Four famous honeypot traps

A look at four other major honeypot traps through history

Mordechai Vanunu

A former Israeli nuclear technician, Mordechai Vanunu decided to reveal details of Israel’s nuclear weapons programme to the Sunday Times in 1986.

Shortly afterwards, he was approached by an American tourist called “Cindy” who seduced him and persuaded him to go on holiday with her to Rome. Once in Rome, Vanunu was drugged and taken back to Israel where he spent a decade in solitary confinement. Cindy, was in fact Cheryl Bentov, an agent for Mossad, which had been tipped off about Vanunu’s “treachery”.

Gabriele Kliem

Gabriele Kliem, a translator and interpreter at the US embassy in West Germany, was engaged to Frank Dietzel for seven years before she discovered that, far from being a physicist working for a research company committed to world peace, as he had told her, he was a married Stasi agent, decorated for his work with her. All her love letters had been passed to the intelligence service. “They would sit and read and laugh and analyse and see how they could hurt me some more. To them I was just a laboratory rat or worse – and to him, I was just a tool,” she later said.

Clayton J Lonetree

Lonetree was a marine corps security guard stationed at the US embassy in Moscow when he was seduced by a 25-year-old female Soviet officer named “Violetta Seina”. It later emerged that he allowed her to wander through the embassy late at night. When he was transferred to Vienna, she threatened to expose their affair and blackmailed him into handing over blueprints of the embassies in Moscow and Vienna and the names of US spies in the Soviet Union. He was sentenced to 30 years (later cut to 15) after being convicted of espionage in Quantico, Virginia, in 1987.

Bernard Bouriscot

The French diplomat fell in love with a Chinese opera performer called Shi Pei Pu in Beijing in 1964. The two embarked on an affair and had a son, Shi Du Du. Boursicot passed 150 secret French documents to the Chinese secret police. It was only upon their arrest for espionage in 1983 that the French intelligence service informed Boursicot that Shi Pei Pu was a man, and that “their” child had been purchased from Chinese peasants. Following a suicide bid and a six-year prison term, Boursicot settled with a male partner. The story inspired the play M Butterfly.