Former CIA Chief of Disguise Answers Spy Questions From Twitter

I'm Jonna Mendez,

former CIA officer and a founding board member

of the International Spy Museum.

I'm here to answer some questions from Twitter.

This is Spy Support.

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@SpicyLime415 asks, Do spies have anxiety?

I think all spies have anxiety.

You wanna make sure you're not setting someone up

for a situation because you forgot a detail.

When the anxiety really kicks in though is

when one of your people is incarcerated, is arrested.

In Moscow, I felt anxiety all the time.

Moscow, I thought, was kind of scary.

When 1985, 10 of our Russian assets were arrested

and executed.

10 of them in a summer.

That kind of anxiety is built into the job.

There's nothing you can do about it except

when you're working,

make sure that you absolutely respect the protocols

that we have to go through,

the level of detail that's required

to carry off an operation.

@RosemaryChalle1 asks, What are CIA handlers?

What you're calling CIA handlers,

I'm calling CIA case officers.

They get the requirement from the government.

We wanna know about nuclear program in this country A,

they go to country A,

they go looking for people

who know the information about country A.

Once they meet them,

they try and recruit them to work for us

and then we get the information back

to our policy makers.

Cut and dry.

@iamkjohnston Has anyone seen the movie Argo?

Just about to watch it.

The story in the movie Argo is that,

really a great demonstration of the kinds of things

that CIA may find itself involved in.

A rescue of six perfectly innocent American diplomats

didn't have anything to do with espionage

except that the rescuer happened to be a spy,

my husband, Tony Mendez.

They used Hollywood as a cover in that instance,

the cover organization in LA to cover the operation.

If anybody called that office

and said, Do these people work there?

The answer would be yes.

The six people being rescued were schooled

in their cover stories over a period of three days,

issued every piece of paper with their new name on it,

and they were whisked out of a very,

very dangerous situation.

Ben Affleck pretending to be my husband,

that was interesting.

@SHoltonRVT asks, Did you know there

is a CIA position titled Chief of Disguise?

How freaking cool is that person?

I was Chief of disguise for two years.

I was Deputy Chief of Disguise before that.

Chief of Disguise has a worldwide staff.

We always have in the back of our minds this memo

that the person, the foreigner,

is gonna take back to his office and say,

Oh, I met with this American.

And everything in his description

of the American that he met is gonna be wrong

from the hair color, length,

is it curly or not, color of eyes, it's gonna be wrong.

Does he wear glasses?

It's gonna be wrong.

Does he smoke?

Is he married?

Does he have a gold chain around his neck?

All of that is wrong.

It's a disguise and it keeps our officer safe.

@pybripro asks, CIA, MI6,

and KGB, FSB,

how do they develop soft skills

like situational awareness, social engineering,

blending in, and creating believable cover stories?

What combat training do they receive?

CIA had a paramilitary capability

and decided to more or less step away from it.

After 911, CIA stepped back up to paramilitary

and has embraced it.

I know they do train in some of the harder skills,

in shooting, in driving, in being in a hostile situations.

We have a facility where we train people.

It's called The Farm.

A lot of people have heard of it.

The Farm is located south of Washington, DC.

They actually put on diplomatic events at The Farm

and you are an attendee all dressed up

and there's someone in that room

who has information that you're looking for.

And part of the training is to see if you can narrow it down

to that person by just having conversations.

@sigmatheory asks, What makes a good spy?

What we're recruiting for when we're looking for spies

and we're talking about case officers here is a charismatic,

intelligent, well-educated,

well-traveled guy, mostly,

but it's more and more women.

Someone you'd meet somewhere

and you'd instantly wanna be their friend.

There are people like this around the world.

Our job is to find them because we cannot teach them that.

We can teach them everything else they need

to know once we get them on board,

but that charisma, they have to bring it

in the door with them.

@MaryMarciniak asks, No signs of me being followed.

Me: Am I being followed?

Seeing someone who looks suspicious

once is not such a big deal.

If you see that person again, that's interesting.

That's a coincidence.

But the third time, starting to approach confirmation

that that person is sticking with you for whatever reason.

There were lots of ways around it.

We would go into a place and go out another door.

We would go into a place and come out looking different.

We would go into a place

and someone looking just like us would come out.

Next question.

You know the whole spy thing of cyanide

and a fake tooth where they bite down and poison themselves.

How often do you think those go off accidentally?

Like, someone is just enjoying a nice hard candy

and then, oops, dead.

In my 27 years, I only knew of two instances

where we gave out cyanide and I knew where they were

because the steel box containing it was in my safe.

The Russians floated stories around that

if they caught their people spying for America,

they would feed them feet first into a crematorium alive.

Most people in Russia that spied for us had that

in the back of their minds

and they thought they'd rather take the cyanide themselves

than take the chance that the Russians meant that

and would do it.

It was very effective.

We didn't hand it out like it was candy.

It wasn't candy.

It was lethal.

And I do know that cyanide really, really works.

@JennyX asks, Does anyone know of a good small spy camera?

I was a photographer when I first joined the CIA.

That was my gig and this camera

was part of my account.

This pen camera, a camera in the end.

Inside of the camera is a film cassette

and inside of the cassette is a little piece of film.

It's about 13 inches long.

It'd have 100 black dots on it after you develop it.

And each black dot would be an eight and a half

by 11 page of information where the paperwork is lying

from his last meeting.

We only gave these pens to people that could get right up

to the person who was making the policy we were after.

You had to hold it at a certain distance.

You can take the picture.

This is a KGB lighter.

They were actually technically very, very good

so I can't disparage it, but if it was a CIA lighter,

it would actually light.

@_Reece asks, Do spies get paid a lot

of money like people who spy on other countries?

And the answer, @_Reece, is no.

They don't pay us enough.

They pay us flat government salaries just like anybody else.

You work at GSA, you work at IRS,

wherever you work in the government,

we're on the same pay scale as them.

Now the assets that are working for us,

the foreigners who are providing us

with the intelligence that we need,

depending on the value of the intelligence,

they can make big amounts of money.

There's a man in this museum, Adolf Tolkachev,

he's called a billion dollar spy

because of the intelligence that he gave to the Pentagon.

While we didn't pay him a billion dollars,

the Pentagon said his intelligence

was worth a billion dollars.

Adolf Tolkachev made a lot of money

except that he got caught and then they executed him.

So I don't think he had time to spend it.

@Tako_0_0, he says

It's crazy how the CIA has three levels of disguise.

Like, it sounds fun to go to level three

to, like, your high school reunion.

I basically break disguise down into two levels.

You have regular disguise and you have advanced disguise.

Regular disguise is what you think it is.

It's mustaches and wigs

and all the accoutrement

that you can put on to change the way you look.

Advanced disguise takes it way up

to another level where you're talking about wearing masks.

We would actually make prosthesis.

This is a sample of a mold of a nose.

We're gonna change a nose on a face using one of these.

We could change your teeth

if we thought it would make a big difference.

We can change almost anything.

@WillFiteForYou, How many CIA assets

and spec ops units do you think the US has

on the ground in Ukraine right now?

My answer would be uninformed

but a pretty confident many.

@erinjack24 says,

I wanna see one of these five second masks in real life.

It was a breakthrough.

Once we could make those masks,

we could do a lot of new things

that we'd never been able to before.

We could make your face and put it on someone else.

We have one here in the museum.

It's a mask that I wore in the White House

to brief the president of the United States.

It is very effective.

The design goal was put it on in a car without a mirror

in the dark, you'd know, okay, that's it.

It's on.

Pat the hair down, get out of the car.

And if you ran into trouble,

you could literally pull it off in three seconds,

crumple it down, put it under your arm,

and walk down the street.

@HeadFunny asks, Real life spies are never attractive,

are they?

It would be detrimental to the job.

Well, our model of the little gray man

which is a model we actually used all the time.

The idea was we wanted you to be so unnoticeable

that people wouldn't even remember

if you had gotten on and off of their elevator.

We don't want you to attract attention.

The CIA doesn't use seduction as a tool.

I have to say, on the other hand,

that the Russians do, and they have in the past.

The East Germans used male swallows.

They used good-looking men to go in to West Germany

and recruit the secretaries of the heads of state.

They did that successfully.

At CIA, it's actually a firing offense

if you sleep with your foreign asset.

@janeagallagher asks, What did microdots use to do?

Microdots were away of communicating with a foreign agent,

a very, very secure way of doing it.

They may well be doing it today.

It looks old school

but the security trumps everything else.

A microdot is a page, normal page of text,

eight and a half by 11 reduced down 400 times.

And what you get at the end

of that reduction is a dot,

a tiny, black spot.

There are two of them in the back of this stamp.

He'd pull his little tiny lens out

of wherever he had it stored, looked like a grain of rice.

He'd put it in the hole in the card,

get some spit, pick up the dot,

put it on the end of the thing, and hold it up to a light

and he could read an eight and a half by 11 page text.

It was a very, very secure way

of communicating with an agent.

@JiriRasanen asks, Aren't all diplomats spies

by definition?

All diplomats, Jiri, in answer to your question,

are not necessarily spies,

but some spies can be considered to be diplomats

for cover purposes.

Diplomatic privileges keep you safe.

They keep you out of trouble.

They get you out of the country when things fall apart.

You are somewhat untouchable when you have diplomatic cover.

That's a very useful thing to have.

State Department doesn't like our using diplomatic cover

because for every one of us using their cover,

they have one less actual diplomat.

There's a tension there.

@lansizhui, Learn when to abort a mission.

In a book that Tony Mendez

and I wrote called The Moscow Rules,

one of the Moscow rules is to listen to your gut always.

If you're on your way to to do anything

and it doesn't feel right, abort the mission.

And at CIA overseas in the station,

the chief of station always knows there's no shame

in coming back and saying, I can't even explain it.

It didn't feel right.

I aborted the mission.

We'll reschedule.

We'll do it again.

It was one of our rules.

@steventothemaxx asks, I'm very interested

in whether or not American spies do have real families

and real friends or is everything in their lives a lie?

You have a choice to make when you are undercover at CIA

whether to tell your family or not.

I think most people do tell their family

because it's hard to do a lot

of what we do without a supportive family.

It's your friends that become the issue.

Most of us, almost all of us,

have to live our cover with our friends.

And this creates a tension over time

that different people treat different ways.

But a lot of people that I know at CIA slowly let go

of those outside friendships

and replace them with inside friendships.

People who know where you work

and then they know you can't really talk

about it either, but they understand.

@mitdasein asks, Watching Killing Eve makes me wonder

how do spies pay for stuff?

Are they issued credit cards for their fake identities?

Do they just carry suspicious amounts of cash?

We do not carry suspicious amounts

of cash if we can help it.

If one of our CIA officers undercover was picked up overseas

and his billfold was confiscated,

everything in that billfold would probably be fake

from a driver's license to a credit card

and it would be in his cover name, not in his true name.

If it's on paper or plastic,

we can make it officially for government use in the CIA.

We can and we do.

@DrewTMitch asks, Do spies get acting lessons?

Do Yale School of Drama Professors adjunct at the CIA?

We don't get acting lessons.

So at CIA, when we give somebody a disguise

for the first time, do you like it?

They always say, Oh, it's great.

I love it, yeah, it feels good.

And then we say, Good.

Go to lunch in the cafeteria

where everybody you know is having lunch in the cafeteria.

You wear it to the cafeteria,

then come back and see us.

And they walk out the door kind of sheepish

and they come back usually just amazed.

They walked right by their boss.

He didn't know him.

He sat next to the guys he works with,

they didn't know who he was.

Then we think, Okay, we did good.

Now he'll wear it if he needs it.

With the disguise, you come up with a character

that you are when you are in that disguise,

complete with the clothing that you wear,

the shoes that you wear, do you smoke, all of this.

You invent a character that doesn't exist

and you become that character

when you're wearing the disguise.

@IamSergioGrant asks, How do spies get recruited?

We run ads in a lot of media.

We come to college campuses for job fairs

and we set up tables and talk to anybody

who walks up to us knowing that a lot

of the people walk up to us really

just to see what we look like.

My husband, Tony Mendez, initially replied

to an advertisement in a newspaper,

said wanted to work overseas for the US Navy

because they didn't wanna say it

in the newspaper back then that it was CIA.

Go to cia.gov and you can apply online.

@maximum_Q, What is a double agent?

A double agent is an agent pretending to spy for one country

while he's actually acting on behalf of another.

When we bring new agents on board at CIA,

there's a whole process of validating that person.

That processing in that bringing an agent on board is all

about making sure that they're not double agents.

And then CIA's most famous double agent at this point,

I guess, was Aldrich Ames, who was a CIA officer,

but he was actually reporting to the Russians over years

and that's where the 10 Russians

that were executed in Moscow in '85,

those were names that he gave to the Russians.

These are the names of your colleagues

who are reporting to the CIA and they killed them.

@notcharegular, I want to learn how to do dead drops

so bad but I'm scared.

Your goal with the dead drop is to transmit information

to an agent that you cannot meet face-to-face.

So if we had to transmit something,

whether it was money or medicine for his kid,

we would give it to him in a dead drop.

Dead drop is something you're gonna leave

by the side of the road or by a telephone pole

or by a construction site or wherever you two decide

and he's going to pick it up at a later date.

There are a number of dead drops here

on display at the museum.

Everything from Aldrich Ames' mailbox.

There is a dead rat.

I made a dead drop once that was so wonderful.

It was a Potomac river rock that would hold a lot of stuff.

The only dead drop I ever knew

that we gave a name to, we called it Rock Hudson.

@MaddieEmmaK asks, Do spies have to go

up a pant size to inconspicuously store guns

on their backs?

We don't normally carry guns on our backs.

In fact, we don't normally carry guns at all.

But if we did, they would be small

and they would be inconspicuous.

@magnifyk asks, In a world of drones and satellites,

why use a spy balloon?

They are easier to control.

They fly lower.

They're carried by the wind.

They also have a lot of built-in deniability

and the images that they take are surprisingly good.

They're often better

than the images taken by our satellites.

The problem is that they're so easy to shoot down.

The most recent episode with the Chinese shows

that this is not the way to go

if you're traveling across US airspace.

@Kt0213 asks Do spies get to choose their own code names?

No, they do not.

They assign you a code name.

It's a first name, a middle name, a last name.

It's always all in caps.

When we communicate around the world

about a particular employee, particular person,

that's the pseudonym for the person we're talking about.

It follows you for your career.

So those are all the questions we have for today.

Thanks for watching Spy Support.

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