How Spies Use Disguises

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We always talk about disguise as though it's an onion.

Whether you're building it,

or whether you're peeling it off,

it's almost transparent layers.

And when you get enough of them going

you disappear and this other person is in the room.

My name is Jonna Mendez

and I was Chief of Disguise at the CIA.

In my role as Chief of Disguise,

my major concern was always protecting people;

protecting our case officers who were

going into situations that might be dangerous,

but importantly, protecting the foreign people

that we were meeting with

who were very often risking their lives.

If you were working in Europe

and you were meeting with a clandestine source at a cafe,

your biggest concern might be that your next door neighbor

was gonna wander into that cafe at that moment

and say hi, Bill when you weren't Bill.

And that kind of casual stumbling upon people was an issue.

And so you'd wear what we call light disguise.

Light disguise can be something as simple as a wig,

maybe some facial hair, maybe some glasses, not a big deal.

The other extreme is advanced disguise

that you would use for up close and personal

for an extended period of time

where the person you were talking to

would have no idea that you were not in true face.

One of the things that was going on

when I was Chief of Disguise was

an enormous research program

into a new advanced disguise system.

It was basically the masks that everybody always wondered

if we used masks, and this was the beginning.

This is a series of photographs

of when I met George H.W. Bush in the Oval Office

and revealed to him that I was briefing him wearing a mask.

When you go to disguise a person,

the general idea is that you're gonna meet

with someone in this disguise

and they're gonna write a memo

of the person that they just met with.

We want every item in that memo

that describes you to be wrong.

If we're looking at a man and we wanna change

the way he looks, start at the top,

and the first thing that comes up is hair.

What's he got and what do you wanna do with it?

If he has curly hair, you wanna go straight,

if he has dark hair, you might wanna go light,

if he's young, you might wanna throw in some gray,

if he's old, you might wanna cover up the gray.

Do you present with facial hair?

If you don't, maybe we're going to give you some.

If you're gonna be somewhere for awhile,

maybe we're gonna have you grow some.

We have made prostheses on occasion.

You could actually change cheekbones.

You can add something here, you can add a forehead,

you can do a nose.

We can do what we call dental facades.

We can change, actually, the shape of your face

with the right dental facade.

This piece is called a plumper,

because it increases the plumpness of your gums.

And when it does that, it changes the profile of your face.

The last thing is artificial pallets,

we take an impression of the top of your mouth.

They can change your enunciation,

they can cause a slight lisp,

it's a little bit different with everybody who wears one,

but if it's enough it's very useful.

We very often discover that older looking men

are considered less threatening

than younger looking men.

So we like to age a person.

With women you have a broader range of what you can do.

You also have one extra step,

you could turn a woman into a man.

I would mention that it's almost impossible

to turn a man into a woman.

What we do is always additive.

We can make you taller, we can make you heavier,

we can make you older, we can't go the other direction.

You wanna be the person that gets on the elevator

and then gets off and nobody really remembers

that you were even there.

That is a design goal at the disguise labs at CIA.

Disguise isn't just all about the facial oval,

it's about how you dress,

how you present yourself in a public environment.

Americans are oblivious to what it is

that reveals them to a foreign crowd

or a foreign intelligence service

when they're out in public.

In terms of behaviors, there are a lot

of small actions that give us away.

The way we eat, Europeans use the fork in their left hand

and it doesn't travel back and forth to the right hand,

whereas we're constantly putting down our knife

and moving utensils back and forth.

The way we smoke, we put it between our first two fingers,

they tend to hold a cigarette

between the thumb and the first finger.

When an American stands, they tend to support themselves

on one foot or the other,

in Europe they stand straight up.

They don't lean on anything,

their weight's equally on their feet.

Changing the way that you walk

requires some amendment to what you're doing.

You're gonna need a physical apparatus

to make you walk differently.

You can't possibly say okay now I'm going to limp.

To change my walk,

I put a little piece of gravel in my shoe,

just a little thing that pinches my toe,

and it changes my walk whether I want to or not.

You can put a bandage around a knee,

something that restricts you will change your walk.

Disguise can be applicable to you

and your everyday life in terms

of traveling around the world and staying safe.

I would use Paris as an example.

Any time you approach Notre Dame Cathedral,

or those bridges that cross the Seine,

those are places where there are groups of people

that either wanna pick your pocket

or they're gonna make some kind of trouble,

and they cluster at these choke points.

And if they can tell from your sneakers,

if they can tell from your baseball hat,

or a lot of other behaviors that we exhibit

that you are an American, you become a target.

If you just wanna play it safe,

there's nothing wrong with stopping at a local store

and buying some local clothes.

If you smoke, get some local cigarettes.

You can always add a pair of glasses,

you can always add some kind of hat.

Just back yourself off from that American imprint

that we all carry with us in so many ways.

You know all these things that we do

are unconscious and they are hard to change.

If you have some friends who are thoughtful,

you could probably sit down with a friend and say

what is it about me that is just a dead giveaway?

And they're gonna tell you things like

oh it's your laugh, or it's the way you sit,

you always slouch down in the chair.

They can help you find those pieces

of your visual personality that are easy to get rid of

once you know they're there.

People have expectations of what

you're going to present to them when you're being you.

We try and brush those away.

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Quick change is the ability

to clandestinely change your appearance,

typically when you're out on the street.

You're using the crowd as a mask.

When we're doing this, we measure it in the number of steps.

And then we rehearse whoever's gonna do it,

you're gonna go in the GAP, you have 37 seconds

to come out with those changes.

The goal of the quick change is to disappear.

If you had surveillance and they discovered

that you were gone, you didn't want them to think

that you had escaped.

You wanted them to think that they had lost you.

It was their fault.

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Blending in is situational, it depends on where you are.

You need to understand what the commonality is there,

what this tribe is that you wanna join.

And once you join that tribe,

you can typically move around freely

because there's no suspicion.

You can't summon up a disguise

in the middle of an event,

but going to the event you can say to yourself

I think I'll leave my baseball cap,

and my sneakers, and I'm gonna leave all that in my room,

and you can realize that being out on the street,

as an American, is sometimes dangerous.

One of our officers,

probably working out of the American Embassy,

would have surveillance 24 hours a day.

They'd have teams of people following them.

But they had work to do,

they had to communicate with people clandestinely.

And the extremes that we would go to

to disguise those people was the most interesting

and the most challenging part of the job.

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Bring it on.

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(laughing) Going on?

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