THE MISTRESS OF DISGUISE
Jonna Mendez was responsible for helping CIA agents pass incognito while undercover or operating in dangerous parts of the world. Her real-life Mission: Impossible-style masks were so realistic they fooled spies, terrorists, drug dealers... and even the president
HEADS turned as the pretty Latina woman waltzed past White House security in the early 1990s.With her thick curly hair, full lips and fluttering eyelashes above a delicately turned nose, in a crisp camel blazer, a pearl necklace above the open collar of her chocolate brown floral dress, Jonna Mendez walked with authority into the Oval Office, trailing the head of the CIA.
Sitting beside President George HW Bush, she explained that she had come to demonstrate advanced new disguise techniques the CIA could use to evade Russian spies.
“We would convincingly disguise an officer, even create a clone of an officer – a twin!” she told the president. “We could change the officer’s ethnicity or gender, or ‘borrow’ another person’s identity if necessary.”
Yet Bush seemed troubled that Mendez had brought no bags with her containing the new disguises. “I’m wearing it,” said Mendez, and stood to reveal her true identity. “Hold on!” said Bush, formerly the CIA chief. “Don’t take it off yet.”
He circled Mendez, searching her face intently for signs of a false nose, or seam. Defeated, he shrugged: “OK, do it.”
In a scene that could have come straight from Tom Cruise and the Mission: Impossible movies that followed years later, Mendez pulled off her full-face mask, revealing her as a fair-skinned blue-eyed Caucasian with dark blonde hair, at least 15 years older than the young Hispanic girl who had entered the room minutes earlier.
“The president’s face came alive,” she says today. “His eyes were almost sparkling as he asked me questions.
“The masks were something that no one else, not even Hollywood, could do.”
Funding was approved to develop the new life-like masks, whose expressive facial mobility allowed CIA agents in Moscow, Havana and Iran to move freely without being tailed or arrested.
Mendez, 78, the former head of the CIA’s disguise department, reveals the secrets of her 27 years as a spymaster in her new memoir, In True Face. She travelled the world as a US spy and developed disguise technologies that Hollywood eventually borrowed.
“If a disguise doesn’t look perfect in a movie, they can always add a little make-up and do another take,” she says. “But if I sent out an agent whose disguise was anything less than perfect, it could cost them their life. We had no second takes.”
As the war on drugs escalated in Mexico and South America, Mendez says: “Disguise was becoming a form of body armour – critical and potentially life-saving. Latin America was always scary because there was so much money and the drug lords were ruthless.”
MENDEZ even became a technical adviser to Hollywood, teaching filmmakers her disguise techniques. “We were ahead of the original Mission: Impossible, but now they use CGI to create flawless masks on screen. That doesn’t work in the field.”
With her husband Tony Mendez – her predecessor as CIA disguise chief – she co-wrote best-selling book Argo, about their plot to help six diplomats flee Tehran disguised as filmmakers, inspiring the Oscar-winning movie of the same name – and pioneered an arsenal of gadgets worthy of James Bond.
“We were Q,” she says, likening their laboratory to 007’s ingenious techno-wizards. “We could make anything – quick-change licence plates, cameras hidden inside packs of cigarettes, jacket buttons that were compasses, silk jacket linings that could be maps.
“We put bugs in books.We put cameras in cigarette packs, strap-on pregnancy bellies – we put them everywhere.” Micro-cameras were concealed in laundry baskets, ink pens, key fobs, neckties and attaché cases given to foreign assets. She created fake ear flaps that covered hidden radio receivers so that CIA spies in Moscow could listen to KGB surveillance frequencies.
Qualified as a marksman and trained in making bombs from household supplies and planting small bugs, she taught new recruits heading to Moscow how to complete a dead drop or raise a signal without being seen.
“We were able to monitor Russians to stay abreast of Russia’s progress in the nuclear realm,” she says.
Yet surprisingly, Mendez admits: “I never carried a gun. Unless you’re in a war zone, operatives are unarmed.
“Espionage is about gaining people’s trust. The Jason Bourne franchise with guns everywhere is Hollywood fantasy.”
But missions were intrinsically dangerous. She smuggled a Soviet defector across the Afghanistan border to Pakistan disguised as a burqa-clad woman. Another defector was whisked away in a US medevac helicopter thanks to a gruesome fake facial wound, from a fictitious grenade, that she created.
In the drug wars, she made CIA agents appear like Mexican locals, with darker hair, skin and eyes.
“Looking like a Norteamericano could get
you killed,” she says. “Disguises made operatives invisible.”
She even tested her mask technology by posing as a black man in a business suit roaming the CIA offices undetected, fooling its director, before peeling off her mask.
Mendez often had to improvise. To help one foreign asset escape hostile territory, she recalls: “I made him look older using Dr Scholl’s foot powder to give him grey hair.”
On other missions, she borrowed local women’s make-up kits to help disguise agents and assets.
Born in Wichita, Kansas, the daughter of an aircraft mechanic, Mendez joined the CIA as a secretary, but was told she would never progress any higher without a technical or engineering degree.
“The CIA was chauvinistic and sexist,” she says. “Women were deemed inferior for the more dangerous field work.”
The old boys’ network opposed her at every turn, often deliberately trying to undermine her career.
AFTER pouring beer over a sexist instructor’s head, he retaliated by throwing a defused grenade at her, which exploded loudly but harmlessly at her feet. “He wanted me to act like a girl, but I refused to cry,” she recalls.
“As a woman you didn’t have to be as good as the men – you had to be better.And women make the best operatives.We are less threatening and in many parts of the world able to blend into the background because we are dismissed as insignificant.”
She had her share of close brushes with death. Mendez was developing microfilm in the US Embassy darkroom in Pakistan when it was attacked and besieged and all staff evacuated except her. In the Middle East, her cover was blown when she was spotted by a dangerous terrorist flanked by two Pashtun guards armed with Kalashnikov rifles.
“He had blown up a US commercial jet and I was convinced they were going to shoot me,” she recalls. “I’ve never been more scared, but he just let me know I’d been made.”
CIA missions took her from Moscow to the Far East, Africa and the Himalayas, but she still regrets the day when, being shoved by an aggressive crowd at an Indian airport, she angrily demanded they stop pushing, only to turn and find Mother Teresa behind her. “I’ve been haunted by my encounter with her in the Calcutta airport,” says Mendez. “To yell at a saint!”
Retired from the CIA, Mendez has penned several books about her life as a spy, and lectures at the International Spy Museum in Washington DC. “I don’t wear any disguises now, though I wouldn’t mind a mask making me look a little younger,” she adds with a smile.
●●In True Face: A Woman’s Life in the CIA, Unmasked, by Jonna Mendez (PublicAffairs, £25) is out now