One morning during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, Jonna Mendez, then the CIA’s chief of disguise, entered the White House wearing a mask. She had originally disguised herself as an African-American man but decided that mask wouldn’t work, not least because her voice would give her away. Instead, she borrowed the face of a female colleague. “It was a little nerve-racking,” she recalls. “I hadn’t really worn it anywhere.” She sat outside the Oval Office, chewing her pencil through the mask, until the president was ready for his morning intelligence briefing.
Entering the Oval with Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser, and Robert Gates, the CIA director, Ms. Mendez delivered the briefing without raising the slightest suspicion. “Then I said, I’m going to show you what we’re doing now, the latest technology. I’m going to take it off.” President Bush, himself a former CIA director, told her not to; he wanted to figure it out himself. Mr. Bush stood up from his desk and circled her but couldn’t spot anything amiss.
“So I just took it off,” laughs Ms. Mendez. “I did the Tom Cruise peel before Tom Cruise did. I think they should call it the Jonna Mendez peel.” Several of the masks she created are now at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. (She sits on the museum’s board of directors and was involved with its design and planning.)
Ms. Mendez, 74, likes a good camera concealed as a lipstick (“In the hands of someone who had access, this was lethal,” she winks). Her favorite disguise was as an African-American woman in red stilettos (“Boy, I was amazing”). But in “true face”—CIA-speak for undisguised—she doesn’t look glamorous or flashy. At the Spy Museum in a floral blazer, Starbucks coffee in hand, she might easily be mistaken for a tourist or a grandmotherly neighbor.
In fact, she operated in some of the most contested locales of the Cold War, serving tours in Europe, Asia, the Indian subcontinent and at CIA headquarters. After 27 years of undercover service, she knows how deceptive appearances can be—and how to spot the illusions of others. “Don’t ever walk by me wearing a toupee,” she says.
Ms. Mendez started out in 1966 as a secretary for the agency. She was living in Germany with her first husband, who revealed three days before their wedding that he worked for the CIA. “I think I recruited myself,” she explains. She quickly hit a ceiling with secretarial work. “There was nowhere to go, no ladder up.”
Recognizing her interest in photography, her boss sent her to “the Farm”—the CIA’s 9,000-acre training facility in Virginia—to take a course in espionage photography. She learned how to read license plates from a bouncy plane and to develop reconnaissance film sent in by agents abroad.
Some of the men hazed her. The darkroom was decorated with photos of nude women, she recalled. “That was just part of the deal,” she says. “You ignore it, and you work harder than they do.”
The Office of Technical Services, where Ms. Mendez spent her CIA career, is staffed with engineers, chemists, physicists, makeup artists, counterfeiters and ink specialists. Ms. Mendez likens them to the “Q” branch in the James Bond films, except that unlike the often lab-bound Q, the CIA’s technical officers regularly went into the field. On two occasions, Ms. Mendez thought she might not escape a mission alive. One was on the Indian subcontinent, during a meeting with a terrorist who claimed to have intelligence on a planned attack; the other was in Bogotá, during the height of Colombia’s drug wars.
“A lot of this stuff came out of our office,” she says, gesturing to the Spy Museum’s displays of gadgetry. There is a fake brick that functions as a concealment device for dead-drops (a clandestine method of passing information by dropping and collecting it at an agreed location). There is also a microdot camera that reduces a photo to the size of a period so that it can be concealed in the text of a magazine. And there are pen cameras and cigarette-lighter cameras, bugging devices and batteries. “We had a huge need for smaller, more powerful batteries,” she says. (Once you bugged a KGB conference table, you were unlikely to get a chance to change the batteries.) “Everything you have in that cellphone,” she says, pointing to an iPhone, “is what we were working on for our whole careers.”
One key CIA challenge was figuring out how to operate in Moscow, where the KGB worked ruthlessly to keep foreign agents from collecting intelligence. At one point, the CIA estimates that the KGB had 50,000 officers in Moscow alone. “We called it the belly of the beast,” says Ms. Mendez. “You couldn’t turn around.”
That is where disguises came in. Ms. Mendez and Tony Mendez, who would later become her second husband, went to Los Angeles to study the techniques of Hollywood’s best makeup artists and magicians. “How you build deception and illusion became really interesting to us,” she says. They created disguises that allowed CIA agents to disappear on the streets of Moscow—wigs, prosthetic noses, false teeth and masks. They could make twins, tricking the KGB into following the wrong person. They could turn women into men and men into women—although mostly, she adds, the male agents wouldn’t let themselves be disguised as females.
Ms. Mendez passes quickly by the museum’s exhibit on her career, which notes that she received the CIA’s Intelligence Commendation Medal on her retirement in 1993, but she stops when she reaches the exhibit dedicated to Mr. Mendez, who died in January. “He is something of a legend at the CIA,” she says. Mr. Mendez came to world-wide recognition with the 2012 film “Argo,” which depicts the operation he ran in 1980 to exfiltrate six American diplomats from Iran during the hostage crisis. (Ben Affleck starred as Mr. Mendez; the movie won the Oscar for best picture.) But the “Argo” caper was just one moment in Mr. Mendez’s long career, she notes. After he retired to paint—he put on art shows with Ms. Mendez, who continues to display her photography—the CIA recognized him as one of the 50 “trailblazers” in the agency’s history.
She leads the way into a room that the Spy Museum has decked out like a drab East Berlin hotel, which stirs memories of all of the bugged hotels where she stayed across the Soviet bloc. “The Stasi were formidable,” she says of the East German secret police. “Everything in here would have a bug in it—the lamp, the book bindings, the lids of the liquor bottle, the plant pots.” After a pause, she adds, “I don’t know where Donald Trump stayed in Moscow, but I know without a doubt that his room was bugged. If he did anything he shouldn’t have, there will be tapes.”
Ms. Mendez worries about partisan politics interfering with the CIA’s work, which “should never be political.” Yet she is confident that the CIA’s division chiefs won’t stand for inappropriately politicized guidance, even if it comes from the very top. “Say that somebody said, ‘Let’s ease off the Russians.’ I don’t think they would,” she says. “They don’t know how to ease off the Russians. They only know one speed and one direction, and that’s ahead.”
Write to Elizabeth Winkler at elizabeth.winkler@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications
Several masks created by former CIA disguise chief Jonna Mendez are now at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the mask she wore in an Oval Office briefing of President George H.W. Bush was on display at the museum (Dec. 12, 2019).