When former Deputy Mayor of London Ian Clement was seduced and drugged in his Beijing hotel room in 2009 only to find his BlackBerry stolen the next day, he admitted that he “fell for the oldest trick in the book.In Atlas Obscura’s Q&A series She Was There, we talk to female scholars who are writing long-forgotten women back into history. * China, too, seems to employ honey traps regularly. A similar trap appeared to catch an American diplomat in Moscow in 2009, but the State Department said the evidence was fabricated as part of a smear campaign. Russian political satirist Viktor Shenderovich was recently filmed cheating on his wife with a young woman named Katya, who had also seduced a half dozen other Kremlin critics.

Russian spy craft didn’t disappear with the Soviet Union. In 1987, he became the first Marine convicted of espionage. One former KGB agent has said that the Soviet intelligence agency didn’t ask Russian women to stand up for their country but “asked them to lay down.” One of the biggest Cold War spy cases was that of Clayton Lonetree, a Marine Corps security guard entrapped by a female Soviet officer, then blackmailed into sharing documents.

No one has perfected the honey trap quite like the Russians. The Central Intelligence Agency doesn’t comment on whether its agents use their sexuality to obtain information, but current and former intelligence officials say it does happen occasionally. Governments around the world set up honey traps to this day, but it’s an especially common practice in Russia and China. The practice continued into the 20 th century and became a staple of Cold War spy craft. Perhaps the earliest honey trap on record was the betrayal of Samson by Delilah, who revealed Samson’s weakness (his hair) to the Philistines in exchange for 1,100 pieces of silver, as described in the book of Judges.

Honey traps, also called “honey pots,” have been a favorite spying tactic as long as sex and espionage have existed-in other words, forever. But some Assange defenders are suggesting that the 39-year-old Australian is the victim of government-sponsored seduction, known as a “honey trap.” Are honey traps real, or are they found only in James Bond movies? Assange stands accused of “rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion” during encounters with two Swedish women. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange turned himself in to British police on Tuesday after Sweden put out a warrant for his arrest.

Female spy agent