An Adult Film to Destroy an Enemy

A History of CIA Dirty Tricks & Mercenaries - Part 3

“Taxpayer monies were spent to provide heads of state with female companions, and to pay people with questionable reputations to make pornographic movies for blackmail.”

-Pike Committee Report, House Select Committee on Intelligence, 1976

Valya was relieved that KGB officer Yuri Krotkov did not want to have sex with her; instead, he wanted her to have sex for her country. Valentina “Valya” Reschetnyk was a student at the Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow, working as a flight attendant for domestic flights in the Soviet Union. In Krotkov’s eyes, she was a perfect candidate to be a KGB swallow, someone capable of seducing the enemy for foreign policy ends. “She was really a beautiful girl,” Krotkov recounted, “blonde with very good English language, a capable girl, and when I gave her name to Colonel Kunavin, after two or three weeks he asked me to invite her to the restaurant and to talk, to realize whether she would accept his offer, and even to prepare her for this sort of job in a friendly way without any specification.”

The KGB gave her a mission: it was 1956 and President Sukarno of Indonesia was making his first trip to the Soviet Union. Reschetnyk was given the codename Lena and she was officially assigned as Sukarno’s translator for receptions in Moscow and she followed him to Leningrad and Soviet Central Asia. “She was almost everywhere with him,” Krotkov recalled. He soon saw the front page of Pravda which featured a photo of Sukarno accompanied by a blonde “movie star.” An associate told him: “Look, Valya is a great girl because she is in Pravda on the first page.” She had not only engaged in a sexual affair with Sukarno, the President was now in love with her, wanting to take her back to Indonesia to make her his third wife. “Valya went to see her parents to consult with them, and the collective decision, I would say, was no.” Sukarno took his case to Kliment Voroshilov, the nominal head of state in the Soviet Union, to seek permission but he was still unsuccessful.

Instead Sukarno bought Reschetnyk gifts and invited a team from the U.S.S.R. to Indonesia with the sole purpose of seeing her. “She told me again that he made an attempt to marry her there,” Krotkov remembered. “But then when she refused, he gave her money and she alone went through Europe back to the Soviet Union…and bought something to wear.” The Soviets furnished a special one-room apartment for her along Izmailovsky Boulevard in Moscow, with the idea of having Sukarno meet her there whenever he visited. Instead of getting the intended use out of the apartment, the pair instead met “in a luxurious house” in Crimea. She was influencing a foreign leader to the benefit of the Soviet Union, and the CIA was watching with keen interest.

According to Krotkov, she was also later involved with Americans:

“I know that after this job when Sukarno went to his country, she was used in other different cases, even with some Americans, because she told me that she met some Americans and then the KGB put her in the Intourist Agency. She worked there. She told me that she met some American tourists and she went with them somewhere outside of Moscow.

“She was, I would say, [a] top level girl, because she was extremely beautiful and intelligent and attractive.”

In response, the U.S. government wanted to recruit their own swallow to target Sukarno; her name and story would remain a state secret for another 65 years.

An Important Target

Business was going well for Robert A. Maheu Associates and that meant for Maheu a “grueling commute” from Los Angeles to Washington, DC on a regular basis. As a fixer and cut-out for the national security state, it also meant taking on the most bizarre and sensitive assignments. In 1956, Scott McLeod, head of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau for Security and Consular Affairs, had such a request, passed on to Maheu through the CIA. President Sukarno of Indonesia was to make an official state visit to the United States beginning in May. The U.S. government was looking to influence the leader of the sixth most populous nation in the world, who was turning out to be, in Maheu’s words, “a very fickle ally.” A CIA intelligence bulletin issued prior to the state visit showed that the Soviet Union was already making moves to court Sukarno, offering economic aid as well as a visit to Moscow that he would accept later that same year.

Determined to please Sukarno and turn him away from the influence of the Soviet Union, the State Department had come up with a plan. In his toast to Sukarno on May 16, President Eisenhower concluded his speech with: “we hope—all of us here—that you will carry back with you a sense that the American people are truly interested in Indonesia and you and your efforts to raise the standards of all your people, to make for them a better life.” Behind the scenes, this meant “supplying him with women”; McLeod informed Maheu that they were looking to provide Sukarno with a new prostitute every night in each city he was to visit, a total of ten across the United States, until his departure on June 3.

McLeod was concerned, Maheu learned, about the potential for blowback in the government providing prostitutes to a foreign leader. The concerns were less about “pimping for one’s country,” but more around security: if one of the women went public, Eisenhower may be subjected to an account of the prostitution ring in the New York Times much to their embarrassment, which may push Sukarno further into the arms of the Soviets. If one of the women were a Soviet plant, she could record the encounter and use this as blackmail material against Sukarno, the United States, or both.

These threats necessitated security checks on the women, which the CIA had no interest in performing themselves, after being asked by the State Department. The Agency instead turned to Maheu to keep its hands clean. Less concerned about exposure of their own employees, the State Department sent along a staffer to accompany Maheu as he checked with local authorities on the women that the staffer picked. Maheu discovered this State Department employee had just experienced his own personal scandal: he had recently returned home from work early one day to find his wife in bed with another man. The couple had since reconciled, but the staffer was devastated and in no mood to be selecting prostitutes for a foreign leader; the entire enterprise “repulsed us both,” Maheu recalled.

A day or two ahead of Sukarno’s visit to each city, Maheu and the State Department staffer would travel there ahead of time; the staffer finding a “selection of girls from which Sukarno could choose” and Maheu liaising with local police to look into the women’s backgrounds. In 1975 testimony, Maheu confirmed that some of the women had prior relationships with the police, such that the police had “some control” over them to mitigate the blackmail risk. Maheu also had a series of questions for the women themselves, as he later wrote:

My questions ran the gamut, from finding out about the women’s prior records to determining their political affiliations. We had to know who their associates were, who their pimps might be, who picked them up, who dropped them off—every detail of their lives was potentially germane. Only after every aspect of these girls checked out would they be among those offered to Sukarno.

Maheu ultimately believed in his mission; if the only way to stay on good terms with Sukarno was to supply him with women, Maheu was happy to perform security checks on behalf of the government. However, he “would have greatly preferred it if we had found better ways to maintain our relationships.” This point was further driven home when the operation did not have the desired effect: “while Sukarno may have left the States satisfied sexually, he was frustrated in every other regard,” Maheu wrote. Sukarno wanted arms and U.S. support on a West New Guinea territory dispute and the U.S. remained silent. Sukarno also sensed correctly that the U.S. was upset that his government was now “Communist-inclined,” a concept he disputed. “Americans do not seem to understand this,” he complained to the U.S. ambassador in March 1958. “I am called a Communist by American press and even Secretary Dulles said that Indonesia was drifting towards Communism. I am not a Communist. Every word I said in America I still stand by. I tried to point out that Nationalism was the fire that was sweeping Asia and this is true. I am a Nationalist but no Communist.”

The following year, in July 1957, Maheu received a call from Colonel Sheffield Edwards, the CIA’s chief for its Office of Security. Edwards sounded nervous and wanted to visit Maheu at his home in Falls Church, Virginia for a drink on his way home. Maheu realized “something was boiling.” Sitting down alone in Maheu’s rec room designed for entertaining, the pair were surrounded by the room’s “nautical motif—a bar made from half of a real lifeboat, lamps made from driftwood, and an entire wall of cooking facilities for lobster dinners and clambakes.” Sukarno’s visit to the U.S.S.R., which occurred starting in late August 1956, had greatly troubled the U.S. government, Edwards explained; it seemed to have fostered growth in the alliance between Indonesia and the Soviet Union and a greater support for the Communist movement in Indonesia while relations with the United States continued to deteriorate. The press quoted one of Sukarno’s speeches in Moscow: “Love, freedom and eternal peace. Only those who are for imperialism want war, only the leaders of capitalism and fascism.” There was talk of $100 million in aid from the Soviet Union. “If the Soviet Union keeps its promises, it will indeed prove to be our best friend,” the first deputy chairman of Indonesia’s parliament was reported as saying. Columnist Paul Wohl in an October 10, 1956 editorial entitled “A Lesson for America” concluded: “America's dollars, commercial salesmanship and abstract freedom propaganda failed.”

Edwards proceeded to take photos out of an envelope and handed them to Maheu. They showed the inside of sleeping quarters in the Kremlin meant for Soviet leaders or visiting dignitaries. Along with the photos, Edwards told a story about a Soviet blonde who had gone a step further than the United States’ 1956 operation. While Sukarno had been supplied with women in much the same manner in the U.S.S.R. as he had in the U.S., a KGB agent had been among these women.

Edwards then showed Maheu a picture of Reschetnyk and explained her cover had been as a stewardess on board the plane Sukarno used while in the Soviet Union. Her KGB status was unknown to Sukarno, Edwards explained, and it was “possible he thought she was an actual conquest.” By this point, Reschetnyk had already visited Sukarno several times in Indonesia. Taking a look at the photo, Maheu found it “easy to see the attraction. She was a knockout.” Sukarno had fallen for her, and while it was not certain what effect this had on his attitude towards the Soviet Union, this honey trap offered the U.S.S.R. “some sort of influence over him.”

Maheu was never told that the initiative was called internally at the CIA “Project Happy Days.” Their later internal summary of the project explained its background and what Maheu was not told regarding the origins of the idea:

In 1957 information was received indicating that during President Sukarno’s visit to Moscow in the fall of 1956, he was introduced to a Soviet woman within the Kremlin. He had an affair with her against the admonitions of his advisers. It was reported that the Soviets took detailed films of the affair and that a copy was sent to the PKI [Indonesian Communist Party]. In June of 1957 Al Ulmer and Samuel Halpern, [Far East] Division, contacted the Director of Security and outlined a project wherein they envisioned a film being made simulating this affair.

The goal, as Edwards relayed to Maheu, was to exploit the affair, “drive a wedge between Sukarno and the Soviets or humiliate him before his own people and weaken his base of power.” Despite his earlier misgivings, Maheu was now all in: “The Soviets sure as hell weren’t playing by the rules, and neither could we.” Reschetnyk and Sukarno had slept together at least one night together in the room for which Edwards had shown photographs. Maheu’s instructions were to use his Hollywood connections and make a film that would appear as if the Soviets themselves had taken it “as Sukarno and the blond had made love in the bedroom.” Rather than a true Hollywood production, it had to have the appearance of a surveillance film: a world leader caught in the act with a KGB agent. “I was asked if I could find some contacts in Los Angeles who could produce a set resembling the headquarters reflected on the pictures, a woman who looked like the female agent, a male who looked like the leader.”

Maheu first approached his main client, Howard Hughes, to see who he thought could help with such a project. In Maheu’s mind, since “Mr. Hughes had been in the industry, he had been in movie studios; I thought he could be helpful to this contract.” Once he had two names recommended by Hughes, he ran them by his CIA contacts in the Office of Security, which included Edwards and his subordinate James O’Connell. The security checks demonstrated that the two candidates “could be trusted completely.” They also liked the politics of these brothers; one of whom happened to be one of the most popular American entertainers of the 20th century.