‘Sex warfare’: How Russian, Chinese spies are luring techies and stealing Silicon Valley secrets

Chinese and Russian spies are reportedly waging “sex warfare” in the United States to steal Silicon Valley secrets. From marrying and having kids with their targets to organising startup competitions, these operatives are using all weapons in their arsenal to conduct espionage.

An expert has described the situation as “the Wild West” to The Times. This coincides with several recent reports of arrests of Chinese students, scientists, and other academics in the US on charges of spying or sneaking out scientific information and biological materials.

Let’s take a closer look.

‘Sex warfare’ to target US tech workers

Sex warfare is being used to seduce and spy on American tech workers, industry insiders have told The Times.

A former counterintelligence official told the British daily that he recently investigated a case of a “beautiful” Russian woman employed at an aerospace company.

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He said he found that the woman, who was married to an American colleague, had attended a modelling academy in her twenties and later went to a “Russian soft-power school”. She vanished for a decade and then re-emerged in the US as a cryptocurrency expert.

“Showing up, marrying a target, having kids with a target — and conducting a lifelong collection operation, it’s very uncomfortable to think about but it’s so prevalent,” he said.

James Mulvenon, the chief intelligence officer of Pamir Consulting, said he was among the many men recently targeted by foreign spies to get access to US tech secrets. “I’m getting an enormous number of very sophisticated LinkedIn requests from the same type of attractive young Chinese woman,” Mulvenon said to The Times. “It really seems to have ramped up recently.”

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Mulvenon recalled that at a business conference on Chinese investment risks held last week in Virginia, two “attractive” Chinese women tried to gain entry. “We didn’t let them in. But they had all the information [about the event] and everything else,” he said.

He added, “It is a phenomenon. And I will tell you: it is weird.”

According to a 2018 Politico report, Russia was employing local high-end Russian and Eastern European prostitutes to gather information on and from Bay Area tech and venture-capital executives. Former intelligence officials also said at the time that China was “certainly out to steal” US technology secrets.

Mulvenon, who has investigated espionage in the US for 30 years, told The Times that the honeytrap tactic was “a real vulnerability” for the US “because we, by statute and by culture, do not do that. So they have an asymmetric advantage when it comes to sex warfare”.

China hosts startup competitions to spy

Beijing is also deploying other methods to allegedly steal US trade secrets.

China is organising competitions for startups in the US to get access to sensitive business plans. It is also trying to sabotage American tech companies, reported The Times. 

In February, the US House Committee on Homeland Security said that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has carried out over 60 cases of espionage in the US over the past four years. A former counterintelligence source, however, told the British daily that there are concerns that this “only scratches the surface”.

As both Russia and the CCP are using ordinary citizens, such as investors, crypto analysts, businessmen and academics, to target their American counterparts, it has become harder to discover the spying operations.

“We’re not chasing a KGB agent in a smoky guesthouse in Germany anymore,” a senior US counterintelligence official said. “Our adversaries — particularly the Chinese — are using a whole-of-society approach to exploit all aspects of our technology and Western talent.”

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How trade theft is impacting the US

The Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property has estimated that the US lost up to $600 billion a year due to the theft of trade secrets. China has been blamed as the main source of this loss.

Speaking to The Times, Jeff Stoff, a security academic and former China and national security analyst for the US government, said that many of China’s tactics were not illegal. It was instead exploiting America’s corporate vulnerabilities using regulatory blind spots.

“The Chinese understand our system and they know how to work within it with virtual impunity — most of the time,” said Stoff. “It’s the Wild West out there. China is targeting our startups, our academic institutions, our innovators, our [Department of Defence] DoD-funded research projects. But there’s not enough oversight and action. It’s all intertwined as part of China’s economic warfare strategy, and we’ve not even entered the battlefield.”

As per the 2018 Politico report, former intelligence officials said that Silicon Valley’s “open, experimental, cosmopolitan work and business culture” has led to a newer, “softer,” “nontraditional” type of espionage, which mostly targets trade secrets and technology.

“It’s a very subtle form of intelligence collection that is more business connected and oriented,” one source said at the time. Spies “are very much part of the everyday environment” here, said this person.

With inputs from agencies