WHY KREMLIN CAN’T GIVE UP ADDICTION TO HONEY-TRAPS
SHE WAS a model, and her nickname was Mu- mu. She had long legs and baby-blue eyes — and was apparently fascinated by my Moscow colleague Mikhail Fishman’s brilliant conversation and witty prose style.
From the moment Mu-mu sent him her first flirty message through social media, Fishman was charmed — and hooked. A few days later, when he and Mu-mu ended up naked in her bed snorting cocaine, Fishman couldn’t believe his luck.
Until, of course, he discovered that while he and Mu-mu cavorted, multiple hidden cameras had been rolling.
Mu-mu was ekaterina Gerasimova, a part-time model and full-time honeytrap agent who seduced at least six critics of Vladimir Putin in 2010 — from Fishman, award-winning editor of the Russian edition of Newsweek magazine, to one of the country’s better-known known political writers and ultra-nationalist firebrands, eduard Limonov.
Other targets — including the leader of an opposition group — smelled a rat and walked out on her before compromising material could be filmed.
The pornographic footage of Mu-mu and Fishman was subsequently published on the internet by an obscure group calling itself the ‘Civil Committee for the Defence of Morality, Law and Civil Agreement’ — but it’s clear from the professionalism of the footage and the slickness of the honey-trap that the FSB, successor to the KGB, was behind the operation.
Such stings are usually used by the KGB to blackmail critics into silence, but on this occasion the resulting scandal didn’t do the targets much harm.
Fishman and his wife gamely appeared in public wearing matching ‘Smile — you’re on camera’ T-shirts. And Limonov seemed positively proud of himself, insisting: ‘I do not see anything objectionable about the fact that opposition men do not refuse women.’
Whatever the truth about the supposed Russian files containing film of Trump indulging in ‘sexual perversions’, the FSB tradecraft behind the honeytrap is entirely real, and hasn’t changed much in half a century.
THE Moscow Ritz-Carlton — where Trump’s indiscretions are alleged to have taken place — is one of the most vulgar, bling-filled tourist establishments in Russia. More pertinently, it stands on the site of the demolished Intourist hotel, renowned as the most bugged building in the country. There is no doubt that its guests are regularly spied on today.
When my father arrived at the British embassy in Moscow as a junior diplomat in 1958, he found himself routinely tailed by a large team of KGB agents, dubbed ‘goons’ after the villains of gangster films.
But he was also targeted by another, less outwardly sinister set of KGB operatives — a cheerful young official named Vadim Popov, supposedly from the education ministry, and an older, clearly more senior man, Alexei Suntsov. Both of them were trying to recruit my father to become a KGB agent, and blackmail was a common method of doing so. Popov would take my father to raucous evenings on restaurant barges on the Moscow river where they were entertained by gypsy musicians.
Later, he showed up to a meeting with my father in a large Party limousine he claimed belonged to his uncle, and which whizzed them to a large dacha in the snowbound woods outside Moscow.
A party of jolly girls showed up for some late-night cross-country skiing. According to my father there was no immediate ‘hanky-panky’ — but one of the girls soon came in pursuit, phoning him at work a couple of days later, even though he had not given her his number.
Suntsov, my father’s other recruiter, took a more sober line, inviting him to evenings at the Bolshoi ballet followed by earnest after-dinner discussions of the class struggle.
BUT as my father discovered later, Suntsov was busy frying a far bigger fish — none other than Maurice Dejean, French ambassador to the USSR, who was seduced by a beautiful maid infiltrated into the embassy by the KGB.
Suntsov was one of Dejean’s handlers — alongside the operation’s mastermind Yury Krotov, who blew the operation after defecting to the West in 1963. French president Charles de Gaulle, on receiving Dejean after his recall, greeted his disgraced ambassador with icy wit: ‘So, Dejean, we’re still bedding away, are we?’
A few years later, in 1968, British ambassador Sir Geoffrey harrison fell for exactly the same trick. harrison was seduced by his Soviet maid Galya Ivanova — a ‘blonde of ample proportions’ according to The Sunday Times, which revealed the affair in 1981.
‘I let my defences drop,’ admitted harrison. Spying is a small world — Ivanova was the sister of eugene Ivanov, the Soviet naval attache in Britain whose affair with Christine Keeler sparked the Profumo Affair.
The honey-trap remains devastatingly effective to this day. As recently as 2009, British diplomat James hudson was filmed with two women in a sauna and massage parlour close to the British Consulate in the Urals city of ekaterinburg. The 37-year-old deputy consul had to quit the Foreign Office as a result.
If anything, modern surveillance techniques and social media make the job of operatives like Mu-Mu easier than ever. her victims were filmed from multiple angles by tiny cameras — and the resulting material can now be published swiftly and anonymously online.
Whether Donald Trump has been the victim of an FSB sting remains to be proved. But if the lurid stories are true, Trump would be just be the latest, and most valuable, prize in a long and distinguished line of victims of an alliance between the world’s two oldest professions — the prostitute and the spy.