The Jordan Harbinger Show - 1027: Jonna Mendez | A Woman’s Life in the CIA

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

Veteran CIA operative and disguise specialist Jonna Mendez joins us to discuss how Cold War espionage shaped modern intelligence gathering!Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1027What We Discuss with Jonna Mendez:Jonna Mendez broke barriers as a woman in the CIA during a time when women were often limited to secretarial roles. She had to persistently push for opportunities to do field work and technical operations.The CIA’s Office of Technical Services (OTS) developed sophisticated disguise and surveillance techniques, including creating masks, altering appearances, and devising ways to evade detection in hostile environments.Cold War espionage, especially in places like Berlin, involved complex operations, surveillance, and counter-surveillance techniques. The Berlin Wall era presented unique challenges and opportunities for intelligence gathering.Transitioning out of CIA work can be challenging due to the secretive nature of the job, with many agents struggling to adjust to civilian life and maintain relationships outside the agency.Developing strong interpersonal skills, adaptability, and a curious mindset are valuable traits for success in intelligence work and many other fields. These skills can be cultivated through practice, diverse experiences, and continuous learning, making them applicable to various career paths and personal growth opportunities.And much more…See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. I was walking down the street, and I'm a woman who doesn't belong in that city and certainly doesn't belong in that street I was walking down, and I bump into this group of guys, and you can see the guns. They all had guns. And I figured, you know, this is the cartel. So they all turned and looked at me. You could almost hear their brains going like,

oh, DEA sending women now. And I thought, you know what, they just might just shoot me. If they've had enough beer and if they're worried, enough about who I am and why in the world am I walking down this street. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety

of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional rocket scientist, Russian chess, Grandmaster, Hollywood, would filmmaker or real-life pirate. And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs as a place to begin. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion, negotiation, psychology, and geopolitics, disinformation in cyber warfare, crime and cults, and more.

That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start, or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, another round with Jona Mendez. You might remember her previous episode where she details her time in Mast, as the chief of disguise for the CIA, former chief of disguise now, of course. This is one of our most popular episodes. Today, we're focusing more on SpyCraft, including her start at the CIA, training in clandestine

surveillance and spy technology, cover stories that spies use crazy disguise techniques and practices, including making doubles of people, Mission Impossible-style face masks that peel off, and other things that you probably, what I certainly thought, were actually impossible and a whole lot more, really interesting episode about a woman in a career that was not really available to women at the time, especially. Now here we go with John A Mendes. Welcome back, and thanks for doing this. Our last interview, I look back, it was in 2020. A lot of people say it was one of their favorite episodes, and I know we've planned this one for a long time because I actually, I checked back last year, and I said, isn't your book out?

And you said, wrong year, pal. And so here we are in the right year, and I'm actually planning to run our preview. episode in a few days, because I think this conversation is going to be a great prequel to that one, because that's kind of how the book reads. And I assume that was intentional. I don't know. This book is what happened when COVID hit. And I got just like everyone else bored. I did all the jigsaw puzzles, all the crossword puzzles. I did all of that stuff. And then I thought, well, I'll just fiddle around with a memoir. I'll just see what I remember, what comes back to me. Because when you leave the CIA, you basically leave with nothing, unless you're Alder James.

God knows what. And then you leave with nuclear secrets. And yeah, you're not supposed to do that from what I understand. Yeah, stuff like that. But you don't take your calendars. You don't take your notebooks. It's all behind. So it's all pretty much from memory.

I bet. You know, I never thought about that. You were very productive during COVID then. I had two kids. So you were productive and I guess I was reproductive. And, man, that would be really tough. Because you can't call an old colleague and be like, hey, what was that operation in Myanmar that we did?

Because, right, they're like, hey, you're retired. I'm not supposed to talk to you about that. stuff. No, I mean, this is so ridiculous. There was a point, and it's in the book, when I ended up going to the White House. Now, that's a very unique thing. Yeah. CIA doesn't do that very often and showing a new disguise. So I'm writing, and the question was, huh, when was that? Well, even in CIA, I'm not sure. I only write it down once on a calendar. I never had written it down anywhere outside. So I'm trying to triangulate. It's like a German D.F thing trying to find the radio transmission. And I'm like, well, it was before this.

It was after that. Bush was still there. Let's see. And the people in the room and Dan Quail was there and just getting it down to. Right. So you basically had to figure out what year somebody was the VP and be like, oh, and there's a dog in the photo. And that dog, they got that dog in this year or whatever.

Millie had her puppies. That was one of the biggest points that I could find. Millie's puppies. That's funny. Bill Webster took me. So he was director of CIA, not for a terribly long time. So, you know, you just kept narrowing in. You said it was like a German D.F. thing? What is that? I don't know what that means.

That's a direction finding. During the Second World War, when the French resistance, well, in other resistance, when they were in radio contact, say in the south of France, and they were communicating with London, so the Allies would know where to bomb, what to bomb, where the bridges were, how many soldiers, the Germans were out there in these trucks and vans with this equipment, triangulating on those signals, trying to find the radio operator. Outside of the military, he had the most dangerous job in the war because they found him and killed him just by the dozens. The direction finders or the-

The radio transmitters, the people who were running the radios and sending messages back to London. I see. Saying, you know, we have people, we have resistance. They've said this bridge is really, really crucial. Bring in something bomb that bridge. Oh, and by the way, drop us some more ammo, some more food, some more money. It's all going on. Oh, my gosh.

So these people were essentially the only line out. So what, or radios, this is a dumb question probably, but I don't know. Were radios ginormous back then? They looked like great big suitcases. And these people were moving every day. And they were typically sheltering in like the loft of a barn in makeshift buildings just moving from location to location, trying to stay ahead of the Germans that were trying to find it. That sounds really, that's a job for somebody who thinks they can't die.

That's a job for one of those like 19-year-old kids who's thinking, no, I'm the superhero in this movie. They're never going to find me. It's part of a story that we tell in the spy museum. The story is actually not about the radio operators. It's about an American woman who was in charge of a big piece of the resistance. She was sit in by the British. Her name was Virginia Hall, and she's famous in my world. But she pulled together these French resistance men, all men,

and they were out there bushwhacking the Germans doing everything they could to interrupt the Germans taking over of France. Virginia Hall was she was operating with one leg. She had lost a leg before the war in a hunting accident. So she had a prosthesis, I think it was from the knee down. She had a wooden leg just back in the 1940s. You can imagine what it looked like. And she was such a force of wrath against the German. They figured out that there was a woman working against them and that she limped.

And so the Germans put up these big posters all over the south of France saying, keep your eyes out for this woman who limps. So Virginia Hall, she's in my heart. She's my favorite because she disguised herself as a shepherdess. She went out and bought a flock of sheep and staff dressed like a French woman. And she's standing in the fields with her sheep, moving with them, you know, limping. But in a flock of sheep, it's really hard to see. And she was just hellbent.

She was calling all kinds of munitions, blowing up bridges. She was running the thing. Jeez. Nowadays, you put the radio in the fake leg, but I guess they didn't have the technology back then. Yeah, yeah. That sounds like something you would invent, actually. In the next war, they'll automate that fake leg. That's right.

That's right. I want to jump back and talk about how you got your start in the CIA. Because it seems like back then, it's not a career path most people would have even heard of. Because back then, there's not a zillion. movies about it, James Bond, I know that's not the CIA, but that whole thing doesn't really exist. The pop culture references are not there. It's not something where you're like, oh, I'm going to grow up and join the CIA. It's like you meet somebody who's in that, you finally find out, and you go, what's that? I've never heard of that. That's absolutely right. It was never on my screen.

I thought, if you asked me what I thought my life was going to look like, I was 18, 19. I thought I was going to end up being an English teacher. I loved English literature. I was in college, I was taking a number of classes in English lift. I didn't think I was going to stay in Kansas, but I thought that would be something that I'd be good at and that I'd probably end up doing. That's not what happened at all. No, my friend got married and she married a second lieutenant. And I thought, oh my God, he's an officer, but I found out, of course, second lieutenant is like, a baby officer. But that's okay. So I went to Europe and I was in their wedding. He was in the fifth at Armored Calvary in Folda, Germany. Folda is a really critical spot.

or it was back then, it was where the fold of gap was. And going back to Bonaparte, the Europeans always knew that if the invasion from the east ever happened, they were going to come to the fold of gap. That's why they had all these tank brigades stationed around there. Anyway, they got married and went to Italy on their honeymoon. And there I was in Europe. And I wasn't about to go home to Kansas. Oh, wow.

So I had to find a job. And I did a place to live. I worked for Chase Manhattan Bank in Frankfurt and met my first husband there. an American who I thought vaguely somehow he did something with the military. He was a civilian. He wasn't military. He didn't wear a uniform. It's hard to explain to young people today. Big parts of Germany. It was like America owned it. We had troops everywhere. We had stores. We had commissaries. We had hospitals. We had just everything. You could live a whole year in Germany as an American and never really interface with the German. After the war, it was just

crawling with it. So when I met this civilian, it made sense that, oh, yeah, he's somehow associated with that huge military presence. He had parents in Vienna, Austria. His dad was a diplomat. And so we would travel down to Vienna a lot and visit them back up to Frankfurt. He proposed to me in Vienna in the subway over coffee. I'd say very romantic in a sarcastic way, but my proposal was much worse. So I'm going to let it slide. He wrote me a poem on a napkin. I kept the napkin. Anyway, I said yes. He was a great guy. And it wasn't until after he proposed to me, and I said, yes, that he said, oh, by the way, I work for the CIA. I'm not a civilian attached to the military. I'm a CIA officer undercover. He couldn't tell me until I said, yes, it was kind of part of the rules at the CIA.

You couldn't divulge your cover status. Yeah, that makes sense. So the exception is fiancé spouse's immediate family, I guess, maybe? Immediate family is your call and different people do different things. The ones that come up first usually is if you have kids, the question isn't, when should I tell them? The question is when they absolutely insist that you explain yourself? Because who are these people that are in your living room every night? You can't talk to them. So telling your kids was always a ride of passage. I think most people found out that the kids were better at keeping the secret than a lot of the adults.

The kids were like, okay, I get it. I never heard a story of a kid passing it along. Huh. That's fascinating. You wouldn't expect that, but yeah, that makes a lot of sense when they just insist because it's like, okay, what's going on here? I'm not leaving until you tell me what the heck is going on. And it's like, all right, you're 15 years old, and Uncle James is not really related to us. The reason he's here every night and the reason he's Lebanese is because we have a special arrangement. I don't understand how we have relatives that don't speak English or whatever. You know, that doesn't make any sense.

Yeah. You know, the other thing that kids could see through so easily, almost always, was disguise. It was hard to fool a kid. I'm thinking about, you know, all the fluffy stuff is over beside them, not part of their vision, and they're just looking clear-eyed at whatever. Yeah, they're not thinking about their mortgage. It's almost a funny trope. There's a movie with, I think it's Nicholas Cage, I could be wrong, but where he switches bodies, he switches lives with himself or something. And in one, he's like a wealthy financial guy who's kind of a jerk. And then in the other one, this other path he didn't take, he proposed to his girlfriend at the time instead of taking the job and he had a couple of kids.

And when he switches lives, the only person that notices is his daughter. And she's like, so you're an alien, right? And he's like, how do you know? And she's like, because you don't know how to do the diaper. And you always knew how to do the diaper. So you're not my dad. It's like she just notices these very little things that she points out in the movie. I think to throw it way back to the 80s, ghost dad with Bill.

I think it was Bill Cosby. Yikes. The little girl is the only one who's like, you're not real. And everyone else can or you're the only one who can see the ghost or something. like that. It's just you're right, little kids, even outside of Hollywood, they just don't have all the noise, right? So their signal to noise ratio is so much crisper and clearer that they might actually notice something like that. Although you would think disguise would be good enough to fool a kid. I guess maybe that's a metric, right? You bring in a group of toddlers, and if they buy it,

you know, you got a winner. That's the best explanation for it I've ever heard, yeah, ratio of noise. Yeah, kids don't have those impediments. It sounds like in the beginning of your career, women were second-class citizens in the CIA. Not just the CIA. I guess 3% of field officers were women. Field work was known as men's work, and it just seemed like you wanted to do something technical, and they were just like, hey, hang on there, little lady,

not so fast. How about some coffee, cream and sugar, please? I mean, it really comes across as that kind of work environment. It was that kind of work environment. As a female, you probably came in the door as a secretary. It didn't really matter what credentials you brought with you. You would probably be maybe in the typing pool with your first goal being how to get the hell out of the piping pool.

There are different pieces of the agency. I worked in a technical, a big directorate. The women that came into that directorate with degrees in chemistry, in engineering, in physics, they would start not as secretaries. They would start as professional, whatever they had trained for. Anything short of that, you could come in with languages like Jean Vertefe, who ended up, she was the one who discovered Alder James was our traitor. she started as a secretary, ended up as chief of station. She was a unique one-off. Most women in the

directed of operations, where I started out, most women could not get into the real work, because the real work was done by men. And they thought that women didn't have any value in that field in doing that work. They thought that the men that we worked with, the foreigners, the assets, we called them, the people that were providing the information to us, the intelligence to us, they said in huge parts of the world, women have no value. They're not going to listen to you. They're not going to risk their life working for your assurances. They're not stupid.

They're not going to do that. Women over the years have proved them to be wrong. I don't think that balance has been righted yet. I think it's being righted as we speak. But it was a huge problem. And the only way, the way I found to get past that was to just kind of elbow my way through it to just make a point of saying, I can do that. And can I, you know, asking, can I do that? Sure, you know, the first time I went out of the street and did work, it was because there was

nobody there but me. So I went out and did what turned out to be a unique, one-of-a-kind, interesting, complicated operation. And that was like in my bona fides. And it was like, well, okay, you can do that. And you had to, every step of the way, you had to prove that you could take care of it. A lot of women just spend their careers as secretaries. Yeah, it seems like an uphill battle. It would just be easier to spend your career as a secretary because otherwise, like you said, you got to throw elbows and it's like, well, that just might get tiring. Or you have a bunch of kids and you're like, I can't throw elbows and have kids. There's a difference between going for a jog outside and going for a jog outside with a 40-pound backpack, right? One is significantly harder than

the other. And it sounds like they just, if you walk in and you're not a guy, they just hand you your backpack. Can we do a quick sidebar on Alder James? Because we mentioned him twice, and some people might know that he's a famous traitor against the United States. But other people are like, what is that? Sounds like a brand of furniture. Yeah, Alder James was one of the moments in CIA's history that everybody would like to erase. He was a CIA officer. He was second generation. His father had been a CIA officer. From the beginning of his career, he was kind of not measuring up. everybody seemed to know it, but they could live with it. He didn't excel. And generally, this sounds ridiculous. Our people do excel. That's why we hire them. We hire the kind of type

A personalities to go out and do this work. For the work that he was headed to do, it's all about your interpersonal skills. It's human. It's person to person. Technology doesn't really even come in. It's you look at the other guy in the eye and saying, you know, we'd really like you to help us. Anyway, how he prospered at that job, I don't know. He was very, very smart, but he was in Latin America and he was getting divorced from a wife he left up here. And he had met a Latin American woman. He was dating her and somewhere in there in the middle of that divorce and his new relationship. He was in dreadful need of money.

And that's what motivates most American spies, people that spy against us. They do it for money. Right. Russians do it for other reasons. They do it very often for ideology. Bob Hanson did it because of business of ego. No one knew how good he was. So to prove to them how good he was, he had to become a spy and they didn't catch him

for 10 or more years. But Aldrich James, he was sort of selling pounds of flesh for gold, is how we thought of it afterwards. He was giving away every foreign asset that he had ever worked with. He gave the name to the Russians. The Russians would arrest that person. person, give him a little mock trial, and execute them. And in the summer of 1985, I think about 12 of the Russians who were working for the CIA,

giving us information on everything from, I don't know, the nuclear program, everything, they were all dead because of Alder James. He was our worst case scenario, total traitor. And now he's spending the rest of his life in Indiana in a maximum security prison. I think it's a maximum security prison. And he's been there, he's 82, so I can't imagine he's going to last too much longer. He's been there since 1994. I hope he lasts forever because his life must be so dreadful.

It's well earned. It's too bad you can't enact more than a life. Yeah, I mean, he's responsible for the death of 12 people. He should do 12 lifetimes. Yeah, memorable people. I look this up, by the way. I remember there was a reason why people spy, right? It's mice is the mnemonic device.

Money, ideology, compromise, and ego. I don't really know what compromise means. I suppose maybe they're being blackmailed somehow. For a long time, it could be homosexuality. If you were gay, you could not work at the CIA. And then they changed the rule because someone figured out that if you were openly gay, you couldn't be compromised because of your penis. And, okay, now you can come in and work.

Yeah. But there are, you know, there are lots of ways that people can be compromised. The problem with the app was that compromise didn't work very well as a tool that we could use. We didn't use compromise as a rationale, but money. Money was the big thing. And the ego, because the ego could be everything from you got passed over for promotion and you thought you really deserved it to have to do with money, have to do with a lot of things. Yeah, what motivates people is interesting.

The Russians were the most interesting because that kind of didn't apply to them. Mostly they were not looking for money. A lot of them were looking for an opportunity to get their families or especially their kids out of Russia, get them to the way. get them into Western schools, give them a life. That was a motivator for a Russian. A lot of Russians, their family structure is so sound. They go back a couple of generations further than we do.

They remembered what Stalin had done to various members of their family. So-and-so was an orphan. So-and-so lost both parents because of Stalin. The mother spent the rest of her life in Siberia. Terrible stories. And these Russians, they remembered those stories. and they would betray their country because of those stories. There's also something to be said for,

I can't leave and I don't want my kids to grow up in this. You might have qualms with the United States, but there are things you can do to get your kids in a better position through hard work, some luck, and so maybe you have to do things that are unfair, work extra hard, harder than you should to get out of it. But it's not literally impossible like it was in the Soviet Union, right, where they had this sort of like, I think it's called blood system.

That says a lot about the system that people complain so much about here. That's a sidebar. I don't necessarily, that's a road, I don't necessarily want to go down in this episode because you have so much to say about some of your early training in the CIA. Some of this is just bananas, right? They finally let you into these higher-level meetings and take courses on clandestine work. And there's one where you describe, it's, it almost sounds like a circus actor and some sort

of harness on an airplane with no doors taking photos. Can you tell us about that? That sounds like something I would just never, ever want to do. Yeah, that was my first photo training exercise. I worked for the director of technical service. And I told him, I thought I might leave. and he knew that I was an avid amateur of photographer. And he said, there's probably more here than this secretarial job you're doing.

He said, why don't you take some of our photo courses? I said, yes. The first course I took was called Airborne Platforms. That was the name of it. It was involved with stabilizing a camera with a lens. The lens already by itself wanted to move because it was a really long lens, like a thousand millimeter and even holding that lens it wants to bob around you have to be very careful with it but doing that from a moving airplane at a door which they had kindly removed so you didn't have to bother with it

and so there's a little wind there's that lens there's the airplane bouncing and the question would be i think i put in the book can you resolve the license plate on that truck driving down that dirt road below you at 60 miles an hour can you make out the license plate that was just one of you know, we were looking at railroad track signals. We were just what kind of intelligence could you capture with your camera from a moving platform like that. I actually thought that was one of the most fun courses I ever took. I said to the pilot, how low can you and I go in this plane?

And we were like out over the Chesapeake Bay. I could have put my foot out and got my toe. Oh, my God. That gives me the hebi-jeebies for sure. Oh, and they had painted out the numbers on the tail of the plane. I think they did. I wasn't the only person. they ever took them that course, but they didn't want that plane to be identified. So there were no

numbers in the tail. It was great fun. And then that evening, I went in, I was a secretary when this happened for the director of my office. And that evening, we went to these big photo labs that we had at a place called the farm. And I was the only one there, turned out all the safe lights on developing the film and hanging it up, the prints. And I thought, well, hey, this is way more fun than being a secretary. And I decided that night that I wouldn't go. talk to the Smithsonian about a job, that I would stay at the CIA and pursue this photo thing. That day was the day that I used to say was the first day I worked for the CIA. My professional career started that day. It was a big deal.

Oh, man, it really illustrates how manual intelligence gathering was back then. Because if you want a license plate now, you tell a satellite to go get it, and it'll take a high-res photo from space. And here, you've got to chase a car with an airplane and a whatever, what was it, a thousand millimeter lens while you're swinging around from a vibrating aircraft and there's a cloud of dust because the car, like you said, is driving 60 miles an hour down some dirt road. And it's just like that was just, there was an art to things back then that maybe is different now. Oh, technology has clearly made a huge difference. It's offered a whole new set of tools that can be used by you or against you or for you,

depending on what you want to do. The technology has opened up windows we never dreamed of. it's given us opportunities to do things we never dreamed of. People are very aware of the threat that that technology can play, a threat to American intelligence, threats to American military, and it's true. But people don't stop to think if you turn that threat around, how can you use it? What can it do for you as opposed to to you?

And that's where a lot of our technical expertise would come into play. even today, maybe especially today. The office that I worked in was like Q. We had all kinds of techs. One half of the office was technical. It was chemists and physicists and engineers, electrical and mechanical. People were such esoteric specialties. You would try and imagine what kind of career they would have outside the CIA.

Who else in the world would let one person spend a whole career doing nothing but ink, ink. it was so important. It was the bottom line to a lot of the things we did. Ink had to be just right. So we were like that. The other half of the office was my half, which was people who would deploy those tools, who would take them to the field, who would hand them to James. And we always kind of sort of an inside joke. We call them all James. All the case officers, they were all guys. We kind of called them all James. and part of us didn't trust James with our gear, because we might have spent $5 million on a program to develop that camera system that fit into a Mont Blanc pen. And now you're asking us to just hand it to James,

and he's going to go somewhere. We usually figured out how to go with him. So if he broke it, we could fix it. If he lost it, we could find it. If he forgot how to operate it, we could refresh him. It was a little inside joke. If he left it on the subway, maybe we could go get it. get it. So we traveled around with James. We not only equipped him and we trained him, but we also

very often accompanied him. That lifestyle must have just been epic. I mean, so tell me, for example, about Berlin in the 80s, the height of the Cold War. That city was just full of spies. It probably, who knows, maybe it still is. It's full of spies. There's underground tunnels. People are trying to escape from one side of the other. It's just absolutely bonkers. That place must have just been such a hotbed and so fascinating. It was surreal to actually go there. And, to be there. It was surreal from the moment they put that wall up. I don't know what kind of a reaction they expected from the rest of the world. I think they expected more than they got. The world just kind of sat and watched and it's like, well, you know, okay, there's a wall to keep their people in.

That was kind of the big revelation was the purpose of the wall was not to keep us out. It was to keep East Berliners in East Berlin, not let them wander over to the West and God knows, betray their country. When I would go up there, going into the east was not an easy thing to do. And every vehicle, every person, every document across that border at checkpoint Charlie or at a couple of other places was administratively. It was just a classy bureaucratic mess. But when I really saw it was when one of our officers, very, very senior officer at CIA, he was up there. And I was there at the same time and they had laid on a helicopter tour of the wall for him. And I went along. We're looking now down at that no man's land from the wall to where civilian Germany started. And it was just

guns in place. It was dogs on chains that could run half a mile either direction. It was guns that were in the ground. They would shoot a spray of bullets in a 360 degree and they were noise activated. It was just like all the different ways you could kill a person if they dared to put a foot on that ground. We flew over a couple of bridges because the wall crosses a couple of bridges. And you'd notice that on each side of whatever crossing there was there, there were embedded in the water. There were platforms with spikes, nails. So if anybody was on a train or a subway or whatever and tried to jump while they'd be impaled, there was no way out of there. and the guys in the guns in the towers giving you dirty looks that in themselves were scary.

It was amazing. Well, you'll probably never have a job that's as cool as John Mendes's a job, but you can console yourself with something from the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Constant Contact. If you ever feel like you need a marketing degree to tackle small business marketing, you need to check out Constant Contact. Constant Contact is not just any marketing platform.

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They're probably not going to want to hang out with you for many of those anyway. So in a couple weeks, we're taking our two and four-year-olds on an adventure to San Diego, hitting up the zoo, channeling our inner childhood a little bit. I never got to do a lot of this stuff as a kid because we had a cottage, which was the most boring place on Earth. Anyway, I don't know who's more excited.

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it's because of my network and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at six minute networking.com. I know you're like, I don't need to network, or I'm already really good at this. Sure. I taught this to the CIA. I've taught this to MI6.

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And it just takes a few minutes a day. If you don't get anything out of it, I will give you a full refund because the course is free. Over at six-minute networking.com. All right. Now, back to John Mendez. So there's definitely people listening right now who are a little confused. Okay, so when Germany was split east and west, they, the allies and the Soviets, you could say, I suppose split Berlin in half because it was a major city. And then people were leaving East Berlin, which was under Soviet control, because, you know, occupied by a sort of Soviet satellite state of East Germany. So they were going to the western side of Berlin that was built nicely, had freedom and, you know, freedom of movement and had a lot of goods and everything. So they decided to build a wall to keep the people inside the eastern side. of Berlin. And it wasn't just a wall that you could walk up in touch. You could, if you were on the west side, you could walk up in touch and spray paint, and it's got some famous graffiti and you go see it

now. It's really interesting. But on the east side, yeah, there's water, there's a big minefield, gun emplacements, all the things that John is talking about to keep Germans, East Germans, from going out of East Germany or East Berlin. And there's an awesome museum in Berlin that I'm sure you've seen called Checkpoint Charlie Museum that has, by the way, it's my favorite museum in the world. It's where all the escape attempts successful and otherwise are cataloged. And people made like hot air balloons out of bed sheets to try and fly over the wall and out of the city. They made little submarines that had little tanks on them so they could go under the river around those platforms you just talked about, around the water, try to go from one side to the other. And the reason

they have this stuff at the museum is some of these people got caught, others didn't. And there's a whole huge list of names of people who made it somewhat near the wall and then ended up getting shot or ended up getting blown up or, I don't know, attacked by dogs and died in the process of trying to get to the other side. So it's actually, there was one that I remember that is burned into my mind of the stuff you talk about in your book. There's a car, and in the seat of the car, they had sewn a person inside the car seat, and then the driver sat on that person, and they drove out of East Berlin. That was one of the more desperate car modifications that I ever heard of. Yeah. But it worked. Yeah. You know, whatever works is,

what you're after. There were lots of issues with cars, and that's why the cars were examined so carefully. We had thermal blankets, so they wouldn't see body heat if they had sensors looking for body heat. There were a thousand ways to modify a car. There were lots of ways to try and get people out, but tunnels, tunnels were the choice. The CIA dug a lot of really great tunnels. My office was in charge of tunnels. That was one of the things that we did. But we did not dig any tunnels under the wall. the West Germans, the young students, they dug hundreds of tunnels under the wall. And there's somewhere, there's numbers of how many people they got out with their tunnels. It was amazing.

Totally amateur, just furious. They had family on the other side of that wall that they wanted to rescue them. They went in and got a lot of people out that way. But like you said, a lot of other people didn't come out that way and they died trying to cross that field. I gave a talk once at West Point about the Cold War, the end of the Cold War, about the fall of the Berlin Wall. And we were talking about what brought it down. It was commonly accepted that we didn't pull it down. They pushed it down from the east.

They pushed it down and came across. And part of the question was, well, why? I mean, what was it they wanted? And I was pointing out rock and roll music trying to make a connection. And I thought it was a pretty good connection because there were a lot of big, big bands, the big rock and roll bands. Rolling Stones, they'd do concerts in Berlin. They always made a point of having the concerts by the wall. They'd point the speakers, this Western rock and roll music,

and they'd blast it, you know, over the wall. And they'd have actually an audience in East Berlin in great places where you could hear the music. They could also see Western TV in East Berlin. And those kinds of things were just, they couldn't touch it. They knew it was there. They could hear it. They kind of see it on TV. wanted out of there. Yeah, I was an exchange student in the former East Germany back in the 90s,

and my host father, he talks about, you'd find out through the grapevine, because of course, it would be pretty hard to find out. I mean, you'd find out the Rolling Stones are doing a concert in Berlin via somebody who heard somebody who heard something on Western radio that they, you know, got from across the border. You'd take the train and go to Berlin. You'd go to either somebody had an apartment and it was asked to elbow in the apartment, or you'd go hang out on the street, but the cops were everywhere, right? Get out of here. No loitering. Because they're like, We know what you're up to. And you couldn't just sit there and jam.

And he also said that him and his friends, they would make these humongous antennas and put them on top of their house so that they could get Western TV. And it was technically illegal, but it wasn't really enforced, I guess, because you've got to pick your battles. So what if people are watching Western TV?

But there was a division of like, I don't know, commie boy scouts that would climb up your house with a saw, saw the antenna down, and then you'd have to build it again because I guess they didn't want foreign influence. I mean, it's basically tankies would go up and saw your antenna down,

But yeah, those concerts, man, they were something. I mean, you hear about it from, like, music-loving East Germans, like my host father, who really were interested in that. And the only Germans, ironically, that don't love David Hasselhoff, they all knew kind of when that was going to happen. And it was just like, the trains were packed with people to go hang out and do nothing in Berlin because you didn't tell the cops what you were doing. Like, oh, yeah, I'm going to visit my cousin.

I'm going shopping. It's like, why are there 3,000 kids on this train? I wonder if Taylor Swift had been around. Maybe she could have broken the wall all by herself. Yeah, maybe. She can go try it in North Korea. She can go play at the DMZ and see what happens. When you're abroad, you must know that local and foreign intelligence agencies,

they're watching you pretty much all the time, right? So how do you handle counter surveillance? Because as soon as you get there, someone's trying to make you, right? Well, one way to handle it is with disguise. In my time, working in disguise, that was the number one issue. Deniability was what we were looking for, either that you weren't American, certainly that you weren't an American official

or an American intelligence officer. With disguise, you can turn yourself into a completely other person from an other place, from another nationality, speaking hopefully another language. Over the years that I was working, I worked for 27 years. When I started, disguise was something nice to have. You'd want to have like a little dop kit in the back of your safe with maybe a wig, mustache, glasses.

I don't know. It's a little bit different for each person. The question would come up, you know, would you really use it if you needed it? because mostly men, I disguised very few women. It was men. It was men case officers. And even the foreign assets we're working with were men.

And men don't really want to put on a wig. I don't know if you've ever had a wig on. No, it sounds really uncomfortable and hot. Yeah, a U.S. Marine would just walk out of the room, if you even mentioned putting a wig on him. But in the time that I was there, things changed. We started working against different categories of people, maybe not always embassies or diplomatic events, but now we're talking about terrorists and we're talking

narcotics and we're talking about people who are armed and have every reason in the world to shoot us if they think we're coming for them. At one point, there's a scene in the book where I'm in Latin America. I think I'm in the drug capital of the world in this town where it was dangerous. I was told I was taken to work in an armored car every day. And I was just working at the embassy on that trip. but it was just considered to be really, really dangerous. I was there to take a group of people who were American and make them look to Latin, which is pretty easy. Dark hair, dark eyes, contacts, dark skin, not hard to do, restile them a little bit.

And out of the street, you couldn't tell our guys from their guys. They didn't all speak Spanish. So those guys were told just to shut up. But then I was walking down the street one night going to a kiosk to get cigarettes. I'm dressed for work. I'm wearing stilettos in a business suit and I'm a gringo. I'm a woman who doesn't belong in that city and certainly doesn't belong in that street. I was walking down and I bump into this group of guys who were just standing around.

There were maybe a dozen of them and you could smell the beer halfway down the block. And you could see the guns. They all had guns. And I figured, you know, this is the cartel pretty much, pretty sure. This is the cartel. And I knew the cartel care less. So they all turned and looked at me. You could almost hear their brains going like, oh, who's that?

DEA sending women now? They weren't concerned at all about CIA. They're worried about drug enforcement agency coming down after then. I don't think they're sending me. I don't think it's DEA, but she's a green girl. What's she doing here? And she's working and where's she working? And I thought, you know what?

They just might just shoot me. If they've had enough beer and if they're worried enough about who I am and why in the world am I walking down this street starting to get dark? I shouldn't be there. Well, I had all these training courses that I used to think were a little silly. One of my training courses told me in a scenario like that, you don't have any choices. You just do not turn around. You just walk through them.

And that's what I did. It's one of the scariest things I ever did. And then walking away from them, you don't know. You don't know if it worked. So being out on the street, when you go to a foreign country, you have to think. think it through before you go. If it's a hostile country, then you have to think on another level. If it's a country, if it's, just say it's Moscow. Oh, well, Moscow has, like, dedicated teams for every American in that embassy that will come out. They have a team somewhere in a warming room,

if it's winter. They have a team waiting. If their person comes out, they can scramble. If their person's in a car, they've got a car on foot, they're on foot, and then just stay with you. Their goal is they don't really care if you know they're there. Their goal is to keep you from doing whatever it is you have in mind, making a phone call, putting up a signal, putting down a dead drop, or, God forbid, meeting with one of their Russian colleagues and collecting information. Their goal was to keep you from doing anything. So if you're visiting there, you need to have a plan when you come into the country. What are you going to do when you walk out the door of the embassy, knowing that they're going to be with you?

what are you going to do about that? And we spend a lot of time developing options that they could do about that. Somebody I know who was in North Korea, which is another denied access area with no U.S. Embassy, this is not an American. She was saying that every time she left their little compound or whatever, where she worked, they would follow her. And she'd turn around and they'd be pretending to talk on their cell phone or something really clunky. It's like they don't really care if you see them kind of thing. So what she did is she realized, all right, these guys all have pot bellies, they're smokers. So she decided to jog. She said these guys would follow her, and they'd be wearing, like, dress shoes in a button down,

and it's hot in the summer. And she'd go out for a jog in Pyongyang, North Korea, and they'd have to run after her. And she said she turned around once, and she saw this guy with a cigarette in his mouth, dangling out of his mouth, button-down shirt, pot belly, kind of hanging out in dress shoes, just doing as damnedest to keep up with her, pretending he's jogging to. And she's just like, it's so clunky, they don't care if they get spotted, because it's like this pathetic. There's no cover whatsoever. He's just, at that point, he's just chasing.

I love these stories. We had a chief of station in Moscow, famous CIA officer named Jack Downing. They ended up calling him back from retirement to Langley to help them devise some new scenarios. But Jack was a runner. He was a serious athlete, spoke fluent Chinese, spoke fluent Russian. But when he was in Moscow, he was chief station. And he set a pattern of running every morning exactly what you're talking about with your acquaintance. But he was a real runner. I mean, he would run. two or three miles in the morning, every morning. He was also an ex-marine. And so what he did is he set a pattern that his team, they were like, he'll be back in seven minutes. We know this drill. And they stopped following him because, I mean, they didn't have evidently a cadre of runners that they could go every morning.

And so he was able to use that brief time that he'd be away to pick up a dead drop or to put up a signal or to do what he had to do. I thought that was so clever. That is clever. Like, all right, this guy's tricked us enough times. I'm not falling for this. I'm not running three miles this morning. I'm going to keep drinking or whatever. And then it's like, all right, I think I shook him. Here's my, I'm going to stretch on this stump over here and drop something in it. I guess it just shows that the highest trained people can also become complacent at some point.

I wonder if you catch yourself still doing counter surveillance stuff while you, I know you're retired, but do you ever go on vacation and you're just like, oh, let me check for a tail real quick? Or like, haven't I seen that guy a few too many times? It's just like got to be burned into your brain after so many years. You notice who's around you. I'm not worried about surveillance anymore, but I still very much to know who's out there. And that old thing once is an accident, twice, a coincidence. Three times is an act of war. We used to laugh when we bumped into that. We came up with an idea that was a very handy thing to be able to do. And we demonstrated it once in a podcast. I took my son with me to that one. It was a wired podcast. We were demonstrating

what disguise on the run is. And you don't have to be running to do disguise on the run. It's a way of completely changing the way you look while walking down a city street. And I wouldn't recommend it in China because already we stand out like whatever. Of course. But the demonstration in New York was my son walks out of an office building at lunch and he's just wearing a blazer, a cotton blazer, shirt and tie. Got nothing. He walks down the street. He walks into this crowd. And they had a long blends on him from maybe a block and a half away. And they're watching him come through this crowd, just like a surveillance team would. And Jesse, he pulls a bag out of his pocket, one of those grocery store bags, pulls on his tie, comes off because it's Velcroat at the back, rolls it up,

puts it in. Now he pulls on his shirt, his button shirt, which has no sleeves to it because I cut them off. And it's open in the back because I cut it open. And it's Velcroed. And he just pulls it straight down, keeps it close to the body, rolls it up, puts it in the bag. He's got on a black sleeveless tank underneath. So now he's wearing the blazer, which is one of those unstructured, just a cotton jacket.

He takes that off, rolls it up, puts it in the bag, then he reaches in his pocket, pulls out another bag, puts the first bag with all this stuff in it, in the second bag, reaches in another pocket, he pulls on a beanie,

he reaches in, I don't know where he had the glasses, He had ray bands, puts his raybands on. He had his AirPods around his neck, pulls them up, puts them in his ears, pulls out his cell phone, he's got his music going. He's in a sleeveless tank. He's got full arm tattoos, both sides that I put on him the night before. One of these just outrageously, just big, big watches that doesn't fit his profile at all.

And he's just this guy bobbing down the street all tatted. And you're wondering, where's his skateboard, you know? So if surveillance was following him, he disappeared. This is in, he did this in about 30 seconds. All of it. He disappeared. And, you know, surveillance typically doesn't follow your face at all. They follow your profile.

The whole point here is change your profile. And they won't know where you went. And they'll think it's their fault. So it's not provocative. That's so interesting, man. I know there's a bit of a non sequitur, but do foreign intelligence agencies often underestimate women? and can you take advantage of that as well?

I can imagine you're in the Middle East, and they're thinking, oh, like, women can't do this job. So you're like, all right, good, okay. All female cadre, they're going to get overlooked. They're all dressed the same as the local women. They're covered from head to toe. I mean, that's got to make things trickier for those guys if they're trying to follow you around.

We like to dress them like the local men. Well, and the local women, but show our commies is very forgiven. You really don't know who's in there and what's in there. So we discovered that our women could move around at night because up to then that was very, problematic. The burqa, of course, is the greatest disguise God ever invented. You can put anybody, anything inside that burqa in Pakistan, and I think in Afghanistan, it's pretty much a shooting offense to try and take a peek. Even in a truck crossing the border, you've got a driver,

he's probably got all kinds of materials in that truck that he's going to sell on the other side of the border. He's got his wife sitting next to him in Burka. That was just the greatest disguise scenario ever because the border people would never ask that driver to show her face and they would never ask her to speak. It just goes against all their rules. But Berka was great disguise. As far as cover stories are concerned, what sort of cover stories could you even be using back then? It seems unusual for anybody back then, let's say the 70s, to travel alone to the Middle East, especially a lone woman. So what sort of story is good enough to be passable, but also too little to follow up on or be uninteresting enough that people would accept it, but then just not

care to ask more? Well, for me, an easy way to do it was to take a bunch of cameras and to be a photographer. That was a natural cover for me. For women that are just traveling, I don't know, you have to put together a scenario, either a business thing or a colleague or a family connection or you have to build something that they can live with. Usually, the issue wasn't women, because again, our operatives, pretty much men. That was the piece of business that was so denied to the women. To come up with cover stories for the men was relatively simple. Their businesses, their executives. I know one person we disguised as a Jordanian pipe fitter. It just happened that he could talk about pipe fitting. He actually knew something about it. And all we had to do was change his teeth and change

his nose. And he looked like a Jordanian. You just, the piece that. it's always missing in these conversations is that the real work, the real work in our office in OTS was solving problems. People will come to us and say, I'm going on a trip. This is where I'm going to be. This is how long I'm going to be there. I'm not sure how to configure this, but I need to be able to do this and do this and meet with this person. So what have you got for me? What can you give me in the way of documents? You need new documents. My husband Tony Mendez was hired on as a counterfeiter forger. he was a fine artist when they hired him, but he could make you anything that you needed. And he could make it as good as it needed to be, or you could cross an international border

with those documents. So is it documents? Here's our document guy. If it's disguise, here's, we've got labs, we can work with you, we can turn you into anybody you want to be. There's a little bit of a fantasy land. What are the limits of disguise, right? Because in the book, you say, oh, these makeup techniques could help people blend into, say, apartheid South Africa, or obscure the presence of a or North Korea. Are you saying you can make a white person look like an Asian? Because if so, that is, that's really incredible. I imagine you can't turn a white person into a person that looks like they're from Africa, but white to Asian, maybe, I don't know, like you mentioned,

white to Latin American. Okay. What are the limits of this realistically? Might be white to Asian. I mean, we had masks. Didn't used to talk about masks. They were, they were kind of off limits and it was fine with me. I didn't talk about masks until about seven or eight years ago when for some reason it's okay the CIA is okay about that they're okay about me writing about masks tells me that we're not either we're not using masks or we're not using them in the same way or they're not made the same way so I can talk about masks we couldn't we never made a mask that we could turn a Caucasian person into an Asian person think Chinese the fit around the eyes is one of the most important thing with those masks and the shape and the

it, it wasn't going to work. In terms of makeup, that also wouldn't work with an Asian. So we would probably just not even attempt to do that when I was working there. I never knew that we did. Before COVID, we used to use those face masks that, you know, just the face masks that you would use with COVID, that kind of mask, because those were common in China. Those were common. I don't know if you remember your history, but there was so much pollution in China. You couldn't see the buildings on the next block because it was just a haze. Everybody was wearing those masks. That was a good start because if that was the case, and if it was daytime, you could do sunglasses, you could do dark hair, you could. But our people were too tall. You know, our people would always

stand out in those crowds. That was part of the operation. This operation has to somehow accommodate that fact, that our people, not that they'd be recognizable. individually, but as a type, we didn't fit into their, and they didn't fit in to our environment either. You mentioned working with local agents and things like that. There's a part in the book where you talk about the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. I assume you're not supposed to get too close to these people, but I wonder if they're ever on your mind years later, because I'm thinking, if I'm in your shoes, I would be so curious if the people I've trained and interfaced with, let's say, in the 90s, were even still alive.

In the book, I ended up training this young Mujahideen, who was in the States just briefly. I never knew all the parameters of why he was here. And what else he was doing. My piece of it was to train him and using a camera with a long lens. He was out in the desert. He had a reason to be there. That's where he operated. He was on a horseback.

And of course, like most Afghans, he was bitterly against. the Soviets. But because of where he was, he would see the planes coming over. He would every once in a while see some of the weaponry. He was in a great position to take some photographs if he just knew how to do it. We were interested in the planes. So I took him over by Reagan International Airport, Arlington Cemetery, and taught him how to use the long lens, how to pan, how to capture those moving objects, how to do still photography, how to take something universal like a Pakistan. cigarettes or coin and put it in the picture so we could figure out the size of things. He was amazed that the CIA would send a woman to train him.

You know, he'd been brought up to all the women he knew were behind a veil and couldn't go out without their male sponsors. So we had a couple of long talks. His English wasn't that good, but it got better while he was there. He and his, I think it was his uncle, they were working. They were being paid with medicine. They were being paid crates of medicine to treat their colleagues. There was no money involved.

I loved training him. And yeah, I thought about him because the Mujahideen, of course, flipped. And then they became our enemy. And we were shooting each other. So after all of that transpired, I ended up going to Peshawar, unrelated to photography. But while I was there, I went into this kind of cavernous room. And around the edge of that room where Mujandine, all of that. of them in their uniforms, all of them with their guns, they're sitting on the floor with their backs

against the wall. Half of them were asleep. They had like almost come off of a field, a battlefield. This was a little bit of R&R they were having. And I was just struck and I started thinking about that young kid and wondering if he was in that room. You put them all in the same uniform and had them all the same gun. They're all kind of the same height. They look a lot like. But yeah, I used to worry about him. He changed. We wrote a book called The Moscow Rules. And at the front of that book, we list the rules. There are 42 of them. And we added a rule to never fall in love with your agent.

And we didn't mean romantic love. We meant don't get too close to them. You can't. It's like you and your dentist or you and your doctor. You have a very pleasant relationship, but it should not get too personal. Not from our point of view, because it could blur your vision. You can make the wrong decisions. Now for something that's not top secret, shout it from the rooftops.

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Email me, Jordan at Jordan Harbinger.com. We're happy to surface that for you because it is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with John A Mendes. It seems like you dealt with a lot more than just misogyny and casual sexism during your training. I mean, it was a guy who threw a grenade at you on a firing range. That's pretty intense.

And there were a lot of attempts to sabotage your performance while you, you were at the CIA. For example, the guy who told you, I think you said something like, oh, it's a photo mission, but it was actually a disguise mission. So you came in with a bunch of cameras and film or whatever, and then you didn't have any of the stuff you needed to create a disguise. So you basically had to create stuff out of what was it, stuff people had in their luggage or whatever. And I wonder, and I'm not excusing this behavior at all, obviously, but do you think being challenged like that made you better at what you did in some ways? I think it made me more determined, you know, to not put up with that kind of behavior.

It was all around you. And like you said at the beginning of this conversation, this wasn't just the CIA. It's just going on in the American workplace writ large. My mom worked at Boeing her entire life. She had the same kind of thing happening. I picked up Michelle Obama's book somewhere in the middle of writing mine, and she's talking about how she couldn't get a loan or a mortgage. This was in the 70s without her husband.

There was a lot of this going on. And a lot of women just decided to tough it out and keep pushing ahead. I don't know. The guy didn't throw a grenade at me. He rolled it at me. And he had disarmed it, so it couldn't hurt me. What it could do is scare me, which it did. The loudest bang I ever hurt in my life.

But, you know, six to one, half dozen the other. I just want to make sure I don't have the wrong impression there. Well, it still exploded, right? It wasn't the full explosion with shrapnel, I guess, I mean, but it still exploded next to you. He didn't mean to hurt me. He meant to scare me. And, I mean, he did. But he, I think he was expected.

that I would run. I think that's what he wanted. He wanted just to see me be a girl on a firing range and run. And I didn't run. That's why I didn't. I thought, huh, I saw what he was doing. I had no idea it was going to go off. I just, I'm like, he's just trying to spoof me, then bang. I mean, I couldn't stop shaking for about 15 minutes. I could not stop shaking. It was really scary. The one who, my boss, who on that operation, who told me it was all photo, didn't need any disguise stuff because I could do either one. I could do a lot of things. And if I just had to know what's packed, because on these trips, you're going to places where there's no Home Depot and there's no anything. There's no place to buy film or fixative or. So he said photo, but it was actually

disguised. That turned out to be probably the biggest operation I ever took part in my life. And I didn't know it. I didn't get to see the paperwork for that operation. He didn't show it to me, which breaks CIA's rules because you never. go off on an operation without personally having read what you need to do. But this happened really quickly. And we wrote that operation in a book called, I wrote it in a book called SpyDust. It's a great operation. I didn't put it in this most recent book because I'd already told the story. Probably should have put it in here and told it again. It was great. It was really great. It was a big deal. I did notice the guy who did this to you, the boss in the book. You call him Smallwood now.

Is that his real name or did you give him that nickname? Because if you're his consistent little dick energy, as the kids say. That is not his real name. But when I gave him that, I just pulled it out of the air. Okay. My younger sister, who was the first person to tell me that that means little dick. Honestly, I had no idea. And if I had known, I probably wouldn't have used that.

But I didn't know. Oops. I thought it was the name of a cabinetry company in England. I'm not kidding you. So the men in my office, after the book came out, would come over and say, I can't believe you called him that. I don't even tell him that I didn't know. I'm like, well, you know, he deserved it.

He did. That is so funny. I mean, whatever. The guy deserved it, right? So if he's still around, good. And if he's passed, oh, well, he's not reading the book. I know you worked a lot against the KGB, of course, especially in Moscow, which is the focus of the episode that I'm going to air in a few days here, our Moscow Rules episode.

But I'm wondering, what's the coolest piece of tech of theirs? that you came across, because I know that you working in the office of OTS, Office of Technical Services, am I getting that right? Surely you were looking at what they were making and going, oh, we have a better thing than that. Oh, wow, that's pretty smart. We got to make our own version of that. Well, the coolest thing was not the latest thing. The coolest thing that comes to my mind.

It's on display in the International Spy Museum right now. It was a big wooden seal, hand-carved seal, an American Eagle, very elaborate carving, just a beautiful piece of work. And it was presented to the American ambassador in Moscow by a bunch of Russian school kids in like the 50s. The group came and they wanted him to have it. He loved it and he hung it in his office in the embassy and it's decorative. It's just beautiful. And I mean, somebody would have looked it over to make sure, okay.

And they looked on the back and looked fine, put it up on the wall. Well, it turns out it was an audio bug. but it was a new and novel. It was so interesting that once it was found, and it hung in the ambassador's office for something like 10 years, and they had security people come through those offices maybe monthly, and they do sweeps, security sweeps.

It never came up. I mean, if there's a bug, you should be able to spot it. It never came up. When they found it, they sent it to our audio people, and they opened up the back of it. and my God, it's a tuning fork. It's just a long piece of metal. There are no moving parts to it.

How can that be a bug? How can it pick up and transmit audio? We couldn't figure it out for the longest time. We called it The Thing. And in the International Spy Museum behind glass and prominently displayed, the signage says, the thing. It was a new approach to how to capture audio that was so elegant and so sophisticated

and so advanced that our own people couldn't recognize it as an audio device. And this was just a great example kind of of making something with nothing. Because Russia back then didn't have a lot, they didn't have a really robust technological advantage. But that's when we started having a little more respect for their technical people. Yeah, wow. The only thing I can think of, I mean, I don't know if you know how it works, but if it's just vibrating, the only thing I can think of, and I am no scientist, is it picks up

speech and then vibrates at a much higher or much lower frequency than that speech. And then some other device picks up those frequencies that maybe travel easier and decipher that, like sort of brings them back down, you know, six octaves or whatever. And it's just so high that you can't hear it. I can't tell you, I really don't know. I didn't follow that. That wasn't in my area of expertise. Yeah, I mean, I have no idea. I'm spitballing based on how can a tuning fork pick up vibrations and then transmit them? And the only thing I can think of, of is it vibrates at frequencies people can't hear, and then it goes through walls and windows and somebody outside is picking up those frequencies. And then, you know, they sort of downgrade it.

I don't know. Look, if anybody knows how that works, email me, because that is so fascinating. That's, I mean, what a cool device, and it was there for so long, and it doesn't have a battery, right? So that thing was just probably effective the whole time that it was in there for years. The other thing that was going on back then that took years and years and years to start sorting it out, there was a barrage of microwaves at that American embassy. over the years, constantly coming in. And people were worried about health issues and this and that, the other.

I've never followed that either because I'm too far away from it now. Not something that piques my interest, but I'm looking right now at Havana's syndrome and I'm thinking, I wonder if that has anything to do with the microwaves they used to send into the embassy. There's a lot going on there.

Yeah, I'm always very curious how that stuff shakes out because it almost sounds psychological, but then you think, okay, they would have probably figured this out by now. It's not like they're not putting any resources towards this. Some of these plots and plans are quite funny. You mentioned in the book, there's a plan to create like an Osama bin Laden double and discredit him by going to strip clubs and bars.

And I just, I couldn't help but think that's got to be kind of a funny gig as a CIA agent. Like, okay, put on this mask and glow blow like 20K in a strip club and then just get hammered and start walking around. I don't know, Dubai or Berlin or whatever, bouncing to different clubs. And you would just have a line out the door of guys trying to get that job. That's right. Pick me. Pick me. That was Tony and I, we actually wrote a memo after 9-11. We were driving home from New York. I had a yellow line pad and we're just spitballing ideas.

What could they do? What could they do? And where we were was the idea of sewing unrest within al-Qaeda, where they'd start suspecting each other of maybe it's, it had to be someone within this group. How could they possibly know? We were doing all kinds of crazy ideas. Tony had years earlier at the beginning of Argo, the story Argo, he had made another Shah of Iran.

Actually, he made two fake shaws of Iran. So that would be three that existed, the real one and two fakes. And the idea was, well, if the Iranians were so worried, if they were so upset that their Shah had come to the United States for cancer treatment, well, what if he left? And somebody filmed it. He's not there anymore. So call your revolution off was one idea. But the idea of doing a double or a triple of someone and then using it in an interesting way, wasn't unprecedented.

We have a picture of Saddam Hussein in a boat. There's about 10 doubles. So it looks like 11 Saddam Hussein's. There's a history of using doubles for this and that. There was also the fact that those terrorists that were actually on the plane and flying it had been in the States and had been going to strip clods. And we just thought, well, that breaks every rule in the religion and drinking. So yeah, it would have been an interesting, but they didn't want to do it. They didn't want to do it?

What? Do you know why? I don't know why. I don't think Tony really got behind it. I think it was spitballing, but I'm not sure that we formally, you know, when he took the Argo story forward, he said the hardest part of Argoe was not walking them through the airport. It was walking that idea. Oh, we're going to put on a movie. We're going to make a movie.

We're going to have a production company. We're going to have an office in Hollywood. taking that idea and moving it through the CIA. He said that was hard. For people who don't know, Argo was the rescue operation of the U.S. and other hostages who were taken at the embassy in Iran. And what was that? Was that 1979?

During the Revolution there, they took everybody hostage and they escaped. And if you haven't seen the movie Argo, they essentially escaped because a fake movie production company full of CIA agents came in and what, smuggled everybody out somehow? I mean, what's the five-minute version of this? You made a good running. Thanks. They took over, the Iranians, they had a revolution. They took over the American embassy.

They took the staff of the American embassy and held them hostage for 444 days. But six of them got away from the embassy and got outside of that perimeter and ended up at the Canadian ambassador's residence. And then they were trapped. They couldn't go through the airport. There was no way out. The borders were too far away. So Tony Mendez said, I know, we'll disguise them as a Hollywood location scouting crew.

and I'll be the producer and we're just coming to Iran because we want to film in the bazaar, we're just checking it out, then we're all going to leave through the airport and we've got all the fake documents, we've got everything we need. In fact, that's what they did. And those six people came out.

And all their colleagues stayed for 444 days in really bad scenario, bad conditions. But the six that were rescued, they were really lucky. They're still around. They still check in. Gosh, what a harrowing story. And stuff like this, by the way, is why whenever you go to one of those countries and you're just on a tour looking at fruit or whatever,

there's guys following you around and you're thinking, why are you following me? I'm a tourist. I have a backpack on. I'm wearing flip-flops. Come on, guys. And the reason is because you just never know. Sure, you're just a kid walking through Central Asia. Uh-huh. Well, we want to make sure that you're really just looking at, I don't know, mangoes or passion fruit or whatever, pomegranates. It's like, you can just see these. My buddy went to Iran in 2010. He invited me. I wish I'd gone. He said they just followed him around, fruit, mark. and tourist areas all day, all night, 24-7 these, I don't know, IRGC or whatever domestic security guys. And they would just, they would get so annoyed with him shopping in the bazaar that they would just start bumping into him because they were just sick of being in the market and he would eventually leave the market, go back to his hotel and they'd just be sitting outside. It was like they just got bored of following him. So they decided to make his life more annoying. But it's because of this, right? It's because they're like, you know, do something. Shit or get off the pot, man,

are you a spy or not? We can't tell. We can't leave anything to chance because last time we trusted somebody to be a Hollywood location scout, they brought a bunch of hostages out. Yeah, exactly. Surveillance, if you're the one doing the following, it must become very tedious. I bet. God. You said the agency values ENTJ personality types, and I wondered, is that a real thing? Because that's my personality type. Did I miss my calling as a CIA operative? What is it about ENTJ that makes those people so suitable for field work? When I mentioned that in the book, I'm quoting Valerie Plain, who is an ENTJ, and said, in her book, I haven't tested this, but she said a lot of her colleagues in her training class

when she came in, there's like a class every year of CT's young professional officers that come on board. She said a good number of them were ENTJ, and she thought that that represented the kind of personality that the CIA values. And there definitely is a personality type that they want. I don't know that it's defined to those four letters in my own rig, but that type of personality does very well at CIA in operations, a person who has serious interpersonal skills, who can engage other people, who has that personality, you meet them, and you're really interested in them, and you kind of want to be their friend, all of a sudden, those kinds of people.

We're looking for those kinds of people. And that's a thing that we can't teach. You know, we can teach you everything else, pretty much, how to shoot a gun. We can teach you the geography of the country, send you to school, learn the language. We can teach you everything you need to know. but you need to come in the door. If you want to be an operations officer, a case officer, you need to kind of bring that sort of a personality in with you.

It is a title. That's interesting. I do have a lot of introvert tendencies as well, though. I read two books a week. I do tons of research on things. I need me time to recharge here and there, so I don't know. I'm on the fence. And it's definitely too late for me.

I'm 44. You're too late to be an operations officer. 32 is pretty much the cut off. They have so much training to do that by the time you're done, they still want to get their value out of you. I would just say that I share all the tendencies you just mentioned. I read voluminously, I value quiet time. I have to recharge.

Yeah, I know we're running out of time here. I know you're getting tired as am I speaking to me time. You've been stationed in so many places. What is your favorite? Are there any sort of places where, yeah, Paris is great, but Burma is really special. You know, I'm very curious you having lived in so many places. You know, the CIA is a little funny about which places I could say I was in and other places that they didn't want me to name.

There was one place I mentioned that there were Toriadores and a pink cape over the suitcase in front of me in line at the hotel. They said, no, no, no, no. That says where you are. I said, no, it doesn't. I can be anywhere in the southern tier of Europe. They're still doing bullfighting all over the place. In France and Portugal, it doesn't say I'm any.

So places that I really liked. I really liked Bangkok. I liked that part of the world. That was an amazing place to live at the time. I expect it still is. And the other part of it is I have to call it the subcontinent. If you read the book, I mean, just again and again, you're like, oh, I know where she is. Now I still know where she is.

But I went out there for a summer for three months to fill in for someone, just fell in love with that part of the world. When I went out the first time, I was a photo operator. When I came back, I said, I'd like an assignment there. They said, the only job opening up in your timeline is disguise. I said, so train me. Be in disguise training for a year and a half. I completely changed my career field to go there. And I loved it when I got there.

It was a great, great assignment. It must be fun and exciting traveling and living all around the world and all these crazy places. I feel like it would suit me well, but what I'm not sure would suit me well is not knowing any of the real names of the people that I worked with

or that I saw on a regular basis or constantly having to make new friends and losing touch with the old ones because maybe you never really knew them in the first place. This is all pre-internet, right? So it's not like you just add somebody on social media or you've got their email, and then when you move from Portugal to Italy

or to Bangkok, you can just keep in touch. This is a group of people that you probably can't even call by phone. You have to send a letter to someplace and see if they're even there anymore. You know, I used to collect stationery as a traveling technical operations officer. I stayed in a lot of nice hotels,

and I would always take the stationery that's always out. I used it to write home because back then we were writing letters, but I was never writing a letter from where I was. So they got a lot of mail from where I had. been, but not, they never knew where I was, and they never knew where I was going. But they knew that at one point, I had been in the, in the, in the Taj Hotel, say, in Bombay, and they would admire

the stationery. That was just adding to what you're saying. Yeah, you walk into CIA, and you don't know it when you walk in, but a lot of us basically say goodbye to our friends that we grew up with, to where we came from, to our old besties, because over time, it's just too hard. to live that lie, to live your cover, to kind of obscure where you are. And so you end up kind of cutting those connections. And you replace them with CIA people who are, I call them, they're insiders. Your own friends are outsiders. Come through a wall.

Now you've got a new set of friends. They are insiders. And throughout your career, you'll keep bumping into these people. You'll see them in headquarters between tours. you go out a new tour, oh, you knew with this person, you worked with him. And that goes until you hit retirement. And when you hit retirement, you walk back through that wall. And the people on the inside, stay on the inside.

And now you're on the outside. And a lot of the connections that you thought were just, you know, typical friendly connections. They don't stand up because, you know, maybe you always laughed and talked to Bill about the job. Well, you can't talk about the job. or about your mutual friends. Well, you know, maybe the mutual friends have moved on and he doesn't want to talk about, oh, he's over here, he's over there. So all of your inside friends now are unavailable to you.

And your old outside friends have abandoned you because they never heard from you. And in retirement, you kind of have to start from scratch in a way. And a lot of our men, remember it was mostly men, had terrible histories when they retired for longevity. they would die way faster than the normal population. Most of them in my office, the technical types, didn't really have a lot going on outside of work. You know, work consumed us. You might get a little bit of that in the book.

We were just living and breathing. That's what we were doing. And you didn't have time for social stuff so much. Our men, 18 months, and they'd have heart attacks. Tony used to say it was like jumping from a moving train or drinking from a fire hose, pick one, but they would die. So we rearranged, totally rearranged our retirement process.

Now there's a six-month, the last I heard, stepping down, they teach you to write a resume, how to use your skills, how to use the skills. You know, what is a former audio guy who spent his career installing bugs? You know, he's a third-story kind of guy. How does he write his resume? Well, we would give them lessons in how to rephrase the work that he knew how to do. Transitioning out must be tough. I know a lot of former CIA operations people, men and women, and I'll say something like,

oh, I got pitched by this former CIA guy. Do you know him? And she'll be like, ah, I've never heard of that person. And then I'll send her a photo and she's like, oh, wait, without the hair, you know, I do know that guy. I just didn't know his name was Andrew because that's not what I heard when I was working there. Or I'll say something like, hey, this guy was head of a station at this place. You know, I don't know. What does he look like? Here he is. Oh, yeah, I recognize that guy. And I just think that's such a weird thing to do. You don't know anyone's name, but you see them all the time. It's not that they've faded. from memory, you just know a completely different version of them. So when they retire, and you're retired, you're like, oh, your name's Daryl. That's hilarious. My name's Daryl, too.

And you just never knew that, even though you worked together for half a decade. You know, you had work names completely. There's a whole personality that's in the file system somewhere at CIA. It's my file. My name is not in that file. Everything in there is pretty much under my working name. And the working name was mostly for paperwork. because my name would change depending on where I was going and what I was doing. But the idea was if somebody ever overran one of our offices and got into the files, and when looking through the files, you would not be in those files. Your name would not be divorced.

I feel like this episode is such a great prequel to the Moscow Rules Show that we did a few years back. So again, I'm going to air that one later this week. And if y'all enjoyed this episode, which I'm sure you did, you will absolutely love that episode, which includes a lot more. I'm going off memory here, but a lot more about disguises, Cold War espionage and other high stakes shenanigans. So, Jona, thank you so much for coming back on the show. This stuff is always so fascinating.

I love the first one. I love this one, too. Thank you. Thank you. If you're looking for another episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show to check out, here's a trailer of our interview with Jack Barski, former KGB spy, who posed as an American in a truer-than-life version of a Hollywood movie.

This is one of our most popular episodes of the show. Jack not only dodged the FBI for decades, but also defected from the Soviet Union, secretly becoming a real American. We'll learn how spies were recruited and trained during the Cold War and what skills Jack used to assimilate seamlessly into American culture. I was untouchable. I was above the law. I was always bypassing customs and passport control, so a young person that really feels good because I never liked rules.

How did you flip to eventually becoming full American? I know they tried to call you home. Can you take us through that? They called me back as an emergency departure. They've done this in the past. We've called back an agent, and as soon as they step on Soviet soil, they are jailed or even executed. I was stalling the Soviets, and then one day they sent one of their resident agents, and he said to me, you've got to come home where else you're dead.

It was a threat. I decided I would defy them and tell them that I'm not returning. I will not betray any secrets, and please give the money on my account. to my German family. Wow. Tell us how you got caught because this story is just not complete until you, like you said, had to face your past.

I was stopped on the other side of a toll gate. It was a state trooper. Just like to check your license and registration. And could you step out of the car? I step out of the car. I still am not having a clue what was going on. Out of the corner of my eye, somebody approaching me from the back.

The fellow introduced himself. He says, Joe Riley, FBI, and he showed me this badge. we would like to talk with you. The first question I asked, am I under arrest? And the answer was no. Then I said, what took you so long? For more from Jack Barski, including how Jack was finally caught by the FBI. And what happened after that, check out episode 285 of the Jordan Harbinger Show.

Incredible, incredible interviewee. I love her. She's so awesome. One of the first American spies actually was a woman, Agent 355 in the Revolutionary War. I think people, they still don't even know who she is. So talk about top secret. Secret never got out. That's pretty incredible.

I could be wrong about that. Somebody looked that up. I couldn't find it. All things, Johna Mendez will be in the show notes over on the website at Jordanharbinger. com. Advertisers, deals, and discount codes, ways to support this show, all at Jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show. Also, our newsletter, Webitwiser, over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash news.

Practical bit every Wednesday. read it in under two minutes, something that you can apply right away, will improve your decisions, your psychology of relationships, well-worthy investment, great companion to the show. Jordan Harbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Of course, six-minute networking over at six-minute networking. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect to me on LinkedIn,

and this show is created an association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting up. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. Now, if you know somebody who's interested in spy stuff or maybe women in careers that are traditionally only dudes, definitely share this episode with them.

In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you'll learn and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Strictly Stalking Podcast. Hey listeners, I know there's no shortage of true crime content out there, but I have to tell you about this new podcast to Ben John. strictly stalking, which is a clever title, I admit. Every Tuesday host Jamie and Jake cover a unique stalking case by interviewing stalking survivors, advocates, and experts. Each episode is jaw-dropping and really opens your eyes to seeing that stalkers aren't just jealous exes. They can be neighbors,

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Switch to Cox Internet today. Requires Cox Mobile Gig Unlimited. Mobile Data speeds reduced after 20 gigs usage per month. Taxes and fees excluded from price guarantee. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way.

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