Dirty tricks and dirty flicks: how the CIA tried to topple a government with a sex tape
Most spy stories are bullshit. Whether they feature MI5, MI6, the KGB, the CIA or any other intimidating-sounding acronym you care to throw in the conversation, they are pretty much always a fantasy, and not just in the way you think.
Of course a James Bond or Jason Bourne flick is a lark. A power fantasy where movie stars quip, angst and flirt with starlets while kung-fu kicking bad guys and blowing the moustache-twirling villain of the piece into the sky with a watch that’s also a nuclear bomb. However, there’s another breed of spy story that tries to get all gritty and realistic with it. You know the sort, your Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spys, your Munichs, your The Lives of Others’.
These are all terribly serious stories about how spywork is just as dangerous as it is in the Hollywood action films, but nowhere near as fun and glamorous. How morally grey to black the whole thing is, and how doing it for any amount of time saps the very humanity from your soul. Now, any time spent looking at exactly what the CIA is up to in literally any given time shows that all of this is entirely true, and yet, the truth does remain stranger than fiction.
The truth is that the reality of spywork ends up smack bang in the middle of both extremes. It’s soul-destroying work that often asks you to risk your life for a country that barely cares about you, often via the medium of sitting in a car for 72 hours straight, listening intently to a microphone feed. Yet you’ll also sometimes find yourself doing that for the most absurd shit you can possibly imagine. The kind of stuff that would get laughed out of the Slow Horses writers’ room for being too silly.
You want proof? Look no further than this spectacular cock up by the CIA.
Did the CIA really make a sex tape?
In 1945, a man known only as Sukarno ran for president in Indonesia. Off the back of a campaign that promised to liberate the country from its Dutch colonisers, he won in a landslide and became a national hero. Known for his confidence, charm, charisma and his popularity with the ladies.
Seriously, his supposed virility and polygamous lifestyle were among the many things that made him so popular in his home country.
More importantly to the United States, he was not throwing his lot in immediately with the Soviet Union. Considering his leftist leanings, this was vitally important, and the US began concocting a plan that would ideally deter Sukarno from fraternising with the Soviets at all. The plan was to fake a sex tape starring the Indonesian president, then say that the Soviets had made it to discredit his primacy.
The trouble was, the moment that the CIA went to Sukarno with the footage, the randy little goat was absolutely thrilled by it. Legend has it that he asked if he could make copies of it to show off back home. Apparently, the film made Sukarno look every bit the stallion he claimed to be, and, considering that was something of an overstatement, the tape would have done wonders for his cult of personality.
American taxpayers’ money was spent stabilising a foreign power’s government by faking a sex tape featuring their president. Truth really is stranger than fiction sometimes.