David McCloskey Sunday Times bestselling spy novelist and former CIA analyst who wrote for the President's Daily Brief and served on field rotations across the Middle East.

“Regardless of whether it was a honey trap, at some point the MSS has a massive amount of leverage over Jensen Huang indirectly because he's having an affair with Alice. … The Chinese MSS has a very, very valuable secret that it has collected on Jensen Huang, and that is that he is having an affair.”

The Rest Is Classified · Geopolitics & World Affairs · November 2026

Context

The hosts were debating whether the Nvidia CEO was the target of a classic honey trap or whether recruitment came after the relationship began. McCloskey argues the label doesn't matter, because China's Ministry of State Security holds leverage either way.

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Transcript

The Rest Is Classified Around 32:18 into the episode

David McCloskey

…I actually think that's probably not how it happened. I think what's much more likely is that she was already close to him, potentially already engaged in a romantic relationship with him. And then they approaches and says, you could be helpful to us. Then you're off to the races. It's

Gordon Corera

different from your classic idea of a honey trap. Someone put in someone's path, you know, who is already an agent to kind of seduce them and build a relationship, which we've seen with the Russians, the East Germans, lots of other cases, and with the Chinese, I think, at points.

David McCloskey

Regardless of whether it was a honey trap, at some point, the MSS has a massive amount of leverage over Jensen Huang indirectly because he's having an affair with Alice. So whether the MSS sort of orchestrates this as a honey trap operation or whether they just stumble upon it and decide to take advantage of it, the end result is the same, which is that, and this is why I think the board, the NVIDIA board sort of downplaying the national security importance of this, is a bit ludicrous because at the end of the day, the Chinese MSS has a very, very valuable secret that it has collected on Jensen Huang, and that is that he is having an affair.

Gordon Corera

Compromat in the Russian terms.

David McCloskey

They do, effectively. Now, how they used it, if they used it, still unclear. But the point is, is that Chinese intelligence had this guy over a barrel.

Gordon Corera

Yeah. And it is worth touching on MegaSpeed, the company that she's working for, because there's a kind of murky element to that as to the extent to which that is acting on behalf of the Chinese state or it's a normal company. And I think that is interesting as well, isn't it? I mean, I do like the…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from The Rest Is Classified

“This is not espionage in the sense of going after deep intellectual property of a company, for instance, or classic national security secrets. It's about understanding the commercial direction and relationships of NVIDIA: who's it selling chips to, who might it be selling chips to, but also understanding Jensen himself and what his relationship with Donald Trump is, what he's lobbying for.” — Gordon Corera, The Rest Is Classified

“Is he ever going to have credibility again as he lobbies to loosen, to sell more chips to China? He's completely had his legs kicked out from underneath him by these leaks. … Is there a political faction inside the White House or inside the government, China hawks, that don't want the Chinese to have access to this stuff and want to take Jensen down? And leaking this is a great way to do that.” — David McCloskey, The Rest Is Classified