The Team House - Chief Of Disguise For CIA | Jonna Mendez | Ep. 270

Episode Date: April 8, 2024

Support the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Jonna Mendez is a former Chief of Disguise in the CIA’s Office of Technical Service, often compared to “Q” in the Ian Fleming novels, Ms. Mendez was also a specialist in clandestine photography. Her 27-year career, for which she earned the CIA’s Intelligence Commendation Medal, included operational disguise responsibilities in the most hostile theaters of the Cold War, from Havana to Beijing to Moscow and ultimately into the Oval Office. Jonna's books:https://www.themasterofdisguise.com/about/jonna-mendez------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------To help support the show and for all bonus content including:https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse-AD FREE AUDIO-AD FREE VIDEO-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseOr make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseTeam House merch: ⬇️https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963Social Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSampleWant to sponsor the show?Email: ⬇️[e-mail]#cia #theteamhouseBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to Team House episode 270. I'm Dave Park with Jack Murphy. And our guest tonight is John A Mendez. Johnna is a former director of disguise for the CIA. And John, thank you very much for being here with us tonight. We really appreciate it. And real quick, before we jump into your interview, we're going to do a quick live read for our sponsor. And then we'll dive right into your fascinating life. So I want to tell our listeners about, Legacy. Legacy provides sperm testing and freezing from home, eliminating the need for visits to a doctor or a traditional fertility clinic. So veterans and members of the armed forces have twice the risk of infertility than the general population. Sperm health can be affected by lifestyle, age, injury, environment, including exposure to toxic chemicals, such as burn pits, radiation, and pollutants.

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givelegacy.com. Thank you. So, John, I'm going to ask you about your origin story and where you started and, you know, we have common beginnings in the Midwest. So please tell us, How did you grow up and what led you eventually to the CIA? And then my best friend, we were 18, got engaged to a young military guy in Folda, Germany. He was a second lieutenant. And they were going to get married in Germany and she asked if I would come and be at her wedding. And that was it. I'd been looking for a ticket out of Wichita for a while, just kind of thinking it'd be nice to see, you know, what the rest of the world looked like.

So off I went and I was in her wedding. He was in V-Corps in tanks. So after the wedding, we took a turn around a spin maybe around the village, the closest village in tanks in a wedding dress. And he was in a talk because it was, I think we destroyed some crops with the tanks. I'm not sure. Anyway, they went on a honeymoon. They got on a train and went to Italy.

And there I was. And I decided it took about, I don't know, a couple of minutes that I didn't want to go back to Wichita. And I needed to figure out a way to stay in Europe. You're from Wichita. I mean, these trees and these hills and Germany was just so damp and green and gorgeous. And I'm thinking wheat fields and silos. So I chose Germany.

And I hopped on a train and went to Frankfurt, which was. was and is a big banking town. And in the Bonhof, in the Haupt Bonhoff, found a phone booth, phone book, got a handful of Deutschmarks, and just started making cold calls. You have to be either kind of dumb or really young to do what I did. So I'm going with really young. And I called, I did it in alphabetical order.

I called first the American consulate. They said, we don't do jobs. We do these. We do these. Move on. So I called American Express, no job. I called Bank of America, no job. And then I called Chase Manhattan Bank.

And they said, I said, I'm looking for a job. They said, oh, okay, do you speak German? No. Have you ever worked at a bank before? No. Do you have a work permit? Which you needed. I didn't know that.

No. And they said, what if you just come down and talk to us? to us face to face. So I did that and I hired me. And I still, not sure I understand that, but I took it. It was luck. It was the beginning of a lot of luck, I thought, my whole career. So I was working at the bank and it was great. The exchange rate was wonderful. I was actually making more money working at a bank in Germany than I was working at Wesley Hospital in Wichita, I'm going to school. And then I met this group of young men who were coming into the bank every two weeks or so. They were clearly cashing their checks. I said, are you military? They said,

no, no, we're civilians. We're civilians. Kind of attached to the military, but not military. Well, I started dating one of them, and about a year and a half later, we got married in Switzerland. So he proposed to me in Vienna, where his parents were living, Vienna, Austria, and we're sitting in the subway. And he said, oh, by the way, after, this is after the proposal, by the way, he said, I'm not really attached to the military. He said, I'm looking for the CIA. So then I, you know, okay, I thought he should have told me before. He didn't think he should, so maybe that tells you something. Anyway, and I started working for the CIA because I was an overseas wife, a contract wife.

In the book, I bring that title up again and again because so many women who have been in that situation, when they leave, they're kind of mad about that situation. But that's how I got in the CIA. I never meant to be working for the CIA. I never targeted that kind of work as some. I wanted to do, I just kind of walked in a side door. Yeah. And I believe that Marty Peterson started out that way too, right, as sort of a contract-wise. Right, yeah.

She was, I think, like, before there was a such thing as a reports officer, I think that was her job as a spouse. And so, you know, in the book you talked about, I mean, your book, a lot of it was about, you know, women fighting for their rights in the agency. and how the agency treat them. But particularly in this contract-wide position, you talked about you could get promoted in one position because of the work you did.

And then when you went back to the states, they would cancel out the promotions. You started over. They'd hire you again at your entry level. It was just like being on a roller coaster. You never went anywhere. They hired you so low that you couldn't go anywhere. And any promotion that you had,

In Washington, they'd take you when you were back overseas. You became a contract wife again. They dropped you back down. So you were never making any progress. The husbands, on the other hand, I mean, they had a good overseas tour. That's where they got promoted. Right. And they never went backwards.

It was just this wife thing. You know, and while I was at the agency, I had an opportunity because I was a really good secretary. and I ended up working for the director of my of my office. It's about a thousand people. I ended up being a GS-9 secretary. And of course, that was the ceiling. There was nowhere to go after that. The CIA started hearing some noise from the women.

They knew they had an issue with these tandem couples that were going overseas. Because more and more women in Washington, D.C., the wise, of the case officers were finding their own professional careers and they didn't want to go overseas with their husbands anymore. Right. And this created a real problem because they counted on the wives to go with the husband, do the secretarial thing or whatever while they're there. And then, you know, it was just for an overseas gig. So it was the wives who, who they weren't careerists at all. They just said, I'm not going to go. I got a great job here in D.C. Why would I? accompany you. Also, the working wives said the same thing. So the task force that I was on, we changed the rules and did the obvious and guaranteed any woman going overseas, any any CIA woman going overseas with her husband to accompany him. She got the same job back or an equivalent job and an equivalent grade when she returned home. That was step one of starting

to fix it. Well, and they didn't just realize. rely on like the contract wives for the administration work, you were part of the case officers cover, right? I mean, you, like, they, when they were approaching assets, if that approach it, if that asset had a family, things like that, like, you, you were part and parcel of that operation a lot of times. You know, the case officers were unrelenting. in their pursuit of their targets.

Our next-door neighbor at one point, his young son was like seven in school. And the neighbor found out that one of the target people had moved into that area. And he figured that the kids knew each other at school. So he planned a recruitment around the kids, getting together with the kids, going to the games, having the family in because the kids.

So. the wives were always part of that kind of thing, whether you were at a cocktail party and the men would speak to women in a way, a more relaxed way than they would to the men. A foreign ambassador would chat with a pretty woman comfortably when maybe he'd be a little standoffish about the husband. Yeah, or just positioning cars. there were a lot of things that women did. Yeah.

Because once we were there, we were kind of under the radar. So out of curiosity, before you, before you were aware that your fiancé or, you know, he was in the CIA, what was your impression of the CIA? What did you think it was all about? And then did that change when you started working for them? From Wichita, CIA was. was so not on my screen. I didn't read anything.

I didn't watch any movies. It just wasn't. I knew it was there. I knew, in theory, that was collecting intelligence for our policymakers. I didn't know much more than that. I didn't have bad or good opinion of it. The way John, my first husband, explained it,

it sounded like it would be something worth doing, something worth being a part of. That was the beginning. of that kind of feeling. I carried that through my career, whether I was grumping about the men or not. And I wasn't grumping about the men all the time. I was working.

Yeah. It was kind of a side thing. Like, yeah, right. You know, I'll never get promoted, but I do like the work that I'm doing. So how long did you work as a contract wife before you actually became an employee? of the agency?

It was when we went back to the states on the first home leave that I became staff. And that's how I ended up when we were back and forth and back and forth. But I was rising up as a secretary, as a top secretary. And there was no, there was no, there was no, there was no, there was no, there was no, there was no, on the ladder. I was at the top rung, couldn't go any further. So I told the director of my office, David Branwine, man I really liked, I said, you know, I think I'm going to go over to the Smithsonian and talk to them about a job. I could see it from my office. I could see the Smithsonian Castle from my office.

And I said, I have a feeling there would be something, I think I said, of substance over there at the Smithsonian. And he said, well, what if you, because I know you really enjoy photography, What if you took some of our photography courses? The office I was in was the queue of a CIA, and cameras was one big piece of it. We did so many other things. But he focused on photography, and he said, you know, you might find that interesting.

Maybe there's something there for you. So I did. I took a bunch of photo courses. Nothing like what I expected. Half of them were not even using commercially available cameras. most of them weren't using commercially available film, and it was all film back then. It was nothing digital, not even on the horizon.

But I did very well, and I really enjoyed that and thought, if I can turn this career into this photo piece of my office, that could be somewhere where I'd be interested in staying. So that was a pivotal moment when he, his suggestion, he was a generous man. And so you started taking the photography classes. And how, like, so you were still at the time, like an administrative assistant, right?

How do you, how did you go from taking these photography classes to actually getting your first? Because you got an, didn't you get an assignment like teaching photography to an asset before you ever actually were promoted out of the? administrative assistant? That was later. Oh, that was later. I'm sorry about that. Okay. That was, I was segue into disguise back then.

The photo thing, I took a lot of courses. And then my husband and I, because we had changed the rules, and I wouldn't lose my grade. As long as I was as secretary, I didn't want to go overseas. Because I thought when I came back, they'd put me at the bottom level of secretary. But when I got up to a GS-9 and took the photo courses and then went back to Europe, I ended up going into the photo labs. We had a huge, big office with one, two, three dark rooms, big dark rooms, all kinds of photography going on. And I wasn't doing any secretarial work anymore.

I was doing the photography and loving it. It was exciting. It was fun. I liked the people I worked with. It was a new piece of CIA. It looks very promising. Yeah. Because you mentioned that, like in the FOIA labs,

you guys were working on concealing cameras and laundry baskets and the bellies of fake pregnant women in a man's tie or buttonhole. How were you guys developing that type of technology? With little teeny tiny cameras. There was the Minox, the one that I think America got a look at it in one of the James Bond films, one of the early ones. There were very small cameras that lent themselves to doing this.

Minotas, Somotrolas, Minox. And you could, we needed concealed cameras. We needed them in a laundry basket in the back of a hatchback with netting in front of it so we could photograph something going on on the street. We put them everywhere. There was nowhere you couldn't. put a camera. It's still true.

Now it's really, really true. There's camera. But we were very innovative. And I remember briefcases. You put them in a woman's purse with a, the actuator would be in the shoulder strap. That was part of the fun.

But then we had the little teeny tiny, little bit of camera called a Tropel. And that was, that's as small as a film camera ever got, I believe. It was, we put them in like Mont Blanc pins. a fat pin.

It looked a lot like today's Sharpie. Yeah. And we'd have a camera inside of it that would be about half the size of the cap. And inside the camera was a film cassette.

Like that black and yellow Kodak film cassette we all knew. But it was really, really small. And there was a tiny, tiny piece of film, maybe eight inches long. How did you develop film that small?

Just breathing hard and trying not to have a heart attack every time I did. The people we gave those two, the people we gave those cameras, those concealments too, were the kind of people that were inside the circle. Think Moscow. I always use Moscow because it's such a great target. Everyone understands. Think of a guy standing in front of Putin's desk and he's got his mobile. pen in his pocket. And he's got his

notepad with him and Putin's talking and he takes it and he's, because it's still writes, it's an ink pen, still writes. And he's taking some notes. Putin's talking. Then Putin turns his head someone else talking to them or on the phone or whatever. And our guy with one finger

could silently with no noise or anything, just hold his pin up and just push the button. Take a picture of the agenda for the meeting or the minutes for the meeting or whatever is lying on his desk. He turns back to the guy. He takes his pin, puts it back in his pocket and goes to lunch with Putin. I like to imagine that going to lunch with

Putin. I mean, it was, you know, the stuff that came out of that pen was just, it was gold. Not everybody got those, but the people that got them had access. Can make use of them. There's one funny story. It's not in my book. It's in another book where the KGB is a arrested somebody and they've confiscated a package that was going to put down. And one of those pins is in the package. So that KGB guy has seen one of those pins before. And he knows that maybe there's a camera in that pen. But he also has seen another pin that looked just like the Chopel.

And it had a cyanide capsule in it. Yeah, that's Marty's story. The man doing the briefing, he's not sure what he's got there on the table, but he was picking it up just very carefully in case it wasn't the pen. The motto at the International Spy Museum is nothing is what it seems to be. Nothing is what you think it is.

Everything is in fact disguised or concealed. And it's not true. The pens were a wonderful example. I think that was Marty Peterson who her asset took the L pill that was disguised inside the pen. Yeah. He had,

He had to almost get into a punching match to get that L-pill. He ended up saying, if you won't give me a way to take my life, then I will not work for you. Right. That was back. When the Russians were circulating this story that if you were arrested or if you were caught, betraying the motherland, they would put you feet first alive into a crematorium. This was to dissuade their officers.

from even thinking about it. So their officers weren't in Sinai pills just in case. And it was, you started going on actual, like, agent meets to show them how to use this equipment stuff at that point in time also, right? Yeah, I got out the door the first time because there was no one there but me. Everybody was away. They were in a different country or there was no one there but me. My boss, second really great boss.

He said, you can do this, right? You know how to do this? I said, of course I know how to do this. So off we went. And it's like the CIA is a meritocracy. If they believe that you can do something, they will typically let you do it. They just never believed that women could go out

and train foreign assets. Of course we could. Yeah. And we did. And then I remember also there was one funny, story you had about decoding secret messages with alcohol, but the alcohol in that country all had cancer in it? Yeah, I put some mistakes in the book, so nobody would think I was just, you know, trying to, trying to bowl people over it with these operations. That was a big mistake I made.

Can you tell us about that? Yeah, I took a train. You know, they're funny about where are you? And there are a lot of city and country names that are not in my book, the same for some others. But I was in Europe. I'm in this country. What I had to do was so simple. I had to develop a secret writing message. And secret writing was part of the photography category. Secret writing and photography.

We did both of those things. So I'm in an embassy. and I had brought everything I needed to develop this message, but not alcohol. So I got some alcohol from a supply room, and I had to boil it. That was part of the recipe. But the alcohol had camphor in it, like Vicks Vapel Rub. And I understand it doesn't just make you sick to breathe it, but it's really unhealthy. You're not supposed to inhale that stuff like.

that. And it got up in the air events and they had to let the people out of the building. Oh my God. And I had to go home and explain to my guys, it was all guys, what I had done, that I had not known, A, that there was camper. And that country, the people in that country liked to make, they all had stills in their kitchen evidently. And they would take pears or or different fruit and they would make brandy out of it. And it was heavily taxed in that country. They didn't want their, they didn't want their natives making liqueur in their kitchens.

That's what the camper was for. But all you actually had to do is just walk across the street to the next country and buy the alcohol. So we learned, we learned that lesson. That only happened once. And then, so then after that, what was your next duty assignment? I think in their book it goes to the Middle East.

So I'm assuming. I was always back and forth. I was back and forth. I did go to the subcontinent. I spent a summer doing a lot of photography, doing some really tough jobs. I was there for three months and I just loved it. I'd never been to that part of the world. I had no idea that it would be so fascinating.

So I went back home at the end of the, three months and talked to my career management officer. And I don't think I call it out in the book. I don't remember. But my career management officer was Tony Mindes was his name. And I had met him. I'd met him before. He was moving up,

but he was moving sideways all the time. He had a lot of different jobs. And I told him I wanted to, I wanted an assignment in the subcontinent. And he said there is no, there's no photography job that's going to open up. there's a disguise job will be the next thing that's in the time frame you might be looking in. And I said, well, you know, I'm sure I could do that work.

Train me as a disguise officer. And that should have been a career-ending moment, I think, because I don't know many people who just do a 90-degree turn in the middle of their career, head down an unknown path. But I did. I really wanted to go out and do that. There came a time when they pulled me out of everything and trained me broadly across all the disciplines that my office represented.

How to put in a bug, how to drill a pinhole in a wall, how to plaster that wall, how to match paint without Home Depot in your hip pocket. you know, how to how to make microdots, just all the things that we did. And combining that with disguise and with photography, toward the end of my career, I was like, it was like one of those freaky one-man bands.

I'd walk in the chief of station's office like, what do you need? Because I could do a lot of things. And I was also smart enough to know when to call the experts, you know, when I got over my head. So, because you talk about the Kandestine Communications Division, right? And then did you do the career development program and all that prior to moving over to disguise or was disguised before that? Disguise was before that. Okay.

So you moved into disguise. Can you tell us a little bit of what disguise was like? Like, was Hollywood, was that the big, was that where the experts were that you guys would kind of tap? Did you develop really solid in-house? All of the above. Yeah. Tony Mendez had run disguised 10 years before me. And when he was doing it, it was not what he inherited,

what he took charge of, was not very well thought of. It was crummy wigs and fake mustaches. And in addition to all of that, the materials weren't all that good. But the men don't want to wear disguise. Men don't want to put on a wig. I'm looking at you too. I don't know. If anyone ever suggested you do that,

but there is built-in resistance. Women, sure, yeah, give me that wig. But there were no women case officers. And actually, the foreign assets that we trained, I never trained a woman. There were all men. So it's a male point of view. So when Tony started,

he started making some big changes. He was the one that connected with Hollywood and got John Chambers, the award-winning guy involved. One of the things that Tony brought in were these, they're like stunt double masks. Like, you know, the guy that pretends to be Brad Pitt and rides off into the distance, just in case he falls off. It's not going to hurt Brad. We had four movie stars that we had their faces after Tony was there. and one of them was Rex Harrison. There were three others,

and I don't know those movie stars. I'm not a big movie person, but they're well-known faces here in the States. They're meaningless overseas. Overseas no one know who Rex Harrison was. So we had an aluminum mold of Rex Harrison's pen. This was like, these were large, medium, and small and an extra. Rex Harrison was large.

We could make his face, his whole face, It didn't move. It was static. But we'd produce a blank. And then we could paint it any way we wanted. We could make him an Indian. We could make him an Indian. We could make him anything.

And we could change his gender. We could turn him into a woman, except with Rex Harrison. That is not a good idea. She makes a very ugly one. And we could use these in car meetings. We'd use them in very selective scenarios where nobody was going to get too close. nobody was going to walk up the person wearing the mask and challenge it. Like in South Africa at the time apartheid was going on.

And if you had two different races sitting together in a car on the street, a cop just might walk over and say, what's going on? You know, it would draw attention. That's where we started out with Tony. And then we started doing half masks so that the top half was a mask. The bottom half was your mouth. your face, usually with the beard. And that was halfway there, halfway where we wanted to be.

But you still couldn't sit face to face with somebody who didn't know you had a mask on. When I came into the picture in disguise, as this is back home from overseas, we did a full court press to do a full face animated mask. And that was the goal. and that was a really hard thing to do. It took us almost as much time to make that mask as it took the CIA to find bin Laden. It took about 10 years.

We had wildly different results. But once we could do that, then we could really use them and it just depended on how fertile your imagination was. What could you do with the mask? How were you guys developing? When you say it took 10 years, was it trying to find new materials, trying to, like, what was the challenges that you face?

It's all over the place. How to find materials that were comfortable enough that you could actually wear it for an extended period of time. And it would depend on where you were going. If it was air condition, it was one thing. If it was, you know, if you were going to Thailand, you're going to be outside all the time. Right. We wouldn't give you a mask.

And then just the movement, how do you get that thing? to move, believably. It was hard to combine those two things. We had outside contractors that worked with us. We had people in L.A. working with us. We had a lot of voices on that, all in classified contracts, trying to make it, trying to make it work. And then we did. The first one they made for me, I was chief, so they made it for me. I was an African-American man. It was great. It was really, really Perfect. Funny, the first time I ever saw Tony Mendez, and I didn't know it was Tony Mendez. I was sitting in the far east.

I was sitting at the chief of station's secretary's desk. This African-American man came in and sat down on the sofa. Like he's waiting for a meeting, and he was there for about five minutes. I was talking to someone. And then he got out and left. And I said later, who was that? We didn't have any African-Americans working in the station at that time. He said, oh, that's Tony Mendez.

He's just trying out some new stuff. He kept popping up in my career. It was kind of odd. Anyway, yeah, the final thing that we did was pretty good. And we started working at the same time, not just with the makeup artist, but with the magic community out in L.A., about how they created deceptions and illusions.

And this whole program was aimed at the KGB in Moscow who followed us so closely. Marty Peterson can certainly weigh in on that. We couldn't do anything. Yeah. That you were smothering us with surveillance, but we had to be able to do things. So what is a deception or an illusion where you can break free from that?

That's what we were always after. Yeah, because later in the book, I remember you talking about the spy dust that the Russians were using, which made it doubly hard. hard for the case officer because at the time it seemed like the KGB just always knew what the police officers were doing. We were marked with an invisible dust. They put it on our door handles.

They put it on anything where they could tell if one of their local employees had shaken hands or received anything from us that dust would be on them. Or they could see where we were going because we would leave like, fingerprints were the lee trail of NPPD was the chemical. Were those like, was it radioactive nucleotides that they used, I mean, what was the tracking mechanism used in spy dust? They had, they had mechanical devices that were put up at what they would consider choke points.

I never saw one. I don't know. It wasn't radioactive. Okay. But it was some sort of chemical then, I guess. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Now, at one point, and I'm sorry I'm a little out of order, but at one point, you basically went, they wanted you guys to actually go through the farm, correct?

We took the ops course down at the farm. Yeah. Yeah. And so what was, why did they have the, like the DS&T or the disguise, you know, I don't know what the department was called at the time, but why were they having the, people going through the farm. And in DDS&T, we were kind of the odd man out. We had been in the DO. Our office had been in the DO.

And we moved to the SMT because there was more money in the SMT. Okay. And we had these big communication systems. We had big programs coming. We needed more money. But we were traveling operational officers. We were all over the world. we probably traveled more than our DO counterparts.

We met with as many, if not more, assets than they did. For every 10 operations that began in the Directorate of Operations, maybe two or three of them would actually turn into something. They would bring us in at that point to the ones that were really going to become something, and we would support it with whatever technology they needed. So we were traveling on airplanes. We were moving around all the time, and we needed, we were on the street, we were meeting with foreign assets and hotels and safe houses.

We needed that training. Yeah, it makes sense. What did you think when you went to that? Because you had been in the agency for a while, right, before you went to the farm? I had been, but I had been in stations overseas, and I had seen a lot. I had a good understanding of how it worked. of the pressures of the security considerations of doing SBRs, of never going directly where you were going,

of covering your tracks every way you could. It was, I thought the time in the farm was time well spent, but it wasn't entirely novel. I knew a lot of the, a lot of the things that they were teaching us. We learned some of the DO stuff that we didn't need and we learned how to, you know, the recruitment process and went to the fake parties that they would give for the trainees

where you're supposed to, in a crowd of maybe 60 people in a room, you're supposed to see if you can find one particular person who's going to be your target. It was, it was, it was fun, I thought. Yeah. And good stories came flying out of there. Like everyone who went through that came back with a great story. Yeah. So you are full time in disguise. And I know you mentioned when I brought up the asset, it was in Afghani, you were in disguise when you trained him. Can you tell us a little bit about that? I was training in disguise full time. And this young Lujahadine was in town and he needed some basic photo training.

And I don't know why they asked me to step out of disguise and do that, maybe because I was going to be going to that part of the world. But I spent about a week training this young man. This was at a different time. This is when the Soviets were in his country. We were supporting the Mujahideen to get them out of his country. This young man had never, he'd never been out of Afghanistan. So he came with all the bells and whistles, the good, young, fervent

Muslim men would have, like is your husband okay with you doing this training? That's one of the first things he asked me. Is this okay with your husband? I said, of course. And we had that conversation for a week. He would describe to me the amazing things you could buy in the bizarre

Kabul. And I would show him how to use a telephoto lens to track planes to collect intelligence for us. He was in a desert area, his job, he was on horseback. He was riding from point A to point B. His uncle was also Mujahideen. He was a doctor.

And the two of them were working for medicine. They were paid in Afghanistan in medicine, penicillin, things like that. So he had a capability to be out where the Russians were in the mountains, to see some of their discarded equipment, to see the planes that are coming in, to see the new equipment that they're bringing in. And I'm training him to take pictures of all of those things and to do it without getting shot.

So, you know, everything he had on his saddle, everything, every piece of equipment, every button on his jacket, we made sure it was matte black. Every camera that we used, if we didn't paint it, black, we put that black tape around it. But for two days, we were by National Airport. We were at Arlington Cemetery. And he's got his long lens.

And he's practicing tracking planes coming down the Potomac River to land at Reagan Airport. And we're, you know, back then there wasn't that sensitivity. There would come a point when you wouldn't be able to do that or somebody would have stepped forward and said, what the, what the hell are you doing here? Right. What is it? But that was, that was before that time. So after a week, he knew what he was doing. He knew how to do it.

You knew how to do it safely. I felt really good about it. It was fun to step out of this disguise thing, do the photo thing, where I was very comfortable and then go back. And, of course, I never heard a word about him. I never knew what happened. But then when everything shifted and when the Mujah Hadim became not our friends anymore, kept wondering.

I mean, I ended up going. up to push hour a couple of times wondering if I'd bump into him but I didn't yeah yeah because you mentioned that you know it's one of the reasons why you guys didn't become too close with your assets because you just never knew which way they're going to go occasionally you know at times yeah um we added we added that as a as a new moscow rule actually don't get too close don't get too close because people are going to get hurt, people are going to get injured, it's not without risks across the board. I would tell civilians it was like when you go see your doctor. Your doctor is trained to not get friendly.

I mean, you're not going to go out and have coffee with your doctor. It's that kind of thing. I have a doctor today. I really like my doctor. But there's that wall. It always has to be that wall. Yeah. So as you're moving,

So as you're in disguise, when do you, well, I guess before we go into sort of when does it spread more into the wider realm of technical operations, right? Because eventually they train you guys in everything. Or it becomes, you know, where it's not, is it still a specialized or does everybody learn a little bit of everything? People pretty much stay in their lanes. Okay. I mean, you spend a career, our office was broken in half. There was the technical, the chemists and the physicists and the electrical and mechanical engineers and crazy guy that did the batteries.

They were one side of our office. There was the operational side. We would take very much the tools that they made and deploy them. And we would go accompany James. There's a whole riff we can do about James because we didn't trust James sometimes to remember what we had taught him. So we'd go. He might forget it. He might break it.

He could lose it. All of these things have happened. So we had some funny James stories. They probably had some funny tech stories too. But people stayed in their lane pretty much. To get that broad training that you're talking about, That was in this thousand person office. They do eight people a year, maybe six.

Take them out of their full-time jobs. And you train for a year, full-time. And learn how to, how to. We had something called a technical operations officer at Tops. There was a Tops program, and this emulated that Tops program. It was very selective, and it was really intense in-depth. And if you came out of that training, you were pretty comfortable with all of the equipment.

And they were comfortable with sending you here and there. That's fascinating. As a singleton. Was that something that you saw, I mean, was that something that had always been there? Or was it something that was developed along the way? It's just,

when I look back at my career, I think some of this comes through in the book. It's not like I had a plan. Yeah. I loved doing the work. I loved. working with these people that were risking their lives to help us. I liked very much the sense of keeping them safe.

To the very end, I like that. I didn't have that as a goal. I was actually, I was back in Germany. Our deputy of our office was walking down the hall. And he said, so what are you going to do when you get back home? That's what happens to everybody. You just bump into people. What are you going to do?

And I blurted out. I guess I had thought about it that I would like to be considered for that program. I'd never told anyone else I'd like to be considered and they typically didn't put women in it and they put me in the program. So you're selected to do that and then at the end of it

you can tell how well you did where they send you and they sent me to Europe to fill in for someone who was back on home leaving who was gone for almost three months. There's a funny story. story in the book because when I was there, this thing broke, this big electronic contraption on the roof of the building was in a flower pot. It was built into a flower pot. It was a device where, and I don't have to

kill you because I put this in the book and they said I can tell this story. It was what we call a cutout device. And so if you're a foreign asset needs to call you and just say maybe you're in the embassy, they can dial a number that calls the flower pot. And the flower. And the flower pot turns the phone around and calls the embassy. So you can't trace the call. Gotcha. And it stopped working. So the chief station said, can you fix that? I said, well, I can certainly go look at it. And I did. And I knew I couldn't fix it once I saw it. And it took, I wanted to fix it, but I couldn't. That's not my. That was, that was where, are you smart enough to know to call in the big guns? So I was.

going to call my office. But I kicked that fire pot. I was just man. It was cement. I just kicked it. And I went back to the office and the chief of station called me in and he said, great job. I said, what? He said, well, no, they cut out.

I said, thank you. It was such a big deal. And you're like piece of cake. You know what had happened was, was, um, because it's it happened somewhere else. I think what had happened is there was a line of sight that was required and there was huge traffic in this city. Just, you know,

it's like New York. It just almost vibrates. And over time, I think it just got out of alignment, just barely. And I just barely pushed it back. But they were so pleased that I fixed it that they sent a message back to my

home base in Europe. And my boss flew to this country to get some of the gratitude personally and then to escort me on. Yeah, they were all thrilled. I never told them that it was luck. I never told my office that it was luck. That's amazing.

You got it. You got you got you got you have to you have to accept luck whenever you can counter it. You know, the story, you know, how it's rigged so that when they call it turns and then it calls It reminds me of like some of the old James Bond stuff or some of the old Maxwell's smart stuff. And it's like how were you in this technical field, not you personally, but your division, how were you guys like coming up with this stuff and staying ahead of what there was on the civilian market? Because civilian technology obviously develops pretty quickly too. But like there must have been so many different gadgets and attempted gadgets and things like that.

would somebody just have an idea and then you'd pass it on to the engineers to see if they could make it work? We had duty officers assigned on Saturday mornings to answer the phones because all the get smarts and all those pop culture things were on during the weekend. Our case officers would be taking notes and then call on Saturday and say, can you do that? Can you actually, can you make one of those because it was in that TV thing and I really liked it? A couple of times we actually built something based on a pop culture reference. But typically, no, we built things because we needed them. Right. Because we made batteries so small, so long lasting, so powerful.

Not because we wanted to do that, but because we needed that. All of our bugs were powered by batteries. and your bug was only going to last as long as your battery. And you were never, ever, ever to go in and change the batteries. So it was circumstances directed us that were to put our effort and where to put our money. We were at that point ahead of commercial technology. A lot of the things we needed weren't for sale yet. During the time I was there, that shifted.

Commercial technology did get ahead of us. That was happening at the end of my career. Was that because of the shift from analog, the digital, or was it already happening? That was a big part of it. So much of what we did. And then we were trying to figure out, okay, now it's a threat. I mean, these things that they're building, they're a threat to us. Is there a way that we can turn this threat back on our opposition?

Is there a way that we can make it a positive move forward for us? it was getting crazy about the time I left. I can't imagine today. Yeah. So I have a two-part question that the first one is, did you ever encounter anything that just blew your mind that you thought this is incredible? And the second part of that,

if it's declassified, can you tell us what it is or what it was? I would tell you honestly that if there was something like, that it might not be declassified yet. So I would just say broadly that I can't, I can't, I can't come up with any one thing. I was always interested in watching things as they morphed. Yeah. We would create something.

Every time you put a new invention, a new tool, a new gadget out in the field, in an operation, it had a shelf life. It was going to somehow be compromised. Right. So you had to be careful about that. When it's compromised, the opposition would look at what we had, and they generally admire it because they wouldn't have one.

And then they'd make improvements on what you were doing, and then we'd capture one of theirs. So it was always fun and interesting to watch the technology bounce back and forth. Always getting better, always improving. It was like ping pong. You'd see something that the Russians did to improve your device. and like, yeah, that's actually a good idea. Absolutely.

And these were, this was our technical side, not so much our operational people. These were our chemists and physicists and all of that same. That's brilliant. Yeah, we'll do that. And then maybe we'll add something else on top of that. I mean, that's what kept them all at their work benches in their labs, you know. Did anybody ever try to revisit the idea of acoustic kitties? Oh, I love that one.

that story is such a good story Vince Houghton put that in his book and then I saw it somewhere else recently and you can't train a cat can't resist training Tony told me a story that that I loved

we were we were working kind of outside of the box we were using homing pigeons with cameras on them and this was a project we did it I think the Brits did it too but But we were in a self-contained project.

And we had some success because a homing pigeon will always come home. So depending on where you release him, you can have him fly over the thing that's interesting to you. And so we thought, yeah, this kind of works here in the D.C. area. We can get some intelligence out of that. So we crated some of them up and we flew them to Europe. And when they opened the crates in Europe, they have all molded. they didn't have any feathers. They dropped their feathers in the crates.

So they had, it looked like the birds you see at Wegmans or giant grocery. He had these naked birds. I couldn't fly. And I asked Tony, I said, were you really part of that? And he said, not really. You know, I was, yeah, I was kind of on the fringe of that. Nobody wanted to say they'd really been a part of that one.

That's funny. So then, So what were, like, what were some of your more memorable moments? Because I know you talked about going back to the subcontinent. You talked about the bombing. Do you want to talk about the bombing in Islamabad when you were there? It was Islamabad, correct? It was Islamabad.

It was a munitions depot that just blew. It was, we were supplied in the Mujahideen with all kinds of, all kinds of rockets. and I can't talk about how much it was, but I was there at the time. And I can't even, today, I can't even say what set it off. Although it didn't seem to be someone trying to light a fire and have everything blow up. I think it was a spark from someone,

or maybe someone was smoking a cigar, you know, and dropped a cigar. It could be that. Exactly. But boy, when it went, it went. and I ended up in the lower level of our embassy, and it went off for about a day and a half. I mean, a thousand people, local nationals that lived around Islamabad, died.

It just kept coming. There was white phosphorus that came into the American school. When we finally went out, you could see rockets with fins sticking out of the ground. OSHA was there in their white spitz. spacesuits, collecting things. It was a nightmare. That's when Milton Bearden was chief of station there. He wasn't there.

He was out of country when that happened. Maybe we should ask Milt. Why he was conveniently gone? We've had Milt on the show a couple times. I'm sure he'd love to come back. That's where I met him when he was chief out there. I walked into his office. I'd heard about this formidable chief station.

I walked in. And he had this, he was sitting at his desk with his feet up, and he had this long stick. And it had like an orb on one end of it. This looked like, you know, one of the, one of the things. Kind of something kingly about it. He was twirling. And he was one of the more interesting people I met. You know, a lot of your book is about the challenges.

that women had. And earlier in the book you talked about, was it the pettico? Yeah, an early panel. Where the women first kind of laid down their grievances, put them on paper, spent a summer working over on the mall and an unair-conditioned building.

I think Eloise Page was part of that and presented them to the powers that be, and the powers that be, they're the ones who named it the pettico panel. Trust me, the women didn't call it that. Men called it that. And there are just, there's just an amazing assortment of quotes that were made and written down and still resonate today. What they thought about all of this, all these grievances that the women had.

And it didn't really do anything. It should have sounded an alarm, did not sound an alarm. The comments were all very dismissive. Oh, they were. were kind of insulting. Yeah. So you talk about a lot of the challenges, but I think the, like,

the chapter on Smallwood really drills into the uphill battle that that you personally and women at large were facing, right? Because you had somebody who was literally trying to tank your career, and the best move for you would be to go to the equal, the EEO or the EEOO, which would have tanked, which would have also taint your career. That's right.

And that, that was, that was a discovery that came late. Um, I didn't know that at the time. I knew my experience. I had seen two women, not on the operational side of my office, but, but on the, um, technical side of my office, two women file EEO complaints. because of bad treatment. And they both won their cases, and they both lost their careers.

And they were gone, they didn't work there anymore. So the man that suggested to me that I might take this blatant sexism and write it down and take it to EEO, he really thought he was a man. He thought that was the solution. That's all he could,

he was a friend. This was a, a more senior person who was visiting our base, who was a friend with Smallwood, who heard my story and thought, this is a perfect case for EEO. He didn't realize that that would have been career suicide if I had done that.

And I realized that he didn't know that. I mean, you know, it's men's rules. Men's rules said, yeah, maybe she has a case. Take it to the EEO. That was no solution. That was never a solution. Can you tell us a little bit about, you know, about Smallwood about this conflict that he created and the circumstances and things like that?

This was just, you know, there's misogyny and there's misogyny. Right. And most men, most professional men, if they feel that the women aren't up to it, I don't know. They just kind of, they don't end up insulting the women. and they don't go to their face and say, I don't want you here. I'd like to see you out of your short of tour for no reason. He did it all.

It was in plain view. It was just endless. And a couple of times on one, probably the most important operation I ever did, I was ever part of, which is not in this book. It's in the book before this book. And I didn't want to tell the same story I didn't include it, but it was really dicey. It was really just a big deal.

And we both flew to this country together, and he didn't show me the cable traffic. And that's a no-no. You always, everybody gets, everybody in the operation gets to read the traffic. He said, there's no time, you know, you need to pack. Take your cameras. This is a camera job. Well, it wasn't a camera job.

It was a disguise job. And I ended up there with nothing to work with, just nothing at all. That kind of just low ball. Sabotage. Yeah. Sabotage. And it didn't work because I ended up making that work. But that was really close.

I think I put in the book, I was getting ready to go on a trip. And I suggested to him that I make a stop on the way to my destination, just a stop and overnight and then out first thing in the morning. As part of my job was to be aware of and familiar with all of the international airports in my area. How do they work? Where are the checkpoints? What the paperwork looked like?

Could we move a defector? Could we move someone through that airport if need be? So I said, so I want to stop in this. I don't think we've ever even been to this airport. He said, that's not an international airport, but it was. but he wouldn't admit it. I had to go off and find. We didn't have a copy of the...

Remember the International Airline Guide that big? It was like an encyclopedia. I had to go find one at the station, carry it back, show it to him. Yes, it is. Oh, he said, okay. He had bet me a six-pack of beer that it wasn't. And in true form,

he didn't give me a six-pack of beer. He never paid his debts. My mother-father. Anyway, he was he was he was the visible face of the worst of men dealing with women and I got to deal with him every day. And he tried on more than one occasion to try to get you a short tour, right? Which would have been very detrimental to your career. Yeah, he told me at one point he was going to send me home short a tour. Well, he had the right to do that, but you have to have a cause.

You can't just, you just can't just up and send someone home. And there was no cause. So my first husband, because my first husband was a polygraph officer, and he was out there. We were a tandem couple. And he gave me a few pointers about how to confront Smallwood, you know. And it worked. I tried to get him to repeat the next day.

I tried to get him to repeat to me verbatim what he had said the day before. He said, I just want to make sure I understood that I heard you clearly. Because I think I got it, but just say it again. You were just back in the States, and you talked to my boss back there, and what was the rest of it? And he wouldn't say twice. When I went home and told my husband, my husband said, he probably thought you had a recording device on.

Right, right. Anyway. That's like asking him to put it in writing. Yeah, but I got out of there in one piece. Felt good about that. And actually when you did get out of their one piece, when you got back, you were sort of like received as a returning hero by the women,

right? Who knew him? Yeah. And we're, I worked, I don't know, for a year, and they made me deputy chief in disguise. So I didn't lose any credit at all. And so you go from, you know, being an operator, somebody on the ground doing this stuff to the deputy chief.

Did you like that transition? No. No, I didn't want to do that. And that's, you know, that's almost career ending, if that's where your head is. but that's where my head was. And I didn't want to go to finance meetings and write evaluation reports on people. And that wasn't why I was there. I wanted to keep doing what I was doing.

And that same husband said, you know, you do what you want to do and what you need to do, but just know that that can be a kind of career-ending point of view, if that's what you do. Just know that. So I said, yes, yes, I'd be glad to be the deputy chief. And then they made me chief. Same thing. And when I became, when I became chief, I discovered that I had a power to actually move some stuff through the pipeline there. And that was that was when that fully animated mask finally, we got to the end of it and we got it sorted out.

And that had been 10 years in the making, like you mentioned. Yeah. It's a lot of work. When you became chief, and now you have this top-down view of an organization, that you had literally started not even at the bottom of, from like below the bottom of it, as somebody, as an administrative assistant who had taken photography courses to get, you know, to get into like the S&T world, what was your world view like?

you didn't come up from a privileged place. You didn't come in from, you know, as a GS-9 or a GS-10. Like, what was that like for you, like now looking down on disguise and looking down on this department? You know, I, today, every summer I speak to this huge group of young kids that come to Washington, D.C. 200 at a time for six weeks, so 1,200 of them. I meet them at University of Maryland on Monday morning.

I'm the first person that they see. I'm the first person that talks to them on this fabulous week that they're getting ready to have. And I talk to them about working, not for the CIA. I talked to them about working for the government. And, you know, they're kids. They're just, but trying to break through to some of them saying, there are some jobs here that are so worth doing. They are worth careers.

There's certainly worth your attention. A lot of government jobs where you'll never make buckets of money, but where you have an opportunity to make a difference, to do something that maybe just nudges a thing to the right or the left, but you can get in the mix and be part of it. And you should keep that in the back of your mind this week that you're going. They'll go to the Capitol. They go to the Senate.

They go everywhere. I would have killed at their age to do that. But I'm trying to enthuse them the same way I was enthused doing the work that I was doing. It's part of why I didn't ever want to run the thing. I just wanted to be part of it. You loved it, yeah. Yeah, I wanted my hands on the week. I wanted to be working in the field.

That's where my passion was. And I hope that everybody can find a job where they feel that way. I think a lot of military guys find that. And maybe it's hard sometimes to walk away from that. You get a taste of what it's like to be part of a team like that, to be out there. It's pretty wonderful. So I talked to them a little bit about, you know, what the CIA,

what it felt like. I don't talk to them about the woman thing, just about the work, the value of the work, and that there are jobs like that all over the place in D.C. Did you see a lot of changes in how women were treated in the years that you were there? Not so much. I think in retrospect, I look back now,

it has changed a bit, not enough. The DO has, the D.O. is the last nasty on you know. women have found their way like in the analytical. They're doing just great there. They've always done great in the administrative world. The women that come into the technological piece, if they've got the training and the degrees, I can't say how they are treated, but I would imagine that it's much more equal than it used to be because a lot of women used to come in with all kinds of degrees and they were hired as

secretaries. Gene Vertifay, the woman who was held responsible for finding Alder James, came from a four-year school with a degree. She was hired as a secretary. He ended up as a chief station somewhere in Africa. And even with women, even if you get a chiefest station, they'd probably put you in after because nobody used to value those assignments very much. So it's slowly changing. They have to change. They basically reflect the American workplace. It's not just the CIA. My mom worked at Boeing her whole life. She had the same issues. I didn't realize they were issues when I was growing up, but I looked back. Boeing would lose contracts and they'd offload a bunch of people, the women, until they got a new contract, then they hire them back. My mom was in

computers. She would go back and be working for the guys she'd been training when they laid her off. That's just how it was. Yeah. Tony, Tony used to say that one of the unique things he thought about working for the CIA, where we worked, was he figured there were only four levels between him or me or the person next to me and the president. If you had a really good idea, he said it's like a balloon. Send it up.

And he said that way before Argo, but then Argo was, Argo was his proof of concept. You get a really great idea, even if it looks like a nutty idea. And you can, you can make a difference. Now,

the rest of us, we used to call it, touching the wire. Every once in a while, you just might be part of a thing going on and you'd get the paper the next morning or the next week and you'd read a little headline in the International Herald Tribune and you'd look at that and you'd think, that's not quite right. But yeah, you know, and that was fun. Yeah. Those moments were priceless. And then of course for every for every one of those there were 20 moments of just utter tedium when nothing. Nothing was that wonderful.

Well, you're just kind of plodding around, keeping everything in line, keeping everything afloat. You know, you have a lot of experiences that obviously you cannot talk about. Do you check back with like the agency every five years or whatever to say, hey, can I talk about this yet? You know, so these things aren't lost to history? The only way I know to check with the CIA is to submit a draft and see if they take it out or not. Yeah. So this is the fifth book, every book. We put things in that we're not sure.

Yeah. And see if they, masks is one of these issues. We've been retired. We were retired a long time ago. We never, ever, ever talked about masks. Yeah. Because it was. And then, I think it was Bob Wallace.

my old office director. I was at a briefing he was giving. And he was talking about masks. And I said, can we talk about those now? I said, yeah. I mean, you find out that way. You just do osmosis almost. Yeah.

So you talked about Tony quite a bit. And there was a point, and you talk about it in your book, where you and your first husband split apart, and then you and Tony were married. and you guys have four books or this is your this is your fifth book correct and and i want to just let other people know what the other books are so that when you order this you can also order those books and you wrote a you co-wrote a bunch of those yeah um so it's moscow the moscow rules argo spy dust and the master of disguise that's right and then this one and then this one the new one

that just came out in true face. And this is your story. And yes. And you know, I'm just noticing in, there's a poster leaning against the wall. It's leaning against that wall, it's Argo, because that door is always open. It's hiding behind the door.

Nobody knows that that poster's there. But I have a vista in my living room, and that's why the door is open. But if you, if you had a camera, you could swing around in this room. There is another poster in this room that is eight feet tall and like four feet wide.

It's an Argo poster. I can't get rid of it. I mean, I can't, I just can't throw it away. I can't hide it. There's nothing I can do with it. I've stuck with it for the rest of it. I live in Argo land in my office. The painting, hold on.

This painting. That's the last painting that Tony did. Oh, wow, that's one of his. He was a, and, and. The little boy in the windowsill? Well, I'll stop driving that. The little boy, that's our son when he was little. Oh, wow.

Tony was, he was hired as an artist. He came in as a counterfeiter forger. He was fine artist, and when he retired, back he went. That's amazing. Back he went to counterfeiting forging. No, but people would ask him about the painting. Is this really your painting? Did you really do this painting?

That's amazing. Is there anything like It's your book is there are so many like personal stories and anecdotes I highly recommend everybody read this It's it's I mean it's a great like I don't want to say day by day but it's it's a great look into Not just like the big operations but all the stuff that goes into making them happen everything yeah everything and and a lot of very personal things too you know um you know friendships and you know one of the things you talk about is not only when you got married uh into the CIA but also as you became more and more active how other personal relationships just kind of fell by the wayside because there's just so much you couldn't tell people all those folks back in wichita um most of them have

no idea whatever happened to me. Yeah. I don't know. I wonder sometimes today with these books out, I wonder, does anybody know that that's me and that they went to school with me? I have no idea because I've completely lost. You walk in the door of the

CIA and it closes behind you. If you're undercover, and I was undercover for my whole career. Yeah. You can't go back to Wichita and pull up people and say, you know, I mean, it's just so uncomfortable. You can't, you know that. You can't do that.

The joke, though, is so you let all your original, your core friends, you let them go, and you make all your new friendships inside. Because you can talk to each other. Not about that works so much, but everybody knows, oh, yeah, he's gone. He'll be back in two weeks. And we understand each other how that works. So your friends become inside. But when you retire, guess what?

You walk back out that door and the door plan behind you. Now you've left all your friends inside and you're outside. it's a bit of a dance. In my office, our retirees, they were always men. Keep that in mind. Our career officers, retirees, their average lifespan was like under two years at one point. Wow.

They were so into the work. They didn't have friends' lives outside. That door closed, and they're on the other side of the door, and they would have heart attacks. They would just die. There's that cliche. about like sergeant majors in the army as well you know your whole life is the military yeah yeah no i think i can imagine that yeah i think that's very true and and it's like it's like you say once you're

on the outside you're on the outside like you're even if your friends are still there it's you know it's like you can't call them up and be casual but you can't you can't really talk about things you know um yeah can't talk about people because because maybe they're not there and they're overseas. You don't know. But it becomes the awkwardness that you had outside when you first went into CIA. Now the awkwardness is inside and you're on the other side of the wall. It's difficult.

Yeah. So is there anything? I know we left out a ton in the book. And I say the details are so detailed. or so detailed that we could spend like two hours talking about it. But is there anything really major that I've left out or that we haven't talked about that you'd like to? I think you, I mean, I really clearly get that you read the book, which is a wonderful. Well, of course.

A wonderful beginning. The fact that you're from Wichita and I'm from Wichita, I think it's a really fun, small factoid that we don't want to leave behind. I think you basically kind of covered it. Our viewers have a few questions. Alex asks, what was the most challenging disguise you ever had to create? Oh, gosh. I don't know that I can try to figure out which answer I would give you. So it's going to be vague.

But it's the idea, once we could make those masks that would animate. where you could actually talk to someone. They had no idea you had a mask on. By the way, I spoke once in the Oval Office to the President of the United States, and he did not know I had a mask on. Oh, that's Jimmy Carter, right? No, that was Bush.

That was George HW. Oh, that was HW. George HW. But what you could do with those masks was really interesting. And we learned a little bit about making masks from the makeup people. But we learned a lot about how to use them from the magic filters, also in LA.

The people that fool you over and over, and you actually pay money and sit in a chair in front of them so they could do something to just mess up your brain because you can't understand how did that just happen. And we said, we'd like to have a few lessons here. We'd like to learn how to create some deceptions ourselves. and the idea of having the mask capability bleeds into a lot of the tools that they use on the stage. One of them is how they use twins.

Twins in the magic community in L.A. It's just huge. They don't actually have to be twins. They just have to look kind of alike. And so in L.A., they're mostly blonde, busty, sequined outfits. and high heels. And nobody's looking any closer than that. So they can build up.

They can, you know, gee, how did she get there? She just was there. They coached us into some really interesting operational scenarios based on the fact that we can make another one of you. Right. That's the crisis. Corbyn asks a question, I guess on the flip side, what was your least favorite project?

Oh gosh What was it? I don't do well remembering Worst of anything I'm an optimist in my heart I guess It was just this stupid machine It was a color processor

A big big machine Full of color chemicals That I insisted we needed And the guys finally I was in the dark rooms This was early in the career And they said well if you think so We don't think we need one

But we'll get one And then they made me clean it every week. I had to change the chemicals. It took all day. And it washed the thing out. You had to these chemicals were so caustic and so nasty and in a dark room that was full of pinups of naked women. Can I say that's my least favorite thing? I'm going to go with that. Okay. And we have some other real quick viewer questions. M. Corbyn, thank you very much. Be sure to subscribe on your fiend smart TV next time you drink at their place. Whether you're visiting a fiend or a friend, yes,

log on to their YouTube on their smart TV and like and subscribe on their account. And check out their Patreon. Yeah. And also, you probably shouldn't be hanging out with fiends unless you're active duty. Brock, thank you very much for the donation. Mohamed Savani, thank you very much. How difficult is physical disguise in the age of omnipresent Chinese surveillance AI in the mass computing?

I don't know. I can only guess. I can guess that it's game changer. I would guess that that's one reason that I can talk about mass now. I suspect that they don't use mass the way that I understand mass that I made.

Everything's changed. Yeah. Was biometrics coming online when you were still with the agency? Just. Just coming online. It was a huge threat. were wrestling with how to do that.

I mean, we were wrestling with, it wasn't far spread yet. The idea was, can we get in the company and somehow create a back door into that technology that we can use? Could we get someone in a company? It's a foreign company. I don't know. It looks, I just have the new issue of studies and intelligence came in today. And the lead article is about AI.

expectations and kind of realities and how it's going to work in the intelligence community. Interesting. J.P. Ortega, thank you very much. Her take on, or your take on Audrey James and Robert Hansen? Worse and worser. At the International Spy Museum, they stand not side by side, but in the same in the same cubicle behind glass and right next to them is Adolf Tolkachev. And I had a fit when I first saw it.

And I said, you got to move tohkajit. I know, I know he's their traitor, but he's, he's our hero. This was a man who was following ideology and who was, who was doing the right thing and who was wonderful asset to the United States. And Alder James and Bob Hansen were just the bottom of the bottom. They were just awful. I think Hansen was probably the worst because I understand that the information that he gave was not just not just the intelligence community of the United States, but that Hansen gave him any country he had touched, anything he had ever seen, that he just gave everything away.

Yeah, brutal. Mahabit Sabani, thank you very much. What are the top three variables of disguise that you've seen people struggle with for developing? Any helpful tips for civilians on disguise for someone who wants to wear a suit for a living? Now out of vote. I have a lot of people that want me to disguise them. Number one, it's not just your facial oval at all. Sometimes that's the least important thing.

When we were disguising people, just generally, we would just size them up and figure out how many things can we change. And we could change a lot. The color of your hair, the length of your hair, the color of your eyes. Do you have a beard or not? Do you have a mustache or not? Do you wear a wedding ring or not? Do you wear a gold chain? Do you wear too much cologne?

Do you dress in a... Just up and down. What I see when you walk in the door and then you change every... You would pretend that someone who was meeting with you was writing a memo to their office. It says, I met with an American. And this is what I got about him

in my five minutes with him at a table. did he smoke? What kind of cigarettes did he smoke? And then you can do it backwards and you can have someone take off their wedding ring and the fact that they have that unsuntan band on their fingernail too much cologne, a gold chain, you can go the other direction and you can create a person in a heartbeat that every woman that sees him will just start stepping away. He's got the signature. I've mastered that disguise. But it's the way you walk, you know? Do you smoke?

How do you smoke? I mean, it's everything. Shoes are really important. It's a whole thing. It's very interesting. One of the things I remember you talking about, you know, disguises and additive, but also one of your bosses was bald, right? And like you gave him a wig for a quick, like,

for a quick change that he could take the wig off to be a completely different person. Yeah, actually, when he left to be Chief Station, he was going to wear that wig every day. It wasn't a wig. It was a $10,000 toupee. It was the best toupee that money could buy. Made just custom made for him, for his head, for his hairline. He was going to wear it every day. He was so happy. Bald men, they may not want to wear disguise, but they like a toupee. So for two years, he was going to be. be this kind of handsome guy.

And then when he needed a disguise, he simply would take it off, put on some glasses. He was going in a more European direction. We disguised a lot of people. And, you know, we used, the men would always say, they'd come for the final fitting and we'd say, so is this what you thought you wanted? Is this going to work for you? They'd say, oh, yeah, this is great. Is it comfortable?

Do you feel right? Oh, yeah, it's good, good. And we knew that what they were going to do was put it in their little doop kit, stick it in the back of their safe, and never put it on them. This was our concern. So we would, while we had them in full regalia in our labs, we'd say, great, go to the cafeteria for lunch, have lunch in that, come back and see us.

And they'd go. And then they'd come back. And they just wouldn't stop talking, saying, you know, I knew those people. I worked with those people. They were at the next table. They didn't have any idea. The woman in the line, she looked up and smiled at me,

and I thought, oh, God, is something coming off? And he said, no, she just liked the way I look. They'd be really enthusiastic. And if you'd think, you know, they might use this. There is one point that I would add. We can't. I don't want to keep you here forever. When I started in disguise,

disguise was a kind of nice to have thing. It was. We'd give you a dop kit. Everything we gave you would fit in that dop kit. If you needed it, there it was. Then it changed when we started working against terrorism and narcotics,

when our targets changed. Because not just the targets changed, but the nature of those people changed. All of a sudden, we're dealing with a criminal element, and very often they were armed. And they could hurt you. Right.

And if you put down Bogota, they just might hurt you for no reason at all, just because you look like a gringo. And yeah, gringo down there is very possibly DEA. I mean, they were paranoid. So in the course of my career, disguise turned into the kind of body armor. Yeah. It could protect you. And our guys were much more willing to wear it. And I think it did protect them.

It could save your life. It could keep someone from following you home to see where do you live, your wife, your kids, your dog, how do you drive to work, bam, you know, once it became that kind of an environment disguised to Ghana, own a meaning. When you say that you've disguised all kinds of people, in your book you mentioned even disguising a prime minister, like there are all types of people and all types of reasons for the disguises. All kinds of people, all kinds of reasons. Yep. It's fascinating.

Everybody needs a good disguise. I think people are sometimes disappointed that I can't just take off this face. Mission impossible. Yeah. And that's it for the questions. So, John, we really, really appreciate you spending a Friday night with us. Well, I owed you something because I made, well, because we screwed up here. It's okay.

First exempted. I'm glad we could make it happen. I'm really glad that we could get you. on the show. And, you know, the next time you come through New York on your book tour, I hope we'll see you again. I got one more book in me. Okay. But I've got to get through. There's this publicity thing this time is making a lot of noise.

I have to get past that. I can't get anything done. Started writing this book during COVID. That's the reason I wrote it. Just, you know, can only do so many jigsaw puzzles. That's good. I mean, I'm glad that the book is doing well. We can't wait for the next one. The next one's a fun story. I wrote it 10 years ago. I've just never done.

Oh, wow. So it'll be easy. It's a spy story? A little bit, yeah. Yeah. Okay, okay. Well, we'll be standing by for that. Yeah.

And people can go out and find the book. It's out now. You find it wherever books are sold. There's also going to be a link down in the description of this podcast and video that you guys can click on. So yeah, that's it. Thank you so much for coming on the show tonight. Pleasure. And we will see all of you guys out there next Friday.

We're going to have Ben McCloughy on the show. He's an Australian journalist who wrote the book Find Fix Finish, which is about the Australian Special Ops guys in Afghanistan during the War on Terror, wrote a lot about the commandos and the SAS. So we'll have him on the show next Friday. Thank you everyone out there, and we will see you next time.