Agent motivation—why spies spy—is a complex subject. As in the case of Delilah, what seems at first sight to be the reason for betrayal is often not the sole one, or even the defining one. A short list of what appear to be the most common motivations—money, sex, revenge, love, hatred, patriotism, ideology, ego and fear—only scrapes the surface. The answer to the question of why spies spy is only rarely simple and straightforward. However, as with Samson and Delilah, sex can be an extremely powerful inducement, particularly when employed by a woman.
During the American Civil War, between 1861 and 1865, a number of female spies from the South seduced senior Union officers and politicians into indiscretions that helped the Confederate cause. Most of these men were unwitting traitors to the North’s cause—what would now be known as “unconscious” or “unwitting” agents—although some undoubtedly realized what was going on and just did not care. Their lust for the women overwhelmed any sense of loyalty. Rose O’Neal Greenhow, a society hostess in Washington, DC, entertained prominent admirers at her fashionable home close to the White House, and from these guests she extracted vital intelligence that she passed on to the Confederacy. Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, credited her early intelligence reports as being the key factor in the Confederate Army’s victory in the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861, the first major clash in the war.
“Wild Rose” ran a network of agents in the US capital, and although some of those were motivated by a belief in the southern cause, a substantial number were simply beguiled by her seductive personality. The Confederate Naval Secretary Stephen Mallory said, with no little amount of admiration, that Greenhow “hunted man with resistless zeal and unfailing instinct,” enjoying, and using, romantic trysts with Union officers and politicians alike. Henry D. Wilson, a Republican senator, who as chairman of Abraham Lincoln’s Committee on Military Affairs was fully aware of the Union forces’ plans, wrote passionate, even obsessive, love letters to Greenhow. “You know that I do love you,” Wilson said in one signed simply “H.” “I am sick physically and mentally and know nothing that would soothe me so much as an hour with you. And tonight, at whatever cost, I will see you.” The Union Army officer Colonel Erasmus D. Keyes, another who spent many hours alone with “Wild Rose,” described her as “one of the most persuasive women that was ever known in Washington.”
Another female spy, Ginnie Moon, whose equally attractive sister Lottie also spied for the Confederates, was at one point engaged to sixteen different Union soldiers, all of whom sent her regular love letters in which they inadvertently included details of what they and their units were doing, producing useful intelligence that she passed on to her Confederate contact, Lieutenant-General Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Undoubtedly, the most brazen of the leading Civil War female spies was Belle Boyd, who was described by one jealous love rival as “the fastest girl in Virginia, or anywhere else for that matter.” When the Boyds’ home town of Martinsburg, at the lower end of the Shenandoah Valley, was taken by Union forces in mid-May 1862, her mother sent Belle, then just seventeen, up the valley to the town of Fort Royal, where her aunt owned the Fishback Hotel. Belle and her maid arrived there around the same time as the advancing Federal forces to find that the Union general James Shields had taken over her aunt’s hotel as his headquarters. Undeterred, Belle seduced Shields, spending four hours closeted alone with him, and then moved on to his aide-de-camp Captain Daniel Kelly, who was so entranced by her beauty that he bombarded her with flowers and love poems. She recorded in her memoirs that she was indebted to him for “some very remarkable effusions, some withered flowers, and last, but not least, for a great deal of very important information.” The most significant thing Kelly told her was the date and time of the next meeting of the general’s war council, which was to be held in the hotel. Boyd drilled a small hole through the floor of the room above and watched the meeting taking place, making a transcript of all that was discussed before sneaking out and crossing the lines to pass it on to the Confederate forces.
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While the male sex drive might seem to make men more susceptible to the use of seduction, women have proven just as vulnerable. The very human need for physical and emotional sexual intimacy with another person has been almost as much of a boon for espionage as it has for prostitution. It is no accident that the two are deemed to be the world’s two oldest professions.
Britain’s modern espionage apparatus dates from 1909, when a Secret Service Bureau was set up in response to the increasing threat of war with Germany. The Bureau was instructed “to deal both with espionage in this country and with our own foreign agents abroad.” The first head of its foreign section, the organisation that would become the Secret Intelligence Service, was a fifty-year-old Royal Navy commander who had been forced off the active list because he was prone to chronic seasickness. Although an apparently unpromising candidate for the job, Mansfield Cumming established many of the traditions still followed by the service he created. Cumming was known only as “C,” from the first letter of his name. To this day, the head of SIS is still known as C, albeit now referring to the initial for “chief,” the formal title, and C still uses green ink to sign official correspondence, a naval tradition adopted by Cumming from the start.
The first C inherited a ragbag of agents from his military intelligence predecessors, most of whose motives were highly dubious motives, but he noted in his diary that Danish naval officer Captain Walter Christmas “seemed straightforward.” The forty-eight-year-old Christmas was in charge of the Danish Navy’s intelligence reports on German ships passing between northern Denmark and Sweden, so he was a very useful source of intelligence on enemy ships leaving the Baltic and entering the North Sea. Cumming’s assessment of Christmas’s reliability rested on the Danish officer’s favored method of passing on his reports and collecting his payment. Christmas received a salary of £200 a year. This was a relatively useful sum, equivalent to around £20,000 or $25,000 at today’s prices, coming as it did on top of his salary as a Danish naval captain, but it was by no means his only reward.
The twice-married Christmas insisted that the courier who collected his reports should be a “pretty girl” who would meet him at a hotel in Skagen, the fishing port at the northernmost tip of Denmark. A succession of attractive prostitutes was selected to keep him happy and when, in 1915, one of them inadvertently gave him away and he had to be exfiltrated from Denmark, the British secret service obtained a flat for him in Shepherd Market, the traditional red-light district of London’s Mayfair.
The link between the world’s two oldest professions was cemented early on in the history of SIS. According to Cumming’s biographer, Alan Judd, who served in SIS himself, the service subsequently “developed something of a tradition in pretty girls.” Sometimes, of course, as the Russians recognised more than most, pretty boys were just as useful.
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The Russians had realized very early on that sex was a valuable tool in the recruitment of spies, not least for the British secret service, whose remarkably extensive agent networks in the Soviet Union were rounded up during the 1930s by the predecessors of the KGB. The United Kingdom was then regarded by Moscow as “the Main Enemy,” and Andrei Vyshinsky, the Soviet State Prosecutor, gave a series of lectures in 1937 warning Russians that “however innocent and naive foreigners appeared, they were probably secret agents sent to the USSR to exploit the human weaknesses and vices of unsuspecting Soviet citizens of both sexes, to get these citizens into their diabolical power and to force them to work as wreckers, terrorists, and spies.”
The Russians were in fact just as happy as the British “to exploit human weaknesses and vices” to recruit their own agents. The first CIA officer to be sent to Moscow in the early 1950s was Edward Ellis Smith, who was ordered to arrange drops for Pyotr Semyonovich Popov, an officer in the GRU, Soviet military intelligence, who served in Austria during the postwar Allied occupation. Popov was a walk-in, an agent who volunteered his services to the Americans during this period (rather than being actively recruited), and he was run by their Vienna station until 1955 when the Russians withdrew from Austria. He was then posted back to Moscow, where Smith was assigned to run him. It was not a successful relationship. The new CIA handler’s choice of dead drops was so inept that Popov asked him if he was trying to get him killed.
Smith was reckless in more ways than one. Yuri Nosenko, who defected to the Americans in the early 1960s, said the KGB used a honey trap, or a sexual compromise, to recruit Smith in September 1956. “We gave him the codename Rhyzhiy (redhead),” Nosenko said, revealing that the KGB had just as little respect for the American as Popov. “We used to call him Rhyzhiy Khui, red-headed prick. He went to bed with his Russian maid, our agent, and we staged a scene that made it look like a criminal offense.” Smith initially considered not reporting the incident and continuing with his relationship with the maid, an “alluring” young woman named Valya. But eventually, after a further meeting with Vladislav Kovshuk, the KGB officer who ran the sting, he decided to tell his bosses in Washington. He was immediately recalled, and the resulting investigation led to his dismissal. In an attempt to mollify him, Smith was set up with a research post at the Hoover Institution but was nevertheless furious at being sacked. Whether he then contacted the Russians, or they found out about his predicament in another way, is unclear, but in the summer of 1958, Kovshuk travelled to the US and spent a lot of time commiserating with Smith over his dismissal, treating him like an old friend. Eventually, Smith gave the KGB officer enough information to allow the KGB to track Popov down. The Soviet intelligence service then ran him back against the Americans as a double agent for a brief while before shooting him. Smith denied any role in Popov’s betrayal and died in 1982, but in 2001, as part of a spate of books trumpeting its successes, the KGB confirmed that he had been successfully recruited as an agent. Although it was sexual compromise that initiated his relationship with an enemy intelligence service, the situation was—as with so many spies—more complex than that, and Smith’s ultimate motive was anger over his dismissal and a desire for revenge.
Oleg Kalugin, a senior officer in the KGB from 1951 to 1990, recalled that during the Cold War its Second Chief Directorate, which was responsible for internal security, had a number of different departments targeting tourists, businessmen or diplomats to entice them into compromising situations that could be used to force them to become KGB agents. An agent would be sent, normally an actress, dancer or professional woman rather than a prostitute—“because they generally were more intelligent and therefore more credible to foreigners”—to pick up the target, usually in the bar of his hotel. The women, known as “swallows”—their male counterparts were “ravens”—were persuaded to have sex with potential agents by offers of money, a better apartment, a promotion, or even a job overseas, although it seems unlikely that many would have seen it as wise to turn down a request for assistance from the KGB.
“I was forever amazed at how much trouble people got into over sex,” Kalugin said. “Catching people with their pants down was a prime way of compromising and recruiting them. As long as men would be men and women would be women, lust would play a role in the spy wars.”
“As long as men would be men and women would be women, lust would play a role in the spy wars.”Having been burned by the Ellis Smith case, the CIA was initially keen to follow suit. In the early 1950s, under a programme appropriately codenamed Midnight Climax, it set up “brothels” in safe houses in the Bay Area of San Francisco and New York’s Greenwich Village to test the combined effects of alcohol, drugs and sex on unwitting men. Prostitutes employed by the CIA took their clients back to the safe houses and plied them with drinks laced with a wide range of different drugs, including LSD, to determine the effect this might have on them. The victims’ reactions were observed through two-way mirrors, with the possibility that men might be induced to talk more freely during sex a particular focus of the tests. The CIA experimented with the idea of the prostitute offering the men an extra sexual service to see if this would make them more likely to open up and talk, but this proved unsuccessful; one of the CIA officers working on Midnight Climax recalled: “We found the guy was focused solely on hormonal needs. He was not thinking of his career or anything else at that point.” The main conclusion—that the men were at their most emotionally vulnerable, and therefore most likely to reveal secrets, during the post-coital period—was scarcely a revelation to anyone familiar with Delilah’s effect on Samson.
Kalugin was dismissive of the CIA’s efforts in using sex as a means of obtaining intelligence, claiming with some justification that the KGB and the other Eastern Bloc intelligence services had turned the use of honey traps into something of an industry. “On the sexual espionage front, we usually got the better of the CIA and hostile intelligence agencies for the simple reason that we were far more willing to use sex as a weapon, and generally had fewer scruples.”
The last point was in fact a key obstacle for the Western agencies. At least in the modern era, it has been forbidden for CIA officers to use sex to recruit agents. “New candidates are informed early on in the interviewing process that such techniques are prohibited,” one long-serving CIA officer said. “Such practices are operationally risky.” The use of sexual relationships to control an agent runs the risk that the agent could come to dominate the relationship. “It gives them leverage over the officer running them, a very undesirable circumstance. Operational control is vital. If the officer is married, additional risks are incurred.”
SIS, the main British intelligence service, has tended to take a more nuanced view, but in general follows the same principles as the CIA. “We hardly ever used sex to recruit agents,” one former SIS officer said. “I know of no case where it was a dominant factor. Even to propose an operation that depended on sex (with or without blackmail) was frowned upon. I recall one case where the target, a Russian, was a rampant homosexual who fraternised homosexual haunts in the country where he was posted. At a target meeting, one officer proposed an operation to seduce and then blackmail him. The officer was warned that this was wholly unacceptable—and thereafter was regarded with caution.”
But a second former officer stated that, unlike the CIA, SIS did not have an absolute ban on using sex and that he knew of two cases where it had been used, although in one of these it had occurred as an unplanned part of the recruitment case rather than the central plank. “It’s very much a case-by-case decision,” he said. “But it’s certainly not commonly done. As a rule, you seek to recruit an agent on more solid grounds than personal affection and make them transferable i.e. you can hand them over to a new case officer without threat to the case.”
