Tangle - Former CIA operative Jonna Mendez

Episode Date: March 22, 2021

Today, we sit down with Jonna Mendez, the former chief of disguise at the CIA. She was recruited to the agency in 1966, spent 27 years in service, and is on the Board of Directors for the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. She spent her career in the Office of Technical Services of the CIA, which is staffed by engineers, chemists, physicists, makeup artists and counterfeiters. It's the part of the CIA you probably imagine when you think of a James Bond movie.In this podcast, we chat with her about her favorite CIA gadgets, what her scariest moments in the service were, the time she got to impress George H.W. Bush and what it's like being in the CIA.If you enjoy this podcast, please be sure to give it a 5-star rating.You can subscribe to the Tangle newsletter here: https://www.readtangle.com/--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight.

Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to my Tangle listeners, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some reasonable debate, and independent thinking without some of that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. In today's episode, we're doing something a little special, a little unique, a little different. We are sitting down with one

of the most interesting people I've ever had the pleasure of meeting, Jonna Mendez. Jonna, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Glad to be here. Typically, Jonna, this is the part of the show or the podcast where I'd ask you to introduce yourself. I might say, Jonna, tell us a little bit about your background. But we've spoken before, and I've followed a bit of your career and your work. And I know you to be a pretty modest person and I don't want to let you undersell yourself to my readers. So I'm going to do the background intro for you today. Jonna Mendez is the former chief of disguise at the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA. She was recruited to the agency in 1966. She spent

about 27 years in service and currently sits on the board of directors for the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. She spent her career in the Office of Technical Services of the CIA, which is staffed by engineers, chemists, makeup artists, counterfeiters. It's basically the part of the CIA you're probably imagining when you think of like a James Bond movie. After retirement, Janna authored several books with her late husband, Tony Mendez, including Spy Dust, which is a book about their time in the CIA during the Cold War. Tony, her second husband, also happens to be a bit of a CIA legend. He was well known for his role in exfiltrating six American diplomats during the Iran hostage crisis in 1980 by having them pose as

a Canadian film crew. If that sounds familiar, it's probably because you saw the Academy Award winning movie Argo, which was based off that event. Did I miss anything there? Anything you'd like to add? I think that's pretty comprehensive. I'm glad that you worked in Tony and the movie. It was just a major moment in our lives. Who gets to have a movie made about them that wins an Oscar? That wins an Oscar and also is, in your case, a movie that portrays you very positively. Some people get movies made about them that do not portray them positively. I think, although no one was thinking about hurting the CIA's feelings or not when the have to admit, there's quite a few documentaries out there that seem to be more, you know, sharpened like a spear rather than celebratory, I guess. It's the old good news versus bad news trope. Bad news leads.

That's right. So look, there's so many places we could go and so many places we could start. But I think a really interesting question I'm curious about, which I realized when doing some background for this interview that I have never asked you before, which is a shame, is how did the CIA recruit you? How did this start? I mean, I'm always so interested in how somebody ends up being an intelligence officer. So I'd love to hear your story. Well, my story is a little anticlimactic when I compare it to some others. But I kind of came in a side door. I was in Europe already. I had left Wichita, Kansas. I went to be in my best friend's wedding. The minute they were married, they didn't want me around anymore. that they were married, they didn't want me around anymore. Go figure. I got on a train and I went to Frankfurt, Germany, and literally went to a phone booth. I was 20 years old, and I'm from Kansas,

right? I don't know anything. Went to a phone booth, got a German phone book and a handful of coins. And I started dialing the American recognizable business names in their yellow pages. I called, well, I called the American consulate. They said, no. I called the American embassy. I'm looking for a job. They said, no, they don't hire. They hire in Washington. I called Bank of America because this is a big banking town. They said, no. And then I called Chase Manhattan Bank and had the oddest conversation. They said no. And then I called Chase Manhattan Bank and had the oddest conversation. They said, oh, okay. Do you speak German? I said, no. They said, have you ever worked in a bank before? I said, no. They said, do you have a work permit? I said,

I don't. And they said, why don't you come in and talk to us? They hired me. That was one of about four or five really remarkable moments when my life took a hard right or a hard left. So I'm working at the bank, not doing a very good job, I must say. They didn't ask me if I was good with numbers, because I could have said no. But these Americans, this group kept coming in. They were kind of my age. They looked like a beacon of light in the middle of Germany. So I met them and they said, oh, we're civilians working with the military. It was a huge, huge American military presence there. them a year and a half later in Switzerland. And he told me about three days ahead of the wedding that he worked for the CIA. And I was like, okay. I was very young. Wow. And then I was a CIA wife and everything shifted. Everything changed. All of a sudden,

I could get a job. And they like to hire contract wives. They didn't have to ship us over with our furniture. We were already there. We worked cheap. So I got a job, an administrative job. We went back to Washington and I got another job, but now this was staff. I got a staff administrative job in the DC area, working for this Office of Technical Service, which is like the equivalent of Q in the Bond movies. It really, it really, we thought we were, they thought we were. So I was working for the director of that office. It's about a thousand people. Back then, it was really interesting, but my work was not interesting. So I was bored and I was going to leave. I told my boss, I said, the Smithsonian, you can see it out the window here. I think there's a job for me over there

that would be interesting. And he wanted me to stay. So he said, why don't you take some of our photography courses? And we had a photography capability that you couldn't find on the commercial market. We had films, we had cameras, we had techniques. It was for CIA officers. And those courses were restricted for operations officers. So he said, you know, you could take some of those courses because you're clearly not busy here. So I took the first course called Airborne Platforms. I went to a little landing strip. It was a little twin-engine plane with the doors off, and you could see the harness. I mean a harness that you sat in and swung in.

It was a man on a stepladder with a paint can and a brush. He's painting out the tail number so they can't report us. There was a microphone and a 35- camera with a thousand millimeter lens, which back there was about, I don't know, 14 inches long. So the object was to ride in this bouncy platform, holding a camera that wanted to bounce anyway, because that lens was so long, and see if you could resolve some things like a microwave tower or a license plate on a pickup truck going down a dusty road. And all I was, I was in charge. I would say, can we go, can we go over here? Can we go over there? I said at one point, how low can we go? And we're skimming that across, you know,

it's actually, it was the Chesapeake Bay. And we went back up. We went up to a height where we actually had a flock of geese just over there. And we were going with them. That night, I'm developing and printing the take because that's my final exam. Show us what you can do. And I've got this music on. It's a huge dark room, just me, red safe lights. And I thought, you know, if this is it, I'll stay.

And that was what I used to consider the first day of my working for the CIA. That was a turn. That was just as much of a turn as the Chase Bank saying, come on down. It's hard to look back and not recognize these moments. But I became a photo operations officer. I already had a deep interest in photography as an amateur. And I had a couple of cameras, no big deal, but I loved the process. I actually loved the darkroom even before I got to CIA. What I learned from those classes I took,

I did many, many classes. It was amazing. And then I became a teacher because that's what you do. If you're working for OTS and you're doing photography, you travel around the world teaching foreign agents how to collect the intelligence that our policymakers are looking for. Not with a 35 millimeter camera, with all kinds of interesting cameras, cameras that today would probably fit inside of a Sharpie and the Sharpie would still write. Ours, we put in these, I don't know, you're probably too young, but there used to be a kind of Montblanc fountain pen. They were status symbols because they cost about $500 for a pen. They were ink pens and we could stuff all kinds of stuff in that pen.

One of them being a camera with film in it. So there's a film cartridge inside of the camera, inside of the pen. Wow. So how do you go from this role in the photography space and the capturing images space and the gadget space. From there to what you are very well known for now, which is the master of disguise, the woman who can change anybody's face. Well, there's probably a teaching moment somewhere in this continuum of my career that I need to sort out someday. There were some pieces that came with the photography job. One of them was like making micro dots. Another one was working in a chemistry lab doing secret writing. Can you really quick, I know what it is, but it's so cool. Can you explain what micro dots

are to our listeners? They're a holy terror if you're in charge of creating some. A micro dot is a photograph of a page, an eight and a half by 11 page, a document, a normal document reduced 400 times. You just keep taking it down, taking it down, taking it down. And it ends up about the size of a period at the end of a sentence, say in a magazine, which was a really great place to hide them. And then you'd send the magazine to your agent. And only he would know, you know, which magazine, which page, which paragraph, which sentence. He'd know that's where it was.

And for him to access it was very, very simple. I always thought if we were sending them to the Far East, for instance, you know, a guy in a rice paddy could basically pull this thing. He could tear out that little circle. He could float it in a little cup of water, and the dot would pop off. Now you have a black dot. He could take a little thing that looked like a piece of rice. It looked like rice, but it was actually a Fresnel lens.

They were very common. He could poke that Fresnel lens into a piece of paper, anything. And then he could get some spit and pick up the dot and stick it on the end of the Fresnel and hold it up to the sun and read the page of text. I love that. It was so secure. Because if you didn't know where that dot was, you would never find it. The flip side was if you had just made a dozen of them, you made them in dozens kind of for insurance because if someone in your office laughed or sneezed or walked by your desk too fast, they would be gone.

Any small movement of air, they were very hard to control. And then for extra security, we could bleach them. So then you actually couldn't see them yourself. You had all kinds of magnifying devices. It was just really hard. But security was the name of the game. The most secure method to contact your foreign agent was the name of the game. Keep them safe.

So I interrupted you there, but you were telling us that you were in the process of leading some teams and making these kinds of little gadgets and intelligence related stuff like micro dots and during this period was when you started to transition maybe into a different role into this disguise role that happened happened one summer when I was sent. I had just finished a long, like a six-month training program. My office, they'd pull like six people out of their regular duties, people that they thought had some potential. And they would train us across all the skills that we represented. A little bit of electronics,

a little bit of covert communications, a little bit of video, a little bit of audio. They teach us everything, a little bit, enough where we had our feet on the ground. And then they actually wanted us to change disciplines. They were trying to create a group of multifaceted rather than single-faceted officers. So I got to the end of that training and there was an opportunity to go to the subcontinent because someone had to come back for two months. So they sent me to do this job. And I simply fell in love with where I was. I did. It just, it was life transforming, that assignment, that interim assignment. I came back to headquarters and I said, I would like to be assigned to that place. I would like to live there and work there and travel from there as opposed to

back here in Washington. And they said, well, you know, there aren't any, there's no photo opportunities coming up in the next two, three years. There's a disguise job coming open. two, three years, there's a disguise job coming open. And I said, well, could you make me a disguise officer? We got two years. And that's what we did. I stepped over here and went back to school to learn how it works in disguise, which is a fascinating area. When I ended up with that training and I'm back out in the subcontinent, well, now I can do two things rather well. I can do photo operations, whatever you need, send me. And I can do disguise operations. So I was double barreled and it was great.

It never, ever was dull or boring. I imagine not. was dull or boring. I imagine not. You have a great story that you've told me once that I have to ask to hear again, that I think sort of illustrates some of your work, which I believe the best way to preface it is that it was a moment where you got to show off some of your skills to President George H.W. Bush. And I think maybe that'd be a good one to start with for our listeners. You know, I think disguise, when I went into disguise, it was considered sort of a nice to have tool. We would prepare disguises for our case officers before they left overseas for overseas. And we would make sure everything fit, maybe a wig, maybe a mustache is different for every person. But it was what we call traditional disguise, what you would think of

when you talk about disguise. We were never really sure that they were going to actually use this stuff. Men have a, there's a resistance factor. Maybe it looks too much like cosmetics, but there are a lot of men that say, yeah, thank you very much. I'll take good care of it. And they won't reach for it. But things changed because we started handling terrorism and narcotics cases, counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism. And those guys were packing guns. Those were not the nice people on the diplomatic circuit. It wasn't that crowd.

These were, a lot of them, kind of criminal. And they would shoot you in a heartbeat. So the disguises that we were issuing all of a sudden took on another piece of adventure. They were now body armor, maybe. Maybe they were the thing between you and a bullet, you and a prisoner somewhere or God, just all kinds of terrible circumstances. So we really knuckled down looking, how can we raise the level of our disguise capabilities? What do we need? And the idea, we had been using masks, Hollywood stunt double masks. We had the mold for Rex Harrison's face, but Rex Harrison was a good one. And we had Rex Harrison all over the world in cars. He could be African-American.

He could actually be a very unattractive female. We could turn Rex Harrison into a lot of things, and we did. But that wasn't good enough because if you got too close to Rex, you'd realize that it was very stiff. We were after an animated mask and it actually took us about 10 years to get there, to find the materials, to find the proper combination where you weren't just a steam bath inside, something that would breathe like skin, something that would look like skin and reflect light like skin. That means multiple, multiple layers of transparent color. Ten years later, we had an animated mask that you could actually put on if you needed gloves to match whatever, to match skin tones. And you could have a conversation with someone wearing that mask.

So one of the first ones I wore to see my office director, different man now. And I said, this is the latest. What do you think? He said, oh my God, that's so cool. Let's show it to the director of CIA. And we did that. That was Judge Webster. He said, let's show it to the president. And I said, okay, but not this one. Why not? Because this one was an African-American man. Looked great on me. And it said, okay, but not this one. Why not? Because this one was an African-American man. Looked great on me. And it moved when I, you know, it animated, but my voice was wrong. I said, Secret Service, they're not going to let me get by on this, but let's do a female. So they said, yes. And we went back and we made a female animated mask. That was,

she was very pretty. I never gave her a name I should have. She's in a box now in the basement, CIA. Only fits me. These things were, they were just, they had to be exactly right. Anyway, I was loving wearing it. I went to Judge Webster's house. We were going to go down.

PDB was going to be delivered, but I was going to talk to him before I was the first one. So we got outside of the president's office and there's a group of people, names that you know, Brent Scowcroft, John Sununu, all the big guys were there, Bob Gates. And they're all laughing and joking. And I'm over here chewing on a pencil. And I don't care if you're the chief of disguise, you're nervous the first time you wear this stuff. And it's the president for Pete's sake. So I went in and sat down, handed him some photos, eight by tens. I said, remember we did these for you when you were chief of CIA. Oh yeah. He said, that was fun wearing those things. They worked really well. I said, well, I brought you

the latest, the best we've got right now. I'm going to show it to you. So he's looking around my chair, like, where is it? I said, well, I'm, I'm wearing it. And, uh, it's, it's taken us 10 years to get here. I'm getting ready to take this off and show it to you. And he said, no, no, don't take it off. Just wait. And he got up, he came out, walked around. He's looking, he's looking to see where, where are the joints? He's looking, I know what he's, he's looking to see the edges because isn't that what you would do? Yeah. Well, he went and sat back down. He said, okay, take it off.

So I did. And I was holding it up so he could just see that it was light as a feather and just pliable. And there was a photographer in there taking pictures, pictures, pictures. And 10 years later, I got the pictures. I got, well, first I got one picture. I was holding the mask up. They airbrushed the mask out. So in my library, I have a picture of me

sitting in front of the president's desk. He's there, I'm here. And they left my finger in like this. So it looks like I'm correcting him or something. And people, they come to my house, only people that know me really well go in the office and they'd see that picture and they'd say, wow, that's really cool. What were you saying to him? And I always would say, well, I, you know, it was a briefing,

but when I left and went out in the secretary's office, about 30 seconds later, the photographer came out and she said, what was that? And what she said what did you do I said I think you photographed it because I noticed I think she's always in there photographing she said yeah but I don't know what that was what was that and I said classified can't tell you maybe that's why I didn't see the pictures for 10 years you think think? Yeah. So, you know, it makes me wonder, I mean, the micro dots, the masks, just the division that you were working in, reflecting on your career now, is there a gadget or a technology or something like that that's sort of your all-time favorite,

like the thing that got you the most excited during your career? There was a category that got me excited. And that was, it kind of goes back to my husband, Tony, because he had stirred this up before I arrived on the scene. But we were, it turns out, working with the magic community out in LA. Tony was a very innovative guy. He really was. I mean, he's gotten all kinds of awards and a movie for his innovative ideas. But he was always taken with magic. And he started talking to the, not the magicians, not David Copperfield, people like that. But there's a whole cadre of people behind them that build illusions and deceptions. They actually engineer that stuff. And Tony was really interested in how that works. So we had established a relationship with those people,

told them our problems, asked them how they could help us. I know at one point, Tony said, you know, I've seen one of your people walk an elephant out on the stage and disappear it. And everybody in that huge audience knows that the elephant didn't just evaporate. And in that building, there's no way that it could go down a service elevator. I mean, where is the elephant? And the magician said, the elephant, of course, is right there. You just can't see the elephant anymore. And Tony said, that, that is something I'm really interested in. I have some people I want to disappear

on the streets of Moscow, among other things and other places. So can you teach me how to do that? And they did. I mean, there is a structure to that kind of innovation. And basically what they told us is you start at the beginning. Where is your stage? What is your stage? Is it in the wall of the parking garage at the U.S. Embassy? Is it the militiaman outside the gate on the street that you have to drive by every time you go out? Is it,

is it the team of people in the car behind you following you down the street? Who is your audience? Where's your stage? Start putting this together. You start talking about point of view, start talking about how, you know, you are in control of this, of this whole thing. They said, you call it an operation. We call it an entertainment. And so using some of their precepts, we were able to do some outrageous things successfully over and over. Because when you can do it really well, nobody understands what just happened. And so you can do it again. You can rob the bank and nobody knows the money is gone.

That was kind of the prevailing slogan at the time. So, I mean, what's an example of how that translates to your work? Somebody leaving, like losing a tail in Moscow? Is that the kind of stuff? Moscow was our toughest place. And when we wrote the Moscow rules, there's no other city in the world that we have a common understood set of rules for working. There's no Havana rules, Paris rules. There are only Moscow rules because Moscow was so hard. It was just so hard. They had an army of KGB whose only job was to shut us down. And there was, you know, our only job was to collect intelligence. So there was, you landed

on the ground and there was a, it was, it was a tough competition. To beat them, the rules told you all kinds of things not to do. Don't piss them off. Can I say that here? It's a Moscow rule. Yes, you can say that. Don't piss them off. So that during the presidential election of 2016, there was a story in the Washington Post about a diplomat coming back to the American embassy in Moscow, 3 in the morning in a taxi, got out of a taxi cab, started walking toward the gate and was attacked by somebody coming out of the militiaman's shack, beaten

to a bloody pulp and medevaced out the next morning. And Tony read the paper and he said, don't piss them off. We don't know what that person did, but it defined the rule. So we wanted our surveillance to think they had us under surveillance when they did not. We wanted to slip away. And then we wanted to be able to slip back in. So one of the devices, for instance, it's in the books. It's a great book called The Billion Dollar Spy. It's written by Dan Hoffman about a Soviet agent named Tolkachev, who was, to my knowledge, probably our most valuable agent we ever had.

He was giving us the plans on Soviet Union's next generation of radar about 10 years out, and we had the schematics. We were so happy. The Pentagon was so happy. That's where the billion dollar amount came from. And then we had trouble meeting him. And it was absolutely necessary to meet this man. You couldn't miss a meeting for any reason.

For some reason, he was having a problem. So we were working with the magic builders. And we were refining and completing this thing called a jib, a jack-in-the-box. Jack-in-the-box is every HOV driver commuter's dream. It was a dummy that would fit in a briefcase. And you could set it on the car seat and hit a button and this thing would rise up. At the beginning, it was fairly simplistic. It got better and better because now we're doing these masks.

So you could have a person in the passenger seat and the briefcase on the floorboards. And all the driver needed was a finger, free. Round a corner to the right, again to the right. The guy in the passenger seat, the operations officer steps out. The case officer pushes the button. The dummy comes up wearing the same clothes, wearing a matching wig, same face, and just keeps going down the street. When surveillance comes around the corner, all they see is some old Russian man walking towards them and they continue to follow the car that they're after.

That jib was the only way that we had the last meeting, the really important meeting with Tokachev and got all that information. I think there were like 37 rolls of film or something that he passed to us that night. It was an incredible operation. But without that jib, we couldn't have gotten our guy free. And by the way, that night, the jack-in-the-box was not in a box.

It was in a birthday cake. Wow. I love that. Yeah. You know, it makes me wonder, too. I mean, you can talk about all this stuff so freely now, and you write about it. And like you're saying, there's so many stories in these books. What's sort of the

statute of limitations on this stuff? I mean, as a former agent, sometimes I wonder how are you allowed to be so frank about these things? Or maybe are you not telling me the truth? You know, I just, I wonder like what, how does that work? Have you signed a release or something? I wonder that I'm going to have to come and kill you? Yeah, maybe. Put that on your list. Every time you write a book, it goes through publication review board. And when you hire on at the CIA, you sign on the dotted line. It says, anything I write or any talk that I give, I'm going to let you look at it first. And if there's anything classified in it, you have, you have, I'm not giving them

the authority. They have the authority to remove it. And that's understood. When we write a book, we're not really looking to tell secrets, but we're looking to tell the stories and maybe educate. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The general public a little bit.

So that every book that goes through publication review and comes out the other side intact somewhat gives us a new set of guardrails. And so the Tolkachev story has been told, not just in Dan Hoffman's book, but it's also told in my last book, The Moscow Rules, which went through PRV. So that's how I know what I can talk about. Everything that we've written

in the books that are published is fair game. And you'll never know the stories that they take out. So they've got one of my books in there now with their Sharpies. They're rolling up their sleeves, getting ready to... know the stories that they take out. So they've got, they got one of my books in there now with their Sharpies. They're like, you know, rolling up their sleeves, getting ready to, and you never really know what's, what's going on. I mean, the line moves a little. It's not like a hard, hard line. You can never, ever say this. It was a time that we couldn't say the word station. That's what we call our offices. They didn't want that word.

Now we can say station. I mean, what happened there? You never know. So I think most people that are writing, that are under the authority of those signatures on the page, I think what we do is we put in a little more. We put in stuff that we anticipate they will take out. Just checking.

Just making sure you guys are... Oh God, if someone from the PRB hears this, give me back that manuscript. I'll show her. In theory, they can only remove something if it still is classifying. Interesting. But I will never forget

that when Valerie Plame wrote her book, they would not let her include her years of service when she started working and when she finished. It's little things like that that you think, what are they thinking? I don't know. I want to be friends with them. As a former officer, I mean, how much insight do you have into what they're thinking or what the happenings are of the CIA now? Are you, you know, former presidents get intelligence briefings. What's life like for a retired CIA officer?

You have relinquished your need to know is what it's like. And this huge door clangs shut behind you when you leave. And this huge door clangs shut behind you when you leave. And a lot of your friendships kind of fall by the wayside because it turns out that you can't really just sit back and have a few drinks and get comfortable anymore. You know, people have to be a little guarded around you, and that's not comfortable. And people like me might be a little curious, although we fight that because it looks so bad you don't leave most people they go to work for the cia spend their career at the cia you can move around you can move around the world you can change you know all kinds of things and but they don't leave. Well, our officers, when they finally left the

Office of Technical Service, like 18 months was the average longevity and they would die. And we actually took a look at it and it turned out that they were mostly men because the office was mostly men. They were so wrapped up in their work and so committed to it. And so, and they, on the outside, they didn't have a lot of other outside interests. You know, they focused on work. And their friends were inside. Everything was inside. And when they got outside, they would have heart attacks and stuff like that.

So we completely revamped our retirement program because of that. We taught people how to, how to rewrite their, their technical skills so that they would become useful again. Cause a lot of the things that they knew how to do really, really, really well to have no legal application outside of the office, you know, an audio officer,

who's just one of the best. What's he going to do with that? Nothing. Wow. When Tony, when Tony and I left, because we were both disguised. He was also in disguise at one point. We got a communication from some card counters out in Las Vegas who made us an offer.

It wasn't hard to refuse, but it was kind of titillating. They said, you know, there are four of us, and we can't go in a casino anymore. They won't let us in because if we can get in, we can just run the table. So how about you come out here and do a little work with us? And Tony said, can you see the headline in the Washington Post? He said, I can. They said, thank you. No, no, thank you. Good luck. Did they offer you a lot of money? They did. They were going to make a lot of money. Yeah, I you. No, no, thank you. Good luck. Did they offer you a lot of money? They did.

They were going to make a lot of money. Yeah, I bet. Wow. I wonder if they found someone else. Yeah, maybe. Throughout your career, this excitement of being on the front lines of this is something that is often portrayed in these books and comes out in these talks. And I'm tempted to ask about some of the scarier moments from your career. I mean, are there times when you were an officer? I mean,

you served undercover in some very dangerous parts of the world at very dangerous times. Were there moments in your career where you ever feared for your life or feared that your cover was going to be blown or feared that maybe one of those disguises you were wearing wasn't going to do its job when it needed to there were there were moments um mostly mostly there were not most of the operations that we were taking part in were were so painstakingly put together that that it almost could become tedious. The detail, I mean, to plan to do something in Moscow, just to put down a dead drop in a dead rat by a tree on a highway

would take weeks and weeks and weeks of planning and scouting the location and photographing and sketching it. It just was, there was a lot of that minutiae involved. But when you got in the middle of operations, in the middle of moments in an operation, it could be really exciting and it could be really scary. One of them that I put in the book, this new book, I actually opened it. The first chapter is about this, but had to do with terrorism. And it really was about terrorism and counter-narcotics when it got scary. But I was back out there in the subcontinent. Notice that I never

see a country, big part of the world. I'm in the equivalent of a Hyatt hotel. It's not a Hyatt, but it looked like a Hyatt. And our chief is going to come in because a terrorist had sent a message in that said, I have information about bringing down an American plane. Back then, we thought it might be Pan Am. He didn't say, but we thought it could be. And so this guy had already, we knew that he was part of a terrorist organization that had done that in the past. So we had to meet with him. And we knew that he knew that we would have to respond to his message. You can't just wave that off. You have to go do diligence and see what he knows. But our chief was scared of this guy with good reason. This was a really bad guy. And so there were seven of us. I was visiting. This wasn't my home base.

I was visiting. And she said, I'm not going without you. You guys are going too. We're all going to this hotel. So I had a day to get together disguises for all these guys. They all had that little kit. We issued them and then we started. So we got them disguised.

To go to that country, I always wore what the local women wear when I was on the street. My maid, it turned out, always would pack that. And I would usually not wear it. But it gave her comfort to know that I could look not like an American if I had to. So I had clothes that I could put on. But this chief was this big, tall, blonde, Texan with a drawl and a very pockmarked face. He was blonde. He was too tall.

So we had to go to the market and get local clothes and get local sandals that looked like they're made out of tires and dyed his hair black, gave him glasses. No fake anything, no mustache, no beard, just gave him a big cigar and a big portfolio to carry. And he kind of, he didn't look, he didn't look local, but he also didn't look American. And we said, okay, so here's what you do. You go in the lobby. You set about that. It's like a tea ceremony. You start getting ready to cut that cigar and do all those things you do when you smoke a cigar.

And you can kind of scope out. You can see if you see him. We'll be around. We'll see if we, we'll have an eye on you. He said, I will not leave the hotel with that guy. We said, that's, we got it boss. So I went to this little glassed in rug shop, three sides glass, and the quarter went down. There's a newsstand across and I got this poor merchant to start rolling out rugs. And I'm looking at them upside down and counting knots. I'm on the floor, but I can see the lobby. We're all just keeping our eyes out for this guy.

We didn't know what he looked like. So I'm doing that and I glanced up out the glass, across the hall, through the glass of the newsstand. And there he was. Without a doubt, it was him. It's a very small man wearing shawl or camise. And he had two big guys, one on each side, with like AK-47s. And a Hyatt. It wasn't a Hyatt, but like a Hyatt. In the newsstand. And the thing was that he saw me.

He was looking at me. You're not supposed to make eye contact. But, you know, you do, and you just kind of get locked. I laugh now. This is one of the scariest moments of my life. I actually thought they were going to shoot me. These people had no qualms. They're in there with their guns. What? They do whatever they want, but he just stared at me for so long. He wanted me to know that he knew, at me for so long. He wanted me to know that he knew. And I got it. I've just never been in the presence of that kind of what it just felt like evil. I mean, it really was like almost a physical presence. And then he just lowered his eyes. And they went out and they went down the hall to the

lobby to meet with the chief. And he told the chief he had seen four of his people. And he did. But the fact that I didn't get shot, because I thought, you know, what do you think? I'm thinking, my mother will never even know it was me. Because I'm not there in my true name. I have another identity when I'm doing that kind of work. I have another name and nationality. What will they do?

And then I thought of the wall of stars at CIA where there's a hundred and I don't know, at this point, they're like 170 people who've been killed in the line of duty. And a number of them don't have their real names. They don't have names attached to the stars because they happened when they were undercover. And I thought I could be one of those stars. This was just a moment. That didn't happen all the time. But boy, when it happened,

when you got yourself in one of those spots, the thing I couldn't do is I couldn't stand up and walk away. I couldn't react. I couldn't, I just had to be, I just had to be there. You know, that makes me wonder, and I guess provokes the question, to be a little morbid for a moment. Let's say the worst case scenario there does play out. Is the CIA's move in that situation that you were just a foreigner who died and whatever your ID was or whatever your personality was, was who you were. And we never find out that John Amendez died in this country undercover. I mean, you know, I read a news story about someone being shot, a civilian in some far off country, and there's a possibility that person is a CIA agent undercover. Is that sort of the takeaway there?

Anything is possible. Actually, I think if anything had happened to me, I think in fact, the office would have known. They would have notified my family, but they would never have made it public and they would never put my name out there. There just wouldn't be, there'd be no point to doing that. So they wouldn't, but they'd let your family know. CIA is actually, it sounds, it sounds ridiculous because it's an enormous organization, but it is like a family. It feels like a family. Even today, it feels like a family. The Spy Museum is my second family. The CIA was my first family, except for my real family, of course. So one thing I've always wondered as a reporter is oftentimes I am reporting on a story or covering something in my newsletter, and there is a statement or a report released by, say, the director of national intelligence. statement or a report released by, say, the director of national intelligence. And a lot of readers in today's political climate actually sometimes write in very critically of me if I

quote an intelligence report or I quote the director of national intelligence because their perspective is these people, even though they are the DNI in our country, can't be trusted. And I wonder what your response is to that or what you make of those reports. I mean, is there an obligation on the part of the intelligence apparatus to publish things that are honest or true? And should I read all of those things with a great deal of skepticism? You know, that just, when I hear, I mean, this stuff is all around us, I know that. It just still makes me cringe when I hear this, that there are alternative facts, which makes it sound like there are alternative truths when there are not. There's

just one truth. And the CIA's job is to go find that information. What is the truth? And get it back here to the people who make decisions in Washington. You can have dissension. You can have dissenting opinions. and a lot of national intelligence estimates, the knees, a lot of them will say, this is how we see it, 17 intelligence agencies, this is what we see, this is what we think. And then there will be annotations that this group says, hold on just a minute, those dissenting, any dissenting opinions, it's just like Supreme Court decisions. They make a decision, and then the people that dissent have an opportunity to make comments. There will always be that, because nobody will ever see things exactly the same way

at the same time. But to be suspect of this, the intelligence community as a whole, which is broken down into all those parts. And when they come together with a consensus, I don't know who in their right mind would not accept it or who would challenge it, who would have other information to bring to that conversation. Very few civilians. I don't know. When President Trump came into power, I was concerned that he could impact the intelligence community. And then I sat back and I really thought about it a lot. And I thought, it is so strong. The people that do the work are so apolitical. They don't care. They don't care who's president. It has nothing to do with their job. You know, when you're, when you're doing the job, it doesn't matter who's in the White House, except with Trump,

you know, it did, it did. And it started twisting some stuff around. And he started putting people in positions inside of the intelligence community that started impacting, I think, the way other decisions were made. People that were all of a sudden maybe afraid to speak up. That's never been the case. You're always encouraged to speak up. Be brave. Be wrong. We don't care. Speak up. So that thing that you're talking about is one of the impacts that Trump made on Washington, D.C. that I don't know. It's going to take years and years to get people to get trust back. Once you lose it, I mean, how do you get it back? By being right a hundred times in a row? I don't know how you... I come out of Wichita, Kansas. I come out of what is basically a rural state. I come out of what is basically a rural state. I come from a town where the front page news was about tractors and the corn crop and the harvest. And the international news was one column on page three.

I know people have different points of view, different priorities, but it's painful to think that. You know, when Trump stood in Helsinki and said, I'm with him, with Putin, I believe him. I don't believe our intelligence community. That was just like, just new report from the U.S. intelligence community that said that Vladimir Putin authorized an influence operation aimed at denigrating President Biden's candidacy and the Democratic Party and was attempting to support Trump. And again, he did it in 2016. Now they're saying he did it in 2020. So this is my question to you is, there is something about that story that fits neatly

into the left leaning the democratic narrative. And so I wonder how to address the skepticism of people, you know, who are supporters of former President Trump and say, well, of course, Joe Biden's intelligence community and intelligence officers are going to release this report that says Russia was trying to help Trump because that fits into the democratic narrative that the 2016 election was stolen, or that Hillary Clinton was robbed, or that, you know, all these other things that have become so political, like you're saying. And, and I don't know how to address that skepticism. I mean, I'm interested in your perspective on that. You know, I think I haven't done it myself.

But I think if we look back, we would see that that intelligence report that was just released was a long time in the making. You know, you just don't dash one of those things off. Biden has been in office 60 days. I think that report was probably well, well underway before Biden took over when Trump was president. Trump was president, like so many other reports that have come out, even when reports come out like the Mueller report, which was pretty straightforward and fairly clear. And look how the results of that were twisted around. If you don't want to hear the truth, or if you don't like the truth that you're hearing, it's so easy to say, oh, I don't think so. I don't believe that. I don't know without being more involved in the current politics of the day. I can't refute it. I mean, I can't say that

it's a Democrat or a Republican thing. But, you know, 10 years ago, we weren't having these conversations. Was it Democrat or Republican? the intelligence community would issue a finding, a report, and it would be accepted as a professional piece of work from a professional group of people who don't have a skin in the game. That's no longer true. We're in a new place. And I don't have a solution for your question. Well, I'll pivot out of politics for the last few minutes of this conversation. I'm looking at my notes in front of me and a few questions that I wanted to make sure I asked. And there was one that I wish I'd gotten to earlier. But I always wonder,

we hear so much, especially people like me who read the works of former U.S. intelligence agents like yourself, who talk about your work in other countries. And I'm curious what you remember maybe about your time in the service about the threats that we had here from other nations spying on us, which always interests me. I mean, you know, sometimes I go to Washington, D.C. to report and I look around a restaurant and I think, I wonder if there's, you know, a Russian spy sitting in here who has embedded themselves in some democratic arm of, you know, the DNC or whatever. And I'd love to hear maybe if you have any stories or remembrances from your time about hearing of the threat that maybe you were surrounded by a spy. Maybe there was someone you

were working with who wasn't who you thought they were. Maybe there were reports about these people who had made it to our soil and had infiltrated our country the same way that our CIA agents often do in other places. Well, you know, that's actually wading into the FBI's field because the intelligence targets back here in the United States belong to them. They're the ones who are chasing the Soviets, probably the Chinese and the rest of them, around Washington and around New York City. We have a member of the Spy Museum, General Oleg Kalugin. He's been there from the very, very beginning because it is an international museum. And he's former KGB.

He served in the United States up in New York. His cover was he was working for Pravda, a Russian newspaper. And he had access. He had all kinds of access. He didn't defect to the United States. He simply moved. He's become a United States citizen. And he's very much on the side of the West in this conversation. But he loves to tell some of the stories about when he was an active Soviet spy here in the United States. And the FBI was after him, how they were trying to set him up.

They were trying to get him in a position where they could actually arrest him and how he knew enough to evade them here and there. I am fascinated by those stories too. The idea of having spies all around you in the United States never really concerned me a lot. I assume that they're here. They must be here.

The fact that the Cold War ended doesn't stop that activity at all. As a matter of fact, at one point Oleg said there were probably more spies per square inch, PSI, in Washington, D.C. now than there ever have been. It has nothing to do with the Cold War. They're after everything. They're after political information. They're after technological information. They're after everything. They're just sucking it up. The Chinese are here and they're after technology, probably ahead of everything else. But yeah, there's spies all around you.

So the FBI has their hands full. I got it. 1985 was called the year of the spy because we had all kinds of American spies discovered. Bob Hanson, Aldrich James was working then. We had so many American spies who were working for the Soviet Union. It was a bit of a problem. It seems to have been solved. Aldrich James is in jail for the rest of his life, in case anyone ever wondered. Rest of his life, and then I think two more lives after that, he gets one hour of sunshine every day,

if it's a nice day, for the rest of his life. Still doesn't seem like enough. John Amendez, we've taken up about an hour of your time now. Before we let you go, I want to give you an opportunity to point people to some of your work, some of your writing. You have a few books. It sounds like you have another one in the works right now being reviewed by the big guys over at our intelligence agencies. Where can people keep up with you or find some of your work if they're interested? Let's see.

Well, the books are out there. The most recent book published is the Moscow rules. It's done very well. And it's, it's it's been fun to, to present that book. This,

this next one is called in true face. And I wasn't sure if people would understand even what that means in true face. If you're in disguise is what you look like before you come into our labs. And we fix you up. So that's going to be the name, I think, whether it's understood or not. I'm doing a lot with the Spy Museum. It's, you know, everything is picking up now.

The pandemic seems to be maybe out there where we can start seeing the end of it. And things are just starting to really look interesting and optimistic. And I'm so excited about that. Lots of work with the Spy Museum. Like I said, they're like a second family. And who knows what's next? Yeah, the Spy Museum is on my post-pandemic list for sure. That is a trip I am absolutely going to make.

Jonna, thank you so much for the time, for coming on and chatting with us. As always, just such a fun, interesting conversation. And hopefully we'll have you on again sometime. It's a pleasure. I love doing it. Today's podcast was produced by Tangle Media in partnership with our friends over at imposter radio if you enjoyed the podcast be sure to give it a five-star rating share with your friends and go check out reedtangle.com for more Thanks for watching! dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web,

his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+.