Her life reads like a spy novel. Over the course of her 27-year CIA career, Jonna Mendez, pulled off dazzling capers. In the 1990s, she wore a shockingly lifelike mask, disguising her true identity as she briefed President George H.W. Bush during an Oval Office meeting. Her globetrotting missions included disguising a prime minister, and her ingenious efforts helped Russian assets helping the U.S. evade KGB detection.
“I just felt deeply and strongly that the work we were doing was work that was worth doing,” she says. “We were helping our country; disguise was a form of protection.”
Thanks to her skills as the CIA’s Director of Disguise during the Cold War, Mendez and her team of artists, chemists, and creative geniuses at the Office of Technical Services hid the identity of CIA officers and foreign assets.
“My mission was to make a mask that our officers could use to protect themselves or have deniability,” she says.
Now 78 and living in Reston, Mendez’s career as a master of disguise is revealed with jarring transparency in her new memoir, In True Face: A Woman’s Life in the CIA, Unmasked, available March 5.
“I was really proud of the work that we did,” she says. “I thought it might be a good thing for people to know.”
Mendez’s barrier-breaking success didn’t stop some of her male counterparts from antagonizing her as she climbed the professional ladder to the top echelon of the CIA. A toxic man she trained with rolled a defused grenade toward her, which went off a few feet from her. One of her male bosses mischaracterized an assignment, forcing her to think outside the box and disguise a foreign asset using Dr. Scholl’s Foot Powder.
“She came up with so many creative solutions on the fly — that’s why she succeeded,” says former CIA operative Valerie Plame, whose career began during the Cold War.
The trailblazer persevered, opening the door for future women to achieve success in the intelligence field. Now an acclaimed author, lecturer, and board member of the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., Mendez’s provocative memoir paints a more detailed portrait of the boys’ club she broke into.
“I’ve turned into a little bit of a spokesperson for women in CIA without ever intending to,” Mendez says. “I talk about what I loved about the CIA, which was most of it.”
Feature image courtesy Jonna Mendez
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