A few days before getting married, Jonna Mendez’s fiancé revealed to her that he didn’t really He worked for the US Army, as he had been told, but was a spy for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The couple was going to get married in Frankfurt, Germany, a city that Mendez had come to as a tourist and in which he had remained employed by the US bank Chase.
Mendez was not very aware at the time of what it meant to be a CIA agent , so her boyfriend’s confession at the last minute didn’t bother her much. But from one moment to the next, she went from being an American citizen in Germany to being a “CIA wife” and got a clerical job at the agency, late in the years .
That was just the beginning of a career of 26 years at the CIA, in which Mendez was promoted and traveled around the world as a photo ops technician and finally as Costume Director in the middle of the Cold War.
After retiring in 1993, collected his experiences in books such as In True Face , to be published in about months, and in Spy Dust Y The Moscow Rules , which she co-wrote with her second husband, Tony Mendez, also a CIA agent, and with Bruce Henderson and Matt Baglio. In addition, she was one of the founders and member of the board of directors of the International Spy Museum in Washington DC for more than 20 years.
BBC Mundo spoke with Mendez about his work and here we tell you his story in the first person.
People think that a costume is a wig, a mustache. But it is much more than that.
At the CIA we could make dental mounts that they changed the way your face looks.
If you had perfect teeth, we could give you teeth that looked terrible and vice versa; and you would have wanted to use them every day.
We had to learn to do things that only your dentist would know : how to make dental impressions , how to work with dental tools. That was the level of detail.
But that was only a small part of what we did to make the costumes work properly.
A bad costume is worse than not having a disguise. If anyone can tell that you’re in disguise, you’re in trouble.
So that we spent a lot of time improving our costumes.
A good costume goes beyond the face. People have unique aspects, which they are not aware of and that can sometimes give them away.
As costume agent, if you come to my laboratory, I have to take into account of your person, including gestures.
If you move your hands a lot, I have to give you something to hold with your hands and not move them anymore.
I could change the way someone walked with something as simple as putting a pebble in their shoe. Or he could put a bandage on one knee.
People can’t hold for a long time a different way of walking than they normally have. At some point they relax and forget, so some physical element must be included to help change the way they walk.
Usually our costumes didn’t make you look any better. They made you look different, but looking “good” was never the goal.
But , as we explained before, Mendez’s history at the CIA did not begin with disguises.
M much before taking care of that area, Mendez returned from Germany to the United States with her then husband and continued working in a office position of the agency, until he got bored and his boss suggested taking one of the intelligence photography courses.
Mendez agreed and believes that that moment was key in his history at the CIA. Then she tells what happened to thereafter.
The beginnings in an airplane
As part of the photography course, I had to get on a plane, with the doors open, with harnesses, a big camera, to see if while I was swinging inside the plane I could take pictures of things like the license plate of a car.
I decided that if that was what I could do, I would stay at the CIA.
That was really the beginning of my career. Let’s say it was in the late 59. Then I became a photography operations technician.
“Invisible”. He traveled the world, training foreigners to gather intelligence information for the US government. .UU.
I taught them different ways to stay safe while doing it, because in some countries, if they caught you doing it, they would kill you. As in Russia. So it was a very interesting job. I liked it a lot.
After a while they sent me to what I will call the “Subcontinent” – I do not specify the name of the countries -, to replace someone.
I fell in love with that country. Everything, the food, the music, the weather, and [cuando acabé] I wanted to return. So I asked the CIA to send me to fulfill some mission there.
They told me there was no photography mission , but there would be a costume job in a couple of years.
I thought “Then maybe I can be a costume agent in two years.” They agreed and that’s what we did.
When I look back, I I say “what was I thinking?” But at the same time, I know that I was listening to my heart and my heart was telling me that I needed to spend time in that place and understand it better.
So I trained for two years and became a costume agent and went to that part of the world.
It was an intense training.
“Our masks had to be perfect”
My main project in the costume area was to improve the technology of masks.
You can wear everything in a mask: different hair, different makeup, different skin tone.
When I arrived, there were masks, but they were Hollywood stunt masks. You couldn’t get close to those masks, because you could see that they were like actors.
I worked with scientists because we needed to improve them . Our masks had to be perfect, you couldn’t take an hour to put them on, you had to put them on in less than a minute.
You had to be able to put it on in a dark parking lot (no mirror), and that you could walk out with it.
We had to find materials, technologies. It took us 20 years, what were my 10 years there as costume director. It was a great job.
We created skins that I could talk to you with just like now (in the interview) and you didn’t realize he was wearing a mask.
000 Once you manage to create such a mask, you can start creating doubles of the agents. That is, you can be here and there at the same time (but actually the one over there is someone disguised as you).
So if you are worried about being followed, [gracias a las máscaras] you have a great chance of deceiving, of making them think that they are following you; but that in reality it is not you [sino que estén siguiendo a otro disfrazado de ti]. You are on the other side, meeting with your agent.
“We didn’t need the part, we just wanted them to believe we needed the part”
Once when I was in the “subcontinent”, there was an operation in a nearby country, to which I ended up going without the tools I needed to fulfill my mission, a costume mission.
We had to enter to a “foreign compound” and steal a piece of equipment that was very precious.
Normally the enclosure was well guarded, but We were going to do it on a weekend, when the people who managed that venue were going to be elsewhere, because we had made sure they were elsewhere. They had been invited to something very important.
A foreigner who worked in that country He was going to help us enter that room.
But if they recognized him, they would arrest him. So we had to disguise it.
But it was going to be difficult because it had part of the disfigured face and I had no instruments with me [para ocultarlo].
It was a country in The one that there wasn’t a mall, so I called the office and said “please ask your wives to send me all your makeup, everything you have.”
I got something for her face, but I had to transform it a lot more.
I had to get old and I made it . I sprinkled foot powder on her hair. I made his hair very gray, I put a mustache, I erased the disfigurement and I put some glasses that looked unique.
It was totally different. He made us enter the compound and we left with the piece that the US intelligence needed.
40 We just stole it.
I returned to the US. I spoke with Tony Mendez (whom I would marry later, but I still didn’t know, otherwise I would have been nicer to him) and he told me to tell him about [cómo había ido] the operation.
But I replied that did not have authorization to do it and he said: “Let me tell you about the operation. We didn’t need the part, we just needed them to believe that we needed the part. ”
Sometimes you think you know what you are doing, but you really have no idea [de lo que planean] to another level [de la CIA].
Moscow, the most difficult
Our most difficult situations occurred in Moscow, so that’s where we applied our most unique solutions.
We needed special measures because the problem [de vigilancia] there was very big.
We had surveillance the 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
If we were walking on the street, [los espías] were j usto behind us. If we were driving, they were behind us. If we were working, they were sitting to the side. Our apartments had listening devices.
There was no place in Moscow you could guarantee that you were alone, except one place specific in the embassy, which was made of transparent plastic blocks, so you couldn’t put a microphone because we would have seen it.
Also, there was a device, which was started by Tony, which we started using in that city, which was called “ Jack in the box ”(Jack in the box), which was a mannequin emerging from a container [cualquiera].
Someone entered a car with a briefcase, sat in the passenger seat and put the briefcase on the ground. When needed, the passenger would get out, the driver would press a button and the mannequin would come out, with the same face as the passenger who had just got out, the same hair, the same clothes.
It was like a choreography when you needed to escape surveillance in the street.
By the time the person watching you reached the car, they would still see two individuals inside.
“The spy of the billion dollars ”
One of our cases in Moscow was that of Adolf Tolkachev, probably the most important spy we had there.
He gave us information, bit by bit, of the Soviet Union’s plans for the next generation of radars, air and ground for the next 10 years.
We had the plans for the teams they were going to build a decade before they were produced, which meant the Pentagon was able to develop countermeasures in advance.
Tolkachev was known in the Pentagon as the “spy of the billion dollars ”
because they calculated that it had saved the Department of Defense more than $ 1, 000 millions of dollars in research and development to discover what the Soviets were going to build.
But meeting this man in Moscow was almost impossible. We were concerned that the KGB would follow us. It was a very difficult situation.
One time, we couldn’t contact him. It did not appear and we did not know what to do. So we decided that someone should knock on the door, but that person should evade surveillance.
So we put two couples at the US embassy to talk on the phone about a birthday party they were both going to. 93
We knew the Soviets were listening and we wanted them to hear that there was a birthday party.
On the night of the supposed party, the two couples left in a car and one of the wives was carrying a birthday cake.
The two men were in front and the wives were behind, one with the cake.
They followed the route they had thought of and after a second turn to the right, the passenger opened the door, the car lights did not come on, the passenger got out, the wife from behind leaned over and put the cake on the passenger seat, the driver pressed a button and a mannequin popped out of the birthday cake.
When KGB surveillance appeared behind them after turning the corner, all they saw was an old man walking (which was actually the agent who had just got out of the car in disguise) —create a disguise of old man was not difficult— and to the embassy car leaving still with four people inside.
470 That was the way our agent was able to knock on Tolkachev’s door.
It was a great operation.
“I didn’t need a costume”
I did not live in the country where I worked. You never lived in the country you worked for. As a resident you were a bit restricted (because you could become [alguien] known to local agents).
So I returned to the “subcontinent” even though I lived in Washington DC and The same was the case with Moscow.
We were coming and going, but always trying not setting a pattern .
I never used my real name to travel. I was always undercover, my entire career.
But more than costumes, what I needed was documentation [falsa] . Each country has its records. They know who has a visa, they know what a visa should look like.
So they were more interested in the documents that I could bring. They weren’t that interested in my face.
I really didn’t need a costume. No one was looking at me.
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