You have to admire Alice Huang, says Sean Thomas in The Spectator. By ensnaring Nvidia founder Jensen Huang, she may have pulled off the “most valuable honey trap” in history. It’s a subtle business. Even the most “spectrum-bound” techie would be suspicious of a supremely beautiful woman, who just happens to hail from a superpower rival, suddenly taking an interest in their work. What’s needed is not a pouting 22-year-old but Alice Huang: sophisticated, elegant, about the right age (younger, but nothing weird) and in a senior role at the biggest buyer of Nvidia chips in southeast Asia. She laughs at his jokes, appreciates fine wine, orders another squillion dollars’ worth of processors… “the trap neatly shuts”.

This is something expert honey-trappers have long appreciated – it’s all about selecting the correct bait. The KGB’s seductresses were called “swallows” and they worked from a “swallow’s nest” – two adjoining rooms, one for the tryst, one for the camera crew. To snare Maurice Dejean, Charles de Gaulle’s ambassador to Moscow, the Soviet spy agency deployed more than a hundred officers and agents, including a French-speaking divorcee and a beautiful film actress. Sometimes it backfired: when the KGB enticed Indonesia’s President Sukarno into a room full of air hostesses and then confronted him with the footage, he asked for copies to show his mates. The supreme craftsman was East German spymaster Markus Wolf, who noticed that 1950s Bonn was full of lonely secretaries with access to state secrets. His carefully chosen “Romeos” weren’t matinee idols but well-mannered, attentive, kind: the sort of men who would listen to a lonely secretary in boring Bonn. It was a genius move. “Lust is a transient thing. Love will have you photocopying documents for 20 years.”

🕵🏻‍♂️🍆 A friend of mine was once posted to a foreign capital so infamous for its extreme foreign intelligence threat, says Jeremy Dicker in International Intrigue, that the embassy briefing basically boiled down to: “every room is wired, every driver is listening and every suitor is a honey trap”. Undeterred, my (single) pal then spent the first week strolling around his new, “thoroughly compromised” flat loudly saying: “Gosh, I sure hope the local spooks don’t find out my fatal weakness for blondes.”

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THE WATER TOWER This former water tower in Lambeth, southeast London, dates back to the 1870s and has been transformed into a spectacular private residence, says Robb Report. Bedrooms, most of which have their own bathrooms, are positioned on six of the eight floors (the fourth floor is home to a dressing room), while a two-storey glass-and-steel extension contains an open-plan kitchen and dining room on one level and a living room on the second. The eighth floor is made up of a large reception room with panoramic views over London, and there’s a roof terrace also offering views across the city. Elephant & Castle Underground Station is an eight-minute walk. £2.5m. Click here to see the listing.

As lethal drones pierce the skies above Ukraine, says Antonia Langford in The Telegraph, fighting is increasingly being driven underground. Ukraine’s Operation Veles, a recent covert counter-offensive in which more than 100 Russian soldiers were killed and 30 captured, was conducted almost entirely in a network of subterranean, decommissioned gas pipelines below Kharkiv. Troops get around either by crawling through the filthy pipelines, which are just 1.2 metres in diameter, or on makeshift buggies nicknamed the “Kupyansk metro”. All that separate the Ukrainians from the Russians further along the pipeline are flimsy barricades of sandbags, and even the slightest whisper of movement can be heard by the enemy. One 22-year-old commander recalls lying between the corpses of three Russian soldiers for 24 hours in the pitch black, unable to make a sound for fear of being killed.

Life down there is “hell”. Soldiers spend as long as 45 days underground at a time, enduring the rancid smell of natural gas, chemicals, corpses and human waste. Many repeatedly vomit, develop skin damage and suffer from gruesome infections. A 27-year-old combat medic, who has done two rotations in the pipes lasting 23 and 43 days, treats the fast-developing medical emergencies with only torches for light. On one occasion, he himself passed out after dragging a wounded comrade 100 metres to a makeshift medical point. As soon as he had been brought around with a hit of oxygen, he was back to work. Yet as harrowing as the conditions are, many prefer the tunnels to the above-ground “kill zone” where troops are endlessly stalked by deadly drones. “It’s damp, it’s dark, it reeks,” says one 29-year-old soldier. “But I felt safer there.”

“If you agree with me on nine out of 12 issues, vote for me. If you agree with me on 12 out of 12 issues, see a psychiatrist.”
Former New York Mayor Ed Koch

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