Espionage ISI Honey Traps

Pakistan’s intelligence agency uses new techniques and an old but effective strategy, deploying online honey traps to get indian armed forces personnel to lower their guard and reveal state secrets

- Kiran D. Tare

Sometime in mid-2020, Krunal Kumar Baria received a Facebook friend request. It was from Sidra Khan, a pretty lady dressed in a salwar kameez who seemed to be in her mid-20s. Baria, posted with the Indian Army’s IT cell in Ferozepur cantonment, didn’t suspect anything amiss. They exchanged phone numbers—she had three, two Pakistani and one Indian.

They started chatting, moved on to WhatsApp calls and gradually things became more intimate. They had phone sex. And soon Kumar was telling Sidra all that she wanted to know.

On October 23, over a year and a-half later, a team from the Punjab Police’s special operation cell, Amritsar, arrested Baria on charges of leaking confidential information. ‘Sidra’ is what India’s military intelligence calls a Pakistani Intelligence Operative (PIO). PIOs work for the InterServices Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency. Sidra had paid Baria Rs 10,000 for information on movements within the Ferozepur cantonment, but sex was her primary tool to extract information.

Entrapment is one of the oldest tricks in espionage tradecraft. In his Arthashastra written over 2,000 years ago, Kautilya explained how ‘stree charas’ (female spies) gathered information for the Mauryan state, which also used prostitutes to elicit information.

The smartphone and social media boom have made the job of new-age spies that much easier. Over the past few months, Indian military counterintelligence teams have uncovered a well-oiled social media entrapment machinery. The investigation has revealed that PIOs had planted malware in the computers of many military personnel to compromise larger volumes of information. In some cases, the PIO had also blackmailed the victim to make him fall in line.