The History of the Honey Trap

[Paul Rigby]

The Washington Daily News, 28* June 1963, p.13

Now, Speaking of Spies

By Richard Starnes

New York – The only professional spy I ever knew for what he was looked as if he had barely enough intellect to match wits with a boll weevil and escape with a bale an acre.

Except for bushy eyebrows he was as ordinary a mortal as the chap who reads the electric meter at Crestfallen Manor. (Say, you don’t think…?) But, nondescript or not, this gent was an ordained spy in the pay of his government.

I have bumped into other mysterious chaps whom I assumed to be in the same dodge, but about them I was never sure. The guy with the awning eyebrows, about whom I knew. Sad to say, I have never run afoul of one of the toothsome girl spy types so much in the newspapers nowadays.

There was one occasion, on Waterloo Bridge in London, in time of war, when a fetching young creature of the female persuasion besought some information from me. What she wanted to know was whether I had a five-pound note on me.

I considered the question a bit cheeky, to be honest, and I doubted either the German Secret Service or the British MI-5 were patiently popping their knuckles while they waited for the answer to it.

Anyway, and quite unlike the things you read in books, this chance encounter never ripened into friendship. I asked her in turn if she could direct me to Westminster Abbey, and she slithered off into the blackout, muttering about how it was a “disgrice” how they were sending children off to war these days.

But in all my bashing about in the intrigue-ridden Middle East, the war-torn Far East, the tinderbox capitals of Europe, nary a time has any foreign power pointed some nubile lady of easy virtue at me in an attempt to wrest secrets from me. You’d think I had the pimples. I mean, everybody who had an hour to kill between planes in London seems to have found his way to Christine Roundheel’s flat, but not me.

And now the fabricants of newspaper sensations of questionable authenticity seem to be trying to tell us that various seedy lads in and around the United Nations have been maintaining a compendium of concubines trained in all manner of deviltry designed to elicit secrets from gents. Well, I hang about there a bit, but not once has any lavishly endowed lady skewered me on a false eyelash. Can it be my roll-on deoderant rolls off prematurely?

Sex has a great deal that might be said in its behalf, but as a preliminary to a seminar on performance data of nuclear submarines it has obvious shortcomings. The girl might ask the proper questions, but the answers she’s likely to get will go something like, “Atomic? Kid, you’re sensational!”

Frankly I’m sorry to sprag this lovely legend. It has kept many a young man’s morale viable under difficult circumstances. You’re stuck in some pestilential cesspool 200 miles from the nearest airstrip, see? And you’re drinking your solitary whiskey in a mean pub where ice is regarded as a typical lie coughed up by Hollywood. Then suddenly the beaded curtains part and there she is, a choice morsel in a Theda Bara haircut and not much else.

It never happens, but it’s wonderful to think about.

*Bit ropey on the precise date, as I can't read my own handwriting.