A large portion of intelligence work is focused on collecting information your competitor or adversary does not want you to have. But another key focus of intelligence is on compromising key individuals.

This involves damaging reputations or putting people in a position where they might disclose sensitive information. To achieve that, intelligence agencies have often used the suggestion, promise or reality of sex.

The reemergence of interest in “sexpionage” comes from recent allegations around Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and his relationship with an executive of a partner company. The US intelligence community believes the woman in question, Alice Huang, is connected to Chinese intelligence.

Nvidia, the computing power behind American AI advances and a significant financial factor in US stock market gains, has launched its own investigation. And the US president, Donald Trump, has said the FBI is looking into the situation.

China has dismissed the claims as a groundless smear campaign.

The situation has drawn attention to the wider vulnerabilities the west has to spying.

The key question is: does any western organisation with deep exposure to Chinese partners have a realistic understanding of how information moves out of those relationships?

My assessment is they do not. In part, this is because Chinese intelligence is widely viewed as a mirror of the west’s heavily controlled intelligence agencies.

But China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law requires organisations and citizens to support and cooperate with state intelligence work.

Any partner with meaningful ties to China is thus a potential conduit, regardless of whether they have been formally recruited.

‘Honeytrap’ agents

Sexpionage captures headlines and drags eyeballs. The promise of a fallen man (nearly always a man) has been a staple of tabloid newspapers, novels, films and television for well over a century. Among the most prominent examples is the Profumo Scandal in the 1960s.

At that time, the then-UK secretary for war, John Profumo, had an affair with a 19-year-old woman, who was also intimate with a Soviet defence attache. This created an intelligence vulnerability.

Similarly, suggestions of government connections to the dead and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein provide whiffs of espionage to sexual abuse and compromise.

Sexpionage can even be seen in biblical accounts. The Book of Joshua tells the story of a woman called Rahab who used her access to Jericho’s military leaders to pass on secrets to the Israelites. It also featured in the intrigues of the middle ages and prominently in the first world war.

Mata Hari, a Dutch dancer and spy, was executed in 1917 having promised intelligence to both the French and German militaries. These intrigues were based on her entanglements with senior military officials on both sides.

Later, during the cold war, the Soviets and East Germans refined their use of so-called “honeytrap” agents towards using ordinary looking, reasonably well-educated men and women with whom a relationship would look believable. These relationships often began without coercion and consequently the betrayal of secrets was more enduring and deniable.

A large number of western officials were recalled home from Moscow or Soviet satellite states during this period after being caught in compromising and staged situations with Russian agents. There were some, like British civil servant John Vassall, whose compromised status was not detected and who spied for the Soviet Union.

Intelligence agencies also had conspicuous success during the cold war through the exploitation of closeted gay men like Vassall and the Canadian ambassador to Moscow, John Watkins, whose compromise might see them prosecuted if they did not comply.

According to author Henry Schlesinger, the purpose of sexpionage falls into four categories. First is to control or coerce the target, persuading them to spy. Second is to collect “pillow talk”, the injudicious comments to a lover in an intimate moment and giving access to their phones or computers.

The third category is collecting information that allows for further exploitation of the target. Minor legal snags such as recreational drug use or driving infringements can be leveraged further. And the fourth is collecting a means by which to discredit protest or political movements.

This is essentially the subject of the current Undercover Policing Inquiry in the UK. Evidence to the inquiry by the Metropolitan Police has confirmed that undercover police officers engaged in sexual relationships to collect intelligence and undermine protest groups from the 1970s until at least 2011.

Targeting tech executives

If we bring sexpionage to the modern day, what might an intelligence agency or officer be considering when targeting a technology executive?

Receiving forewarning of US government decisions is a key interest for China, as is gauging the extent to which the US tech industry relies on Taiwan. Moreover, access to technology or finance executives and companies is valuable.

We also need to consider the incentives of technology leaders. Private firms are not obliged to engage in counterintelligence, the business of finding spies.

Stopping a major commercial partnership because there is some evidence of exposure to a foreign government could also be seen as bad business.

However, businesses should have some curiosity in who they are trading with, not least because of the strong market responses to this. Nvidia’s share price tumbled US$330 billion (£246 billion) after the company announced it would launch an investigation into the recent reports.

Governments need to watch closely for compromise activities against companies they now think of as core infrastructure. In the Nvidia case, it has been reported that US government officials suspected there was a problem before allowing the company’s advanced H200 chips to be exported to China.

This is the sort of vulnerability intelligence agencies are there to prevent.