A digital-age spy thriller caromed through the Twitterverse over the past week. And now that some of the story has come to light, one central question remains unresolved: Who, if anyone, was @PrimorisEra working for?

PrimorisEra was the Twitter handle of a variously identified woman who purported to be a player in U.S. national security matters. She -- or at least, her bikini-clad avatar -- was also a looker, and seemingly unusually eager to ply her attractiveness -- as well as her fondness for missiles -- in the defense-oriented corners of the Twitterverse.

However, the increasingly contradictory claims she posted to her many accounts soon earned her a less admiring sort of attention, and once a few other national-security tweeters cast suspicion on her possible motivations, PrimorisEra suddenly tried to disappear. Her Facebook account went dark, as did her logins on various other discussion boards and social-media outlets where she posted content under numerous digital aliases.

And this being Washington, the whole mysterious disappearing act fueled further speculation. Was PrimorisEra a "honeypot"--in the vein of deported Russian spy Anna Chapman--seeking to use her social-media charms to solicit national security information from drooling defense geeks? Was she a government agent or contractor out to test vulnerabilities in U.S. national security information systems--or one who got carried away with her avatar's fantasy powers as a covert agent? Or was she just a fraud and wanna-be? Or was she all of the above?

Wired's Spencer Ackerman investigates the curious case of PrimorisEra. As Ackerman explains, PrimorisEra beat her hasty retreat from the social media world after a female Defense Department contractor used her own Twitter account to publicly charge her with being an information-seeking honeypot -- or honey-bot, as the case may be. Ackerman's reconstruction of the whole odd saga bears quoting at length: