> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://goodoil.news/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Long and the Hard of ‘SEXINT’ - URL: https://goodoil.news/the-long-and-the-hard-of-sexint/ - Published: 2026-08-22T21:00:50.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-22T21:00:49.000Z - Description: How turning an inadequate dictator into a fake pornstar backfired. - Author: Lushington Brady - Tags: History **John Le Carré** knew the spy trade from the inside and, in a strange case of life imitating art, gave it some of its more memorable neologisms. One of them was *honey-trap*, another word for what is also known as *sexpionage*, which is as old as Jael pegging Sisera a little too literally for his comfort. Modern honey-trappers, though, aren’t so bent on nailing their targets’ heads to the floor. The point is rather to get them to spill the contents of their skull-case more metaphorically – and, from an intelligence point of view – usefully. Sex and secrets have been bedfellows for as long as one person has wanted something the other preferred to keep quiet. The intimacy of the bedroom, or the back of a parked car, has always been a useful solvent for discretion. > [“Loose lips sink ships”](https://daily.jstor.org/the-long-history-of-sexpionage/?ref=goodoil.news) and “Keep mum, she’s not so dumb” sloganeered Allied propaganda on the home front of the Second World War. But it was the Cold War, particularly in its retellings in novels, film, and television, that made “honey-trapping” and “honeypots” familiar phrases. The Soviets, never ones to under-organise a dirty business, called their female operatives “sparrows” and the male ones “ravens.” The job description remained straightforward: get close, get intimate, get the goods, whether that meant documents, recruitment, or leverage for later blackmail. Fiction has never tired of the device; from Le Carré’s own pages through to the current crop of spy dramas, the honeypot remains a reliable plot engine. It remains a real engine of spycraft, too. Only the methods have changed. > US Army lawyers/colonels **David Wallace** and **Mark Visage** note that “honeypot” has also entered the lexicon of cyber war. Only instead of a seductive agent, this kind of honeypot is “a physical or virtual environment designed to lure the attention of intruders with the aim of deceiving the intruders about the nature of the environment.” In other words, it’s a decoy computer system. The hacking of such a system potentially allows its designers to “gather counter-intelligence about the intruders’ intent, identity, and means and methods of cyber operations.” The honey-trapping here is all about the bytes. > > “Additionally, the honeypots are weaponized. Destructive malware is incorporated into the honeypots and, upon activation, will cause significant damage to an intruder’s own cyber infrastructure.” The legal status of these weaponised traps under international law is, as one pair of military lawyers put it, “complex, multi-faceted, and unsettled”, which is bureaucrat-speak for ‘it might be illegal, but we’re doing it anyway’. A more straightforward tactic is SEXINT (sexual intelligence), or the monitoring of a target’s internet sex usage. How damaging was it to **Osama bin Laden**’s reputation for upright Islamic austerity, to learn that he was systematically working his way through the Pornhub catalogue? Others argue that fundamentalists, by their nature, are particularly vulnerable to blackmail via deepfakes. Well, the saga of former Indonesian dictator **Sukarno** might be a cautionary tale. While the KGB sent fake air hostesses to induct him into the Mile High Club, the CIA tried their hand at pre-AI deepfakes, in one of the more entertaining Cold War misfires. The Americans went one better than the Soviets and commissioned a pornographic film starring a Sukarno look-alike. Neither approach worked. Sukarno made no secret of his habits, and the Indonesian public was largely unbothered. But, yes: the CIA got into the porn business, making films of a Sukarno look-a-like going at it hammer-and-tongs “in ecstatic sexual congress with a woman”, according to a 1976 *Village Voice* article. The only problem was that that wasn’t going to fool anybody, much less embarrass its target. Because, not only were his lecherous tendencies common knowledge anyway, Sukarno apparently “was cursed with an extreme case of premature ejaculation”. Unlike the film, which showed the fake Sukarno’s paramour aglow with fulfilment, women in reality tended to leave his bed aglow with nothing but embarrassment and frustration. By depicting him as a **John Holmes**\-style Indonesian Superman, the film flattered and delighted, rather then enraged or embarrassed, the dictator. --- 💡 ****If you enjoyed this article please share it using the share buttons at the top or bottom of the article.**