...
By Shane Croucher
Senior Editor
0
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
A beautiful woman posing as a business executive seduces one of the most consequential technology leaders of the modern era. Why? To steal his secrets and secure cutting-edge artificial intelligence chips for a devilish communist foe.
Add a few guns, gadgets, and explosions, and this fevered interpretation of Nvidia’s Jensen Huang drama could be the plot of the next James Bond movie.
The franchise, now under Amazon's creative control, is auditioning to fill the shoes vacated by Daniel Craig, who played the iconic British spy from 2006.
Read More on Analysis
Will it be Callum Turner or Robert Pattinson? Jack Lowden or Nicholas Hoult? Or someone else altogether? The 007 producers are spoiled for choice on the acting front. And the writers are too—for inspiration from tales of spycraft all around them.
Is real-world espionage on the rise, or are spies just getting caught more?
"There is a tsunami of national security threats out there right now," Professor Anthony Glees, an intelligence and security expert at the University of Buckingham in England, told Newsweek.
The worst fear about the dramatic Huang story is that he had an affair with a Chinese honeypot spy who used their relationship to help Beijing in the great-power AI race with the U.S., in which Nvidia's most-advanced chips are a major strategic asset.
Nvidia, the world-leading chipmaker co-founded and until this week led by Huang, said its board has "no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised." Huang has admitted only to being unfaithful in his marriage.
Related Story
The Nvidia ‘Spy’ Was Real, But China Export Controls Are Realer
It is not clear if the woman at the center of these allegations—Alice Huang, no relation to Jensen, a former executive at Singapore-based cloud computing firm Megaspeed—was actually a Chinese asset.
Beijing has dismissed the claims as smears. Investigations in the U.S. are ongoing and yet to conclude.
But the former Nvidia CEO is a giant in the technology world whose significance is difficult to overstate, and he was a key player in the U.S.-China competition that will likely shape the rest of this century. The espionage narrative, fact or fiction, is utterly compelling.
Web of Spies
This wasn't the only shocking spy story to break in recent days. The U.S. and U.K. announced that a senior American officer working at a sensitive NATO facility in southwestern England had been arrested on suspicion of spying for Russia.
The 41-year-old lieutenant colonel, reportedly snared in a sting, was based at Imjin Barracks, headquarters of NATO's Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC). FBI Director Kash Patel called it a "Russia-related espionage investigation." The Kremlin denies involvement.
Last month, Germany arrested August Hanning, its foreign intelligence chief from 1998 to 2005, on suspicion of treasonous espionage. Der Spiegel reported a possible Azerbaijani link, which Azerbaijan calls disinformation.
Days later, the Justice Department charged an OpenAI engineer with bugging an executive conference room in San Francisco, the device allegedly hidden in toilet paper behind a television.
The FBI says he targeted talk of OpenAI's superintelligence work. He has pleaded not guilty.
Such dramatic reports—coupled with NATO allies' warnings about relentless hybrid warfare waged by Russia on their territory, including risky sabotage attacks—create the sense that we are in a new age of resurgent espionage activity.
Many Enemies
Britain's domestic spy-catchers agree. MI5 chief Sir Ken McCallum said in October that the agency now devotes more resources to state threats than during the Cold War. Its caseload has quadrupled in a decade.
Where the Cold War had one main enemy, Glees counts at least three now—Russia, Iran and China—and possibly North Korea.
More harm is being done, he argues, not merely noticed. The internet helps, too. Google Maps spares spies some scouting, while LinkedIn signposts academics who might unwittingly help.
Related Story
Russia Keeps Violating a Major Cold War Deal. Now Putin Wants to Revive It
Glees also said large numbers of dual nationals from states that are foes also pose a threat in Western societies.
"They are always going to be a risk, either because they in some way are happy to work for their countries or because having relatives in their home nations can make them liable to blackmail," he said.
'Sense of Insecurity'
Professor David Gioe, an intelligence scholar at King's College London who has served in the FBI, CIA, DIA and U.S. Navy, is more cautious about a surge in espionage activity, which is hard to quantify and depends on which activity you define as such.
Without many services' classified records, he told Newsweek, nobody can answer definitively. Much depends on what counts as espionage. But on sabotage specifically, largely intelligence work, the rise is unmistakable.
Russian operations in Europe have surged, which he ties to how badly Moscow's war in Ukraine is going. But he also said more spies may be getting caught because more people are looking.
"We see lots of states investing in their own sovereign intelligence capabilities because of a sense of insecurity," Gioe said, noting that the world is "febrile" at the moment.
After two decades focused on terrorism, he notes, MI5 has rebalanced toward state threats. That alone could swell its caseload.
If cases keep climbing once that surge levels off, perhaps the spies, not the spy-catchers, are multiplying. Alternatively, it could be a redirection of existing resources to counterintelligence cases, creating an increased risk in other focal areas of their work.
Related Story
Nvidia’s China Saga Shows Why America Should Sprint on AI
Then, of course, there is the rapidly developing cyber threat. Both Glees and Gioe say cyberattacks are easier, can be done at scale, and perpetrated aggressively without the need for the kind of kinetic action that could trigger NATO’s Article 5, for example.
"In their own way they can cause serious damage to our way of life even if it's non-nuclear damage," Glees said.
The recent disruption to European grocery stores, whose refrigeration systems came under suspected Iranian-linked cyberattack, offers a glimpse of what may lie ahead.
An interesting question may be whether there is more worth spying on. Espionage is no longer just a great-power game, Gioe says. Middle powers are running more ambitious operations.
And the private sector has multiplied the targets: Elon Musk's next move, or Nvidia's, is worth knowing.
"These people are richer and more powerful than some countries," Gioe said.
The next 007 will still need a license to kill. Real spies can make do with a LinkedIn login.
View 0 Comments
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines