Whether for real-world CIA handlers or fictional 007s, there is no tactic in spycraft more enduring than the honeypot. And so in the Old Testament, we saw the Philistines deploy Delilah's feminine wiles to undermine Samson, and in the 1980s, we had Clayton Lonetree, the U.S. Marine blackmailed at his Moscow post by a beautiful Soviet. And now we have Maria Butina, allegedly the latest in a long history of double-crossing women whose success depends entirely on how much more they understand men than their marks understand women.

Maria Butina in a photo from her Facebook page. Credit:Facebook

Spend an hour or three scrolling through Butina's prodigious social media presence and certain themes emerge. Her Instagram is a series of strategic fitness selfies - a sculpted deltoid, a Lycra'd thigh - showcasing both strength and femininity. In photos snapped outside the gym, her hair is long and styled. She cooked homey-looking recipes: baked chicken, scrambled eggs. She shared spiritually-tinged aphorisms: "Faith makes all things possible. Love makes them easy." She posted dog-whistle appeals to lonely men: "I want to love someone whose heart has been broken, so that he knows exactly how it feels and won't break mine."

Maria Butina in an image from her Facebook page. Credit:Facebook

And she posted guns. In picture after picture, Butina holds firearms of all shapes and sizes. Here, she brandishes a handgun and wears a cowboy hat. There, she crouches in the snow, leaning a rifle over a dead boar. Do wingtipped eyeliner and bombshell-red lipstick pair well with semi-automatic weapons? On Maria Butina's Facebook feed they do.