The people that get targeted by this tend to be more low-level people who by virtue of their status and position may be less guarded physically, but also kind of conceptually.
Dana Taylor:
Getting a peek inside the Pentagon has become more difficult for the press under the current Trump administration. The Pentagon Force Protection Agency didn't respond to your request for comment. What do you know about how the Pentagon protects its personnel from becoming targets?
Kim Hjelmgaard:
Well, counterintelligence work, we should say at the top here is, like a lot of intelligence work, it's something of a dark art, and those involved in it don't like to divulge their secrets. I think the thing we can say, it's a general point, but there's some specificity in it, which is that counterintelligence work involves situational awareness.
The police force that you mentioned, the Pentagon Force Protection Agency, these are the folks that guard the Pentagon look after its infrastructure. They're sort of vetting who's coming in and out of the building each day. When we approach them for comment around some of the activity that has been alleged to take place outside the Pentagon with overseas operatives just kind of hanging around the perimeter or hanging around the entrance to try to get low level information, they didn't give us much of a reply. However, I'm told from a couple of different sources that they are aware of that activity and they've got steps in place to counter it.
Dana Taylor:
Kim, you mention China, are Russian and Chinese governments both culprits here and are other foreign governments attempting to gather intelligence in this way?
Kim Hjelmgaard:
So probably good at this point to step back a bit, all countries have spies. All countries seek to gain the upper hand through intelligence collection. In the current geopolitical space, the United States is most worried about China and Russia. They appear to be the most consistent culprits. They of course deny this. North Korea and Iran are two other countries that also try to steal American secrets.
I mean, as I kind of mentioned earlier, honey traps, they represent a fairly small number of cases, there aren't official tallies, and a lot of the world's kind of STEM research, scientific technological advances do take place in the United States. So it stands to reason that a country like China, which is battling the US for superpower supremacy, China, which has about three times the volume of intelligence agents as the United States, it stands to reason that they would operate widely in the US.
Just to get more concrete for you, one former head of a major intelligence agency in the United States told me that the Chinese currently send about 30,000 LinkedIn messages every hour to engineers, coders, Silicon Valley types, all the kind of brain trusts of America, hoping that there will be some people that respond and that eventually get lured to conferences in China where they give presentations and hopefully the Chinese can learn something about their research as a first step, and then over time they try to sort of collect more and more information in the hope that eventually they get to something that is proprietary, confidential. It's in the private sector often so it's not necessarily classified, but it's still illegal to steal it.
Dana Taylor:
Kim, is sexpionage something western governments are also guilty of, specifically the US? Has that been asked and answered directly?
Kim Hjelmgaard:
Well, the official version is that they don't do it. That said, there are some historical examples, mostly during the Cold War. The US intelligence agencies, the US government, current and former will say that in the west, we're bound by moral codes and regulatory environments, and we just don't do that. Should we believe them? Maybe, maybe not.
Dana Taylor:
Kim Hjelmgaard is a world affairs correspondent for USA TODAY. It's good to speak to you, Kim.
Kim Hjelmgaard:
Thanks so much for having me.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks to our senior producer, Kaely Monahan, for her production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. I'll be back tomorrow morning with another episode of USA TODAY's The Excerpt.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Sexpionage is a hidden threat to US security | The Excerpt
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