Phillip Knightley gives a brief history of the honey trap via five examples. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, which is used in the spy business, his first example should make it clear:
In 1986, Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli technician who had worked in Israel’s Dimona nuclear facility, went to the British newspapers with his claim that Israel had developed atomic bombs. His statement was starkly at odds with Israel’s official policy of nuclear ambiguity — and he had photos to prove it.The period of negotiation among the newspapers was tense, and at one point the London Sunday Times was keeping Vanunu hidden in a secret location in suburban London while it attempted to verify his story. But Vanunu got restless. He announced to his minders at the paper that he had met a young woman while visiting tourist attractions in London and that they were planning a romantic weekend in Rome.
The newspaper felt it had no right to prevent Vanunu from leaving. It was a huge mistake: Soon after arriving in Rome with his lady friend, Vanunu was seized by Mossad officers, forcibly drugged, and smuggled out of Italy by ship to Israel, where he was eventually put on trial for treason. Vanunu served 18 years in jail, 11 years of it in solitary confinement. Released in 2004, he is still confined to Israel under tight restrictions, which include not being allowed to meet with foreigners or talk about his experiences. Britain has never held an inquiry into the affair.
The woman who set the honey trap was a Mossad officer, Cheryl Ben Tov, code-named “Cindy.” Born in Orlando, Fla., she was married to an officer of the Israeli security service. After the operation, she was given a new identity to prevent reprisals, and eventually she left Israel to return to the United States. But her role in the Vanunu affair was vital. The Mossad could not have risked a diplomatic incident by kidnapping Vanunu from British soil, so he had to be lured abroad — an audacious undertaking, but in this case a successful one.
There are a number of variations:
The broadest honey trap in intelligence history was probably the creation of the notorious East German spymaster, Markus Wolf. In the early 1950s, Wolf recognized that, with marriageable German men killed in large numbers during World War II and more and more German women turning to careers, the higher echelons of German government, commerce, and industry were now stocked with lonely single women, ripe — in his mind — for the temptations of a honey trap.Wolf set up a special department of the Stasi, East Germany’s security service, and staffed it with his most handsome, intelligent officers. He called them “Romeo spies.” Their assignment was to infiltrate West Germany, seek out powerful, unmarried women, romance them, and squeeze from them all their secrets.
Thanks to the Romeo spies and their honey traps, the Stasi penetrated most levels of the West German government and industry. At one stage, the East Germans even had a spy inside NATO who was able to give information on the West’s deployment of nuclear weapons. Another used her connections to become a secretary in the office of the West German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt.
The scheme lost its usefulness when the West German counterintelligence authorities devised a simple way of identifying the Stasi officers as soon as they arrived in West Germany: They sported distinctly different haircuts — the practical “short back and sides” variety instead of the fashionable, elaborate West German style. Alerted by train guards, counterintelligence officers would follow the Romeo spies and arrest them at their first wrong move.
Three of the women were caught and tried, but in general the punishment was lenient. One woman who managed to penetrate West German intelligence was sentenced to only six and a half years in prison, probably because ordinary West Germans had some sympathy with the women. Wolf himself faced trial twice after the collapse of communism but received only a two-year suspended sentence, given the confusion of whether an East German citizen could be guilty of treachery to West Germany.