It’s hard for me to believe that Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. couldn’t figure out that the Russians they were meeting with might have had ulterior motives. I had an experience some years back that demonstrates how espionage recruitment works.
I was working on a project that was partly classified. My work was mostly unclassified. It was long enough ago that scientists exchanged reprints of their articles printed (nicely, by the journal publisher) on paper.
I loved getting reprint requests. International stamps on postcards, sometimes letters. One of them was from a Chinese institute, a complimentary letter with a lovely stamp on the envelope. A bit nicer than usual, but not extraordinary. So I sent the reprints.
They sent back another letter and some of their reprints. We should talk about our mutual interests. Perhaps I could even visit their laboratory. At that time, not many Americans were visiting China. It was intriguing and potentially a status point at work.
The project had a fair bit of visibility, and other governments were sending letters of interest in collaboration. One government offered to send two post-docs, all expenses paid. We had a good laugh about that. There wasn’t an institutional training program about recognizing recruitment, though.
An international meeting was coming up that they and I planned to go to. We could meet there. The Chinese interest began to seem more than normal collegiality.
I went to the meeting in Hawaii. They didn’t show up. I was relieved. I’ll never know for sure if they were trying to recruit me. That’s the point – the interest seems to be genuine, and they push a little bit and then a little more until you are giving them more information than you should.
Later it turned out that two people working on that project did give too much information to the Chinese.