U-Stasi in Action

Every now and then, we’re offered a little glimpse of the surveillance society’s efforts to compromise and control various individuals of interest to them.

The CIA introduced King Hussein of Jordan to a Jewish B-list Hollywood actress in 1959 — touching off an affair that produced a dwarf love child who later killed her, reports say. Sensational new details of the king’s relationship with actress Susan Cabot were revealed in a recently declassified government memo, according to USA Today. The CIA was bucking to curry favor with the randy young Mideast leader when it agreed to procure women for him during his visit to Los Angeles in April 1959, the three-page document shows.

Hussein was 24 and had divorced his first wife about two years earlier.

The young king “was especially desirous of female companionship during his Los Angeles visit, and it was requested that appropriate arrangements be made through a controlled source of the [CIA’s] Office [of Security] in order to assure a satisfied visit,” according to the anonymously written memo.

Before she went to the gig, Cabot, 32, was told, “We want you to go to bed with him,’’ according to the memo. “The actress said that she rejected the proposal but finally went to [the] party. She became quite taken with [Hussein] and found him to be most charming,” according to the document.

A few days later, the king asked the CIA to arrange for him and his new girlfriend to get together while he was in New York City. The agency rented a house for them in Long Beach, LI, and also got her a room at the Hotel Barclay in Manhattan “under an assumed name,’’ the memo says.

Still, their relationship was not without a politically worrisome issue. Cabot, whose real name was Harriet Shapiro, was of Jewish heritage, a thorny issue given Hussein was Muslim, according to reports.

It’s apparent that very little of the shenanigans we are witnessing today, from Epstein and Maxwell to the Havana Syndrome, are new in any way, shape, or form. The only difference is that thanks to technological advances, the CIA’s surveillance program has expanded from particular persons of interest to pretty much everyone.

Which is why one should always assume that every email, every comment, every image uploaded, every Internet search, has been logged and catalogued in case it can be used against you. And why one should never place too much trust in women – or men, for that matter – who inexplicably find one to be irresistibly attractive.

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