The CIA is the world’s most famous secret intelligence agency. Its directors, in retirement, write best-selling memoirs. Reporters detail its covert operations when they go wrong, and sometimes when they go right. Scribes like me write history books about the CIA, interviewing spies who have spent their lives undercover. And its veterans write autobiographies like Jonna Mendez’s engaging and enlightening “In True Face,” an important addition to the canon of nonfiction books about an institution encrusted in myths created by movies, television, novels, hostile intelligence services and, occasionally, the agency itself. This book, written with Wyndham Wood, is filled with adventures and operations whose details, somewhat to my astonishment, have escaped the gimlet eyes of the censors at the CIA’s Prepublication Classification Review Board, remaining unobscured by their inexhaustible supply of black Magic Markers.
Mendez, born Jonna Hiestand, rose from the typing pool in the early 1960s, besting misogynistic bosses, sharpening her skills during many years working overseas and becoming the CIA’s chief of disguise, master of the masks and other magic tricks that enable American spies abroad to evade detection by their enemies. She started out as a 21-year-old “contract wife” — her first husband, after he proposed, revealed he was a CIA officer. A contract wife was one step up from a chattel slave. As his spouse, she was hired as a secretary at the CIA logistics base in Frankfurt, Germany. The second step up was as staff secretary to the head of the CIA’s Office of Technical Service, where the officers of the clandestine service went for spy gear. (The office also ran the Cold War mind-control experiments known as MK-Ultra. Among other sins, its scientists drugged unsuspecting human subjects with LSD, in pursuit of a truth serum suitable for interrogations.) Mendez, bored senseless as a typist, prevailed upon her boss to let her learn clandestine photography. She did so well that she was soon training a recruited foreign agent in that dark art.
She eventually secured a job in the Clandestine Imaging Division, dealing with invisible ink and microdots. And then, having learned to flex instead of curtsy, she became the most talented aide to Tony Mendez, the master of disguise who ran the CIA’s Graphics and Identity Transformation Group in the 1970s. She became proficient in the use of sophisticated bugs, tiny cameras, covert communications systems, fake passports and undetectable disguises. She learned the mask-making techniques taught by a CIA contractor — the Hollywood makeup artist who had won an honorary Oscar for “Planet of the Apes.” She underwent training in enduring enemy detention, locked in a small cell, deprived of sleep and food — a template for the CIA’s interrogation of prisoners in “black sites” after 9/11.
She took assignments all over the world, especially the Indian subcontinent. Working in Pakistan — the hub of the CIA’s gunrunning mission sending hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of weapons a year to the Afghan guerrillas fighting the Soviet army in the 1980s — she plotted to smuggle a Soviet defector into safe passage. In one scene, she recalls being crushed in a teeming security line at the Kolkata airport and yelling at a tiny woman in a white sari to quit shoving, only to realize she had accosted Mother Teresa. After describing a trip to Hong Kong to buy a suitcase’s worth of wigs and tinted eyeglasses, she depicts herself relaxing with an ice-cold martini and a Marlboro in the Intercontinental Hotel lobby bar, overlooking Victoria Harbor at sunset. For a moment, she is Bond — Jane Bond.
Things got really interesting for her, personally and professionally, after she became the Disguise Branch liaison to the spies trying to operate in Russia, China, East Germany and Cuba — “denied areas,” where CIA officers were under round-the-clock surveillance as they tried to conduct espionage. Her work put her on a fast track for promotion. Along with her, women at CIA headquarters were starting to rise up in rank, to rise in revolt against the men who had held them down. Three decades of subsequent lawsuits and public shaming have cracked the glass ceiling and controlled, but not conquered, a CIA culture once more sexist than the Marines.
In Tony Mendez, she had found a boss who treated her as an equal. After he retired, she became chief of disguise. She made masks that could change the wearer’s race and gender, a nice trick, and a necessity in a clandestine service made up almost exclusively of White men working abroad in lands where they were a minority. To prove how effective these tools were, she went to the Oval Office with the CIA director, having disguised herself as a younger woman who worked with her. President George H.W. Bush, a former CIA director himself, was suitably impressed at the reveal. As her fame within the CIA increased, her marriage, gone stale years before, officially died. She and Tony, a widower, declared their love for each other. Kismet! Nineteen years to the day after they met at a CIA Christmas party somewhere in the Far East at the height of the Vietnam War, they spent Christmas Eve 1990 at the Brandenburg Gate, where the Berlin Wall had just fallen. They married at the close of the Cold War. Shortly thereafter, at 47, she was pregnant with her first child. A new life beckoned. She retired.
Six years later, she and Tony dropped their masks when a reporter from the New York Times came to interview him about his life and career. (Full disclosure: That was me. I am also very briefly quoted in the book on the subject of sexism at the CIA.) The newspaper story revealed that he had helped create a long-secret operation code-named ARGO — the elaborate escape plan, the false identities and the brilliant disguises that got six Americans out of revolutionary Tehran while others were held hostage in 1980. Jonna and Tony started writing their own story. George Clooney’s production company on Line 1, Brad Pitt’s on Line 2. Ben Affleck stepped in. He played Tony; Jonna and Tony went to the Oscars; “Argo” won best picture. Nowhere in fiction does a CIA story have a Hollywood ending like that.
When Jonna Mendez first joined the CIA six decades ago, and for years thereafter, “obfuscation and deception” ruled her life. “Even my best friends and family didn’t know what I did or who I worked for. … No one really knew who I was anymore.” One of the virtues of “In True Face” is that this no longer is true.
Tim Weiner has won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for reporting and writing about intelligence. His new book, “The Mission: The CIA at War in the 21st Century,” will be published next year.
In True Face
A Woman’s Life in the CIA, Unmasked
By Jonna Mendez, with Wyndham Wood
PublicAffairs. 306 pp. $30
An earlier version of this review incorrectly described the disguise that Jonna Mendez wore while meeting with George H.W. Bush in the Oval Office. She was disguised as a younger woman, not as a Black man.