Thursday, February 26, 2026, episode of the podcast The Excerpt: How do nations keep secrets when intimacy is still used as a spying tool? Kim Helmgaard, world affairs correspondent for USA TODAY, joins us for an excerpt to discuss modern sex espionage, its risks, and why even trained officials remain vulnerable.
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Dana Taylor:
Sex for secrets. Even in an age of digital surveillance, human desire remains fragile. Foreign intelligence services continue to use intimacy as a means of gathering information. Is there a way to protect national security secrets from sexual espionage?
Hello. Welcome to this excerpt from USA TODAY. I’m Dana Taylor. Today is Thursday, February 26, 2026. If trained personnel with security clearances can be compromised in this way, how safe are our secrets? More on that. USA TODAY world affairs correspondent Kim Helmgaard joins us. Kim, it was great talking to you.
Kim Helmgaard:
Thank you for having me.
Dana Taylor:
Can we live in an era of spy satellites, facial recognition tools, AI surveillance, and the ability to track billions of personal devices? With all this technology, why are old-school, low-tech things like honey traps still being deployed? And what kinds of national secrets are adversaries trying to access through these relationships?
Kim Helmgaard:
Yes, that’s exactly right. So I would say that the kind of mix of secret and open source information that you mentioned is definitely at the cutting edge of intelligence. Current and former intelligence officers and chiefs say the satellite stuff, the AI stuff, the human side of the job, interpreting the data, forming relationships on the ground – all are equally important and necessary.
In the popular imagination, spy work involves all kinds of rooftop chases, men and women with guns taking down entire armies. But in reality, it’s very process-heavy, time-consuming, bureaucratic, and requires humans to be there to integrate and interpret the data and see where everything goes.
I think the thing to note is that we are talking about honey traps. These represent a relatively niche or small subset of the kind of total espionage that countries like China and Russia do, and there aren’t that many… There are no official statistics or numbers. Intelligence agencies keep all of this classified, so we don’t know its exact scale.
In general, what spies targeting the United States are hoping to do, and this is particularly true of China, is that they are trying to do what’s called technology transfer, which is essentially intelligence agents infiltrating American universities, research centers, think tanks, and companies and trying to obtain or obtain a mixture of classified and open source information, with the goal of pushing it back to the spymasters in Beijing or wherever they are.
Dana Taylor:
Are we talking about American soldiers and officers being cheated here, or are we talking about people engaging in transactional sex? Do they know what they are doing or are they underestimating the security risk?
Kim Helmgaard:
I think it’s fair that it runs the gamut. Our report uncovered several never-before-seen examples of honeypot failures. This is primarily where suspected intelligence agents approach members of the U.S. military or defense contractors and attempt to lure them into relationships that may reveal secrets over time. We also discovered cases in which the US military was deceived. This is primarily communicated to us through trials and prosecutions.
My overall feeling is that the U.S. government is very aware of these risks and has consistently communicated them to 18 different intelligence agencies across the universe. In fact, somewhat amusingly, I noticed that on Valentine’s Day, which just passed, the U.S. Army’s Counterintelligence Corps actually posted on social media about this topic. The post, without getting too specific about the issue, was essentially saying that if you’re a 5 and the person you’re interested in is a 10, you might want to give it some serious thought. So a lot of the counterintelligence training that’s given to military, officers, and defense contractors boils down to, “Don’t be naive, don’t be stupid.”
Dana Taylor:
How difficult is it to track attempts to extract information through sex when the transaction is so up close and personal?
Kim Helmgaard:
Well, it’s actually very difficult. It took me several months to find and vet examples for this story. Honey traps generally don’t make the news because they’re classified, and the amount of declassified details is fairly sparse. Still, we persevered and found some. As I said at the outset, I would like to point out that we usually hear about failures, not successes, and most of the failures we hear about occur through prosecutions, trials, and the involvement of the U.S. Department of Justice. Nevertheless, this article manages to unearth some other examples that have never made the news before.
Dana Taylor:
Kim, how are honey traps different from money traps? Are they closely related, or does money give the spy more leverage?
Kim Helmgaard:
Therefore, motivation has changed over time. I think there was a consensus during the Cold War that the ideology of capitalism versus socialism versus communism was the primary driver of this kind of activity. However, research by the U.S. Department of Defense shows that overall financial compensation is fundamentally more important than any other factor. We’re in the realm of informed speculation here, but what experts say is that the money is a little more traceable and could have more influence because it exposes people to bribery, corruption, and blackmail. Therefore, when it comes to seduction and intimacy, there is also a concern that the quality of information obtained from these types of endeavors is not necessarily robust.
Dana Taylor:
Are these tactics primarily limited to diplomatic circles and soldiers sent overseas? Are we witnessing sex espionage happening here in the United States, or even within the Department of Defense?
Kim Helmgaard:
So most of the examples we’ve seen so far focus on the US military and defense contractors. The common perception is that most of this activity probably takes place overseas, and the targets are usually not top-level people. It’s not the ambassador, the foreign minister, or the CEO of a company. These targets tend to be lower-level people who, by virtue of their position and position, are less guarded physically as well as conceptually.
Dana Taylor:
Under the current Trump administration, it has become even more difficult for news organizations to get a peek inside the Pentagon. The Defense Department’s Military Protection Agency did not respond to a request for comment. What do we know about how the Department of Defense protects its personnel from targeting?
Kim Helmgaard:
Well, counterintelligence, like much intelligence, is a kind of dark art, and the people involved in it don’t like to give away their secrets. All we can say is that this is a general point, but there is also some specificity to it. That is, counterintelligence involves situational awareness.
The police you mentioned, the Department of Defense Military Protection Agency, these are the people who guard the Department of Defense and protect its infrastructure. They are like inspectors who come in and out of buildings every day. The Pentagon did not respond to requests for comment about the alleged activity outside the Pentagon, with foreign agents loitering around the area or loitering near entrances trying to obtain low-level intelligence. However, we have heard from several different sources that they are aware of the activity and are taking steps to counter it.
Dana Taylor:
Kim, you mention China, but are both the Russian and Chinese governments the culprits here, and are other foreign governments trying to collect information in this way?
Kim Helmgaard:
So it’s probably best to back off a bit at this point. Every country has spies. Every country aims to gain an advantage through information gathering. In the current geopolitical space, the United States is most concerned about China and Russia. They seem to be the most consistent culprits. Of course they deny this. North Korea and Iran are two other countries attempting to steal U.S. secrets.
So, as I briefly touched on earlier, honey traps are a fairly small number of incidents, there is no official tally, and much of the world’s STEM research and advances in science and technology are happening in the United States. So it makes sense that a country like China, which is competing with the United States for superpower supremacy and has about three times as many intelligence agents as the United States, would operate extensively within the United States.
More specifically, one former head of a major U.S. intelligence agency told me that the Chinese now send and respond to about 30,000 LinkedIn messages an hour to engineers, programmers, Silicon Valley types, all kinds of brain groups in the United States. He said he hopes some people will eventually be invited to a conference in China to give a presentation there and hopefully the Chinese can learn something about their research as a first step, and then as time goes on, they’ll try to collect more information. We hope that we will eventually arrive at our own proprietary information. Although it is not necessarily classified as it is often in the private sector, it is still illegal to steal it.
Dana Taylor:
Kim, are Western countries, especially the United States, also guilty of sex espionage? Was that a direct question and answer?
Kim Helmgaard:
Well, in the official version they don’t do that. That said, there are some historical examples, mostly from the Cold War era. U.S. intelligence agencies and the U.S. government, both now and in the past, will tell you that in the West, we are bound by moral norms and regulatory environments, and we don’t do that. Should we believe them? Maybe not.
Dana Taylor:
Kim Hjelmgaard is USA TODAY’s world affairs correspondent. Nice to talk to you, Kim.
Kim Helmgaard:
Thank you so much for having me.
Dana Taylor:
We would like to thank Senior Producer Kaely Monahan for her production assistance. Executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think about this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thank you for your attention. I’m Dana Taylor. Tomorrow morning, we’ll be back with another episode of USA TODAY Excerpts.
