Beyond Jensen Huang: Spy cases involving missiles, moles and fatal romances
As Nvidia is looking into allegations involving a possible Chinese spy, CEO Jensen Huang has come clean about his affair. Prior investigations peered into the homes of individuals entrusted with sensitive information, as well as missile labs and embassy security posts.
‘I was unfaithful to my wife,’ the Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang acknowledged in a statement published on Sunday. He apologised to his family and colleagues and pledged to cooperate with the investigation that now has a national security dimension.
The New York Times reported that the CEO was said to be in a romantic relationship with a former executive at Singapore-based Nvidia customer Megaspeed, identifying them as Alice Huang.
According to the NYT report, the woman was an asset of China’s Ministry of State Security, and the intelligence agency’s goal was to gain knowledge about AI chips manufactured in the US and to persuade the company to sell China its most cutting-edge chips.
In turn, Nvidia’s board said it currently has no reason to believe national security or company secrets were compromised. Independent directors and outside lawyers will investigate the reports of foreign intelligence targeting.
Whatever the internal probe would bring, this is by far not the first case of state or corporate secrets being traded for a reward as old as time.
- Pradeep Kurulkar and his 'Zara'
- Christine Fang’s political contacts
- East German 'Romeo' agent
- US Marine and 'Uncle Sasha'
- Mordechai Vanunu's Rome trip
The side story: China weighs letting ByteDance and Alibaba buy new Nvidia chips
Pradeep Kurulkar and his ‘Zara’
In 2023, Indian defence scientist Pradeep Kurulkar was arrested after investigators alleged he shared sensitive information with a person posing as ‘Zara Dasgupta’, a software engineer based in London.
The chargesheet, cited by local media, said the scientist was passing data on Indian missiles and drones to a female Pakistani intelligence operative. His trial began in July 2026, with Kurulkar insisting that the information in question was already available in the public domain.
Christine Fang’s political contacts
A 2020 investigation by Axios revealed that suspected Chinese operative Christine Fang developed political access partly through alleged sexual or romantic relationships with two unnamed Midwestern mayors. Her contacts included then-Conservative Eric Swalwell, whose campaign she helped fundraise for, according to Forbes.
An affair with Swalwell has not been established because he ended contact after an FBI briefing, and a separate inquiry by the House Ethics Committee was closed in 2023 without taking any further action.
Read more: US says DeepSeek trained AI model on restricted Nvidia Blackwell chips
East German ‘Romeo’ agent
Gabriele Gast, an employee of West Germany’s intelligence agency, the BND, has been caught passing her own country’s secrets to the man she loved. By the time she joined the service in the early 1970s, Gast was already on the books of the rival East Germany’s Ministry for State Security, better known as Stasi.
While travelling to East Germany, Gast met and fell in love with a Stasi operative named Karl-Heinz Schneider, who was nicknamed ‘Romeo agent’ by Spiegel magazine. Gast’s job allowed her to have access to top-secret documents and report on the most sensitive developments inside the West German government.
In 1991, a Munich court sentenced Gast to six years and nine months in prison, concluding that she had spied out of love rather than for money.
US Marine and ‘Uncle Sasha’
Clayton Lonetree, a Marine Corps Security Guard, began a relationship with a locally hired Soviet employee, Violetta Seina, while serving at the US embassy in Moscow in the early 1980s.
According to the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, Seina introduced Lonetree to a supposed relative, ‘Uncle Sasha’, who turned out to be a KGB officer. The Marine would leak secret information to his Soviet handlers, including US embassy plans.
Convicted in 1987 and initially sentenced to 30 years, he received sentence reductions and was released in 1996.
Mordechai Vanunu’s Rome trip
Mordechai Vanunu was an Israeli nuclear technician who helped expose his country’s secret nuclear weapons programme. In 1986, he handed over to The Sunday Times photographs and information from the Dimona nuclear facility where he had worked.
While in London, Vanunu met a woman who called herself ‘Cindy’ (her real name was Cheryl Bentov) and persuaded him to go to Rome. He found out that she was Mossad agent who was instrumental in helping Israeli operatives seize him in Italy and take him to Israel. Vanunu was convicted of treason and espionage and spent 18 years in prison, according to The Times of Israel.
