Was James Bond violating the law by having a romantic relationship with a Russian spy in the 1970s movie “The Spy Who Loved Me”?
Bond, or his real-life counterpart during the Cold War, was a British government employee, not an American one, and ABC News doesn’t mention British policies in its article on how the United States is now prohibiting personnel in China from having “romantic, sexual relations with Chinese citizens.”
The report does mention that according to declassified State Department documents, in 1987 “the U.S. government barred personnel stationed in the Soviet bloc and China from befriending, dating or having sex with locals after a U.S. Marine in Moscow was seduced by a Soviet spy.” But the restrictions were relaxed after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
In China, a blanket ban on such relations has not been in effect for many years. Until the new ban in January, U.S. personnel in China were required to report any intimate contact with Chinese citizens to their supervisors, but were not explicitly forbidden from sexual or romantic relationships.
U.S. diplomats and intelligence experts say that Beijing continues to aggressively use so-called honeypots to access American secrets. In presentations before being stationed in China, U.S. personnel are briefed on case studies where Chinese intelligence services sent attractive women to seduce American diplomats, and warned that dozens of Chinese state security agents can be assigned to monitor any individual diplomat of interest….
[Peter Mattis, a former CIA analyst, pointed out] that Chinese state security doesn’t gather intelligence just through spies, but also by pressing ordinary Chinese people for information, often through threats or intimidation. That, Mattis said, means any Chinese citizen who dates an American diplomat could be vulnerable to coercion.
Although the new rule was installed by departing U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Burns in January, it is only now being reported on. According to Mattis, the rule means that China’s Ministry of State Security “has gotten a lot more aggressive” at trying to infiltrate the U.S. embassy and the U.S. government.
Despite the ban, we probably haven’t heard the last of CCP seduction of American diplomats. Or American politicians.
