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On the eve of the Iraq war, the CIA kicked around a rather odd idea: make a gay sex tape featuring a teenage boy and an ersatz Saddam Hussein.

“It would look like it was taken by a hidden camera,” one former intelligence official tells SpyTalk. “Very grainy, like it was a secret videotaping of a sex session.”

The notion was eventually nixed. But “the agency actually did make a video purporting to show Osama bin Laden and his cronies sitting around a campfire swigging bottles of liquor and savoring their conquests with boys,” a CIA officer recalled. The actors were drawn from “some of us darker-skinned employees.”

Hmmm… I wonder if that’s how the rumor surfaced in the British press of al-Qaeda chiefs “raping young male converts to shame them into becoming suicide bombers.”

Either way, it wasn’t the only time American operatives attempted to use homoerotic tactics against its enemies in the Middle East. There were the nude human pyramids at Abu Ghraib. And before 9/11, the CIA tried to recruit a gay agent who could penetrate and compromise Al Qaeda’s inner circle.

One would be tempted to say that such antics might be coming to an end, now that “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is mercifully heading for history’s ash heap. But agency spooks have been out of the closet for more than a decade. And yet, they still dreamed of shaming Saddam with gay sex.