FollowingFaye: CIA's Former Chief of Disguise Reveals Secrets

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

CIA's Former Chief of Disguise Reveals Secrets

An excerpt from People -

CIA's Former Chief of Disguise Reveals Spy Secrets: 'People Who Knew Me Well Will Be Shocked' (Exclusive)

Trailblazer Jonna Mendez revolutionized the CIA’s techniques — and now she’s finally sharing her own story

By Dawn Klavon

“I didn’t join the CIA thinking I’d drive over the Alps in a Jaguar like James Bond,”
says Jonna Mendez (in 2023 and, opposite, disguised as a man in 2005).
PHOTO: NANCY PASTOR/THE WASHINGTON TIMES; TINA LEU

When Jonna Mendez, then the CIA’s chief of disguise, was asked to brief President George H.W. Bush on the agency’s new mask technology in the early 1990s, she wanted to make a powerful impression to secure more funding.

“It’s expensive to make these masks,” says Mendez, 78.

Meeting Bush in the Oval Office disguised as a Latina woman with black curly hair, she described the extraordinary results her team achieved to evade Russia’s KGB. Bush curiously glanced to her side, perhaps looking for a briefcase holding the new disguise. She told him she was wearing it.

“He said, ‘Hold on, don’t take it off yet.’ Then he got up and took a closer look,” she recalls. “He said, ‘Okay, do it.’ ”

Like a Mission: Impossible character, Mendez slowly peeled off a remarkably lifelike mask, revealing her true face: blue eyes, fair skin and short, dark blonde hair. When she held up the disguise that duped everyone in the room, Bush and his advisers seemed dazzled.

“The masks were something that no one else, not even Hollywood, could do,” she says.

That’s just one memory from Mendez’s 27-year tenure as a master of disguise that she’s mined for her CIA-reviewed memoir In True Face: A Woman’s Life in the CIA Unmasked, out March 5.

“This is my career that no one knows about,” she tells PEOPLE in this week's issue from her Reston, Va., home. “You step into that world, and the door closes behind you. I thought it would be interesting to open the door. People who knew me well will be shocked.”