Jensen Huang’s Honey Trap: Sex and Espionage

On Nov. 8, 2026, Jensen Huang told Nvidia employees, “I was unfaithful to my wife.” He named no one. That same day, Nvidia’s board opened an inquiry into reports that foreign intelligence had targeted him. On Nov. 11, the board accepted the resignation of the man who had led Nvidia since its founding in 1993. He gave up the presidency, the CEO’s job, and his board seat. Hours after Nvidia announced his departure the next day, Attorney General Todd Blanche confirmed the FBI was investigating and said the Justice Department had reached no conclusion about whether Alice Huang had spied for China. Beijing denied the accusation. Nvidia had a successor ready. Washington had an open investigation.

Jensen Huang’s Honey Trap: The Price of a Secret is Nothing New

A honey trap uses the promise or reality of intimacy to get at something a person would otherwise protect. The name went into wide circulation with John le Carré’s 1974 novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The bargain goes back a good deal further. In the Book of Judges, the Philistine rulers each offer Delilah 1,100 shekels of silver to find out where Samson gets his strength. He gives her three false answers. Then he tells her about the hair. He falls asleep with his head on her lap, and she calls in a man to shave him. Scripture supplies the bargain up front. In the real cases, finding out when somebody offered the silver can take decades.

Paris had its own version of the story by 1917. Twelve years earlier, a Dutch woman named Margaretha Geertruida Zelle had danced at the Musée Guimet under the name Mata Hari. The costumes and the invented stage persona made her famous. War made her mobility, her money troubles, and her connections interesting to intelligence services. She accepted 20,000 francs from a German consul and got the code name H21. Her explanation, preserved in the account of the Fries Museum in her hometown, was wonderfully unhelpful to a prosecution looking for a straightforward motive. She said she considered the money repayment for furs the Germans had confiscated. She also agreed to work for French intelligence.

The French intercepted German messages referring to H21. A military court convicted her, and on Oct. 15, 1917, a firing squad executed her at Vincennes. The conviction is a fact. The scale of the damage France attributed to her remains a different question. The Fries Museum says the prosecutor failed to prove that she gave the Germans incriminating information. The legend proved easier to sustain. The dancer with lovers in uniform had all the ingredients for a story people wanted to believe, and the firing squad gave that story an ending.

A generation later, an American working for British intelligence got her hands on something a government could actually use. In 1942, as the Allies prepared to invade Vichy-held North Africa, Amy Elizabeth Thorpe Pack, known as Betty and codenamed Cynthia, worked with French Embassy press attaché Charles Brousse to obtain Vichy naval codes in Washington. In biographer Mary Lovell’s account, a guard came upon them with a flashlight during a late-night visit. Pack had undressed, giving him what looked like a lovers’ rendezvous to back away from. Brousse helped get the codes photographed. He later married Pack. The romance provided cover for a burglary, and the person on the other side of it turned out to be a collaborator in every sense.

The Cold War Puts It on the Payroll

In late October 1954, a British Embassy clerk named John Vassall was photographed at Moscow’s Berlin Hotel. According to his confession, summarized in a declassified CIA report, Soviet agents used the pictures to recruit him the following March. The British government had sent a man to Moscow whose private life could cost him his career and expose him to prosecution back home. The Soviets exploited the opening. He kept supplying documents after he returned to London and took a job in naval intelligence. In September 1962, investigators searching Vassall’s flat found 15 rolls of exposed film. On them were 140 photographs of pages from 17 official Admiralty documents. Vassall got 18 years. In the Commons the next spring, MP Niall MacDermot put part of the bill on Britain’s doorstep, saying that “we are paying the price as a country for our attitude to homosexuality.”

Britain got a second scandal while it was still arguing about the first. War Secretary John Profumo had met Christine Keeler at Cliveden in 1961. She also knew a Soviet intelligence officer. Profumo denied impropriety in the Commons in March 1963, then resigned after admitting he had misled Parliament. If you stopped the story there, you could sell it as the espionage scandal of the decade. Lord Denning kept going. His inquiry found no security risk. The man lost his office for the lie he told the House. Vassall had left investigators rolls of film. The distinction matters when a government, a company, or a newsroom tries to explain a spectacular fall.

East Germany’s foreign intelligence service, run for decades by Markus Wolf, took a longer view. Its officers understood who actually handled the papers in Bonn. Ministers came and went. Secretaries knew the files, the visitors, and the routine. The Stasi’s own surviving training material treats secretaries as a source worth studying. In one case recounted by the CIA, a woman code-named Inge stayed late at the West German chancellery copying documents. She knew the man she loved worked for East Germany. What she learned only after her arrest in 1977 was that their wedding had been staged. There had been vows, rings, and a register. Her colleagues thought she was working late. She thought she was married.

What Reached the Other Side

In Beijing in 1964, a 20-year-old French Embassy clerk named Bernard Boursicot met the opera performer Shi Pei Pu. They became lovers. Boursicot said he believed Shi was a woman and that they had a child together. He testified that years later, after he returned to Beijing, a man he identified as a Chinese intelligence officer told him he could keep seeing Shi if he supplied information from the embassy. Boursicot said he made copies of material in the diplomatic pouch. He maintained much of it was publicly available, and Beijing denied involvement. A French court convicted both men of espionage in 1986 and sentenced them to six years. The extraordinary private story inspired M. Butterfly. The diplomatic pouch was the part that put two people in prison.

That December, there was a fire in the hearth and a quartet singing carols at the U.S. ambassador’s Christmas party in Vienna. A Marine named Clayton Lonetree walked up to the CIA station chief. “I’m in something over my head,” he said, according to The Washington Post’s reconstruction. Lonetree had met Soviet agent Violetta Seina in a Moscow subway station, begun an affair with her, and passed confidential information to a Soviet agent he knew as Uncle Sasha. A military court convicted him. The more explosive public story, that Soviet operatives had roamed inside the Moscow embassy, later fell apart for lack of evidence. One man’s confession established plenty. The story that grew around it reached further than the facts.

The FBI managed to spend more than $1.7 million over 18 years on an intelligence source whose handler was sleeping with her. Katrina Leung reported on China for the bureau. In 1991, the FBI learned she had disclosed information about its operations to a Chinese intelligence officer. The bureau let her handler, James J. Smith, confront her. Years later, when an order to give Leung a polygraph was softened into a suggestion, Smith ignored it. The Justice Department’s inspector general documented the affair and the bureaucratic failures in 2006. A judge had already dismissed the classified-material case because prosecutors blocked Leung’s access to a witness she needed for her defense. She later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and filing a false tax return. Ask who had authority to investigate the warning, and you get a fair idea of how it stayed a warning for so long.

The old trade acquired a Facebook button. In September 2021, when investigative reporter Christo Grozev flew from Vienna to a conference in Valencia, a member of a Russia-directed spy ring was on his flight. Another, Vanya Gaberova, obtained a conference pass and helped watch him at his hotel. Messages presented at trial showed two men discussing using her as a honey trap after Grozev accepted her Facebook request. Gaberova testified that she knew nothing of that plan and never spoke or messaged with him. A jury convicted her of conspiracy to spy. The surveillance was real. The messages establish what the men discussed. The record of the trial shows no romance.

Jensen Huang’s Honey Trap: The Kiss and the Shipping Records

Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le and unrelated to Jensen Huang, was an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based cloud computing company that was an Nvidia customer and partner. That business relationship matters on its own. A partner can have access to product road maps, buying opportunities, and the people who decide which customer gets scarce hardware. In early November, The New York Times, citing people briefed on a U.S. intelligence memo, reported that China’s Ministry of State Security had recruited Alice Huang for insight into American AI chips and possibly to influence Nvidia’s position on Chinese access. The Financial Times reported that the memo described the relationship as romantic. CNN reported that intelligence officials disagreed about how strongly the evidence supported recruitment. Whether Beijing took an interest in a relationship already under way, directed the approach from the start, or had any operational role at all remains unsettled. Reuters said it could not reach Alice Huang for comment.

There’s a second trail, and it starts with the servers. Singapore’s Home Affairs Ministry says police and customs opened their own investigation in February 2025 into possible false declarations tied to server purchases. In June, U.S. Commerce Department officials conducted a shipment verification check at Megaspeed, with Alice Huang present. Singapore police took her passport during their investigation. They later concluded there was insufficient evidence she had committed offenses relating to the suspected false declarations. They also said she knowingly gave inaccurate information to downplay her role in the company. They warned her, barred her from returning, and gave back her passport. She left Singapore on Feb. 26, 2026. The Megaspeed investigation remains open. Megaspeed says it cooperated with U.S. inspections and hired a law firm to review its GPU inventory and export compliance. The export trail predates the public reports of an affair. In October 2025, Sen. Tom Cotton had already asked the Commerce Department to investigate Megaspeed over possible diversion of Nvidia chips to China.

Nvidia’s directors said on Nov. 8 they had no reason at that point to believe American national security or company secrets had been compromised. They retained former acting U.S. Attorney Joon H. Kim and his firm, Wachtell, two days later. After Huang resigned, Nvidia installed Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress as interim CEO. Three House committee chairs renewed their demand for answers. They requested a closed-door, transcribed interview with Huang on Dec. 1. House Foreign Affairs Chairman Brian Mast separately told reporters Huang’s team had indicated he would cooperate and that an earlier appearance was possible. Senate Banking Chairman Tim Scott called on Huang and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to testify. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Chris Coons asked the administration to preserve licensing and shipment records. Those investigators have something more concrete to work with than the restaurant footage. In January, the Commerce Department moved Nvidia’s H200 and certain comparable chips to case-by-case license review for China and Macau, subject to conditions. An export license has conditions. A shipment has a destination and an end user. If someone intervened to obtain a license, move a shipment, or change an allocation, investigators can ask who authorized it, when, and why.

Go back to the glass in Taipei. Two executives are in a room full of people, and a camera catches a kiss. It will run on television as long as this story lasts. The useful work in Congress starts when somebody turns off the video and opens the shipping records. Who knew about the relationship when Megaspeed was doing business with Nvidia? Did anyone with a personal stake sign off on an allocation, a financing decision, or an exception? What information went where, and at whose direction? On those questions turns the difference between a CEO who wrecked his own career and a foreign intelligence service that got something America meant to keep.