From The Wall Street Journal:
In 1976, the CIA’s Moscow station heard some excellent news. One of its most prized sources, a well-placed Soviet diplomat who’d turned on the regime, had been transferred back to Moscow.
The asset, code-named TRIGON, had already been supplied with the T-100, an experimental CIA camera concealed inside a pen, and was in a perfect position to copy scores of classified documents.
The only challenge was getting in touch with him.
Armed with a seemingly limitless budget, the KGB had put an estimated 50,000 spies on the streets of Moscow, wrapping the city in an impenetrable surveillance blanket. Any CIA officer who left the U.S. embassy would be followed by highly-trained teams of 20 or more.
So many CIA assets had been exposed and killed over the last decade that the station had all but stopped trying to arrange face-to-face meetings. Some spymasters in Washington viewed Moscow as a lost cause. The station chiefs had only one card left to play.
When he arrived in Moscow in 1976, Tony Mendez had spent 11 years at the CIA but had little experience in covert operations. He’d originally been recruited as an artist. Now he ran the agency’s disguise branch.
Mr. Mendez met with every field officer in Moscow. He logged their exact clothing and shoe sizes, collected hair samples and color-matched their skin tones. A few months later, he returned from his laboratory with some unusual cargo: enough masks, wigs, dental facades, prosthetics, makeup palettes and made-to-measure costumes to put on a magic show. If the CIA wanted to operate freely in Moscow, its agents had to disappear.
Mr. Mendez and his team trained operatives to apply disguises in layers and showed them how to radically alter their appearance on the street, changing from a man in a suit to an old woman in a shawl in less than 45 seconds. To help them bail out of moving cars undetected, CIA technologists invented the “Jack in the Box,” a briefcase containing a spring-loaded inflatable dummy that popped up in the empty seat.
As far-fetched as it sounds, this experiment in deception and illusion became the central pillar of a unique operational mindset known as “the Moscow Rules.” By learning to outfox the KGB, the Moscow station not only connected with TRIGON, it scored some the biggest espionage coups in American history.
. . . .
The operation Mr. Mendez is best known for was the hair-raising exfiltration of six U.S. diplomats from Iran in 1980. After concocting a madcap cover story about a fake Hollywood movie, he posed as an Irish filmmaker and smuggled the diplomats out of Tehran disguised as a Canadian film crew.
This audacious feat of leadership earned Mr. Mendez the Intelligence Star for valor, but like all CIA operations, its details were immediately locked in a vault. When Mr. Mendez retired in 1990, he never imagined the story, or his identity, might be disclosed.
In 1997, however, the CIA’s then-director, George Tenet, decided to declassify the operation. He even told Mr. Mendez to talk to the press. The story would inspire the 2012 movie “Argo,” in which Ben Affleck played Tony. It won three Academy Awards including best picture.
. . . .
Mr. Mendez was a reluctant celebrity. He felt more comfortable blending into the background. But he also realized that his unsolicited fame could be used for good. Together with his wife, Jonna, herself a former CIA chief of disguise, he won the CIA’s approval to write books.
And that’s how I got to know them.
In 2002, I arrived at a Manhattan restaurant fully expecting to be dazzled. My wife, Christy Fletcher, a literary agent, had invited me to meet two of her newest clients—Tony and Jonna Mendez.
Tony wasn’t just a spy, he’d been named one of the 50 most-influential “Trailblazers” in CIA history. I pictured him arriving in a Savile Row suit with a shoulder holster, arm in arm with Jonna in diamonds, black Chanel and a dagger strapped to her thigh.
I realized I had a lot to learn about spies.
As their books make clear, the best cover for a real spy is to be neither remarkable nor unremarkable. Tony came to dinner wearing jeans and a sweater. He was handsome, but not in a way that turns heads. No matter the topic, he spoke in the same low, colorless rumble. The Mendezes were warm, curious and unfailingly modest. When it came to the CIA, they mostly talked about lifelong friends they’d made in the field.
Tony and Jonna didn’t think they should receive all the credit. Becoming authors was a way for them to acknowledge the artisans, tradesmen, magicians, makeup artists and Hollywood prop-masters who had made invaluable contributions by sharing their trade secrets.
They also wanted Americans to know that CIA officers weren’t deranged assassins, but good, hardworking people trying to keep the country safe without expecting to be thanked.
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal
I have a neighbor I really like. He’s an older guy, retired. He never raises his voice, he always talks with a degree of calm. He is unremarkable looking, neither good or bad. When I speak to him I can’t seem to figure out if he is telling me something he believes or something someone else believes. He’s completely unreadable. I don’t know anyone who can tell what that man is thinking when they speak to him. In his home office, on the wall with all his family photos and awards for public speaking, stashed all the way at the bottom is a plaque with seven badges on it. The plaque reads, “From the office of the director of central intelligence.”