But the CIA employed multiple methods in its efforts to oust the Indonesian president, and far earlier. The agency wasted a million dollars trying to sway the Indonesian elections of 1955, according to Evan Thomas’ The Very Best Men: The Daring Early Years of the CIA.

To the agency’s chagrin, the communist party — an important Sukarno ally — received a “surprising” six million votes in the election. Over the next two years, Sukarno strengthened ties with Moscow and Beijing.

The CIA considered “a full-scale paramilitary operation” but put that plan on ice after Frank Wisner, the longtime Directorate of Plans for the CIA, advised that such an operation could fail or backfire, according to Thomas.

“Absolute control [of the rebellion] could not be guaranteed … that explosive results were always possible, that U.S. officials must be braced for allegations of covert U.S. activities,” Wisner warned.

With the CIA’s hopes of friendly rebels overthrowing Sukarno curtailed, the agency searched for alternative methods. When reports surfaced that Sukarno engaged in an affair with a flight attendant — who may have been a KGB spy — the spooks saw an opportunity to exploit his alleged promiscuity while undercutting his status as a national hero.

Initially, the CIA relied on spreading rumors and pushing reports of the alleged affair.

“The idea was that Sukarno’s well-known womanizing had trapped him in the spell of a Soviet female agent,” William Blum wrote in Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. “He had succumbed to Soviet control, CIA reports implied, as a result of her influence or blackmail, or both.”

The reports of Sukarno gallivanting with a Russian flight attendant, and potentially providing the Soviets with some leverage against him, seems to have had some basis in reality.

Sukarno had traveled in the company of a blonde flight attendant during a visit to the Soviet Union, and the same flight attendant later traveled to Indonesia with Soviet official Kliment Voroshilov and was seen in Sukarno’s company several times, according to Blum.

And the Soviets did at one point attempt to blackmail Sukarno by filming him having sex with a group of flight attendants. “When … Sukarno visited Moscow in the 1960s, the KGB sought to take advantage of his renowned sexual appetite, sending a batch of glamorous young women posing as air hostesses to his hotel,” Tim Lister wrote in a CNN piece on sex and espionage.

Lister’s timeline might be off, as other 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.