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The following episode contains explicit language and sexual themes. Listener discretion is advised.

About four years ago, I received an unexpected offer to interview the President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko. He wanted to create, Mutually Beneficial Ties with the US. Someone evidently thought that one way to do that was for me to profile Lukashenko for Rolling Stone magazine. Belarus courts Between Russia and the European Union has been ruled for decades by autocratic President Alexander Lukashenko. He declared victory in August elections the US said were fraudulent. Huge protests followed, and he moved swiftly to crush them. They reached out to me and I told them that if my editors approved the story, I'd be honest in the interview and wouldn't be throwing him softball questions. And they seemed open to that.

He and Russian President Vladimir Putin are two pees in a pod when it comes to shutting down dissent. So Putin swiftly helped his skiing partner with $1.5 billion. Months of systematic repression and torture followed, documented by human rights groups.

Then came the emails. Ask me what women I liked. Asking me to send photos of my type of women. Offering to arrange dates for me when I'm in Belarus. Perhaps they can even throw a party for me, stocked with beautiful women. I will be set in Belarus for the trip and possibly my life, they said. As a journalist, I knew what accepting favors, whether cash or sex or anything from a subject can mean. The end of your career. And that was my first possible experience with what the Russians call, Compromat.

Compromat comes from the Russian for compromising material. It means that the Russian secret state have managed to film somebody having sex with somebody they shouldn't be having sex with.

Politicians, diplomats, spies, whoever.

A former British spy called Christopher Steele reported that the Russian secret state had filmed Donald Trump in a hotel room in Moscow.

Trump has denied it ever happened.

But if it did happen, then that was a classic case of compromise.

I had to kill you.

I'm really sorry. I had to do it.

Got to go on my own. You Episode 5, Chapter 11, Seduce and destroy.

I wanted to let you know I was transcribing the interview with the sex spy, and I actually have first-hand knowledge of this because in my past life, I worked on these Black programs in aerospace. Each program had its own security officer.

Shockingly, at least to me, the voice you're hearing is that of my audio transcriber. For 10 years, she's listened to my interviews and written down the secrets of the famous and powerful, from Tom Cruise to Elon Musk. This is the first time she's called like this. After listening to my first recordings with Alia Rosa, she wants to let me know that she has actually had her own experiences with compromise and sex espionage.

We would actually have meetings where the upper management would inform us about it, and the men who were usually the target had to sign paperwork indicating, yes, they had been informed about these women, especially for Russia.

I had no idea that prior to this, she'd worked at a company that contracted with the military and that spies like Elia are evidently a well-known threat in the industry. Wow. It was part of standard operating procedure.

Absolutely. Every program I worked, we talked about it. I just remember them warning mostly men about women who might approach them when they're traveling on work or traveling out of town.

And what would it telltale signs of these people?

Oh, if the woman was extremely attractive, definitely. If she was really out of your league type of a woman, and if she came on sexually, too aggressive sexually or wanted to be alone with you or wanted to get into your hotel room with you for whatever reason and to watch you drink, they could drug you, that thing.

In fact, the government was so worried about compromise that anyone with a secret sex life was considered a security risk.

There were people who openly keyed on their wives that everybody knew, and they lost their clearances.

I asked my transcriber for her thoughts on this story since she's listened to the recording so closely.

I think it sounds accurate because it was exactly what we were being warned about. She's incredibly attractive. She's charming. She's smart. She's manipulative. She's loyal to her country. It all sounds like it worked.

I call Elia after speaking with my transcriber, and Elia has just returned from a session with a new therapist. How was your therapy session?

Honestly, not really good. I mean, I don't know. It's really It's difficult to go through that again. It's so many feelings, so many sensations which just disgust me so much. I feel really guilty.

Are you guilty in what way?

I I felt like I have done so much bad things in my life, really bad things. I've done so many things which I never wanted to do. The therapist, she said that I had to survive. That's why I did it. But it doesn't matter to me. It's just like I feel really guilty.

I ask her more about it. Elia said she was at a friend's birthday and was given a small dose of mushrooms, something she doesn't ordinarily do. This triggered memories that she keeps compartmentalized in her mind. She calls that compartment, Pandora's Box.

I felt like I saw so many ghosts of those people who who were killed or I did unintentionally, or they were affected by my life or something. I saw them, and it was so scary. I felt like I saw even their faces. It's not really pleasant view. It's like maybe I'm going crazy. I don't know.

We talk about PTSD and therapy and decide to take a little time off so that Alia can recover from her experience. She feels that unburdening herself of her secrets will give them less power over her. In the meantime, I tell her about the conversation with my transcriber. So my transcriber called. She-and we discuss how large this program must have been and how many women must have faced similar traumatic experiences.

You know, Neil, I feel very, very big sorrow and very big sadness. When I think about these women, I remember my classmates. They all came so young and fresh and beautiful. And then just in a few months, instead of happy face, instead of smiling, smile. I saw sorrow and helpless and nothing else. I wonder how many women have done this throughout the history. And how many women are doing this right now in the whole world, even in the United States.

So while Alia takes some time off, I decide to take some time to find answers to her questions about the program. Since speaking to my transcriber, I've been wondering similar things. Are there other countries also using sex as a weapon of war? And just how big are these operations?

Celebrating the music and artists you've loved on iHeartRadio over the past year. I'm giving you an exclusive first look at the biggest new songs coming in the summer of '24. Witness music history, iHeartIn elevator award recipient, Beyoncé. I Heart Icon Award Recipient, Beyoncé. Ihearticon Award Recipient. Share. And performances by Justin Timberlake. Green Day. Tlc. Jelly Roll. Laine Wilson. Tate McRoy.

And your host, Luda Our 2024 I Heart Radio Music Awards, Monday, April first. Watch on Fox starting at 8:00 PM, 7:00 Central.

Bring a little optimism into your life with The Bright Side, a new daily podcast from Hello Sunshine, hosted by me, Danielle Robé. And me, Simone Voice.

Every weekday, we're bringing you conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration, and so much more.

I am so excited about this podcast, The Bright Side.

You guys are giving people a chance to shine a light on their lives, shine a light on a little advice that they want to share.

Listen to The Bright Side on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search The Bright Side. I spend the next couple of weeks doing research and interviewing agents and journalists from around the world. And what I find shocks me. First of all, it's not just Russia that does this. It's China.

Chinese intelligence intelligence operation on US soil targeting American politicians with a female operative who had ties to a Democratic congressman and intimate relationships with at least two Midwest mayors.

North Korea.

According to Jung, North Korea's Honey Trap plan, established by former leader Kim Jong-il, was to set up foreign dignitaries with female spies posing as translators or aides.

Pakistan.

They're befriended on emails and WhatsApp group, et cetera, and they get in trapped, and then they emotionally get in trapped.

Even America, the United Kingdom, and so many others throughout history. The women met the soldiers in a pub in Lisbon, a pub frequented by off-beauty soldiers from a nearby army band. And it was here that this carefully planned operation began. In fact, even ancient military writings advise weaponizing this weakness in human nature.

If we go back two and a half thousand years, one of the ancient military writers said that you should train a martial warrior to identify and exploit poor human weaknesses. They were fear, lust, anger, and greed. Certainly, these are all used in sexpionage.

This is David Lewis, a psychologist and author of the book Sexpionage: The Exploitation of Sex by the Soviet Union. I called Dr. Lewis to find out the impact that this type of spycraft has had on political history and why it works so well.

It's always struck me as a psychologist. It's very strange that you have people who are immensely Very powerful, usually highly educated, very wealthy, yet they throw it all away for the sake of a one-night stand.

Yet it happens over and over again. If you think that most people would be smarter, think again. Here's just one chilling example of a target who's literally in hiding from the government, throwing all caution to the wind for an attractive woman. Mordechai Venunu was working as a technician in an Israeli nuclear facility when he began to have moral misgivings. He gathered evidence, left the country, and told journalists for the first time about the extent of Israel's nuclear weapons program. And then, as he was working with the Times of London on leaking the story, he met someone special. Here he is describing it in his own words, speaking to an interviewer from 60 Minutes, Australia.

I bought a cigarette and I saw an American woman standing there buying a cigarette. I look at her, she looked at me.

You'll notice in this next part, some similarities with Elia's training, which is that the agent never approaches the target. She gets the target to approach her. You took the initiative, to forgive the colloquially, to pick up this lady.

Yes. You did it. If she had tried to pick me up, then I would have suspected her. But if I took the initiative, I mean, I'm not suspecting her.

She was dragging you into her trap? No, I was already in her trap.

No. I was already in her trouble.

After a few dates, she convinced Vanuunou to join her for a weekend in Rome. Despite being a whistleblower who was wanted for treason by the Israeli government, Vanuunou suspected nothing and flew to Rome with her. In the car from the airport, she kissed him passionately all the way to the house where they'd be staying, evidently to keep him from thinking with his brain.

When I entered the house, the door opened and immediately jump on me two people, and one kick me in the stomach and I collapse, another one jump on me, put his hand on my mouth, silencing me. Another woman come and injected me, and then I lost my conscience.

The Nunu spent the next 18 years in an Israeli prison, 11 of those years in solitary confinement. And this is just one of many historically significant examples. From the Moon Sisters, two Confederate seduction spies who at one point were engaged to 38 Union soldiers between them, to Ramon Mercator, an agent of Stalin who honey trapped his way into Leon Trotsky's study where he executed the famous Russian Revolutionary with an ice pick.

Posing as a Trotskyist, Ramón Mercator seduced Trotsky's secretary.

Soon, he was a frequent visitor to Trotsky's villa and a familiar face to his security guards.

I don't think people really understand the extent to which sexual aversion has helped shape Western society.

This is historian David Lewis again. I have a specific question that I'm hoping he can answer. How did sex binage go from a dirty trick that governments use in a moment of desperation, like in the cases we just heard, to what Elia and my transcriber have been describing to me, a factory-like training camp that a country uses to churn out sex spies?

We can trace the start of what we might call industrial sexual conversion, back to a woman called Katherine Zabit. She was actually known as Katie Smith. She started life- Katie Smith began running Berlin's most in-demand brothel.

Then, World War II began.

When she thought war was going to be declared after Hitler had come to power in 33, she tried to flee to England. She was arrested at the border, and she was offered a choice. She could either come back and run her brothels for the government as spy centers, or she could go to a concentration camp. She decided to set up the brothels for them. Salone Kitty, a notorious house of forbidden pleasures in Berlin under the Nazis. This was organized by a guy called Walton Schillenberg, who was head of SS counter espionage. Now, this was the first time the girls used were highly trained. They had to be aged between 20 and 30. They had to be single. They had to be National Socialists, Nazis, in other words. When they joined, they were inducted into the SS. They took an oath of elitist to Hitler. They attended classes on hairdressing and social etiquette, but also on unarmed combat, marksmanship, foreign languages, uniform identification. So they were very professional spies. This was really the start of the industrialization of sexual aversion. And it was certainly a model were followed by the KGB after the war where they took control.

Now, were the KGB the first ones to then take women and some who'd never even had a sexual experience before and then train them from there versus using sex workers?

I don't know of any other intelligence agency which had done that to that extent. On the outskirts of Moscow, stands the giant Training Academy of the KGB. Here, the uncles, as they're called in the espionage business, are instructed in how to persuade to offer sex to foreigners in return for information. These days, the organization is called the FSB. But while the name may have changed, sexual entrapment using young women is still a priority.

Young women, much like Elia and her classmates.

They had trainers in there, taught them the ropes and showed them how to behave and really deprived them of their inhibition. So they were prepared to go with any man, however disagreeable they found him, or however older he was, or indeed, however young he was in order to extract information from them. And they were taught how to behave naturally, although the situation they were in was, of course, anything but natural.

Celebrating the music and artists you've loved on iHeartRadio over the past year and giving you an exclusive first look at the biggest new songs coming in the summer of '24. Witness Music History. Iheartinnovator Award Recipient, Beyoncé. Ihearticon Award Recipient, Beyoncé. It's Share. And performance is by Justin Timberlake. Green Day. Tlc. Jelly Roll. Laine Wilson. Tate McRoy. And your host, Ludacris. Our 2024 iHeartRadio Music Awards. Monday, April first. Watch on Fox.

Starting at 8:00 PM, 7:00 Central.

Bring a little optimism into your life with The Bright Side, a new daily podcast from Hello Sunshine, hosted by me, Danielle Robé. And me, Simone Voice.

Every weekday, we're bringing you conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration, and so much more.

I am so excited about this podcast, The Bright Side.

You guys are giving people a chance to shine a light on their lives, shine a light on a little advice that they want to share.

Listen to The Bright Side on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search The Bright Side. Chapter 12, Tools of the Trade. As our time off draws to a close and Leah feels ready to continue her story, I find myself deep down the rabbit hole of Russian espionage. I even managed to find FBI agents and contractors who work to bring down the Russian Illegals program, 11 spies who are working in the US using seduction and other techniques to infiltrate different groups. You did some work with, I think you were saying, with agents that were still working here? Turn off the recorder. Most of the people I reach aren't willing to talk about it on their record, not just in America, but even more so in Russia, where my sources fear reprisals from Putin. Here's a former Russian intelligence officer who was trained at the same academy that Alia went to, speaking through a translator. Have you ever heard of a program like that?. With this question, I will not be able to respond to this question due to, let's say, professional secret. Many of these sources were willing to speak to me off the record, and a few you'll hear from shortly were surprisingly willing to talk openly.

And here's what I learned. There are four levels of sexual espionage that are important to know because they'll help explain the next parts of Alia's story and because they're still going on today. Level one is the most mild, but it's also the most common. It is everywhere. Unknowingly, you may have come across it in your own life. It's called nabludina, or surveillance. In American in intelligence terms, we call these people Eyes and ears.

One of their biggest exports of Russia is beautiful women, and they send out an enormous amount of girls into the world.

This is Ina De Silva, one of the first Russian model agents in New York City during the 1990s.

All these girls were sent out into the world, and they were told, Try to meet important men, try to attach yourself to important men. They would send back information to handlers that, This moment, I'm dating so-and-so. I've met so-and-so. The handlers would decide if anybody was important enough to really put an effort into by maybe recording them. They would receive further instructions.

She mentions a well-known Russian model who did this type of work along her boyfriend, who was also her KGB handler.

If you're really going to do modeling, you do not go Moscow to Washington. They lived in Washington for a year attending daily cocktail parties at embassies, consulats, and stuff like that. That's a typical thing. It's pretty unbelievable. I mean, Germany right now is like a rat's nest with all of this.

German intelligence agency has warned against the risk of an aggressive Russian espionage operation.

This comes as West ramps up its support for Ukraine.

They've all been told to penetrate and influence anybody who has decision-making powers in Germany, regarding meaning military. The war in Ukraine is also being fought by all these girls that are all over. Important cities. There's this Russian doll, a doll within a doll within a doll, Kolomotivoshka. Well, a lot of these girls, that's really what it's like. Unless any national security agencies, any of these countries, gets lucky. I think it's very difficult to keep track of these women.

Level two is provocatia in Russian or provocation. And someone who has eyes and ears, if they land the right target, can be moved by their handler into this more prestigious position of influence. One example of this type of agent is Maria Butina, who is living in, yes, Washington, DC, and convicted in 2018 of acting as an unregistered foreign agent of Russia.

She definitely was going into these conservative circles, among mostly the Republican Party, the NRA, these types of places, where there is a machismo, and she came in looking sexy, toting a gun, and she used that to- This is Alex Finley, a former CIA officer who is stationed in Europe and the author of the Victor Kero Trilogy of Novels About the CIA. The whole point as an intelligence officer is you have to assess your target. What is it that's going to motivate them? Or what are their vulnerabilities? She knew and understood, if I go in in short shorts and carrying my gun, that's going to get me closer to them. Now, separately, she did have relationships with a few different political functionaries within the Republican Party.

She goes on to mention a prominent figure that Maria Butina had a relationship with, one who ended up pushing many conspiracy theories that may have been planted in his mind by this agent. Because the goal of these agents is not just to spy, but to suit his powerful, vulnerable people and influence their thoughts and behavior to help destabilize a country.

She knew who to target, and she knew how to find the people that were going to have the sympathies that she needed to help push more and more ideas. You see, it's not always just, I'm going to have sex with you. You give me secrets. It can become a bit more complicated.

I ask Alex what she thinks of the statements from Ina De Silva, the model agent, about the large number of low-level Russian agents still operating in the US, and she confirms this terrifying assessment.

We went through this kicking diplomats and everything out over the past few years, right? But those are just the people who are declared. So you have to assume that there's still networks of illegals, these sleeper cells who live and work among us like normal Americans, but in fact, they're Russian agents, and then their assets, I'm sure. I'm sure you have a A huge network of them still in the United States doing both collection and also influence operations.

So what happens when these Russian agents get expelled and go home? The answer, they return as military heroes. Or more accurately, the modern equivalent of that, celebrities.

Butina is on Russian state TV. Chapman became a playboy model. They get rewarded, these women.

The other spy Ina de Silva is referring to is Anna Chapman, who is arrested and deported as part of the illegals program. But it gets even darker. Level three is kompromat. This is journalist Mark Hollingsworth, the author of Agents of Influence: How the KGB subverted Western Democracies.

The term kompromat is a Russian term which means compromising information. And what the KGB, and now the FSB, Russian Intelligence Service, specialize in Kompramat in terms of finding compromising information about Western politicians, diplomats, spies, officials.

Many believe that Putin, who was formerly director of the FSB, rose to power through compromat.

Putin is in the intimidation business.

When Vladimir Putin met Angela Merkel, he knew her weakness. The German Chancellor was afraid of dogs, so Putin whistleed in a black labrador just to intimidate her.

What's interesting about Putin is that there's a strong case to be made that he only became President of Russia in 2000 because of a honey-trapping complement operation. What happened was that in 1999, there was a corruption investigation into President Yeltsin's office. Young women were hired to sleep with him, and they did the-So rather than defend themselves in this corruption investigation, the Yeltsin government decided to set up a honey trap for the prosecutor leading the investigation instead. And then the FSB leaked the videos to Russian TV stations. And the significance of this is that the FSB intelligence officer who was actually seen delivering the incriminating videos to Russian TV companies and holding press conferences about it was Putin. And so basically, the consequence of this honey-trapping operation was that it helped Putin become the next President of Russia after Yeltsin. Yeltsin appointed Putin, his successor. By 2000, Yeltsin had resigned, and Putin was President.

The extremes that the Russian government has gone to get compromised, even go so far as drugging foreign officials and staging sexual scenes of them while they're incapacitated.

They'll do anything. There were no limits, and they would get you drunk, or they would poison you, or they would hire women or men.

Of course, this type of compromise doesn't always work if a target is single or doesn't have sexual secrets or shame. But compromise can get much more sophisticated than this. Listen carefully to author David Lewis's explanation of this honey trap and notice He noticed how the target is slowly manipulated, deeper and deeper into a web he can't get out of.

An American businessman visiting Moscow on a business trip would be hooked up with an attractive woman who he thought he'd just met by chance. She would be very charming. They would go back to his hotel or her hotel, or else they would be walking back to the hotel when she would start to kiss him. She would then rip her clothes and scream rape, whereupon, burly police officers would come and arrest him. That was one of the ployers they used. He would then be offered freedom in return for some very minor secrets which he knew perfectly well were completely unimportant, but they were secret documents. But of course, that was the bait. He would then be filmed handing over the documents, and they would then blackmail him not on the sex charge, but because he had committed an act of espionage and Which is what you'll see is.

Not only is this incredibly harmful to these men, it's harmful to people who have experienced sexual assault and are not believed. Lastly, level four is the love trap, or as the FSB calls it, establishing an operative relationship, the most effective, complex, and destructive of these tactics. It's based on a psychological understanding that not everyone responds to blackmail. But human beings will do just about anything for love. And there are men and women around the world in long term relationships, even marriages, to these types of spies. One example of how this worked is the story of Gabriele Klein. She was a translator at the US Embassy in East Germany when one day she met a man on the riverbank and began dating him. She also began giving him hundreds of secret documents for what he claimed was a world peace project. It wasn't until he was arrested seven years into the relationship that she learned he'd been a male sex spy known as a Raven or Romeo the whole time. Here's journalist Mark Hollingsworth.

It was a very organized strategic operation. It was quite sad because certainly at the end of the Cold War, these East German spies would break off the relationships, and the women were devastated because they thought it was a serious relationship. And then they would get into trouble because they'd leaked secret documents.

There's one last spy story I studied that shows just how powerful a love trap can be. It was called the Espionage Case of the Century. It also became known as a Sex for Secrets Marine Spy Scandal of 1987.

It involved a Marine Guard at the American Embassy in Moscow, Clayton Lontree, who traded secrets for love with-Sergeant Clayton Lontree was a Marine stationed as a guard at the US Embassy in Moscow, where he began dating a Russian embassy employee who was, of course, a swallow.

He fell in love and was soon giving her plans to US embassies, as well as the names and identities of US agents in the Soviet Union. He was eventually caught and arrested, becoming the first Marine convicted of spying against the United States. After serving some seven years in prison and finding out about the extent of his betrayal, here's what he told an interviewer when asked about his affair with the Russian spy. What we had back then was genuine.

I respect her.

I forgive her. This is the danger of playing with the fourth and darkest level of sex binage, because love is a lot more powerful, persuasive, and longer lasting than sex. You'll notice that one thing is missing from all this research into the methods and consequences of sex binage, the perspective of the agents themselves, the swallows and ravens. That's because there wasn't a single seducer spy I could find prior to this podcast who had ever publicly gone on the record and revealed the inner workings of this training and these missions. We only know the stories of their victims. But let's not forget before we continue with the Leah story that the agents themselves, possibly without a single exception, are victims as well. Here's David Lewis again with a case of the Soviet spy, Goodrin Hydel, who broke the cardinal rule of the Love Trap. She developed genuine feelings for her target.

She was under orders to seduce an American officer who had access to native secrets. Then she made a mistake, the worst mistake a swaluer could ever make. She actually fell in love with her target. She wouldn't put pressure on him because she feared it might end the relationship. Her bosses suspected she's changed sides, so they had her terminated with extreme prejudices.

If your body is disposable to the state, so too is your life if you decide you want your body back. This, in the end, is what I learned from my research. No person wins when sex and love are used as weapons of war. Everyone loses. This is exactly what Alia Rosa discovered when she made the same critical mistake and fell in love with one of her targets. The consequences for her would be even worse death.

So when the criminals find out that I was a mole, they put the bag into my head. They drove me to the forest. They beat me up. They did terrible things. But that moment when I was ready to be dead, he called them and he gave the order to bring me back to him.

This would come much later in Aaliyah's career, after being pulled deeper and deeper into a world from which there were few escapes besides death, whether at the hands of your enemy, your own government, or yourself. Aaliyah returns in episode 6, available now on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. For full credits, check out our show notes.

Celebrating the music and artists you've loved on iHeartRadio over the past year. I'm giving you an exclusive first look at the biggest news songs coming in the summer of '24. Witness Music History. Iheartinnovator Award Recipient. Beyoncé. Ihearticon Award Recipient. Share. And performances by Justin Timberlake. Green Day. Tlc. Jelly Roll. Laine Wilson. Tate McRay.

And your host, Ludacris.

Our 2024 iHeartRadio Music Awards. Monday, April first.

Watch on Fox starting at 8:00 PM, 7:00 Central.

Everyone in our country has a voice. It's something that says not just where you come from, but who you are. Welcome to NPR's Black Stories, Black Truths, a collection of podcasts and a celebration of the hosts in journalism who've always spoken truth to power. Our and dynamic as the Black experience, and stories should never be about us without us. Find NPR Black Stories, Black Truths on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.