5) Pandora's Box
2024-03-26 00:41:56
<p>Imagine you were a fly on the wall at a dinner between the mafia, the CIA, and the KGB. That’s where this unprecedented story begins. A journey through the dark world of Russian intelligence where, for the first time, a professed “sex spy” tells her story. All of it. </p> <p>Host Neil Strauss (Rolling Stone, The New York Times) brings listeners into the dangerous world of sexpionage, where enemies of the State are not the only victims. So too are the spies themselves, brainwashed to believe that their bodies belong to Russia and meticulously trained to become “the perfect weapons.” Who is Aliia Roza? From the creators of the hit podcast series To Live and Die in LA, this is To Die For.</p>
Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, the host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday.
Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand, accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm John Walczak, host of the new podcast, Missing in Arizona. And I'm Robert Fisher, one of the most wanted men in the world.
We cloned his voice using AI.
In 2001, police say I killed my family and rigged my house to explode.
Before escaping into the wilderness.
Police believe he is alive and hiding somewhere.
Join me. I'm going down in the cave. As I track down clues. I'm going to call the police and have you removed.
Hunting. One of the most dangerous fugitives in the world. Robert Fisher. Do you recognize my voice?
Listen to Missing in Arizona every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.
All eight episodes of To Die For are available now to binge absolutely free.
But for ad-free listening and exclusive bonuses, subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus at tenderfootplus.
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Warning. The following episode contains explicit language and sexual themes. Listener discretion is advised.
About four years ago, I received an unexpected offer to interview the president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko. He wanted to create, quote, mutually beneficial ties with the U.S. And someone evidently thought that one way to do that was for me to profile Lukashenko for Rolling Stone magazine.
Belarus, caught between Russia and the European Union, has been ruled for decades by autocratic president Alexander Lukashenko. He declared victory in August elections the U.S. said were fraudulent.
Huge protests followed, and he moved swiftly to crush them.
They reached out to me, and I told them that if my editors approved the story, I'd be honest in the interview and wouldn't be throwing him softball questions. And they seemed open to that.
He and Russian President Vladimir Putin are two peas in a pod when it comes to shutting down dissent. So Putin swiftly helped his skiing partner with $1.5 billion.
Months of systematic repression and torture followed, documented by human rights groups.
Then came the emails. Asking me what kind of women I liked. Asking me to send photos of my type of women. Offering to arrange dates for me when I'm in Belarus. Perhaps they can even throw a party for me, stocked with beautiful women.
I will be set in Belarus for the trip and possibly my life, they said.
As a journalist, I knew what accepting favors, whether cash or sex, or anything from a subject, can mean. The end of your career.
And that was my first possible experience with what the Russians call Kompromat.
Kompromat comes from the Russian for compromising material. It means that the Russian secret state have managed to film somebody having sex with somebody. they shouldn't be having sex with. Politicians, diplomats, spies, whoever. A former British spy called Christopher Steele reported that the Russian secret state had filmed Donald Trump in a hotel room in Moscow.
Trump has denied it ever happened. But if it did happen, then that was a classic case of Kompromat.
Sorry. I had to do it. Gotta go on my own. You didn't guess that behind I was loading my gun. I got you, I tear you apart.
I had to kill you.
Cause it's so much fun.
I wanted to let you know I was transcribing the interview with the sex spy.
And I actually have firsthand knowledge of this because in my past life I worked on these.
black programs in aerospace. Each program had its own security officer. Shockingly, at least to me, the voice you're hearing is that of my audio transcriber. For 10 years, she's listened to my interviews and written down the secrets of the famous and powerful, from Tom Cruise to Elon Musk. And this is the first time she's called like this.
After listening to my first recordings with Aaliyah Rosa, she wants to let me know that she has actually had her own experiences with Kompromat and sex espionage. We would actually have meetings where the upper management would inform us about it. And the men, who were usually the target, had to sign paperwork indicating, yes, they had been informed about these women, especially for Russia.
I had no idea that prior to this, she'd worked at a company that contracted with the military and that spies like Aaliyah are evidently a well-known threat in the industry. Wow. And it was like part of standard operating procedure. Absolutely. Every program I worked, we talked about it.
I just remember them warning mostly men about women who might approach them when they're traveling on work or traveling out of town. And what were the telltale signs of these people? Oh, if the woman was extremely attractive, definitely. If she was really out of your league type of a woman. And if she came on sexually, too aggressive sexually, or wanted to be alone with you, or wanted to get into your hotel room with you for whatever reason, and to watch you drink, they could drug you, that kind of thing.
In fact, the government was so worried about Kompromat that anyone with a secret sex life was considered a security risk. There were people who openly cheated on their wives that everybody knew, and they lost their clearances.
I asked my transcriber for her thoughts on Aaliyah's story, since she's listened to the recordings so closely. I think it sounds accurate, because it was exactly what we were being warned about. She's incredibly attractive. She's charming. She's smart.
She's manipulative. She's loyal to her country. It all sounds like it worked.
I call Aaliyah after speaking with my transcriber, and Aaliyah has just returned from a session with a new therapist.
How was your therapy session?
Honestly, not really good.
I mean, I don't know. It's really difficult to go through that again. It's so many feelings, so many sensations, which just disgust me so much. I feel really guilty.
Guilty in what way?
I feel like I have done so much bad things in my life, like really bad things. I've done so many things which I never wanted to do. The therapist, she, said that I had to survive, that's why I did it, but it doesn't matter to me. It's just like I feel really guilty.
I ask her more about it. Aaliyah says she was at a friend's birthday and was given a small dose of mushrooms, something she doesn't ordinarily do. This triggered memories that she keeps compartmentalized in her mind. She calls that compartment Pandora's box.
I felt like I saw so many ghosts of those people who were killed, or I did unintentionally, or they were affected by my life or something. I saw them and it was so scary. I felt like I saw even their faces. It's not really pleasant view and it's kind of like maybe I'm going crazy, I don't know.
We talk about PTSD and therapy and decide to take a little time off so that Aaliyah can recover from her experience. She feels that unburdening herself of her secrets will give them less power over her. In the meantime, I tell her about the conversation with my transcriber. So my transcriber called. And we discuss how large this program must have been and how many women must have faced similar traumatic experiences.
You know, Neil, I feel very, very, very big sorrow and very big sadness when I think about these women. I remember my classmates. They all came so young and fresh and beautiful. And then, just in a few months, instead of happy face, instead of smile, I saw sorrow and helpless and nothing else.
I wonder how many women have done this throughout the history and how many women are doing this right now in the whole world, even in the United States.
So, while Aaliyah takes some time off, I decide to take some time to find answers to her questions about the program. Since speaking to my transcriber, I've been wondering similar things. Are there other countries also using sex as a weapon of war? And just how big are these operations?
Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday.
Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Stories about regaining a sense of safety, a handle on reality, after your entire world is flipped upside down. From unbelievable romantic betrayals.
The love that was so real for me was always just a game for him.
To betrayals in your own family.
When I think about my dad, oh, well, he is a sociopath.
Financial betrayal.
This is not even the part where it steals millions of dollars.
And life or death deceptions.
She's practicing how she's going to cry when the police calls her after they kill me.
Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm John Walczak, host of the new podcast, Missing in Arizona. And I'm Robert Fisher, one of the most wanted men in the world.
We cloned his voice using AI.
In 2001, police say I killed my family. First mom, then the kids. And rigged my house to explode.
In a quiet suburb.
This is the Beverly Hills of the valley. Before escaping into the wilderness. There was sleet and hail and snow coming down. They found my wife's SUV. Right on the reservation boundary.
And my dog flew. All I could think of is, you're going to sniper me out of some tree? But not me.
Police believe he is alive and hiding somewhere. For two years. They won't tell you anything. I've traveled the nation. I'm going down in the cave.
Tracking down clues.
Searching for Robert Fisher.
One of the most dangerous fugitives in the world. Do you recognize my voice? Join an exploding house. The hunt. Family annihilation.
Today. And a disappearing act.
Listen to Missing in Arizona every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.
I meet agents and journalists from around the world. And what I find shocks me. First of all. It's not just Russia that does this. It's China.
Chinese intelligence operation on U.
S. soil, targeting American politicians with a female operative.
who had ties to a Democratic congressman.
and intimate relationships with at least two Midwestern mayors.
North Korea.
According to Jiang, North Korea's honey trap plan, established by former leader Kim Jong-il, was to set up foreign dignitaries.
with female spies posing as translators or aides. Pakistan.
They befriended on e-mails and WhatsApp group, et cetera. And they get entrapped, and then they emotionally get entrapped.
Even America, the United Kingdom, and so many others throughout history.
The woman met the soldiers in a pub in Lisbon, a pub frequented by off-duty soldiers from a nearby army base. And it was here that this terribly planned operation began.
In fact, even ancient military writings advise weaponizing this weakness in human nature.
If we go back to two and a half thousand years, one of the ancient military writers said that you should train a martial art warrior to identify and exploit four human weaknesses. They were fear, lust, anger, and greed. And certainly these are all used in sexpionage.
This is David Lewis, a psychologist and author of the book Sexpionage. The Exploitation of Sex by the Soviet Union. I called Dr. Lewis to find out the kind of impact that this type of spycraft has had on political history and why it works so well.
It's always struck me, as a psychologist, very strange that you have people who are immensely powerful, usually highly educated, very wealthy, and yet they throw it all away for the sake of a one-night stand.
Yet it happens over and over again. And if you think that most people would be smart, think again. Here's just one chilling example of a target who's literally, in hiding from the government, throwing all caution to the wind for an attractive woman.
Mordecai Venunu was working as a technician in an Israeli nuclear facility. when he began to have moral misgivings. He gathered evidence, left the country, and told journalists for the first time about the extent of Israel's nuclear weapons program. And then, as he was working with the Times of London and leaking the story, he met someone special. Here he is describing it in his own words, speaking to an interviewer from 60 Minutes Australia.
I bought a cigarette, and I saw an American woman standing there buying us a cigarette. I look at her, she look at me.
You'll notice in this next part some similarities with Aliyah's training, which is that the agent never approaches the target. She gets the target to approach her.
You took the initiative to forgive the colloquialism, to pick up this lady. Yes. You did it. If she had tried to pick me up, then I would have suspected her. But if I took the initiative, I mean I'm not suspecting her.
She was dragging you into her trap. No, I was already in her trap.
After a few dates, she convinced Venunu to join her for a weekend in Rome. Despite being a whistleblower by the Israeli government, Venunu suspected nothing and flew to Rome with her. In the car from the airport, she kissed him passionately all the way to the house, where they'd be staying, evidently to keep him from thinking with his brain.
When I entered the house, the door opened and immediately jumped on me, two people, and one kicked me in the stomach and I collapsed. Another one jumped on me,
another woman came and injected me and then I lost my conscience.
Venunu spent the next 18 years in an Israeli prison, 11 of those years in solitary confinement. And this is just one of many historically significant examples. From the Moon sisters, two Confederate seduction spies who at one point were engaged to 38 Union soldiers, between them, to Ramon Mercator, an agent of Stalin.
in Trotsky's study where he executed the famous Russian revolutionary with an ice pick.
Posing as a Trotskyist, Ramon Mercator, seduced Trotsky's secretary.
Soon he was a frequent visitor.
to Trotsky's villa.
and a familiar face to his security guards.
I don't think people really understand the extent to which sexual aversion has helped shape Western society.
This is historian David Lewis. again. I have a specific question he can answer. How did sexpionage go from a dirty trick that governments use in a moment of desperation, like in the cases we just heard, to what Aliyah and my transcriber have been describing to me. A factory-like training camp that a country uses to churn out sex spies.
We can trace the start of what we might call industrial sexual aversion back to a woman.
who began running Berlin's most in-demand brothel. Then World War II began.
When she thought war was going to be declared after Hitler had come to power in 1933, she tried to flee to England. She was arrested at the border and she was offered a choice. She could either come back and run her brothels for the government as spy centers, or she could go.
to Berlin. Salon Kitty, a notorious house of forbidden pleasures in Berlin under the Nazis. This was organized by a guy called Walton Schillenberg, who was head of SS counter-espionage. Now, this was the first time. the girls used were highly trained.
They had to be aged between 20 and 30.
They were trained on hairdressing and social etiquette, but also on unarmed combat, marksmanship, foreign languages, uniform identification. So they were very professional spies.
This was really the start of the industrialization of sexual aversion. It was certainly a model followed by the KGB after the war where they took control.
Now, were the KGB the first ones to then take women from some who'd never even had a sexual experience before and then train them from there versus using sex workers?
I don't know of any other intelligence agency which had done that to that extent. On the outskirts of Moscow stands the giant training academy of the KGB. Here, the uncles, as they're called in the espionage business, are instructed in how to persuade women to offer sex to foreigners in return for information. These days, the organization is called the FSB. But while the name may have changed, sexual entrapment using young women is still a priority.
Young women, much like Aliyah and her classmates.
And they had trainers in there kind of taught them the ropes and showed them how to behave and really deprived them of their inhibitions. so they were prepared to go with any man, however disagreeable they found him, or however older he was, or indeed however young he was, in order to extract information from them. And they were taught how to behave, naturally, although the situation they were in was, of course, anything but natural.
Hi, it's Andrea Gunning,
host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast.
is expanding.
We are going to be.
releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday.
Each week, you'll hear brand new stories. First-hand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction.
left behind.
Stories about.
regaining a sense of safety,
a handle on reality after your entire world is flipped upside down. From unbelievable romantic betrayals.
The love that was so real for me was always just a game for him.
To betrayals in your own family.
When I think about my dad, oh, well, he is a sociopath.
Financial betrayal.
This is not even the part where he steals millions of dollars.
And life or death deceptions.
She's practicing how she's gonna cry when the police calls her after they kill me.
Listen to Betrayal weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
All I can think of is he's gonna sniper me out of some tree. But not me.
For two years. they won't tell you anything. I've traveled the nation. I'm going down in the cave. tracking down clues.
They were thinking.
that I picked him up and took him somewhere. If you keep asking me this, I'm gonna call the police.
and have you removed. searching for Robert Fisher?
one of the most dangerous fugitives in the world. Do you recognize my voice? Join an exploding house to hunt family annihilation.
today.
in A Disappearing Act.
Listen to Missing in Arizona every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.
As our time off draws to a close and Leah feels ready to continue her story, I find myself deep down the rabbit hole of Russian espionage. I even managed to find FBI agents and contractors who worked to bring down the Russian illegals program. Eleven spies who are working in the US using seduction and other techniques to infiltrate different groups. You did some work with, I think you were saying, with like agents that were still working here?
Turn off the recorder.
Most of the people I reach aren't willing to talk about it on the record. Not just in America, but even more so in Russia, where my sources fear reprisals from Putin. Here's a former Russian intelligence officer who was trained at the same academy that Leah went to speaking through a translator. Have you ever heard of a program like that?
This question. I will not be able to reply to respond to this question due to, let's say, professional secret.
Many of these sources were willing to speak to me off the record, and a few you'll hear from shortly were surprisingly willing to talk openly. And here's what I learned. There are four levels of sexual espionage that are important to know, because they'll help explain the next parts of Leah's story and because they're still going on today.
Level one is the most mild, but it's also the most common. It is everywhere and unknowingly you may have come across it in your own life. It's called наблюдение or surveillance. In American intelligence terms, we call these people eyes and ears.
You know, one of their biggest exports of Russia is beautiful women, and they send out an enormous amount of girls into the world.
This is Ina De Silva, one of the first Russian model agents in New York City during the 1990s.
All these girls were sent out into the world and they were told try to meet important men, try to attach yourself to important men and they would send back information to handlers that you know. this moment I'm dating so-and-so. I've met so-and-so and the handlers would decide if anybody was important enough to really put an effort into by maybe recording them or, you know, they would receive further instructions.
She mentions a well-known Russian model who did this type of work along with her boyfriend, who was also her KGB handler.
If you're really going to do modeling, you do not go Moscow to Washington. They lived in Washington for a year, attending daily cocktail parties at embassies, consulates and stuff like that. It's like a typical thing. It's pretty unbelievable. I mean Germany right now is like a rat's nest with all of this.
German intelligence agency has warned against the risk of an aggressive.
Russian espionage operation. This comes as West ramps up its support for Ukraine. They've all been told to penetrate and influence anybody who has decision-making powers in Germany, you know, regarding meeting military. So I mean the war in Ukraine is also being fought by all these girls that are all over important cities. You know, there's this Russian doll a doll within a doll, within a doll called a matryoshka.
Well.
a lot of these girls. that's really what it's like, unless, like any, you know, national security agencies, any of these countries gets lucky. I think it's very difficult to keep track of these women.
Level 2 is provocatsiya in Russian, or provocation. And someone who is eyes and ears, if they land the right target, can be moved by their handler into this more prestigious position of influence. One example of this type of agent is Maria Butina, who is living in, yes, Washington D.C. and convicted in 2018 of acting as an unregistered foreign agent of Russia.
She definitely was going into these conservative circles, right among mostly the Republican Party, the NRA, these types of places where there is a machismo, and she came in looking sexy, toting a gun, and she used that.
to.
. This is Alex Finley, a former CIA officer who was stationed in Europe and the author of the Victor Caro trilogy of novels about the CIA.
The whole point as an intelligence officer is you have to assess your target. what is it that's going to motivate them or what are their vulnerabilities. She knew and understood. if I go in in short shorts and carrying my gun, that's going to get me closer to them. Now, separately, she did have relationships with a few different political functionaries right within the Republican Party.
She goes on to mention a prominent figure that Maria Boutina had a relationship with. One who ended up pushing many conspiracy theories that may have been planted in his mind by this agent. Because the goal of these agents is not just to spy, but to seduce powerful, vulnerable people and influence their thoughts and behavior to help destabilize a country.
So she knew who to target and she knew how to find the people that were going to have the sympathies that she needed.
to help push.
more and more ideas. So you see, it's not always just a. I'm going to have sex with you. you give me secrets. It can become a bit more complicated.
I asked Alex what she thinks of the statements from Ina De Silva, the model agent, about the large number of low-level Russian agents still operating in the U.
S. And she confirms this terrifying assessment.
We went through this sort of kicking diplomats and everything out over the past few years. right, but those are just the people who are declared. So you have to assume that there's still networks of illegals you know, sort of these sleeper cells who live and live and work among us like normal Americans, but in fact they're Russian agents and then they're assets. I'm sure. I'm sure you have a huge network of them still in the United States, doing both collection and also influence operations.
So what happens when these Russian agents get expelled and go home? The answer they return as military heroes, or more accurately, the modern equivalent of that celebrities.
Butina is on Russian state TV. Chapman became a playboy model, you know. so they get rewarded, these women.
The other spy Ina De Silva is referring to is Anna Chapman, who was arrested and deported as part of the illegals program.
But it gets even darker.
Level 3 is Kompromat. This is journalist Mark Hollingsworth, the author of Agents of Influence how the KGB subverted Western democracies.
The term Kompromat is a Russian term, which means compromising information. and what the KGB and now the FSB Russian Intelligence Service specializing in Kompromat in terms of finding compromising information about Western politicians, diplomats, spies, officials.
Many believe that Putin, who was formerly director of the FSB, rose to power through Kompromat.
Putin is in the intimidation business. When Vladimir Putin met Angela Merkel, he knew her weakness. The German Chancellor was afraid of dogs, so Putin whistled in a black labrador just to intimidate her.
What's interesting about Putin is that there's a strong case to be made that he only became president of Russia in 2000 because of a honey trapping Kompromat operation. What happened was that in 1999 there was a corruption investigation into President Yeltsin's office. Young women were hired to sleep.
So, rather than defend themselves in this corruption investigation, the Yeltsin government decided to set up a honey trap for the prosecutor leading the investigation instead.
And then the FSB leaked the videos to Russian TV stations, and the significance of this is that the FSB intelligence officer who was actually seen delivering the incriminating videos to Russian TV companies and holding press conferences about it, was Putin. And so, basically, the consequence of this honey trapping operation was that it helped Putin become the next president of Russia after Yeltsin. Yeltsin appointed Putin his successor. By 2000. Yeltsin had resigned and Putin was president.
The extremes that the Russian government has gone to get Kompromat even go so far as drugging foreign officials and staging sexual scenes of them while they're incapacitated.
They'll do anything. There were no limits and they would get you drunk or they would poison you, or they would hire women or men.
Of course this type of Kompromat doesn't always work if a target is single or doesn't have sexual secrets or shame. But Kompromat can get much more sophisticated than this. Listen carefully to author David Lewis's explanation of this honey trap and notice how the target is slowly manipulated deeper and deeper into a web he can't get out of.
An American businessman visiting Moscow on a business trip would be hooked up with an attractive woman who he thought he'd just met by chance. She would be very charming. They would go back to his hotel or her hotel, or else they would be walking back to the hotel when she would start to kiss him. She would then rip her clothes and scream rape, whereupon burly police officers would come and arrest him. That was one of the ploys they used.
And he would then be offered freedom in return for some very minor secrets which he knew perfectly well, were completely unimportant. But they were secret documents. But of course that was kind of the bait. He would then be filmed handing over the documents, and they would then blackmail him, not on the sex charge, but because he had committed an act of espionage which was much more serious.
Not only is this incredibly harmful to these men, it's harmful to people who have experienced sexual assault and are not believed.
Lastly, Level 4 is the Love Trap, or as the FSB calls it,
quote,
establishing an operative relationship. The most effective, complex and destructive of these tactics. It's based on a psychological understanding that not everyone responds to blackmail, but human beings will do just about anything for love, and there are men and women around the world in long-term relationships, even marriages to these types of spies.
One example of how this worked is the story of Gabrielle Klein. She was a translator at the U.S. Embassy in East Germany when one day she met a man on the riverbank and began dating him. She also began giving him hundreds of secret documents for what he claimed was a world peace project. It wasn't until he was arrested seven years into the relationship that she learned he'd been a male sex spy, known as a raven or Romeo, the whole time.
Here's journalist Mark Hollingsworth.
It was a very organized strategic operation. It was quite sad because, certainly at the end of the Cold War, these East German spies would break off the relationships and the women were devastated because they thought it was a serious relationship and then they would get into trouble because they had leaked secret documents.
There's one last spy story I studied that shows just how powerful a love trap can be.
It was called the espionage case of the century.
It also became known as a.
sex for secrets marine spy scandal.
of 1987.
It involved a marine guard at.
the American embassy in Moscow, Clayton Lone.
Tree, who traded secrets for.
love with the Russian Sergeant. Clayton Lone Tree was a marine stationed as a guard at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, where he began dating a Russian embassy employee who was, of course, a swallow. He fell in love and was soon giving her plans to U.S. embassies, as well as the names and identities of U.S.
agents in the Soviet Union. He was eventually caught and arrested, becoming the first marine convicted of spying against the United States. After serving some seven years in prison and finding out about the extent of his betrayal, here's what he told an interviewer when asked about his affair with the Russian spy.
What we had back then was genuine.
I respect her. I forgive her.
And this is the danger of playing with the fourth and darkest level of sex espionage, because love is a lot more powerful, persuasive, and longer lasting than sex.
You'll notice that one thing is missing from all this research into the methods and consequences of sex espionage. The perspective of the agents themselves, the swallows and ravens. That's because there wasn't a single seducer spy I could find prior to this podcast who had ever publicly gone on the record and revealed the inner workings of this training and these missions. We only know the stories of their victims. But let's not forget, before we continue with Aaliyah's story, that the agents themselves, possibly without a single exception, are victims as well.
Here's David Lewis. again with the case of the Soviet spy, Gudrun Heidel, who broke the cardinal rule of the love trap. She developed genuine feelings for her target.
She was under orders to seduce an American officer who had access to native secrets. Then she made a mistake, the worst mistake a swallower could ever make. She actually fell in love with her target.
She wouldn't put pressure on him because she feared it might end the relationship. And her bosses suspected she's changed sides, so they had her terminated with extreme prejudice.
If your body is disposable to the state, so too is your life if you decide you want your body back. This, in the end, is what I learned from my research. No person wins when sex and love are used as weapons of war. Everyone loses.
And this is exactly what Aaliyah Rosa discovered when she made the same critical mistake and fell in love with one of her targets. The consequences for her would be even worse than death.
So when the criminals find out that I was a mole, they put their back into my head. They drove me to the forest. They beat me up. They did terrible things.
But that moment, when I was ready to be dead, he called them and he gave the order to bring me back to him.
This would come much later in Aaliyah's career, after being pulled deeper and deeper into a world from which there were few escapes besides death, whether at the hands of your enemy, your own government, or yourself.
Aaliyah returns in Episode 6, available now on Apple Podcasts or wherever. you get your podcasts. For full credits, check out our show notes.
Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, the host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand-new stories,
firsthand accounts.
of shocking deception, broken trust,
and the trail of destruction.
left behind.
Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Do you recognize my voice?
Listen to Missing in Arizona every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.
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