Even if the enterprise was unhinged, the language was crafted with a watchmaker’s precision: “We are looking for women and girls who are intelligent, multilingual, nationalist-minded,” read a top-secret circular issued by Adolf Hitler’s secret police, “and, moreover, man-crazy.” Late in the summer of 1939, weeks before the Second World War began, the Gestapo arrested Katharina Zammit, an upmarket Berlin brothel owner, as she tried to escape Nazi Germany for England. Kitty’s Salon, the 340-square-metre establishment Zammit ran from an elegant apartment at Giesebrechtstraße 11, was now to be taken over by Nazi counter-intelligence chief Walter Schellenberg and wired with microphones and cameras.
Last week, when news broke that Nvidia chief Jensen Huang had been involved in a romantic relationship with a woman alleged to be an asset of China’s intelligence service, the story overwhelmed the internet. Technology, espionage and sex are among the great obsessions of our times — but it is rare for characters to leap from departure-lounge novellas to newspaper front pages.
The story of Kitty’s Salon, though, holds a cautionary lesson about the supposed power of sex. As word of the new ownership spread, the only regular customer still willing to talk was Nazi SS official Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich’s main security office.
Worse, the bugs installed in the salon were themselves being monitored by Ljubo Kolchev, a press secretary at Romania’s embassy who was the undercover British intelligence officer Roger Wilson.
For more than a decade, Western intelligence services have been warning business leaders and politicians to beware of sexual blackmail by China’s foreign intelligence service, the Guojia Anquan Bu, or Ministry of State Security. The Nvidia story contains many of the elements highlighted in those warnings. Last year, Nvidia came under investigation after committing to sell close to $2 billion worth of top-of-the-line chips for data centres in Singapore and Malaysia. American sanctions monitors suspected the chips were being diverted to China by the Nvidia chief’s lover, Huang Le.
Little evidence, though, has since emerged to link Huang Le to the GAB or to any criminal wrongdoing. There is even less evidence that Jensen Huang, an outspoken critic of technology sanctions that he argues undermine American primacy, backed chip sales to China because he had been seduced. Just three of the 224 cases of Chinese espionage against the United States between 2000 and 2024 involved sex.
The swallows’ nests
“Feline, trembling in a thousand rhythms, exotic yet deeply austere, slender and supple like a sacred serpent,” wrote one stricken reviewer. The erotic dancer who arrived on the Paris stage in 1903 was rumoured to be the daughter of an Indian temple dancer; others claimed she had been raised in the jungles of Indonesia.
From her teenage years, her biographer Pat Shipman has recorded, Margaretha Zelle made a precarious living trading sex for male patronage, “changing her story like other women change hairstyles.” For a decade, her faux-Oriental routine — once performed alongside the great Sufi musician Inayat Khan to lend it authenticity — placed Zelle at the centre of European pop culture.
Everyone knows what happened next: the 1931 film, starring Greta Garbo, portrays Mata Hari stealing secrets from her lover, Lieutenant Alexis Rosanoff. Later, however, she falls in love with the young officer and finds moral redemption by visiting him after he is blinded in an accident, knowing that a firing squad awaits her.
The story we all know is wrong, though. It serves only to turn our gaze away from the patient efforts the GAB made to establish itself as a credible intelligence service.
From 1955, when a Chinese scientist at Caltech was reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for sending home books and journals sold openly in the United States, the GAB has followed a well-established template.
Much of the technological intelligence China values most, it realised, could be found in libraries and bookstores; much else could be stolen with relative ease. The GAB also showed skill at raising high-level assets through its diaspora connections.
For three decades, until his retirement in 1985, Beijing-born CIA officer Larry Wu-tai Chin provided critical information on American policies, including President Richard Nixon’s planned détente.
“The United States — and the Soviet Union, for that matter — emphasised recruiting a small number of agents and pushing them to produce large amounts of information,” counter-intelligence officer Tod Hoffman has written. “The Chinese rely on large numbers of people, each producing relatively small amounts of intelligence.”
Former Australian intelligence officer Paul Monk notes that the GAB rarely makes cash-up-front offers. Instead, targets are offered influential contacts in China and help setting up or expanding a business or research project there. Friendship and long-term relationship-building are put on the table, rather than ideology or cash.
Imagining enemies
Trapped in Berlin after the war broke out in 1914, Zelle realised that the Belle Époque — the gilded era of artistic radicalism, scientific discovery and cultural liberation that had begun a quarter-century earlier — was finally disintegrating.
Lovers helped her pay her way back to Amsterdam. Friendless and crushed by debt, she accepted an offer of ₣20,000 from German diplomat Karl Kroemer to spy on England. Though she had no intention of delivering, Zelle drew the attention of counter-intelligence officials when she passed through Folkestone on her way to Paris. “A bold kind of woman,” one British counter-intelligence officer noted disapprovingly as he ordered a search of Zelle’s belongings. Nothing incriminating was found, but she was considered “to be not above suspicion”.
French police responded to these vague suspicions by opening Zelle’s mail and questioning staff at the Grand Hotel in Paris. They found plenty of evidence of a hedonistic, sexually open lifestyle — but none of espionage. Late in 1917, Zelle was put on trial.
Much of the evidence, including handwritten copies of telegrams rather than the originals, was contentious. French prosecutors could not show that she had passed on anything beyond gossip available in newspapers, yet she was convicted of treason. Lead prosecutor André Mornet later admitted: “There wasn’t enough [evidence] to flog a cat.”
Honey-trap prosecutions over the last two decades have often had similar endings. Katrina Leung, an immigrant recruited by the FBI in 1982, was alleged to have worked for China from the outset, even as she had affairs with both the officers handling her.
Leung was never charged with passing documents to China, and the case was dismissed amid allegations of prosecutorial misconduct. She later accepted a plea deal on tax-evasion charges, receiving a three-year suspended sentence.
Hawaii-based defence contractor Benjamin Bishop, by contrast, was convicted in 2014 of leaking secret information to his lover, a Chinese graduate student. FBI investigators found that he had passed on information about missile and radar systems, as well as nuclear weapons.
Declassified FBI documents from 2013 also record the agency’s investigation into the relationship between student Fang “Christine” Fang and Congressman Eric Swalwell. Although neither was prosecuted, the FBI suspected Fang of improperly influencing his fundraising. Swalwell admitted to having a sexual relationship with Fang but said she had never sought classified information or tried to influence his work.
Plain-vanilla spies, meanwhile, made off with critical technologies in sectors from aerospace to missiles—but lacking the lure of the honey-pot, few of those cases received close attention.
Also read: What Nvidia’s Jensen Huang said on China and the AI race
Lives broken by paranoia
Little was trapped in the spider’s web the Gestapo had laid at its sex salon. Propaganda minister Josef Goebbels was found to enjoy watching lesbian sex, banned in Berlin’s cabarets after the Nazi takeover, but remained boringly loyal to the Führer. The Gestapo investigated Josef ‘Sepp’ Dietrich, Hitler’s driver-turned-general, after colleagues reported that he was critical of Adolf Hitler.
At Kitty’s, Dietrich hired all the women for an all-night orgy but showed no interest in discussing politics with them. Galeazzo Ciano, Fascist Italy’s foreign minister, was recorded making derogatory comments about the Nazis — though none more derogatory than those he routinely directed at his father-in-law, Il Duce, Benito Mussolini.
For the women caught up in these spy panics, the consequences were often devastating. After fashion model Christine Keeler was found to be moving between the beds of British defence minister John Profumo and Soviet spy Yevgeny Ivanov, the honey trap became established, alongside the nuclear weapon, as one of the most recognisable features of the Cold War. Keeler served prison time for perjury; Profumo was soon rehabilitated by the English elite.
The gender politics of espionage have played out in India, too. Eminent scientist Nambi Narayanan spent years fighting the consequences of a case in which the Kerala Police alleged that he had been lured into selling national missile secrets by two Maldivian women, Mariam Rasheeda and Fousiya Hassan.
Other ongoing cases raise similar questions. Though prosecutors accuse Amritsar-based vlogger Jyoti Malhotra of passing sensitive information to Pakistan, they have not disclosed what this information was or how she obtained it.
Like poison and guns, prejudice can kill. After public claims that she was responsible for the deaths of 50,000 troops, Zelle was marched before a firing squad. The dancer gave her last performance, refusing the customary blindfold.
“This lady knows how to die,” remarked the officer who ordered the men to open fire.
Praveen Swami is a Contributing Editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Maryam Hassan)