Jonna Mendez spent nearly 30 years helping design life-saving missions at the CIA, where she became chief of cover — but she hasn’t shared her full story until now.
“In the CIA, if you have a great idea, you can take it to the president,” says Mendez, who hopes her new CIA-reviewed memoir, In True Face: The Life of a Woman in the CIA Without Masks, out March 5, will inspire a new generation to serve. “It was a special power, because we knew there was always an opportunity to save the world.”
In the new book, Mendez reveals many juicy details — from how she briefed President George HW Bush on the agency’s new mask technology while wearing one of the advanced masks without his knowledge, to her long-running romance with Antonio “Tony” Mendez, a charismatic a CIA agent. officer and former chief of camouflage best known for rescuing six American diplomats from Tehran in 1980. That experience inspired the Oscar-winning 2012 film. Argotin which Tony is portrayed by Ben Affleck.
“We had a relationship like I never knew,” she says of Tony, with whom she’s collaborated on several bestsellers — including Spy dust, Argot and Moscow rules — after they retired in the 1990s and before he died of complications from Parkinson’s disease in 2019. “Losing him was extremely painful. He was my other half. I’m still not over it.”
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Their history dates back to the Cold War, when the duo became allies in the CIA and helped develop several evasion protocols and gadgets that would impress even James Bond.
“We were Q,” Mendez says, comparing their office of scientists and artists to the techno-gurus in the 007 movies.
Jonna Mendez says husband Tony (at the 2013 Oscars for “Argo,” starring Ben Affleck) was her “life raft.”
courtesy of JONNA MENDEZ
The resulting devices gave the CIA an advantage as they worked to outsmart Russia’s enemies in the KGB.
“We could make anything—quick-change license plates, jacket buttons that were compasses, silk jacket linings that could be maps,” she says. “We put mistakes in the books. We put cameras in cigarette packs, on pregnant bellies – we put them everywhere.”
In the following excerpt from In True Face: The Life of a Woman in the CIA Without Masksexclusively to PEOPLE, Mendez gives readers a fascinating insight into how she tested new spy tools to fool the KGB.
We would often run tests at Georgetown to gauge how good a new mask technique or technology was. One day I ventured out to test an early prototype of a new mask. This one turned me into a black woman. To tone down the color transition just around the eyes, I wore medium tinted glasses, but otherwise the mask went on easily. I also wore a pair of elbow-length gloves to match the pigment of the mask. The hair was longer than mine, casually styled. I thought I looked pretty good, which we didn’t promise.
The OTS Special Surveillance Team (SST) drove me to a residential area a few blocks east of Wisconsin Avenue. We coordinated our watches and confirmed my pickup time and location before they drove off. I was alone, free to move around this active, modern waterfront neighborhood on foot. I decided to wear a new pair of red heels. Complete with a black dress and gold earrings, I fit right in with the trendy crowd in the neighborhood. No sooner had I settled into my mask than it started to rain. At first it was just a drizzle. I thought about opening the compact umbrella in my bag, but went into the store instead.
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Jonna Mendez (left, teaching at the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, 2002) says the center “isn’t just a project — it’s become a family.”
Courtesy of the International Spy Museum
Before I even glanced at the salesman, I felt his eyes on me. Was he looking out for me because I looked black? Or could he tell I was wearing a mask? Worried that my disguise would be noticed, I slipped out the front door. The rain began to come down in sheets all around me, immediately fogging up my glasses, making me unable to see a foot in front of me. Pausing under the awning, I took off my glasses to wipe them, knowing I couldn’t enter another store. As I stood in the rain, slowly ruining my new shoes, the parking attendant across the street started waving. “Come here baby!” he shouted, motioning for me to enter his little car park ranger’s shack. I shook my head no. He stepped toward the curb, insisting. “My friends are on their way. It will come soon!” I replied with relief as I noticed my SST guys in a van with a “Tony’s Pizza” sign pull up in front of me. Destroyed, those high heels never saw the light of day again.
Almost two decades into my intelligence career, we were finally ready to launch the disguise concept that had been brewing in my brain for years. Finally, we would disguise the officer and send her to one of the cities with the highest stakes in the world — Moscow. I was convinced that this would be an effective strategy; The Russians didn’t use women in the field, and I was sure they didn’t expect us to either. However, this was the first time and I wanted to be on the ground in Moscow when we launched it.
This was my inaugural trip as Deputy Chief and I was looking forward to getting back into the field. I could have easily sent one of our undercover line officers to deal with the situation, but when I accepted the position, I insisted on staying intimately involved with our officers’ clients and their specific problems. It was part of my monitoring of operational management and providing solutions that will improve the business. I was now a manager, yes, but still a hands-on clerk in many ways. It meant extra work, but it was a job I still loved.
Before I left, our SST team, which was composed of chemists, engineers, physicists, woodworkers, linguists, artists, and forensic experts, continued to plan and rehearse fraud schemes on the streets of Washington, DC. To ensure that our test scenarios remained current, each officer who returned from the Moscow assignment briefed us on the current techniques employed by the KGB.
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We’ve always built our surveillance detections around the idea of being tracked. However, most of our operational scenarios were based on the idea that the KBG would respond to us, not predict us. Now it seemed that they already had knowledge of the destinations of our officers. We wondered if this was due to their use of spy dust, a chemical compound called nitrophenyl pentadienal, NPPD, or bullet in Russian, which translates to “mark”. Combined in powder form with luminol, it was a marking material that was applied to car handles, door handles, and almost any other surface our officers might touch. The KGB could then track anything else, or anyone else, that CIA officers later came into contact with. I was hoping that by using a woman as a case officer we would be able to solve this problem. If the KGB had overlooked the possibility that a woman could be a spy, they wouldn’t have bothered to dust the surfaces she touched.
Throwing the female officer out on the street also provided plenty of opportunities for camouflage in a city like Moscow, which was full of suspicion. We might need to fool the militia guy whose watchful eye was on the embassy door, blend in with an ethnically diverse population, or create a doppelgänger of a famous person. In other cases, we may have to complete a dead fall or perform a car escape. Disguise can also be used to escape and return to the city’s mundane day-to-day surveillance. It was an active city where our officers were always on alert. Disguise was integral to our success there.
To ensure that no part of the officer’s mask was soiled with spy dust, we used clothes and shoes made in Russia, but never worn on Russian soil. We would disguise our employee as a babushka, one of the women who performed daily maid duties at the embassy. This mask would give her an extra layer of invisibility, positioning her as someone without powers, special skills, or access.
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Cover of Jonna Mendez’s new book, “In True Face,” out March 5th.
The plan was for our disguised officer to join the crowd of babushkas gathering to exit the building in the afternoon. They always left in a large group and went out together at the gate, past the policeman and into the street. While their IDs were checked when they entered the embassy in the morning, there was no check when they left. These women changed and changed regularly, so a new face in the crowd would hardly attract the attention of the other babushkas or the militia. This would hopefully get our cop out on the street unsupervised. If it worked, we intended to repeat this scenario over time.
When our clerk returned to the embassy a few hours later, she looked like the American she was, carrying a large bag from the hard currency store as if she were just another employee returning from a shopping expedition. We were all a little giddy from the success of our test drive. We just added another weapon to our arsenal without raising a single drop of suspicion.
Derived from In True Face: The life of a woman in the CIA, without masks by Jonna Mendez. Copyright © 2024. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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