![]() If court records hadn't revealed Butina to be flesh and blood, I would have looked at her Facebook feed and assumed she was a bot or a scammer, one of those lovely women who sends a friend request, says you're cute, then asks you to wire her $5000. In her photos she is almost always alone, like a Realtor's open house left purposefully devoid of furniture so prospective buyers could imagine themselves living there. If there were boyfriends in her life, or dates, or parties or nightclubs, they weren't a part of her online personality. Furthermore, honeypots are resources that have. Maria Butina is an NRA Cool Girl, a unicorn dream of what a man who loved guns might be seeking in a woman to love him. A honeypot is a security resource whose value lies in being probed, attacked, or compromised (Spitzner, 2002). The common thread, Flynn writes: a Cool Girl is "basically the girl who likes everything he likes and doesn't ever complain." Cool Girls might package themselves in different formats for different types of guys. The concept was a major theme in Flynn's novel, Gone Girl - which is itself essentially a deep dive into the relationship equivalent of spycraft: the personas some women adopt in order to please men, and the boyfriends who buy into it. While Cold War buffs spent the past week talking about how Butina was reminiscent of Jennifer Lawrence in Red Sparrow or Keri Russell in The Americans, the pop-culture reference I kept thinking of was author Gillian Flynn's description of a "Cool Girl." Whether or not Butina is actually a Russian spy, what becomes clear is that she was very good at being an American fantasy.
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