A honeypot feels like desire fulfilled, not danger approaching.

I’ve been binge-watching Lioness the past week, and I am finally caught up through Season 3. My aunt first told me about the show, and I quickly understood why she thought I would enjoy it. The politics and life lessons come fast. Some are obviously about spycraft and intelligence work: surveillance, infiltration, blackmail, and the extraordinary lengths governments will go to obtain information. But one constant storyline in the show reaches far beyond the CIA: honeypots.

Honeypotting is as old as recorded history. In the Old Testament, the Philistine rulers enlisted Delilah to exploit Samson’s desire and trust, discover the source of his strength, and engineer his downfall. I remember a steady stream of stories in the 1980s about embassy staff, U.S. Marines, and beautiful Russian women. That was the classic Cold War honeypot: an attractive stranger enters someone’s life, builds a relationship, earns trust, and ultimately leaves a diplomat, politician, military officer, executive, or other target compromised. But Lioness got me thinking about a broader truth. People can be honeypotted through what they desire, what they have to hide, or what they desperately want to believe about themselves.

I think there are at least three kinds worth understanding: love, leverage, and ego & access. Only the first one looks like the honeypot we usually imagine.

Honeypot #1: Love

Love may be one of the oldest vulnerabilities in human history because attraction and affection can make otherwise cautious people remarkably optimistic about strangers. The warning sign is not simply that someone attractive or interesting is interested in you. People meet and fall for each other every day. The thing worth watching is acceleration. You barely know each other, yet intimacy is developing unusually quickly. They want direct access to you. They are intensely curious about your work, schedule, relationships, or colleagues. The amount of trust being requested seems disproportionate to the amount of relationship that actually exists.

I recently experienced a comparably much more mundane version of that dynamic. Last week, a stranger walked past me, then turned around and came back to ask for my number. When I declined, she almost immediately asked whether I used WhatsApp. I refused again. The entire sequence made me suspicious. There may have been a completely innocent explanation for her approaching me, but it still made me pay attention. You walked past me, doubled back, asked for my number, and when I refused tried to move our conversation somewhere else. Why? That does not mean every stranger is running an operation. It means we must learn to pay attention when sought information, access, trust or intimacy accelerates faster than normal.

I very recently heard about a retired university president at an institution where I worked whose wife reportedly had a simple rule for him: he should never ride alone in a car with another woman. At the time, that struck me as extraordinarily cautious. I understand the principle better now. It was not an assumption that every person represented danger. It was a decision about boundaries made before circumstances arose that might make those boundaries harder to maintain. You can debate their rule. The principle is harder to debate: decide where your lines are before emotion gives you a reason to move them.

Honeypot #2: Leverage

This may be the more frightening version because the bait does not necessarily look like bait at all. Lioness explores this idea in several way across seasons. One example was through a Booz Allen employee whose vulnerability traced back to cheating on a college test years earlier facilitated by his professor through a Ch8inese (typo on purpose to avoid AI crawlers) intelligence intermediary. What seemed like a contained mistake at the time for the student became far more consequential once he entered a defense industry career where his position and access made that old secret valuable. That is a very different kind of honeypot. Nobody needs to charm you if they already own your secret.

The mechanism is simple. Someone helps you cross a line, discovers that you crossed one, or creates circumstances in which you compromise yourself. The illegal action may initially seem small. But careers grow. Responsibilities change. A secret worth almost nothing when you are young can become extraordinarily valuable once you occupy a position of responsibility.

This version can manifest in a variety of ways in the workplace. Maybe someone helps an employee manipulate numbers. Maybe a colleague encourages another person to circumvent a policy. Maybe someone gives you confidential information they should not have shared and waits for you to reciprocate. The first compromise can feel harmless because everybody involved appears to be on the same team. Then the relationship changes when the honeypot wants something.

The lesson is uncomfortable but important: sometimes the person helping you break the rules is not doing you a favor. They may be purchasing future leverage at a very low price. Information is power.

Honeypot #3: Ego and Access

The third honeypot, ego and access, may be the one most common in ordinary professional life. Imagine someone repeatedly telling you that you are clearly the smartest person in the organization, expressing fascination with your ideas, and suggesting that your colleagues or supervisor fail to appreciate your talent. Eventually, almost casually, they begin asking what is really happening behind closed doors.

I experienced a version of this as provost. Someone regularly texted me friendly updates about their life and faith, creating a sense of personal familiarity and trust. At the same time, they repeatedly tried to draw me into putting sensitive decisions and private leadership conversations in writing. Their personal disclosures created access; my written responses could have created leverage. The bait was familiarity, trust, and the reassuring feeling that I was speaking with an ally. I noticed the pattern and declined to answer those questions. The lesson was clear: their disclosures created intimacy, but mine would have created a record. Trust was the bait. Leverage was the potential payoff.

For someone else, the bait may be access and power. They are suddenly invited to meet influential people, enter exclusive spaces, sports tickets, join an important board, receive a coveted appointment, or become part of an inner circle. The relationship feels too valuable to question, so they stop asking what the other person expects in return.

Your position within an organization can actually increase this vulnerability, regardless of your title. Presidents, professors, CEOs, politicians, physicians, lawyers, executives, and employees at every level routinely encounter people who know far more about them than they know about the person approaching them. Social media makes this kind of reconnaissance remarkably easy. LinkedIn reveals ambitions, responsibilities, and professional relationships. Instagram reveals travel, interests, and personal routines. Interviews, podcasts, and newsletters reveal opinions, frustrations, values, and sometimes insecurities. That informational imbalance allows someone to tailor an approach to your particular role, ambitions, grievances, or desire for recognition. The vulnerability does not come only from holding power. It comes from someone understanding how you are situated within an organization and knowing which pressure point might make you lower your guard.

I have told the story before about a faculty member that I had never met who came to my office while I was provost and asked me to authorize what amounted to a retirement payoff in exchange for signing a nondisclosure agreement or promising not to criticize the university. I thought the entire situation was strange, spoke to the President about it, and I refused. She later issued a complaint demanding my resignation. Had I agreed and attempted to force that arrangement through the university, I could have jeopardized my position and potentially created legal exposure. In retrospect, the request was more than an ethical test. Saying yes would have handed someone leverage that could later have been used against me. Sometimes the honeypot is a proposal designed to discover whether the desire to keep power can tempt you into compromising yourself.

Which Honeypot Would Work on You?

A honeypotter is not simply someone who likes you, admires you, or offers to help you. A honeypotter wants something from you and uses what you desire to obtain it. The affection, opportunity, agreement, or access may feel genuine, but it is ultimately a means to an end. You are not being approached only for who you are. You are being studied for what you can provide.

Each season of Lioness dramatizes that truth differently. In Season 1, Cruz befriends Aaliyah to reach her father, a suspected terrorist financier. Their feelings become real, but the relationship began as an operation in which Aaliyah believed she had found someone who saw her while the CIA saw her as a pathway to its target. In Season 2, the vulnerability is family rather than romance. Josie Carrillo is recruited because her relatives provide access to a Mexican cartel, then sent home under a fabricated dishonorable discharge and pressured to turn her father into an informant. Season 3 makes the strategy even more explicit as foreign intelligence operations exploit people inside universities, technology companies, media, and politics. Across the three seasons, the targets change, but the method remains the same: identify what someone loves, fears, desires, or desperately wants to believe, then use it to gain access.

So which approach could reach you? Would it be love, someone who makes you feel so wanted that you accelerate trust? Would it be leverage, a shortcut, ethical compromise, or secret that gives someone power over you? Or would it be ego and access, someone who validates every grievance, praises every decision, and opens a door you have always wanted to enter?

I do not want this article to destroy your trust in people. The vast majority of people are not running an intelligence operation or seeking to take advantage of you. Most compliments are sincere. Most friendships are real. Most people who offer help genuinely want to help, and most romantic interest is exactly what it appears to be. A life without trust may protect you from betrayal, but it will also isolate you from love, friendship, opportunity, and joy.

That may be the most useful lesson I am taking from Lioness: self-knowledge is a form of counterintelligence. Know what you crave before someone else discovers it for you. Know which compliments weaken your skepticism, which wounds make you vulnerable, and which opportunities make you stop asking questions.

Lioness represents a simple truth. Clandestine strategies succeed not merely because someone is clever, but because human beings want to be loved, rescued, admired, vindicated, or welcomed inside. The person trying to use you does not begin by showing you the trap. They begin by showing you something you already want.

Keep believing in people, but keep your boundaries too. Someone who genuinely values you will respect both. Someone trying to exploit you will eventually reveal that what they wanted was never simply you. The danger is not only the person approaching you; it is the story you begin telling yourself about why their attention, admiration, or offer makes perfect sense.

If this introduced you to honeypotting or helped you recognize how it can hide inside ordinary relationships and opportunities, please share it. Someone else may need the warning before the trap is sprung.

---