In China’s Spy Operations, Romance Can Be a Long Game

At the height of the Cold War, a top official in China’s intelligence agency said that his country would never use seduction to entrap a person.

Such tactics might be for the C.I.A. or the K.G.B., the official named Kong Yuan, of the Central Investigation Department, told a group of agents in training in April 1960, but China was guided by principles. He looked at the few female comrades in the audience. “Rest assured, we will not be asking you to go run beauty traps.”

Despite that pledge, captured in a 2010 memoir by a former Chinese diplomat, China’s intelligence services have for decades used romantic entanglements to compromise or extract information from prominent people.

American officials say that China’s Ministry of State Security, which runs intelligence operations today, recruited a Chinese businesswoman to collect intelligence on Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia and one of the most powerful figures in the artificial intelligence boom.

It was not clear what role the woman, Alice Huang, or Huang Le, might have had with the Chinese spy agency. Ms. Huang was a top executive of a Singapore company that operates data centers in Southeast Asia using Nvidia chips and that rents their computing power to Chinese firms.

Mr. Huang has acknowledged that he had an affair with Ms. Huang. President Trump has said that Mr. Huang told him that he was not aware that the woman was a spy. China has rejected the espionage allegations against Ms. Huang, calling them smears against the country. U.S. officials have not provided evidence for their claims. Ms. Huang has not responded to requests for comment.

The use of relationships or seduction in the world of espionage is not new or unique to China. The tactic was made infamous by East Germany’s “Romeos,” male Stasi agents tasked with seducing the clerks of Western officials, and by the Soviet Union’s longtime use of sexual blackmail, among other examples.

What is unique about China’s use of the tactic is the amount of time invested, according to Nicholas Eftimiades, a retired senior American intelligence officer who writes about China’s espionage operations.

“They play this long term,” he said. “These are long-term relationships, sometimes marriages.”

Perhaps the most famous example involves Shi Peipu, a Peking Opera singer whose two-decade relationship with Bernard Boursicot, who worked on French diplomatic missions in Beijing and Ulan Bator in Mongolia, drew Mr. Boursicot into spying for China. Both were arrested in France, at which point Mr. Boursicot learned that his lover was a man. In 1986, they were convicted of espionage. Their story inspired the play “M. Butterfly” by David Henry Hwang.

More recent cases include Christine Fang, or Fang Fang, who was believed by counterintelligence officials to be a Chinese spy and who was in a physical relationship with former U.S. Representative Eric Swalwell between 2012 and 2015.

Separately, a retired U.S. Army officer who was working as a contractor for the U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii was sentenced to prison in 2014 for emailing defense secrets, including details about joint training exercises between the United States and South Korea, to a 27-year-old Chinese woman with whom he had been involved romantically for almost two years.

In 2003, an F.B.I. agent, James J. Smith, who worked in Chinese counterintelligence, admitted that he had an affair for nearly 20 years with a Chinese American businesswoman suspected of being a Chinese double agent. The woman, whom he had recruited as an asset, was found to have given classified U.S. government information to Beijing.

Both the United States and China appear to be concerned about the possibility of emotional or other manipulation by the other side. Last year, the U.S. government prohibited American personnel in China from having romantic or sexual relationships with Chinese citizens, according to The Associated Press.

China’s intelligence agency itself frequently warns its citizens to look out for foreign operatives attempting to trap them. In May, China’s Ministry of State Security published an article on WeChat that called on residents to “be wary of sudden advances and overt displays of affection from seemingly perfect individuals of the opposite sex.”

“Avoid falling into the ‘gentle trap,’” it said.

Alex Joske, managing director at Garnaut Global, an advisory firm, said the Chinese ministry’s warnings about espionage “are usually based on the kinds of things that they do rather than what other countries actually do.”

Compared with Western intelligence agencies, the Chinese government is more willing to use blackmail and coercion in its operations, including romance and sexual activities, he argued. Western governments see blackmail as a less reliable way of motivating a source or asset, he said.

China’s Ministry of State Security, which oversees operations abroad as well as security within the country, is known for its highly coercive methods that include threats of arrest and detention.

The agency also exploits other forms of relationships, like family ties. A former F.B.I. agent in New York was recruited, with the help of his mother in China, to pass information about the agency to Beijing. He pleaded guilty to the charges in 2016.

China does engage in the kind of sexually baited entrapment one might see in a spy drama, according to former American intelligence officers. “A diplomat walks into his hotel room, and there’s a girl in his bed. I mean, that stuff happens. It’s just kind of ridiculous,” Mr. Eftimiades said.

Dennis Wilder, who was senior China director at the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration and a former senior intelligence officer, describes how when he traveled to Beijing, a woman would often be waiting in the elevator for him when he returned to his hotel.

“She’d say, ‘You know, I can come to your room.’ And I’d say, ‘Well why do you want to come to my room?’ And they did this over and over again to see if they could get me,” he said, noting that if he was ever to publicly accuse the Chinese of trying to entrap him, they could say the women were prostitutes working on their own volition.

“That’s the beauty of this kind of thing. It’s totally deniable,” Mr. Wilder said.

But more often than not, Mr. Eftimiades said, Beijing is not sending operatives to stage romantic encounters for blackmail. Instead, it looks for people whose personal or professional lives give them access to potential targets, he said.

Many details of the relationship between Mr. Huang and Ms. Huang, including when they met and under what circumstances Ms. Huang may have begun gathering information for Beijing, remain unclear.

China’s large diaspora includes executives, students and others who can be recruited in what Mr. Eftimiades calls the country’s “whole of society” approach to espionage.

Of the many cases of Chinese spying that have come to light over the past few years, only a handful involve romantic relationships. In most cases, the best motivation is money, Mr. Joske says. But when it comes to targeting wealthy elites, money is not always as powerful a recruitment tool.

“So instead, you try to co-opt someone in their circle,” he said. That includes someone with whom that person has a close relationship.