What does it mean to move through the 
world undetected?
Disappear from those who might be watching?
To be seen one way and then to change into
something completely different.
To elude surveillance.
And communicate clandestinely.
Spycraft depends on it.
And nations depend on the intelligence they
receive from spies who often hide in plain sight.
But in an age of eroding privacy, how can
you conceal your identity?
How have the professionals done it?
And how are new technologies changing all of that?
That is the focus of today's show: to unveil
a master of disguise.
That was the most terrible disguise I have ever seen.
In Russia, we have much better disguise, really.
Really.
A master of masquerade.
A don of deception. A capo of camouflage.
I have many of these.
Welcome to GZERO World.
I'm Ian Bremmer and today we have a very 
special guest.
Joining us is the CIA's former Chief of Disguise.
I'm talking about Jonna Mendez.
Both she and her husband Tony headed up the
agency's disguise unit.
Their job: protect CIA case officers with
masks and costumes.
And she did it right under the nose of the Kremlin.
We'll get into how and what's different today.
Then I've got your Puppet Regime.
I was in my office one day not long ago when
I got an unexpected call.
Bremmer, come to the White House.
We gotta talk.
But first, a word from the folks who help
us keep the lights on.
The year was 1965.
A man named Tony Mendez was living in Denver when he saw a newspaper ad that would change his life.
And the face of American espionage.
The ad asked for artists to work overseas
for the Navy.
That meant CIA.
Mendez would soon find himself designing disguises
and developing clandestine covers for
covert operations worldwide.
He even wrote a book about one such action in Iran.
That was later turned into the Oscar-winning film Argo.
It's an exfil.
From where?
Worst place you can think of.
During an operation in Bangkok, Mendez would
meet his future wife Jonna, also CIA officer.
And it was Jonna who would eventually take
over his job.
Now, after 27 years in the clandestine service,
she says she wants to set the record straight.
There's a few perceptions she'd like to fix.
Hollywood often gets it wrong.
And The Bourne Identity.
Come on, Showtime.
But according to Mendez, there's also a few
that get it right, namely the FX series The Americans.
But times have changed.
The world of espionage is undergoing a revolution.
Not only are private contractors now a part
of the game but there's a ton more information to scour.
Your cell phone is an explosion of personal
data that can be used to crack any cover.
New technologies involving computer hacking
and facial recognition software are being
employed to mine databases that never existed
even a few years ago.
And China, with its millions of cameras and
billions of lines of code, is increasingly
at the vanguard.
China has over 200 million surveillance cameras
monitoring one point four billion Chinese
citizens, their internet use, where they travel,
where they stay, who they're connected with,
their behavior.
That allows China to put over one million
Uighurs in detention camps and they're exporting
the technology to countries like Ecuador,
the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Pakistan.
Can the CIA keep up?
Will a simple disguise be enough to evade
what the Chinese can monitor?
We'll see.
I’m with Jonna Mendez, author of The 
Moscow Rules and a former head of disguise,
Chief of Disguise for the Central Intelligence Agency.
I did not know that we had a Chief of Disguise.
Do we still have a Chief of Disguise?
I believe we do.
You believe we do.
Playing the same kind of role that you did
when you were there?
I would imagine that it's changed somewhat.
Everything has changed.
A lot of really fascinating stories about
your history but the one that I have to ask
you about – have to, have to – is that
you were once in a meeting with former
President George Bush Sr. in the White House.
Right.
In disguise.
Yes.
He was not aware you were in disguise.
No.
Until at some point in the meeting.
That's correct.
So how did that possibly come about?
Well it evolved, that meeting, over some time.
It came out of disguise division’s sincere
interest in mask technology.
If we could do realistic masks, we could create
scenarios and situations that would be wonderful
from our point of view.
But it went back to our use of stunt double masks out of Hollywood that Tony Mendez had initiated.
They were –
Tony, your…
Tony Mendez, my husband.
Who was Chief of Disguise before you.
He was there ten years ahead of me.
Did you guys like occasionally not recognize
each other as a consequence?
That seems like something you should be doing.
We couldn't do that but we had fun playing with that.
I don't look very good in his mustache and wig.
He looks less good in my wig and earrings
but, you know, we fiddled around with it.
Tony was an artist.
He was very creative.
Some of that came out in that Argo movie.
But anyway, he went out to Hollywood.
He worked with John Chambers, who did the
masks for Planet of the Apes.
He got very taken with –
They were human-like masks.
Human-like, that could convey a lot of emotion.
They were not what we would call animated
but around the eyes and the eyebrows, they could –
there was some movement.
So we started there.
We wanted to make animated masks that were
realistic, where I could sit and talk to you
just like this, wearing a mask, and you would
not know it was on me.
That was the beginning.
It took a good ten years of finding the right
materials, working in some chemistry labs,
putting together the bits and pieces to come
up with something that would serve our requirements,
which was unlike the Tom Cruise masks or the
masks that you see in Hollywood.
The requirement for ours was that it would
go on in ten seconds.
It would go on in a car in the dark without
a mirror, that you could put it on and you
knew when you stepped out of the car, it was perfect.
And the other requirement was that it came
off the same way.
It came off quickly, collapsed down into nothing,
so it could be stashed or hidden.
And there was no residue.
You look just like you did when you put it on.
That took some work because Hollywood could
spend hours putting it on and hours taking it off.
When Hollywood, in the form of John Chambers,
saw what we had done with his technology,
how we had moved it over here, they were stunned.
So we started producing these masks and the
first one – one of the first ones that came
out was for me and it was an African-American male.
So I showed it to my office director, then
we took it to Judge Webster, who was head of CIA.
He said, let's take this to the White House.
That is spectacular.
And I said it's not going to work in the White
House because it's a male.
I can't get away with this.
And the mask that was made was a face that
was donated to me by a woman who worked for
me and she was leaving to come out to California.
And so she gave me basically her face.
Took about 20 years off of my age.
I looked very good in this mask.
I had a great hairdo.
I mean, I liked this mask a lot.
And we went to the White House.
They were going long in the Oval Office in
the first meeting so we were all gathered outside.
A big group of men and me, the unknown person.
They were cracking jokes and I was a little
paranoid because when you are wearing some
of these outfits for the first time, it's a little nervousness, and it’s the President of the United States.
But when we went in and we sat in a half circle
around his desk and I was the first one to brief him.
So I took some pictures to show him when he was chief of CIA, wearing our more traditional disguises.
President Bush, he had served in that role before.
He had served in that role.
So I said I'm here to show you where we are now.
We've moved forward.
I'm going to show you the latest new technology.
He said, well where is it?
Show me.
I said, I'm wearing it but I'm going to take
it off and show it to you.
And before I could he said, no, no, hold on.
And he got up and he walked around me, walked
behind me, he’s looking, went, sat back down
at the desk.
He said ok, take it off.
So I did that Tom Cruise peeling it off as
dramatically as I could.
John Sununu, who's sitting next to me in the
chair, got very bothered by that because he
had not been paying any attention.
He was making notes for what he was going
to say to the president, you know, he was up next.
Brent Scowcroft was there.
Bob Gates was there.
It was a great crowd.
It’s a decent piece of Cabinet, actually.
Yes, yes.
What did you see the purpose of having a Chief of Disguise as being in the CIA for
American national security purposes?
You know, this was the Cold War days, of course.
When I was Chief of Disguise – and the whole
time that I was coming up through the disguise
ranks and doing the work, all overseas, almost
entirely overseas – in my heart, what kept
me there all that time was the idea that we
were protecting people that were working for us.
And I always would take it to worst case scenario
and that was always Moscow, because the people
working with us, for us in Moscow were in
absolute danger if they were discovered.
And their tradecraft was very high.
Their tradecraft had to be very high.
I mean, in Moscow we – it was so suffocating,
that environment, to do the work.
The KGB, their surveillance, this embrace
that they had us in.
It was almost impossible to move.
But we had to move, we had to collect intelligence.
The use of disguise there was to let our officers
step out of that surveillance perimeter, get
on the other side of it, out of the bubble,
and go and not meet face-to-face because that
was too dangerous.
Even if you were out of that surveillance
bubble, it was still too dangerous.
They would kill ‘em if they found ‘em.
So just to get our officers out where they
could put down a dead drop or put up a signal,
pick something up, put something down, make
a phone call, mail a letter.
Disguise would allow those things to happen
and we went to more and more extreme lengths
with our disguises to let that happen.
Explain.
Well, this is –
What is an extreme length?
A particularly extreme length in the Cold War.
I keep taking this back to my husband Tony,
who passed away in January.
He's on my mind.
I'm sorry.
He was – we had an operation that we wanted
to do that would take one of our people down
into a manhole.
If you think of the beltway that encircles
Washington D.C., this was a manhole on a road like that.
Heavily traveled.
The ring road.
Think of the ring road.
That’s what we talk about in Moscow, yeah.
Think of having an American walking down the
ring road and dropping into a manhole.
This is not a good way to go.
So we came up with a new concept called disguise
on the run, which meant that you can change
your appearance while you're walking through
crowds, on the street, in front of everyone.
The more people the better.
The crowd is part of the operation.
So to demonstrate it, we set up a scenario
in our buildings over by State Department,
where we had a long, long dimly lit hallway.
We put the office director at one end and
we put my husband at the other end.
And he had 45 steps and 45 seconds to show
our office director how he was going to change
his appearance walking down a street.
You had to imagine the crowd.
When he's just walking straight at the director.
So Tony stands at one end, he's got a briefcase,
a raincoat, he's wearing a suit.
That's it.
He starts walking toward the director.
Now this is going to sound silly but you have
to hold your laugh till I tell you what happened
at the end.
He starts walking forward, sets down the briefcase,
takes off his raincoat, but he didn't take
it off any old way.
He peeled off his raincoat.
So he turned it inside out.
He's holding the sleeves and when he's out
of it and it's inside out, it's a woman's coat.
It's pink and it's kind of dirty and it's
got a shawl attached to it.
And he puts that on.
He takes a couple of steps, pulls up his pants,
pulls up his pants, there's Velcro.
He’s wearing black men’s shoes, black stockings.
He reaches down, takes off a shoe cover, takes
off a shoe cover, now he's wearing black Mary Janes.
He's got two men's shoes, which he puts in the top.
Now he's got breasts.
Pulls the coat together, pulls the shawl up,
a gray wig drops down covering his hair.
Reaches in his pocket, puts on a mask just like that.
Has his briefcase, hits a button, pops open.
It's a grocery cart full of groceries.
It's inflated.
It's a brown bag with bread, celery sticks.
Keeps walking, keeps walking.
This is James Bond stuff we're talking about.
This is Tony Mendez, the creative guy that
worked in our midst, thank goodness.
So our office director thought ok, that's
pretty good.
Now we took that to Moscow but we didn't turn
a guy in a suit into an old woman.
We turned an American diplomat in a three-piece
suit out for an afternoon walk into an old
Russian man who reeked of vodka and smelled
like garlic and was wearing – he looked
like one of these old pensioners that sometimes
you see around.
He came through the woods and out of the woods,
walked out to the street, no pedestrians are there.
He had a big heavy book, he opens it up, there's
a very special tool.
He reaches down, pulls up the manhole, drops
down in it.
Now he is a diplomat.
He was a diplomat.
I assume he was also an agency person undercover
being a diplomat.
He was all of those things.
So he had been trained in being able to do
that very well.
Trained and trained and trained.
You could not have a diplomat, an American
diplomat – a man on the street could not
have pulled this off.
They wouldn't do it.
Well, they shouldn’t do it.
Yes.
Was it successful?
It was successful.
This was the beginning of an incredible operation
where there was a nuclear plant outside of the city.
There was a headquarters in the city.
We had seen from our satellites they were
digging a trench.
We were interested in that trench.
At the same time, their electronic communications
from those two buildings ceased.
So we went down and there was a communication
cable and it was covered.
It was encased in a gas-filled sleeve so you
couldn't get into it but the man that dropped
down into it and went in first, the first
man in, the man in the Russian costume, took
enough pictures to set us up to begin an operation
that was one of the most productive operations
we ever ran in Moscow, intercepting those
communications.
And it went like gangbusters until an American
traitor, Bob Hanssen, divulged the secret
to the Russians.
So they shut it down.
So – I mean, that’s an extraordinary story.
When I hear about some of the efforts of U.S.
intelligence to go after our enemies in the
field during the Cold War, some of the most
extraordinary ones I hear about the Cubans
and efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro.
Exploding cigars, you know, coconuts underwater
while he's scuba diving.
Were there efforts on the disguise side to
infiltrate, effectively, to get close to Fidel?
I don't know of any particular efforts in that arena.
I do know of those attempts at assassination.
I know that they failed.
I know that the men in my office said at one
point, if they want to assassinate him,
they should get a professional.
They were talking like a mobster, not us.
We clearly couldn't handle that very well.
Our exploding cigars failed.
They thought if the government really thinks
they need to assassinate Castro, they should
get a professional.
Because they said we weren't really in the
business of assassination.
We really weren't in that business.
So I mean how much do you think all of this
has changed post-Cold War?
I mean, we had this brief period of time when
it seemed like we no longer had to worry about
these big spy versus spy issues.
U.S.-Russia relations today seem to be every
bit as bad as they were during the Cold War.
China, very different kind of competitor but
nonetheless all sorts of stealing each other's secrets,
national security concerns.
What do you think about the way that the world
has evolved?
I think you could make a case that maybe the
Cold War isn't over, that it's just tamped down,
that it got muffled, that it got put
into a lower level, a lower echelon.
Putin was KGB and it shows.
They're very heavy-handed.
It's very coarse what they're doing.
There's no nuance at all.
He is a thug and they are behaving like thugs.
They're going into our ambassadors’ residences.
I'm in the middle of Ambassador McFaul –
McFaul’s book, yeah.
He was there 2012 to 2014.
Yeah, we had him on the show.
I wish I had seen that show.
I’d like very much to listen to him talk.
But I mean the things that they've done , breaking
into Americans apartments up, making aggressive
moves with helicopters on defense attaché
cars that are on approved trips out of the city.
It's not a friendly place but it's never been
a friendly place.
Do you think that in terms of these efforts
that we have to ensure the safety of our people
and to carry out counterintelligence, are
the Russians the most capable still today
or has it become much more diffuse?
I think the Russians have always been so capable.
They put so much energy into it.
There's a Russian general, Oleg Kalugin, who
works with us at the Spy Museum –
And he's written quite a bit, actually.
He's written quite a bit.
The Second Directorate was the name of his book.
He – in that book, he said at one point
that there were 50,000 KGB officers in Moscow.
He's also said that there are, you know, as
many if not more Russian operatives in the
United States today as there ever have been.
It's never eased off.
It's never slacked off.
It's absolutely still there.
But you see they're working from different
platforms now.
They're working from electronics, from cyber,
from hacking stations.
Now we're sitting here in the nation's capital
right now.
I'm a piker.
I'm an amateur.
I'm not involved in spycraft.
If I wanted to disguise myself so I could
walk down the street and look completely different –
no prosthetics, I don't have anything
special, no masks – what would you tell me to do?
I would tell you to just look at a – look
at a picture of yourself and just go up and down.
It's not about your face always.
It's part of it.
The facial oval is a piece of it.
But everything, from the way you walk, what
you do with your hands.
Everything from what you wear, the kinds of
clothes that you wear, what you carry.
You can come in to the facial oval and if
you wear glasses, take them off, put on contacts.
You can change your hair.
It's easy as can be.
You can put on a hat.
We do – when we talk to some younger people,
we talk about stereotyping.
How people look at you, glance at you, and
they make assumptions.
Big assumptions.
It's like you have a barcode on you.
People scan you and they go oh, I know who
that guy is.
He drives that BMW over there and this other
guy, he drives that pickup truck.
So to make that point, we have like a baseball
cap with a ponytail hanging down behind it.
That's the guy that drives the truck.
You show that to a bunch of young people in
a classroom and you say, this guy's in front
of you in line at 7-Eleven.
It's six thirty in the evening.
What did he drive in?
He’s in a truck.
What's he listening to on the radio?
They know.
What's he buying?
He's buying beer.
What kind of beer?
They know what kind of beer.
They know that guy.
What we would like to do when we were disguising
people is play into that stereotype.
Give them just the handles that they need.
They make the rest of the assumptions.
So for instance –
Things they think they saw, they didn't actually see.
Their brain’s just filling it in.
You take a diplomat, take his tie, unbutton
his shirt, put a gold chain there.
Put too much cologne on him.
Have him take off his wedding ring, where
you can still see the white band where he's
married but his ring is gone.
You just start fooling around a little bit like that.
Add a tattoo, pierce some – you know, he's over here.
This is no longer an American diplomat.
This is another guy.
So there are different levels of disguise.
Only a few of them have to do with putting
on a mustache and a wig.
Jonna Mendez, lovely to have you on.
Thanks so much.
Thank you.
Good to be here.
And now for something completely different:
I've got
Your Puppet Regime.
I was in my office one day not long ago when
I got an unexpected call.
Bremmer, come to the White House.
We gotta talk.
Mr. President, thanks for your time.
I have some ideas for you on a G-Zero world
and where I think America First could –
Quiet, Bremmer, ok?
You screwed up bigly.
That tweet you made up about me was the worst
piece of fake news I have ever seen.
Oh.
I mean, it was plausible.
Ian, proper fake news should not be plausible, ok?
You gotta go big league.
For example, like: Mexico is already paying
for the wall.
Or, like, for example, yes, I read that book.
You understand me?
I did apologize after the –
Also a terrible rookie and loser mistake,
to be honest with you, ok?
You don't see me apologizing.
Really, the second you apologize it’s like, bing!
You’re dead.
Ok, I get it but we're talking about one tweet.
I mea, it was a single tweet.
You really don't get it, do you, Bremmer?
Look, fake news, they call it a volume game.
Volume, volume, volume.
You see, one piece of fake news, it's like,
the media will call it a lie.
But 10,000 pieces of fake news?
Now we're talking about a
That's our show this week.
Hope you enjoyed it.
Come back next week.
Every week, really.
Because otherwise, you know, it's hot.
Why would I be doing this?
And if you like what you see, you want to
check out more, why don’t you look us up
on gzeromedia.com?
