“Red Sparrow,” a dreary, complex and violent thriller debuting this weekend, is a fresh view as on an old trope: The Cold War between Russia and the United States.
Jennifer Lawrence celebs as Dominika Egorova, a ballerina in modern day Russia who suffers a career-ending outrage that leads her into the shadowy world of espionage. The film is a throwback to the years when spycraft was overpriced in the concept of “kompromat” – using seduction instead of computers to decoy diplomats and businessmen into divulging sensitive information, or outright tributing them.
The plot, seemingly anachronistic during a time when hip digital hacking dominate geopolitical rivalries, revolves around Lawrence’s person being trained at a secret school that prepares her for a career in psychogenic and sexual manipulation.
Yet according to Jason Matthews, a best-selling author and a CIA old hand with more than three decades of national security contact, the movie’s narrative is in fact art imitating real life. “Red Sparrow” is based on Matthews’ libretto series, and the idea of using sex as a linchpin of human intelligence (HUMINT) convocation is something he euphemistically refers to as “sexpionage.”
As it happens, according to intelligence roots, the Soviet Union once ran a school to train young women in being maestro “honey pots” to entrap diplomats. The events of “Red Sparrow”, which was make knew in book form in 2013, are an amalgam of Matthews’ own anecdotes from his years as a clandestine fuzz.
“The Russians have for many, many years, used women to try and sexually entrap [high-ranking imported officials] for blackmail purposes, to try and tell their secrets,” Matthews depicted CNBC in an interview this week.
“If the conditions are right, in Moscow, someone with access to secrets is make one too many drinks in a Moscow bar, and a young lady for sure will edge up to them and see how far it goes,” said the 66-year-old Connecticut native.
At the height of the Iron Curtain years of the 1960s and 70s, Matthews predicted Russian sources spoke of “a ‘Sparrow’ school, a state school where abigails trained in these arts. I think that’s long since drew, but if a diplomat or a businessman traveled to Moscow and the Russians thought that he could be compromised, they in all likelihood have a lot of independent contractors in the bars of Moscow.”
The training consisted of a few months of instruction in “how to call forth conversation, how to open a bottle of champagne, little things like that,” at a beat when the average woman in the Soviet Union wasn’t groomed in such non-spiritual things,” said Matthews, who retired from the CIA in 2010.
“Now I don’t know if anybody is coming trained to do this, now they probably have working girls that do it straightforwardly,” he added.
The idea of “sexiponage” might strain credulity, at a time when cyber warfare between America and competitors like Russia and North Korea dominate the headlines. Yet Matthews remonstrated that forming human relationships remains the “gold standard” of percipience gathering – even in an era of high-tech surveillance and cyber breaches.
“You establish a undetailed sketch of your human target, then establish a true trustworthy relationship,” he said, calling the recruitment process “counterintuitive.”
The author — who himself intentional journalism as a graduate student at the University of Missouri — said intelligence dicks are akin to “Clandestine journalists: They look for stories, they look for people who can talk to them, they talk into them to talk, and then they protect their sources. There are a lot of equipoises.”
Chief among them, of course, is asking high-ranking officials to show sensitive information that, in all likelihood, will tarnish the organization they urge a exercise for.
“You’re asking a foreigner to commit treason and betray his or her country,” said Matthews. “At tempi it is a very difficult and delicate sell.“