Swallow

The CIA, KGB & the Lure of Honeypots

Phillippe Latour had a sneaking suspicion the woman he was about to sleep with was possibly part of a KGB plot to entrap him. Visiting Russia for the first time in the late 1960s, the forty-two-year-old Latour worked for a private company developing missile guidance systems on behalf of the French government, an occupation certainly of interest to the Soviet leadership. Surely, however, the hotel losing his reservation and upgrading him for free to a better suite had been a coincidence. Tania, the woman now in his room, who happened to approach him in a restaurant and spoke perfect French, probably was a language teacher and did have a husband who neglected her, he reasoned. Rather than turn down the opportunity, he decided to take some minor precautions. He locked the bedroom door and wedged a chair under the doorknob to prevent any interruptions. He closed the heavy curtains over the windows to stop any photographs from being taken from neighboring balconies.

Tania’s dress was already on the floor and she was removing her stockings and undoing her garter belt. Latour glanced nervously at the large mirror facing the bed, but he consoled himself that the wall to which it was fastened, separating the bedroom from the adjoining lounge, was too small for a camera to be hidden inside.

“Please hurry, Phillippe darling,” Tania whispered, now naked on the sheets. “I have to be at work in the morning.” Latour was still standing, fully clothed as he continued implementing his security measures. After turning off the light, he believed that he had secured the room to the greatest extent possible: they were in total darkness with only a small amount of yellow light visible from a vent located between the bedroom and the corridor. Having dabbled in photography, he knew that no film would be usable in such low light. He got undressed as quickly as possible and lost all of his fear in the moment as he turned his attention to Tania.

Post-coitus, Tania turned on a bedside light, got dressed swiftly, and kissed him on the forehead. “I will try and meet you tomorrow evening. You are a wonderful lover. Bon soir.” He would never see her again.

Instead, Latour was greeted by two KGB officers in plainclothes the next day and handed an envelope filled with 8x10 glossy photographs of his intercourse with Tania. His amateur knowledge of photography had been no match for the KGB’s technology: their camera lens that entered the room surrepticiously when needed was equipped to increase light upwards of 150,000 times. Had the photographs been of poor quality, Tania would have returned another night. The thin yellow light from the hotel room vent, however, proved to be sufficient.

The Hidden Side of Operation Midnight Climax

“The use of sex is a common practice among intelligence services all over the world. This is a tough, dirty business. We have used that technique against the Soviets. They have used it against us.”

—Assistant FBI Director William C. Sullivan, testimony before the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, November 1, 1975

The Federal Bureau of Narcotics was advised to stay away from the safehouses on certain nights. The CIA publicly admitted later they used safehouses located in New York City (circa 1960-1966) and San Francisco (circa the late 1950s to June 1965) for drug testing on unsuspecting Americans, but they hid any further operations that may have taken place there. Jack Anderson, a journalist with a prodigious cache of secret documents and sources, wrote in February 1975 of how their activities also extended into “love traps…where foreign diplomats were lured by prostitutes in the pay of the CIA.”

Through one-way mirrors hidden in the apartments, agents of the CIA would film the sexual activities in the New York safehouse to blackmail the targets into becoming informants for the Agency. On the six-floor of a high-rise building in Greenwich Village, a large painting of two ships masked the presence of a see-through one-way mirror to film the blackmail operations, which gave direct view of a sofa that doubled as a bed. Those looking to record the proceedings on the other side of the wall in the adjoining apartment would swing back another painting on hinges, akin to a cabinet door, to reveal the hidden mirror. Sound was recorded through a Japanese screen hung in the room, equipped with microphones. The San Francisco apartment lacked mirrors, but contained audio surveillance equipment. The CIA’s local agent who ran the latter safehouse in its final years, Colonel George White, decorated the apartments in red and white, hanging a photo of actress Mae West and images of can-can dancers. If they wanted to construct a brothel, Sally Stanford reasoned they should have consulted her. A San Francisco madam at the time, she critiqued their choice of décor years later once the existence of the West Coast safehouse was revealed: “That’s about the scope of their minds. Now when I had my places, they were filled with good French furniture, lace curtains, Oriental rugs. Maybe they thought they were going first-class with those pictures of can-can dancers and that sort of thing. Well, I knew Col. White. And that kind of décor sounds like his kind of taste.” The CIA worked hand in hand with the Bureau of Narcotics, White himself a former member, which included recruiting other former officers for the work. In both cities they maintained side-by-side apartments, each one costing $160 to rent monthly in New York. To ensure the plausibility of the rooms as residences for unsuspecting victims, the apartments were made to look as if they were being lived in on a regular basis, the shelves and fridge stocked with food and alcohol. Male and female prostitutes were employed by the Agency’s agents for a range of sexual services.

Researching this topic in the late 1970s for his seminal book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, while he did not explore the blackmail angle to the safehouses, John Marks came across curious documentation amongst the few financial records that remained in the CIA’s files. Following the cessation of drug testing in the safehouses, the Agency for some reason paid $30,000 ($300,000 today) in 1964 to keep them operational. “Something was going on at the ‘pad’,” Marks wrote, noting that George White continued to bill the CIA for his unusual expenses ($1,100 in February 1965 alone), invoking in the request his euphemism for prostitutes: “undercover agents for operations.” White jokingly referred to the work in the safehouses as “Operational Midnight Climax” on some of these vouchers. Relying on interviews with former CIA officers, the full scope of the safehouse operations remained a mystery to readers of Marks’ book: “What White was doing with or to these agents [during this period] cannot be said.” He did learn, however, that these operations in New York and San Francisco were nearly exposed two years later, as a Senate committee run by Senator Edward V. Long happened to examine wiretapping by agencies such as the Narcotics Bureau. The Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics at the time, Henry Giordano, suggested to the CIA team that had run the program it would be a “helpful thing” if they shut down the inquiry. Rather than attempt such a maneuver, Marks recorded how the Agency chose a more simple path, explaining how two officials “misled and lied to the top echelon of the Treasury Department (the Narcotics Bureau’s parent organization) about the safehouses and how they were used.”

As part of his 1975 article, Anderson noted these blackmail operation revelations as ones the Agency was desperate to cover up in light of ongoing congressional investigations at the time (committees and commissions named after members of Congress in the 1970s included Pike, Rockefeller, and Church). To a large degree, the Agency succeeded in keeping this history under wraps. Even when the Project MKULTRA hearings occurred two years after Anderson’s article, no questions on this topic were asked and the preferred narrative that these were only testing sites that got out of control prevailed: “In the project, the individual conducting the test might make initial contact with a prospective subject selected at random in a bar. He would then invite the person to a ‘safehouse’ where the test drug was administered to the subject through drink or in food. CIA personnel might debrief the individual conducting the test, or observe the test by using a one-way mirror and tape recorder in an adjoining room.”

According to Anderson’s account, the CIA “possibly got the idea to use honeytraps from the Russians, who long have used sex blackmail to entrap Westerners into spying for them.” While the details of many such operations are likely lost to history, there were examples that came to light that would elucidate how far espionage services would go in terms of blackmail on both sides in the Cold War.