China and Russia have deployed attractive women to america to seduce unwitting Silicon Valley tech executives as a part of a “sex warfare” operation geared toward stealing American technology secrets, in line with a report.
Chinese and Russian agents are also using social media, startup competitions and enterprise capital investments to infiltrate the guts of America’s tech industry, the report said.
“I’m getting an unlimited variety of very sophisticated LinkedIn requests from the identical form of attractive young Chinese woman,” James Mulvenon, chief intelligence officer at risk-assessment firm Pamir Consulting, told The Times.
“It really seems to have ramped up recently.”
A former US counterintelligence official who now works for Silicon Valley startups told The Times that he recently investigated one case of a “beautiful” Russian woman who worked at a US-based aerospace company, where she met an American colleague whom she eventually married.
In response to the previous counterintelligence official, the girl in query attended a modelling academy when she was in her twenties. Afterward, she was enrolled in a “Russian soft-power school” before she fell off the radar for a decade — only to re-emerge within the US as an authority in cryptocurrency.
“But she doesn’t stay in crypto,” the ex-official said. “She is attempting to get to the heights of the military-space innovation community. The husband’s totally oblivious.”
The previous counterespionage official told The Times that these sorts of scenarios occur more often than people think.
“Showing up, marrying a goal, having kids with a goal — and conducting a lifelong collection operation, it’s very uncomfortable to take into consideration however it’s so prevalent,” he said.
“If I desired to be out of the shadows, I’d write a book on it.”
In response to Mulvenon, security turned away two attractive Chinese women who tried to realize entry right into a business conference on China investment risks in Virginia last week.
“We didn’t allow them to in,” he said. “But that they had all the data [about the event] and all the pieces else.”
He added: “It’s a phenomenon. And I’ll let you know: it’s weird.”
Mulvenon, a counterespionage expert, said that the seduction tactics utilized by foreign honeypots was a “real vulnerability” for the US “because we, by statute and culture, don’t try this.”
“So that they have an asymmetric advantage on the subject of sex warfare,” he said.
A senior US counterintelligence official told the publication that America’s enemies have replaced Cold War–era spies with on a regular basis operatives who pose as businesspeople, investors or analysts.
“We’re not chasing a KGB agent in a smoky guesthouse in Germany anymore,” the official said.
“Our adversaries — particularly the Chinese — are using a whole-of-society approach to take advantage of all points of our technology and Western talent.”
The House Committee on Homeland Security has warned that the Chinese Communist Party carried out greater than 60 espionage operations contained in the US over the past 4 years, though former officials consider the true number is much higher.
American authorities have repeatedly accused Chinese operatives of targeting cutting-edge industries. In a single case, Klaus Pflugbeil, a resident of Ningbo, China, was sentenced last December to 2 years in prison for attempting to sell stolen Tesla trade secrets at a Las Vegas conference.
“In stealing trade secrets from an American electric-vehicle manufacturer to make use of in his own China-based company, Pflugbeil’s actions stood to learn the PRC [People’s Republic of China] in a critical industry with national security implications,” said Matthew Olsen, the US assistant attorney general for national security.
The Commission on the Theft of American Mental Property estimates that China-linked corporate espionage costs US taxpayers as much as $600 billion a 12 months.
The Post has sought comment from the Russian and Chinese governments.
