Sexpionage

Sexpionage is the involvement of sexual activity, or the possibility of sexual activity, intimacy, romance, or seduction to conduct espionage. Sex or the possibility of sex can function as a distraction, incentive, cover story, or unintended part of any intelligence operation.

In the Soviet Union, female agents assigned to use such tactics were referred to as swallows, while male ones were known as ravens. A commonly known type of sexpionage is a honey trap operation, which is designed to compromise an opponent sexually^: 230 to elicit information from that person.

Sexpionage is a historically documented phenomenon, though a book review published by a CIA publication in 2008 noted that the three English-language books about it suffered from errors of fact and lack of documentation.