The CIA and KGB Both Tried to Blackmail This World Leader With Sex Tapes. One had a real video, the other decided to make a fake. CIA even used Marilyn Monroe for their purposes.

Knowing Sukarno's weakness for women, the CIA even tried to use Marilyn Monroe for their purposes.

Additional connection to JFK

During the filming of the movie "Bus Stop" in 1956, Monroe met with the President of Indonesia. Initially, she had no idea who he was—she simply called him Prince Sukarno. However, Marilyn and the Indonesian president developed a mutual affection. "The evening was drawing to a close, and they kept disappearing somewhere," recalled "Bus Stop" director Joshua Logan. "The atmosphere was, to put it mildly, very sexual. I think they arranged to meet later." Many years later, Sukarno told his biographer that Marilyn, who also lived in Beverly Hills (where the reception was held), called him in his room and requested a private meeting.

....Sources suggest that the KGB was cooking up stories about Sukarno and flight attendants as far back as 1957 or 1958. Regardless of the timing, the KGB misread a crucial aspect of Sukarno’s sexual proclivities — he never tried to hide those tendencies.

If anything, he flaunted them.

Sukarno openly supported polygamy, Elizabeth Martyn explained in The Women’s Movement in Postcolonial Indonesia. He took on four “official” wives while maintaining a “de facto” marriage with a fifth wife. And Sukarno once bragged to a U.S. diplomat that he was “a very physical man who needed sex every day,” and shocked his government hosts in Washington when he demanded they provide him with call girls during a visit, according to Peter Arnett’s Live From the Battlefield.

Given Sukarno’s boasts, the KGB shouldn’t have been too surprised that its efforts to blackmail him went astray. “When the Russians later confronted him with a film of the lurid encounter, Sukarno was apparently delighted,” Lister wrote.

“Legend has it he even asked for extra copies.”

The CIA was equally slow in learning this lesson. Propaganda agents continued spreading the rumor of the Soviets blackmailing Sukarno with a sex tape. Meanwhile, the agency pushed forward with the paramilitary operation, despite Wisner’s warnings.

Joseph Burkholder Smith, who led CIA operations in Indonesia from 1956–1958, wrote in his memoirs. “[Sukarno’s alleged dalliances with flight attendants] appeared in the press around the world,

The general line of thinking at the CIA seemed to be that if the sexy spy story had inspired the rebellion to some extent, then the spies just needed a bigger, sexier story to kick off a successful revolution. And what better way to tell a story than with visual aids?

So they, too, decided to make their own sex tape, starring Sukarno. Sort of.

“A substantial effort was made to come up with a pornographic film or at least some still photographs that could pass for Sukarno and his Russian girlfriend engaged in ‘his favorite activity,” Blum wrote. “When scrutiny of available porno films (supplied by the Chief of Police of Los Angeles) failed to turn up a couple who could pass for Sukarno (dark and bald) and a beautiful blonde Russian woman, the CIA undertook to produce its own films.”

This suggests the CIA had somehow heard about the Soviet films, but not that they were a complete bust. Nonetheless, as agents failed to find lookalikes in available films, they also failed to find an actor who could stand in for Sukarno.

So the CIA decided to make “a full-face mask of the Indonesian leader,” Blum wrote. The mask would then be sent to Los Angeles “where the police were to pay some porno-film actor to wear it during his big scene.”

Presumably, there were no close ups. However, by all accounts, a film was produced. It’s just the details that are still a matter of debate.

In The CIA’s Black Ops: Covert Action, Foreign Policy, and Democracy, John Jacob Nutter contends that the film, titled Happy Days, was produced with the actor wearing a mask. Blum, on the other hand, agreed on the title but alleged that the film was made by Robert Maheu, “former FBI agent and intimate of Howard Hughes,” at a later date using a Sukarno lookalike.

https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-cia-and-kgb-tried-to-blackmail-this-world-leader-with-sex-tapes-927fc7ddbd48