Jonna Mendez walked into the Oval Office wearing someone else’s face. George H.W. Bush, a former CIA director himself, circled her chair looking for the disguise and could not find it. When she peeled off the full-face silicone mask to reveal herself, the president burst out laughing, and the budget she had come to pitch was approved on the spot. That moment captures something essential about the woman who spent nearly three decades as the CIA’s chief of disguise: the work was always stranger, more precise, and more consequential than any Hollywood version of it. For anyone who has ever felt their life was locked into a single trajectory, Mendez’s story is a direct challenge to that assumption.
She grew up in Wichita, Kansas, fully expecting to become a librarian or an English teacher. A friend’s wedding in Germany changed everything. Unable to bring herself to go home, she walked into a Frankfurt train station, found a phone book, cold-called four American banks, and landed a job at Chase Manhattan Bank. That toehold led to an apartment, then to a boyfriend who turned out to be CIA, then to a marriage proposal on the Vienna subway, then to a job offer from the agency itself. She was hired as a secretary. The ceiling arrived almost immediately.
From a dead-end desk to the darkrooms of Europe
Rather than accept the ceiling, Mendez told her boss she was thinking of going to the Smithsonian. He suggested she try the CIA’s photography program instead. What that meant in practice was nothing like a community college course. The agency’s camera inventory included a pen that held 100 frames, designed for use in front of a foreign official’s desk without detection. It included a micro-dot, a page of text photographed and reduced 800 times until it was the size of a period at the end of a sentence. A foreign agent receiving one in the mail would already have a lens the size of a grain of rice. A drop of saliva, a quick hold up to sunlight, and a full 8-by-11 page of text became readable. Mendez was in charge of developing the film those cameras produced, which she described as one of the hardest things she ever did.
Excellence in that role opened a door to disguise work, which opened a door to India, which she had fallen in love with during a temporary posting. The career pivot felt risky and illogical at the time. In retrospect, it meant she was the only person in the building who could do photography, disguise, and a measure of document forgery. ‘You’re never starting over,’ Mel Robbins observed during the conversation. ‘You took absolutely everything with you.’ Mendez agreed.
The disguise toolkit she described went far beyond wigs and mustaches. The full-face masks her team developed could animate naturally, change a person’s ethnicity, change their gender, and survive a Secret Service sweep at the White House. In Moscow, where CIA officers were followed by surveillance teams the moment they left the embassy, the masks allowed a twin to emerge from a kiosk and lead the tail down the block while the real officer slipped away to do the actual work. For men who were harder to disguise because they typically wear fewer accessories, the team’s approach was behavioral: a cologne no one would expect, a gold chain, an unbuttoned shirt, a removed wedding ring leaving its pale impression. ‘Someone in your family gave you a shirt in the last 10 years that you just hate,’ she told her officers. ‘It’s in the back of your closet. That’s your disguise shirt.’
The Argo operation, which her husband Tony Mendez ran and which she co-wrote the book behind, followed the same logic at a larger scale. Six Americans who had escaped the seized U.S. embassy in Tehran were sheltered by Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor. Every exit from Iran was blocked by revolutionary guards. Tony’s solution was to build an entire fake Hollywood production company, place full-page ads in the Hollywood Reporter and Variety for a science-fiction film called Argo, staff a real office in Los Angeles with staff who would answer the phone, and send the six Americans out as a location-scouting crew. The Iranians could call the number. Someone would pick up. The whole fake world held.
What actually produces courage, according to someone who had to use it
In Latin America, on a posting near cartel territory, Mendez went out alone for cigarettes, took a shortcut she immediately regretted, and came face to face with roughly 20 armed, intoxicated men in an alley. Her training was unambiguous: turning back would signal that something was wrong. She walked forward, kept her pace, did not look back, and made it to the hotel lobby, where she finally lit the cigarette she had gone out for and found her hands were shaking too hard to smoke it.
That story is her clearest illustration of how she thinks about courage. ‘I think the idea of courage is misunderstood,’ she said. ‘A lot of people think that it’s something that you walk around with, that it’s inherent. It is not. Courage comes from confidence. Confidence comes from knowledge, from knowing what you’re doing.’ She described surviving three days of mock imprisonment during CIA training, locked in a box too narrow to turn her shoulders, fed half a cup of rice and a cup of water per day, by mentally walking through the Flint Hills of Kansas in tall grass under a green infrared glow. The sandy beach she tried first did not work. The Flint Hills did.
Her advice for anyone who wants to build that muscle: start with the conversations on your list that you have been avoiding. Approach what scares you in small steps. Enough small steps, she believes, can move very large things.
The two stars carved in marble
Toward the end of her book, Mendez describes a CIA forward base in Afghanistan where the chief and her deputy were both women. A car arrived carrying an Afghan informant the team had been working to bring in. He stepped out, opened his vest, and detonated. The chief of the base had three children. The other woman had two.
Mendez paused at this in the conversation, the observation still clearly unresolved for her: she had spent years talking about women achieving parity in the workplace, and then found herself asking whether dying the same as men was the proof.
She left Wichita expecting a library. She ended up briefing presidents in borrowed faces, extracting people across controlled borders, and training officers to survive interrogations they knew were exercises but feared anyway. When Robbins called her a national treasure, Mendez laughed and said her son and his girlfriend keep asking if she’s done yet. Some things, she added, still have to remain undercover.
