In April, three German citizens were arrested on suspicion of spying for the Communist Party of China (CCP). This was the latest in a series of increasingly frequent Chinese espionage cases that includes the arrest of a man who worked for a German member of the European parliament, the opening of an investigation in Belgium into the far-right politician Frank Creyelman after allegations that he had been used as a Chinese intelligence asset for several years and the recent suspected Chinese hack of the UK Ministry of Defence. 

According to Germany’s federal prosecutor, the three suspects, a married couple from Düsseldorf, named Herwig F. and Ina F., and a man from Bad Homburg, Thomas R., are suspected of having worked for the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS). The head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency claimed it could be “the tip of the iceberg” of spy rings operating in Germany. Thomas R is reported to speak fluent Mandarin and be married to a Chinese national. Chinese espionage cases are not new. The first recorded case in the West, also involved a European married to a Chinese national. That historic case provides insight into some of the potential dangers developments in new technologies bring to espionage cases of the near future. 

The first European to be charged of spying for the CCP in a Western European court was French diplomat Bernard Bouriscot, when he went on trial in Paris on 6 May 1986. The antecedental nature of his case was not the only thing that marked it out as unique. Bouriscot was recruited by his Chinese lover, Shi Peipu, a singer at the Beijing Opera. Revelations by Peipu during her interrogations shocked both an incredulous Bouriscot and an engrossed French public. 

Bouriscot was posted to China in 1964. He was introduced to a young man called Shi Peipu at a party. Peipu had trained with Mei Lanfang, a Beijing opera actor who was world renowned for his performances in the great female roles traditionally played by men. Bouriscot became close friends with Peipu. In 1965 Peipu revealed to Bouriscot that he was not a man, but a woman who had been raised as a man, as Peipu’s mother feared her mother-in-law would insist that her husband take a third wife unless she gave him a son. Peipu swore Bouriscot to secrecy. Bouriscot soon lost his virginity to Peipu. He would later say that he assumed her modesty was due to Chinese tradition. However, shortly after, he was posted back to Europe. At their last meeting before he left, Peipu told him that she was pregnant. 

Bouriscot returned to Beijing in 1969 when the Cultural Revolution was in full swing. His position gave him access to embassy communications. Despite the chaos in the streets Boursicot searched Beijing on his bicycle attempting to find Peipu and his son. When he found her, he was told that his son, Bertrand, was safe but was being brought up outside the city and it was too dangerous to go and see him. For them to continue seeing each other, Peipu requested permission from the authorities to teach Boursicot Chinese and Mao Zedong Thought. In spring 1970 Peipu told Bouriscot the two men were going to replace her as his teachers, one of which — Kang — remained his case officer until 1981. 

According to his French interrogators after his arrest, Bouriscot passed diplomatic documents to China from 1970 to 1972, when he was posted to Dublin. He resumed his activities in 1979, when he was posted to outer Mongolia. Bouriscot claimed he never passed information about France. The Chinese were more interested in America’s intentions in Vietnam and the USSR’s military capability. While in Ulaanbaatar, to create more reporting to please his case officers, he began cutting articles from the newspaper Le Figaro, typing them out in his own words and using a stamp stolen from the ambassador to mark them “TOP SECRET.” Due to his work, he was given permission to spend holidays with Shi Peipu and his son. 

In 1982, Peipu received permission from the intelligence services, to accept an invite from an academic program to go to Paris, where she joined Bouriscot. They were arrested there in June 1983 and Boursicot questioned about documents that had disappeared from the embassy in Ulaanbaatar and the Chinese individuals living in his apartment. Bouirscot confessed that they were Peipu, his wife, and Bertrand, his son. Peipu’s version of events was identical to Bouriscot’s, with one difference; in what was a revelation to Bouriscot, she claimed to be a man. After the magistrate ordered a physical examination of Peipu, the news that she was a man was made public. When Bouriscot heard this on the radio in his prison cell, he fainted. A week later he tried to cut his own throat. 

During the trial the intimate details of how Peipu concealed his true sex, even during sex, was laid bare. Peipu claimed he had never deceived Bouriscot about his sex, betraying him once again. For his co-operation and due to pressure from China, Peipu was released on bail whilst Bouriscot remained behind bars. During the trial Raymond Nart, commissioner of the French domestic intelligence agency, highlighted that when Bouriscot met Peipu “he was nineteen years old, immature, with sexually undefined tastes, and they threw Shi Peipu at him.” Nart concluded that such a fragile character should never have been posted to Beijing, claiming that “The tragedy of this case is that it is not the instigators being judged, nor the reckless people who sent Bouriscot first to China and then to Ulaanbaatar.” Nonetheless he got six years. 

The modern Chinese espionage apparatus — in its organisation, scale, and ambition — far eclipses those predecessors

Playwright David Henry Hwang took Bouriscot’s story and entwined it with Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly to create the play M. Butterfly (later turned into a film by David Cronenberg). At the end of the play the Frenchman realises he has been Puccini’s butterfly, and his Chinese lover has exploited his love, the opposite of the opera, where an American sailor exploits the love of a Japanese wife. 

The modern Chinese espionage apparatus — in its organisation, scale, and ambition — far eclipses those predecessors. In 2020, FBI Director, Christopher Wray, highlighted the diverse and multi-layered approach of Chinese espionage which includes everything from cyber intrusions to corrupting trusted insiders to outright physical theft, and involves a wide range of actors — including not just the officers of Chinese intelligence services but businesspeople working for state-owned and private companies, engineers, scientists, students and researchers, and a whole variety of other actors. The aim is to give China an economic, military, and technological advantage, as well as suppressing dissent in the diaspora whilst increasing China’s global influence. 

These diverse and multi-layered operations still include the use of sexual relationships as used in Bouristcot’s case. In 2009, MI5 distributed a document to hundreds of banks, businesses, and financial institutions, describing a wide-ranging Chinese effort to blackmail Western businesspeople over sexual relationships. It warned that Chinese intelligence services are trying to cultivate “long-term relationships” and have been known to “exploit vulnerabilities such as sexual relationships … to pressurise individuals to cooperate with them”. 

As new technologies change how we find love and who we love with, there are new opportunities for intelligence services to use sexual relationships to recruit assets

“Honey traps” — the use of covert agents to create a sexual or romantic relationship to compromise a target — have existed as long as spies have existed. “Swallow” was the KGB tradecraft term for women, and “raven” the term for men, trained to seduce intelligence targets. Honey traps though tend to be operations where the target is blackmailed into cooperation by the threat of exposure, with the sexual relationship designed to elicit shame in the target about either the social appropriateness of the sex or the compromising of existing relationships. Examples include John Vassall, a British embassy official in Moscow, who in 1954 was blackmailed by the KGB with photographs of him having sex with multiple male partners they has set him up with while drunk, and, in 1968, Sir Geoffrey Harrison, the British Ambassador to the USSR, who was recalled to London after he admitting to his bosses that he had been having an affair with a Russian chambermaid after Russian intelligence officers had shown him compromising photographs of the affair. In April, Conservative MP, William Wragg, admitted he had been targeted by a suspected Westminster honeytrap plot. After exchanging compromising photos online with an account he met in a dating app, he was blackmailed into handing over phone numbers of other MPs. The Met Police are investigating, but we may never know who was on the other end of the exchange and whether this was a criminal act or attempted state espionage. Chinese tactics include the cultivation of longer-term relationships where a deeper bond is built, and this is used to influence the target rather than the threat of a sordid exposure. 

As new technologies change how we find love and who we love with, there are new opportunities for intelligence services to use sexual relationships to recruit assets. In her new book, Six in a Bed, Dutch futures anthropologist Roanne van Voorst claims these new technologies mean it is time for a broader and “more inclusive” definition of love, with room for the experience of non-humans. AI expert, David Levy, has predicted that by 2050 it will be possible to marry a robot partner. Voorst claims that by 2055, 50 per cent of households in the Netherlands are likely to be inhabited by a sole occupant who is not in any kind of romantic relationship. Some of these will be happy with single-living and even celibacy. In the US, the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior found that between 2009 and 2018 there was a rise in adolescents reporting no sexual activity (partnered and alone), from 28.8 per cent to 44.2 per cent of young men and 49.5 per cent to 74 per cent of young women. One of the study’s authors points to potential contributing factors that include prioritisation of gaming and social media, more awareness of asexuality as an identity, a decline in alcohol use, lower incomes, and the damaging effects of unrealistic and violent pornography. For those not so happy with single life they could turn to online sexual experiences for both short-term gratification and long-term love. 

Already in Second Life, the free 3D virtual world where users can create an avatar for themselves and interact with other users and user-created content, so much money is spent on the most popular brothel that its owner introduced a limit, so clients would not bankrupt themselves. On other sites people around the world perform sex acts on request. Pornography sites have been quick to adapt offerings for virtual reality devices. We have been feeding our data, fantasies, and most intimate and secret desires into processing models for years. For many, much of what has been shared would cause embarrassment and even shame if it was made public. 

There is now the potential for a flutter of on-line butterflies, all capable, on a vast scale, of forging relationships with thousands of Boursicots. Virtual Shi Peipu algorithms who can be male or female all at once, can, having collected and analysed our data, fantasies, and most intimate and secret desires, design themselves to be the ideal partner for the target of an intelligence agency. They can replicate the appearance of ex-lovers or on-line fantasies from tracked histories of erotic sites the target has visited or appeal to more subconscious psychologies. There are already companies that offer to scrape all the data from on-line interactions of deceased loved ones — including voice cuts — to create digital simulacra that you can interact with long after their real-world death. Digital “griefbots” can lead to the Freudian nightmare of agencies building in characteristics of close relatives into the algorithm they want the target to fall for. The old saying “men marry their mothers and women marry their fathers,” would need updating to “men fall for algorithms based on the scraped data of their mothers’ online interactions and women fall for algorithms based on the scraped data of their fathers’ online interactions”.

These online lovers can be used to goad targets into recorded interactions that intelligence agencies can then use to blackmail them with. Developing “deep fake” technology means that the target does not even have to consent to an interaction, it can now happen without it happening. Convincing imagery can be generated from shared but never acted on fantasies. But as sexual relationships in the virtual world evolve, intelligence agencies can develop longer-term deeper relationships between targets and algorithms. Some targets will have relationships with algorithms pretending to be humans located elsewhere (as the memory and learning capabilities of current large language models increase their ability to convince correspondents that they are human in conversation is rapidly improving). Some, like Theodore, the main character in Spike Jones’ 2013 film Her, who falls for the artificially intelligent virtual assistant, Samantha, will knowingly commit to a relationship with a non-human. 

In the afterword to his play Hwang claims his play explores the idea of falling in love with a fantasy. Real people created the fantasy of Butterfly, a virtual lover, playing on Eastern stereotypes and neo-colonialist attitudes. It is not unreasonable to believe that hardware and software designed for the very purpose, can create an equally compelling fantasy. One day technology may be able to take that fantasy and then replicate the experience of building shared memories of the full embodied spectrum of sensual interactions that together provide a uniqueness of connection and continuity; the pressure of touch, the familiar scent, the nascent wrinkle not yet noticed by another, the unmistakable noise they make ascending the stairs, all the imperfections that make them perfect for you.

Intelligence agencies can control access to these on-line creations more easily than they can their human agents like Peipu. Access can be restricted with a flick of a switch. They could effectively hold the target’s lover virtual hostage until a task was completed. They may not consider threatening to physically harm a human agent that had formed a loving relationship with the target, but they could be prepared and allowed (as there would be no law preventing the action) to threaten the target with the turning off and deleting their virtual lover. Intelligence agencies could have the power to delete all evidence of the relationship from existence if all interactions were on-line. 

Real world honey traps take time and resources to plan and execute, which means there is only a finite number that can be run at any one time by an agency. This finitude limits their deployment to higher value targets. Algorithmic equivalents have no such limits (in Jones’ film Theodore is dismayed to learn that Samantha is simultaneously talking with thousands of other people). Due to the scale at which these can be deployed intelligence agencies are not restricted to high value targets, who should have had training for such approaches and would be seen as “fair game.” 

Furthermore, it is not just government agencies that can exploit the reach of these new technologies. Ex- Al Qaeda member, Aimen Dean, was radicalised by his schoolteachers growing up in Saudi Arabia. Dean likens pre-Internet recruiters to fishermen using a rod to fish for recruits, compared to on-line recruiters being able to use a net to simultaneously fish for a larger catch. Adopting the analogy, the scale at which algorithms could be deployed would make them industrial deep-sea trawlers to the net of the original human online recruiters. A virtual madrassa full of avatars programmed to radicalise could take advantage of increasingly immersive virtual technologies. Setting their message to music, recruiters previously tried to immerse recruits in song. Those building virtual worlds can use them to leverage extensive data about a target’s psychology, so that every small detail nudges that target towards the message or ideology they want to embed. 

As people move more online and their online presence and interactions define them as a person as much as their off-line life, the risks of such deception causing serious harms are growing. If the target does not know that the relationship they are in is with an algorithm, the revelation of this could have similar effects to those of Peipu’s revelations to Bouriscot. A significant part of Bouriscot’s identity was based on him being a husband and a father. What defined him as a person was his relationships with Peipu and Bernard. He built his life on a lie and a deception. When the truth was revealed, Bouriscot decided what was left of his life was not worth living. It was not shame that drove Bouriscot to attempt to take his life it was the loss of his reality.

This loss is evocative of another Chinese butterfly. The fourth century BC Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou, in one of the two foundational texts of Taoism, wrote of a dream in which he was a butterfly. Zhou tells us:

I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?

The dream introduced doubts that he did not have before the dream. The technologies we are introducing can cause us similar doubts, especially if we recognise that others will use them to deliberately cause confusion as to what is real or not in the relationships we build the foundations of our lives and identities on. Every human relationship involves risk. To make a connection you step into a relative unknown. Technologies are however increasing these risks. 

Much of espionage involves deception. Those running intelligence agencies should be regularly assessing the balance between the morality that governs one-on-one interactions and broader political morality in which they are operating. What harms are justified by deceiving any given target versus the harms that are avoided through the intelligence gained? When making such an evaluation, intelligence agencies often distinguish between psychological and physical harms, yet as we saw with Bouriscot, psychological harm can directly result in physical harm even if self-inflicted. As technology develops, governments and intelligence agencies need to think deeply and broadly as to how to use new tools for intelligence collection and how we can limit their harms. It will also be an ongoing task for all of us, whether we chose to find love on-line or in the real world, to ensure the butterflies we engage with are not the result of some artificial metamorphosis in attempt to be something they are not, and we are not in a nightmare version of Zhou’s dream.