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Speaker 2: Warning, the following episode contains explicit language and sexual themes.
Speaker 3: Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 4: About four years ago, I received an unexpected offer to
Speaker 4: interview the President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko. He wanted to
Speaker 4: create quote mutually beneficial ties with the US, and someone
Speaker 4: evidently thought that one way to do that was for
Speaker 4: me to profile Lukashenko for Rolling Stone magazine.
Speaker 5: Belarus quotes between Russia and the European Union has been
Speaker 5: ruled for decades by autocratic President Alexander Lukashenko FTKL victory
Speaker 5: in August elections the US said were fraudulent. Huge protests followed,
Speaker 5: and he moved swiftly to crush them.
Speaker 4: They reached out to me, and I told them that
Speaker 4: if my editors approved the story, I'd be honest in
Speaker 4: the interview and wouldn't be throwing him softball questions, and
Speaker 4: they seemed open to that.
Speaker 5: He and Russian President Vladimir Putin are two peas in
Speaker 5: a pod. When it comes to shutting down to scent.
Speaker 5: So Putin swiftly helped his skiing partner with one point
Speaker 5: five billion dollars. Months of systematic repression and torture followed,
Speaker 5: documented by human rights groups.
Speaker 4: Then came the emails, ask me what kind of women
Speaker 4: I liked, asking me to send photos of my type
Speaker 4: of women, offering to range dates for me when I'm
Speaker 4: in Belarus. Perhaps they can even throw a party from me,
Speaker 4: start with beautiful women. I will be set in Belarus
Speaker 4: for the trip and possibly my life, they said. As
Speaker 4: a journalist, I knew what accepting favors, whether cash or
Speaker 4: sex or anything from a subject, can mean the end
Speaker 4: of your career. And that was my first possible experience
Speaker 4: with what the Russians call compromat.
Speaker 6: Compromat comes from the Russian for compromising material. It means
Speaker 6: that the Russian Secret State have managed to film somebody
Speaker 6: having sex with somebody they shouldn't be having sex with. Politicians, diplomats, spies, whoever.
Speaker 6: A former British spy called Christopher Steele reported that the
Speaker 6: Russian Secret State had filmed Donald Trump in a hotel
Speaker 6: room in Moscow. Trump has denied it ever happened but
Speaker 6: if it did happen, then that was a classic case.
Speaker 7: Of compromat.
Speaker 8: Sorry, I had to do that.
Speaker 7: I got on my duty.
Speaker 9: The away that was how my.
Speaker 3: God, I got to.
Speaker 10: You.
Speaker 8: I had to joy.
Speaker 10: It, says Sost.
Speaker 4: Episode five, chapter eleven, Seduce and Destroy.
Speaker 11: I wanted to let you know I was transcribing the
Speaker 11: interview with the sex buy and I actually have firsthand
Speaker 11: knowledge of this because in my past life I worked
Speaker 11: on these black programs in aerospace. Each program had its
Speaker 11: own security office.
Speaker 4: Shockingly, at least to me, the voice you're hearing is
Speaker 4: that of my audio transcriber. For ten years, she's listened
Speaker 4: to my interviews and written down the secrets of the
Speaker 4: famous and powerful, from Tom Cruise to Elon Musk. And
Speaker 4: this is the first time she's called like this after
Speaker 4: listening to my first recordings with Alia Rosa. She wants
Speaker 4: to let me know that she has actually had her
Speaker 4: own experiences with compromont and sexpionage.
Speaker 11: We would actually have meetings where the upper management would
Speaker 11: inform us about it, and the men who were usually
Speaker 11: the target had to sign paperwork indicating yes, they had
Speaker 11: been informed about these women, especially for Brussia.
Speaker 4: I had no idea that prior to this, she'd worked
Speaker 4: at a company that contracted with the military, and that
Speaker 4: spies like Aleah are evidently a well known threat in
Speaker 4: the industry.
Speaker 3: Wow, it was like part of standard operating procedure.
Speaker 11: Absolutely every program I worked we talked about it. I
Speaker 11: just remember them warning, mostly men about women who might
Speaker 11: approach them when they're traveling on work or traveling out
Speaker 11: of town.
Speaker 3: And what were the telltale signs of these people.
Speaker 11: Oh, if the woman was extremely attractive, you know, definitely,
Speaker 11: if she was really out of your league type of
Speaker 11: a woman. And if she came on sexually, you know,
Speaker 11: too aggressive sexually, or wanted to be alone with you,
Speaker 11: or wanted to get into your hotel room with you
Speaker 11: for whatever reason and to watch your drink, they could
Speaker 11: drug you that kind of thing.
Speaker 4: In fact, the government was so worried about compromant that
Speaker 4: anyone with a secret sex life was considered a security risk.
Speaker 11: There were people who openly key it on their wives
Speaker 11: that everybody knew, and they lost their clearances.
Speaker 4: I asked my transcriber for her thoughts in Aliah's story.
Speaker 4: Since she's listened to the recordings so closely, I.
Speaker 11: Think it sounds accurate. Because it was exactly what we
Speaker 11: were being warned about. She's incredibly attractive, she's charming, she's smart,
Speaker 11: she's manipulative, she's loyal to her country.
Speaker 3: But it all sounds like it worked.
Speaker 4: I call a Leah after speaking with my transcriber, and
Speaker 4: Aaliyah has just returned from a session with a new therapist.
Speaker 3: How was your therapy session?
Speaker 9: Honestly, not really good.
Speaker 12: I mean, I don't know, it's like really difficult to
Speaker 12: go through that again. It's like it's so so many feelings,
Speaker 12: you know, so many sensations which are just like disgust
Speaker 12: me so much.
Speaker 9: I feel really.
Speaker 3: Guilty, guilty in what way and can very differ like.
Speaker 9: In many like I felt like I have done so
Speaker 9: much that, you know.
Speaker 12: Things in my life, like really bad things, Like I've
Speaker 12: done so many things.
Speaker 9: Which I never wanted to do.
Speaker 12: The therapist she said that I had to survive, That's
Speaker 12: why I did it. But it doesn't matter to me,
Speaker 12: you know, It's it's just like I feel really guilty.
Speaker 4: I asked her more about it. Eliah says she was
Speaker 4: at a friend's birthday and was given a small dose
Speaker 4: of mushrooms, something she doesn't ordinarily do. These triggered memories
Speaker 4: that she keeps compartmentalized in her mind. She calls that
Speaker 4: compartment Pandora's box.
Speaker 8: I felt like I saw so many ghosts of those
Speaker 8: people who who were like were killed or I did unintentionally,
Speaker 8: or they were affected by my life or something like.
Speaker 8: I saw them and it was so scary. I felt
Speaker 8: like I saw they.
Speaker 9: Even they faces.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 12: It's not really pleasant, you know, view and it's kind
Speaker 12: of like maybe I'm going crazy.
Speaker 9: I don't know.
Speaker 4: We talk about PTSD and therapy and decide to take
Speaker 4: a little time off so that Aliah can recover from
Speaker 4: her experience. She feels that unburdening herself of her secrets
Speaker 4: will give them less power over her. In the meantime,
Speaker 4: I tell her about the conversation with my transcriber, So
Speaker 4: my transcriber called she and we discussed how large this
Speaker 4: program must have been and how many women must have
Speaker 4: faced similar traumatic experiences.
Speaker 13: You know, Neil, I feel very very very big sorrow
Speaker 13: and very big sadness when I think about this woman.
Speaker 12: I remember my classmates, the old king, so.
Speaker 13: Young and fresh and beautiful, and then just in a
Speaker 13: few months, instead of happy face, instead of smile.
Speaker 9: I saw sorrow and helpless and nothing else.
Speaker 13: I wonder how many women have done this throughout the history,
Speaker 13: and how many women are doing this right now in
Speaker 13: the whole world, even in the United States.
Speaker 4: So while Aliah takes some time off, I decided to
Speaker 4: take some time to find answers to her questions about
Speaker 4: the program. Since speaking to my transcriber, I've been wondering
Speaker 4: similar things. Are there other countries also using sex as
Speaker 4: a weapon of war? And just how big are these operations.
Speaker 4: I spent the next couple of weeks doing research and
Speaker 4: interviewing agents and journalists from around the world, and what
Speaker 4: I find shocks me. First of all, it's not just
Speaker 4: Russia that does this, it's China.
Speaker 2: Chinese intelligence operation on US soil, targeting American politicians with
Speaker 2: a female operator who had ties to a Democratic congressman
Speaker 2: and intimate relationships with at least two Midwestern mayors.
Speaker 14: North Korea, according to Young, North Korea's honeytrap plan, established
Speaker 14: by former leader Kim Jong il, was to set up
Speaker 14: foreign dignitaries with females buys posing as translators or aids.
Speaker 10: Pakistan, You're dear, befriended on email and WhatsApp group, etc.
Speaker 15: And they get entrapped, and then they emotionally get in.
Speaker 4: Trapped, even America, the United Kingdom and so many others
Speaker 4: throughout history.
Speaker 15: We will then Nostellius in a pub and Lisbon a
Speaker 15: pub frequenc it biof cuity sellers from a nearby army
Speaker 15: plan and we're here.
Speaker 7: This tamply planned opper began.
Speaker 4: In fact, even ancient military writings advised weaponizing this weakness
Speaker 4: in human nature.
Speaker 16: If we go back to two and a half thousand years,
Speaker 16: one of the ancient military writers said that you should
Speaker 16: trade a martial art warrior to identify an employed four
Speaker 16: humored weeks. So they were fear, lost, anger, and greed.
Speaker 16: The certain of these are all used in sexpionage.
Speaker 4: This is David Lewis, a psychologist and author of the
Speaker 4: book Sexpionage, The Exploitation of Sex by the Soviet Union.
Speaker 4: I called doctor Lewis to find out the kind of
Speaker 4: impact that this type of spycraft has had on political
Speaker 4: history and why it works so well.
Speaker 16: It's always struck me as a psychologist very straight. So
Speaker 16: you have people who are immensely powerful, usually highly educated,
Speaker 16: very wealthy, yet they throw it all away for the
Speaker 16: sake of a one night stead.
Speaker 4: Yet it happens over and over again. And if you
Speaker 4: think that more people would be smarter, think again. Here's
Speaker 4: just one chilling example of a target who's literally in
Speaker 4: hiding from the government, throwing all cautions to the wind
Speaker 4: for an attractive woman. Mordecai Venunu was working as a
Speaker 4: technician in an Israeli nuclear facility when he began to
Speaker 4: have moral misgivings. He gathered evidence, left the country and
Speaker 4: told journalists for the first time about the extent of
Speaker 4: Israel's nuclear weapons program. And then, as he was working
Speaker 4: with the Times of London unleaking the story, he met
Speaker 4: someone special. Here he is describing it in his own words,
Speaker 4: speaking to an interviewer from sixty minutes Australia.
Speaker 17: I bought a cigarette that I saw an American woman
Speaker 17: standing there buying gos a cigarette.
Speaker 3: I look at her, she look at me.
Speaker 4: You'll notice in this next part some similarities with the
Speaker 4: lea's training, which is that the agent never approaches the target.
Speaker 3: She gets the target to approach her.
Speaker 6: You took the initiative to forgive the collequialism to pick
Speaker 6: up this lady.
Speaker 3: Yes, you did it.
Speaker 17: If she had tried to pick me up, then I
Speaker 17: would suspected her. But if I was too with the initiative,
Speaker 17: I mean, I'm not suspecting it.
Speaker 9: She was dragging you into her trap.
Speaker 17: No, I was already in her trap.
Speaker 4: After a few dates, she convinced Venunu to join her
Speaker 4: for a weekend in Rome. Despite being a whistleblower who
Speaker 4: was wanted for treason by the Israeli government. Venunu suspected
Speaker 4: nothing and flew to room with her. In the car
Speaker 4: from the airport, she kissed him passionately all the way
Speaker 4: to the house where they'd be staying, evidently to keep
Speaker 4: him from thinking with his brain.
Speaker 17: When I entered the house, the door opened and immediately
Speaker 17: jump on me two people and one kick me in
Speaker 17: the stomach and I collapsed. Another one jump on me,
Speaker 17: put his hand on my mouth, silencing me. Another woman
Speaker 17: come and injected me, and then I lost my conscience.
Speaker 4: The New New spent the next eighteen years in an
Speaker 4: Israeli prison, eleven of those years in solitary confinement. And
Speaker 4: this is just one of many historically significant examples from
Speaker 4: the Moon Sisters. Two Confederate seduction spies who at one
Speaker 4: point were engaged to thirty eight Union soldiers. Between them
Speaker 4: to Ramone Mercator, an agent of Stalin who honeytrapped his
Speaker 4: way into Leon Trotsky's study, where he executed the famous
Speaker 4: Russian revolutionary with an ice pick.
Speaker 7: Posing as a Trotskyist or Ramon Mercando seduced Trotsky's secretary.
Speaker 7: Soon he was a frequent visitor to Trotsky's villa and
Speaker 7: a familiar face to his security guards.
Speaker 16: I don't think people really understand the extent to which
Speaker 16: sexual version has helped shape Western society.
Speaker 3: This is historian David Lewis. Again.
Speaker 4: I have a specific question that I'm hoping he could answer.
Speaker 4: How did expionage go from a dirty trick that governments
Speaker 4: use in a moment of desperation like in the cases
Speaker 4: we just heard. Twitaliah and my transcriber have been describing
Speaker 4: to me a factory like training camp that a country
Speaker 4: uses to turn out sex buys.
Speaker 16: We can trace the start of what we might call
Speaker 16: industrial sexual version back to a woman called Katherine Zabage.
Speaker 16: She was actually known as Kitty Smith. She started life.
Speaker 4: Kitty Smith began running Berlin's most in demand brothel. Then
Speaker 4: World War II began.
Speaker 16: When she saw war was going to be declared after
Speaker 16: Hitler come to Part thirty three, she tried to flee
Speaker 16: to England. She was arrested at the border and she
Speaker 16: was offered a choice. She could either come back and
Speaker 16: rather her brothels for the government as spy centers, or
Speaker 16: she could go to a concentration gap. So she decided
Speaker 16: to set up the brothels for them.
Speaker 12: It's all own Kitty Riou's House for Forbidden Pleasures in
Speaker 12: Berlin under the Nazi.
Speaker 16: This was organized by a guy called Walton Schillenberg, who
Speaker 16: was head of SS counter espionage. Now this was the
Speaker 16: first time. The girls used were highly trained. They had
Speaker 16: to be aged between twenty and thirty. They had to
Speaker 16: be single, they had to be National Socialists snots these
Speaker 16: other words. When they joined they were inducted into the SS.
Speaker 16: They took it over the leaders to Hitler. They attended
Speaker 16: classes on hairdressing and social etiquette, but also on ad
Speaker 16: armed combat marksmanship, foreign languages, uniform identifications, so they were
Speaker 16: very professional spies. This was really the start of the
Speaker 16: industrialization of sexual reversion and it was certainly a model
Speaker 16: followed by the KGB after the war, and they took control.
Speaker 4: Now with the kg be the first ones that then
Speaker 4: take women, some who'd even had a sexual experience before,
Speaker 4: and then train them from there versus using sex workers.
Speaker 16: Don't know of any other intelligence agency which had done
Speaker 16: that to that extent.
Speaker 15: On the outskirts of Moscow stands the Giant Training Academy
Speaker 15: of the KGB. Here the uncles as they are called
Speaker 15: in the espionage business are instructed in how to persuade
Speaker 15: women to offer sex to foreigners in return for information.
Speaker 15: These days the organization is called the FSB the Wild
Speaker 15: The name may have changed. Sexual entrapment using young women
Speaker 15: is still a priority.
Speaker 3: Young women, much like Aaliyah enter classmates.
Speaker 16: And they had traders in their kind of total the
Speaker 16: robes and showed them how to behave and really deprive
Speaker 16: them of their inhibitions. So they were prepared to go
Speaker 16: with any bad however disagreeable they found him, or however
Speaker 16: older he was, or indeed however young he was, in
Speaker 16: order to extract information problem, and they were taught how
Speaker 16: to behave that. Actually, although the situation they were in
Speaker 16: was of course, I any think about.
Speaker 4: Natural Chapter twelve, Tools of the Trade. As our time
Speaker 4: off draws to a close and Leah feels ready to
Speaker 4: continue her story. I find myself deep down the rabbit
Speaker 4: hole of Russian espionage. I even managed to find FBI
Speaker 4: agents and contractors who work to bring down the Russian
Speaker 4: illegals program. Eleven spies who are working in the US
Speaker 4: using seduction and other techniques to infiltrate different groups. You
Speaker 4: did some work with I think you were saying with
Speaker 4: agents that were still.
Speaker 3: Working here, turn it off in the corner.
Speaker 4: Most of the people I reach aren't willing to talk
Speaker 4: about it on the record, not just in America, but
Speaker 4: even more so in Russia. Or my sources fear reprisals
Speaker 4: from Putin. Here's a former Russian intelligence officer who is
Speaker 4: trained at the same academy that a Lea went to,
Speaker 4: speaking through a translator.
Speaker 3: You ever heard of a program like that? With this question,
Speaker 3: I wouldn't.
Speaker 12: I will not be able to reply to respond to
Speaker 12: this question due to let's say, professional secret.
Speaker 4: Many of these sources were willing to speak to me
Speaker 4: off the record, and a few you'll hear from shortly.
Speaker 4: We're surprisingly willing to talk openly. And here's what I learned.
Speaker 4: There are four levels of sexual espionage that are important
Speaker 4: to know because they'll help explain the next parts of
Speaker 4: a lea's story, and because they're still going on today.
Speaker 4: Level one is the most mild, but it's also the
Speaker 4: most It is everywhere, and unknowingly you may have come
Speaker 4: across it in your own life. It's called nabludinya, or
Speaker 4: surveillance in American intelligence terms. We call these people eyes
Speaker 4: and ears.
Speaker 14: You know. One of their biggest exports of Russia is
Speaker 14: beautiful women, and they send out an enormous amount of
Speaker 14: girls into the world.
Speaker 4: This is Ina DeSilva, one of the first Russian model
Speaker 4: agents in New York City during the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 14: All these girls were sent out into the world and
Speaker 14: they were told try to meet important men, try to
Speaker 14: attach yourself to important men. And they would send back
Speaker 14: information to handlers that you know, this moment, I'm dating
Speaker 14: so and so, I've met so and so, and the
Speaker 14: handlers would decide if anybody was important enough to really
Speaker 14: put an effort into by maybe recording them or you know,
Speaker 14: they would be received further instructions.
Speaker 4: She mentions a well known Russian model who did this
Speaker 4: type of work along with her boyfriend who was also
Speaker 4: her KGB handler.
Speaker 14: If you're really going to do modeling, you do not
Speaker 14: go Moscow to Washington. They lived in Washington for a year,
Speaker 14: attending daily cocktail parties and ambassies, consulates and stuff like that.
Speaker 14: And that's like a typical thing. It's pretty unbelievable. I mean,
Speaker 14: Germany right now is like a rat's nest with all
Speaker 14: of this.
Speaker 3: German intelligence agency has warned against the risk of an
Speaker 3: aggressive Russian espionage operation.
Speaker 9: This comes as West ramps up its support for Ukraine.
Speaker 14: They've all been told to penetrate and influence anybody who
Speaker 14: has decision making powers in Germany, you know, regarding meaning
Speaker 14: Milly So. I mean, the war in Ukraine is also
Speaker 14: being fooed by older girls that are all over important cities.
Speaker 8: You know.
Speaker 14: There's this Russian doll, a doll within a doll within
Speaker 14: Nadal Kolomatosha. Well, a lot of these girls. That's really
Speaker 14: what it's like, unless, like any you know, national security agencies,
Speaker 14: any of these countries gets lucky. I think it's very
Speaker 14: difficult to keep track of this women.
Speaker 4: Level two is pravo kasia in Russian or provocation, and
Speaker 4: someone who has eyes and ears, if they land the
Speaker 4: right target, can be moved by their handler into this
Speaker 4: more prestigious position of influence. One example of this type
Speaker 4: of agent is Maria Bhutina, who is living in yes, Washington,
Speaker 4: DC and convicted in twenty eighteen of acting as an
Speaker 4: unregistered foreign agent of Russia.
Speaker 10: She definitely was going into these conservative circles right among
Speaker 10: mostly the Republican Party, the NRA, these types of places
Speaker 10: where there is a machismo. And she came in looking sexy,
Speaker 10: toting a gun, and she used that.
Speaker 4: This is Alex Finley, a former CIA officer who was
Speaker 4: stationed in Europe and the author of the Victor Caro
Speaker 4: trilogy of novels about the CIA.
Speaker 10: The whole point, as an intelligence officers you have to
Speaker 10: assess your target. What is it that's going to motivate
Speaker 10: them or what are their vulnerabilities. She knew and understood
Speaker 10: if I go in in short shorts and carrying my gun,
Speaker 10: that's going to get me closer to them. Now, separately,
Speaker 10: she did have relationships with a few different political functionaries
Speaker 10: right within the Republican Party.
Speaker 4: She goes on to mention a prominent figure that Maria
Speaker 4: Boutina had a relationship with, one who ended up pushing
Speaker 4: many canspeak theories that may have been planted in his
Speaker 4: mind by this agent, because the goal of these agents
Speaker 4: is not just a spy, but to suit as powerful,
Speaker 4: vulnerable people and influence their thoughts and behavior to help
Speaker 4: destabilize a country.
Speaker 10: So she knew who to target, and she knew how
Speaker 10: to find the people that were going to have the
Speaker 10: sympathies that she needed to help push more and more ideas.
Speaker 10: So you see, it's not always just to I'm going
Speaker 10: to have sex with you, you'd give me secrets. It
Speaker 10: can become a bit more complicated.
Speaker 4: I ask Alex what she thinks of the statements from
Speaker 4: Ena de Silva, the model agent, about the large number
Speaker 4: of low level Russian agents still operating in the US,
Speaker 4: and she confirms this terrifying assessment.
Speaker 10: We went through this sort of kicking diplomats and everything
Speaker 10: out over the past few years, right, But those are
Speaker 10: just the people who are declared, So you have to
Speaker 10: assume that there's still networks of illegals, you know, sort
Speaker 10: of these sleeper cells who live in live and work
Speaker 10: among us like normal Americans, but in fact they're Russian
Speaker 10: agents and then their assets. I'm sure, I'm sure you
Speaker 10: have been a huge network of them still in the
Speaker 10: United States doing both collection and also influence operations.
Speaker 4: So what happens when these Russian agents get expelled and
Speaker 4: go home. The answer, they return as military heroes or
Speaker 4: more accurately, the modern equivalent of that, celebrities.
Speaker 14: Bhutnai is on the Russian State TV. Chapman became a
Speaker 14: playboy model, you know, so they get rewarded.
Speaker 4: This women, the other spy, Ina de Silva is referring
Speaker 4: to is Anna Chapman, who's arrested and deported as part
Speaker 4: of the illegals program. But it gets even darker. Level
Speaker 4: three is compromant. This is journalist Mark Collinsworth, the author
Speaker 4: of Agents of Influence, How the KGB subverted Western democracies.
Speaker 18: The term compromat is a Russian term which means compromising information,
Speaker 18: and what the KGB are now the FSB in Russian
Speaker 18: intelligence service specializing compromat in terms of finding compromising information
Speaker 18: about Western politicians, diplomats, spies, officials.
Speaker 4: Many believe that Putin, who was formerly director of the FSB,
Speaker 4: rose to power through kompromat.
Speaker 19: Putin is in the intimidation business. When Vladimir Putin met
Speaker 19: Angela Merkel, he knew her weakness. The German chancellor was
Speaker 19: afraid of dogs, so Putin whistled in a black labrador
Speaker 19: just to intimidate it.
Speaker 18: What's interesting about Putin is that there's a strong case
Speaker 18: to be made that he only became President of Russia
Speaker 18: in two thousand because of a honey trapping compromat operation.
Speaker 18: And what happened was that in nineteen ninety nine there
Speaker 18: was a corruption investigation into President Yeltsin's office. Young women
Speaker 18: were hired to sleep with him and they did the classes.
Speaker 4: So rather than defend themselves in this corruption investigation, the
Speaker 4: Yeltsin government decided to set up a honeytrap for the
Speaker 4: prosecutor leading the investigation instead.
Speaker 18: And then the FSB leaked the videos to Russian TV stations.
Speaker 18: And the significance of this is that the FSB intelligence
Speaker 18: officer who was actually seen delivering the incriminating videos to
Speaker 18: Russian TV companies and holding press conferences about it was Putin.
Speaker 18: And so basically the consequence of this honey trapping operation
Speaker 18: was that it helped Putin become the next president of Russia.
Speaker 19: After Yeltsin, Yieltsen appointed Putin his successor by twos Yieltsen
Speaker 19: had resigned and Pousa was president.
Speaker 4: The extremes that the Russian government has gone to get
Speaker 4: compromont even go so far as drugging foreign officials and
Speaker 4: staging sexual scenes of them while they're incapacitated.
Speaker 18: They'll do anything. There were no limits, and they would
Speaker 18: get you drunk, or they would poison you, or they
Speaker 18: would hire women or men.
Speaker 4: Of course, this type of compromont doesn't always work if
Speaker 4: a target is single or doesn't have sexual secrets or shame.
Speaker 4: But compromot can get much more sophisticated than this. Listen
Speaker 4: carefully to author David Lewis's explanation of this honeytrap, and
Speaker 4: notice how the target is slowly manipulated deeper and deeper
Speaker 4: into a web he can't get out of.
Speaker 16: An American businessman visiting Moscow or the business trip would
Speaker 16: be hooked up with an attractive woman who he thought
Speaker 16: he'd just met by charge. She would be very charming,
Speaker 16: would go back to his hotel or her hotel, or else.
Speaker 16: They would be walking back to the hotel when she
Speaker 16: would start to kiss him. She would then rip her
Speaker 16: clothes and screen rape, whereupon birdie police officers cover arrest him.
Speaker 16: That was one of the ploys they used, and he
Speaker 16: would then be offered freedom in return for some very
Speaker 16: minor secrets which he knew perfectly well were completely unimportant,
Speaker 16: but they were secret documents, but of course that was
Speaker 16: kind of the bait. He would then be filmed handing
Speaker 16: over the documents and they were then blackmailing, not on
Speaker 16: the sex charge, but because he had committed an act
Speaker 16: of espionage and which was not sull serious.
Speaker 4: Not only is this incredibly harmful to these men, it's
Speaker 4: harmful to people who have experienced sexual assault and are
Speaker 4: not believed. Lastly, Level four is the love trap, or
Speaker 4: is the FSB calls it quote ESTA an operative relationship,
Speaker 4: the most effective, complex, and destructive of these tactics. It's
Speaker 4: based on psychological understanding that not everyone responds to blackmail,
Speaker 4: but human beings will do just about anything for love,
Speaker 4: and there are men and women around the world in
Speaker 4: long term relationships, even marriages, to these types of spies.
Speaker 4: One example of how this worked is the story of
Speaker 4: Gabrielle Klein. She was a translator at the US embassy
Speaker 4: in East Germany when one day she met a man
Speaker 4: on the river bank and began dating him, She also
Speaker 4: began giving him hundreds of secret documents for what he
Speaker 4: claimed was a world peace project. It wasn't until he
Speaker 4: was arrested seven years into the relationship that she learned
Speaker 4: he'd been a male sex buy known as a raven
Speaker 4: or Romeo the whole time. Here's journalist Mark Collingsworth.
Speaker 18: It was a very organized strategic operation. It was quite
Speaker 18: sad because, certainly the end of the Cold War, lusis
Speaker 18: Germans eyes would break off the relationships and the women
Speaker 18: were devastated because they thought it was a serious relationship,
Speaker 18: and then they would get into trouble because they had
Speaker 18: leaked secret documents.
Speaker 4: There's one last spy story I studied that shows just
Speaker 4: how powerful a love trap can be.
Speaker 20: It was called the espionage case of the Century. It
Speaker 20: also became known as a sex for secrets Marine spy
Speaker 20: scandal of nineteen eighty seven. It involved a marine guard
Speaker 20: at the American Embassy in Moscow, Clayton loan Tree, who
Speaker 20: traded secrets for love with sergeon.
Speaker 4: Clayton Loan Tree was a marine stationed as a guard
Speaker 4: at the US Embassy in Moscow, where he began dating
Speaker 4: a Russian embassy employee who was of course a swallow.
Speaker 4: He fell in love and was soon giving her plans
Speaker 4: to US embassies, as well as the names and identities
Speaker 4: of US agents in the Soviet Union. He was eventually
Speaker 4: caught and arrested, becoming the first marine convicted of spying
Speaker 4: against the United States. After serving some seven years in
Speaker 4: prison and finding out about the extent of his betraying,
Speaker 4: Here's what he told an interviewer when asked about his
Speaker 4: affair with the Russian spy.
Speaker 8: What we had back then was genuine.
Speaker 17: I respect her, I forgive her.
Speaker 4: And this is the danger of playing with the fourth
Speaker 4: and darkest level of sexpionage, because love is a lot
Speaker 4: more powerful, persuasive, and longer lasting than sex. You'll notice
Speaker 4: that one thing is missing from all this research into
Speaker 4: the methods and consequences of sexpionage, the perspective of the
Speaker 4: agents themselves, the swallows and ravens. That's because there wasn't
Speaker 4: a single seducer spy I could find prior to this
Speaker 4: podcast who had ever publicly gone on the record and
Speaker 4: reveal the inner workings of this training and these missions.
Speaker 4: We only know the stories of their victims. But let's
Speaker 4: not forget before we continue with the LEAs story that
Speaker 4: the agents themselves, possibly without a single exception, are victims
Speaker 4: as well. Here's David Lewis again with the case of
Speaker 4: the Soviets by Gudrin Heidel, who wrote the Cardinal Rule
Speaker 4: of the Love Trap. She developed genuine feelings for her target.
Speaker 16: She was under orders to seduce an American officer who
Speaker 16: had access to data secrets. Then she made a mistake,
Speaker 16: the worst mistake a swallow could ever make. She actually
Speaker 16: fell in love with her target. She wouldn't put pressure
Speaker 16: on you because she feared it might end the relationship,
Speaker 16: and her bosses suspected she's changed sides, so they had
Speaker 16: terminated with extreme prejudice.
Speaker 4: If your body is disposable to the state, so too
Speaker 4: is your life if you decide you want your body back. This,
Speaker 4: in the end, is what I learned from my research.
Speaker 4: No person wins when sex and love are used as
Speaker 4: weapons of war.
Speaker 3: Everyone loses. And this is exactly what a Leah Rosa.
Speaker 4: Discovered when she made the same critical mistake and fell
Speaker 4: in love with one of her targets. The consequences for
Speaker 4: her would be even worse than death.
Speaker 21: So when the criminals find out that I was a
Speaker 21: mon they put the back into my head. They drove
Speaker 21: me to the forest, They beat me up, they did
Speaker 21: terrible things. But that moment, when I was ready to
Speaker 21: bedad he called them and he gave the order to
Speaker 21: bring me back to him.
Speaker 4: This would come much later in Aliah's career. After being
Speaker 4: pulled deeper and deeper into a world from which there
Speaker 4: were few escapes besides death, whether the hands of your enemy,
Speaker 4: your own government, or yourself. Leah returns in episode six,
Speaker 4: available now on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 4: Form full credits, check out our show notes