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How to Fake Your Identity
1.6k Plays26 days ago
In this episode, we speak to former CIA Chief of Disguise Jonna Mendez about faking identities in the world of espionage and intelligence.
Jonna was recruited into the CIA in 1966, where she lived and worked undercover in multiple countries across Europe and Asia. Jonna’s work included denied area operations in complex and high risk locations such as Moscow, East Germany, and Cuba. During her 25 years' experience with the CIA, Jonna was awarded the agency’s Intelligence Commendation Medal, and she is a founding member of the Board of Advisors at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. With her late husband, Tony Mendez, Jonna is the best-selling co-author of Argo, The Moscow Rules, and Spy Dust. Her latest book, In True Face, recounts how determination (and some good fortune) helped her build her incredible career in the face of limited opportunities and misogynistic expectations when it came to women in front line intelligence work, and is available now from PublicAffairs books.
If you like this show, help fund hosting fees by supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/EncyclopediaGeopolitica
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to How to Get on a Watchlist, the new podcast series from Encyclopedia Geopolitica. um In each episode, we'll sit down with leading experts to discuss dangerous activities. From assassinations and airliner shootdowns through to kidnappings and coups, we'll examine each of these threats through the lenses of both the Dangerous Act to seeking to conduct these operations and the agencies around the world seeking to stop them. In the interest of operational security, certain tactical details will be omitted from these discussions.
00:00:34
Speaker
However, the cases and threats which we discuss here are very real.
Meet the Hosts and Guest Experts
00:01:01
Speaker
back correct nine one one what's the emergency I'm Louis H. Prisant, the founder and co-editor of Encyclopedia Geopolitica. I'm a researcher in the field of intelligence and espionage with a PhD in intelligence studies from Loughborough University. I'm an adjunct professor in intelligence at Science Pro Paris, and in my day job, I provide geopolitical analysis and security-focused intelligence to private sector corporations.
00:01:25
Speaker
I'm Laxander Shokiewicz, a co-editor of Encyclopedia Geopolitica, a multilingual security and intelligence professional with masters in international security from Strasbourg Paris. I've served in both consulting and in-house roles, bridging the gap between analysis and operations, and focusing on threat identification and monitoring, geopolitical intelligence and strategy, and security support to various public and private audiences.
00:01:47
Speaker
So in today's episode, we're talking about how to fake your identity. yeah We've got a particularly cool guest lined up to talk about this, Johna Mendez. Johna is a former chief of disguise who was caught recruited into the CIA in 1966, where she lived and worked undercover in multiple countries across Europe and Asia. Johna's work included denied area operations in complex and high risk locations, such as Moscow, East Germany, and Cuba.
00:02:12
Speaker
During her 25 years of experience with the CIA, Johnna was awarded the agency's Intelligence Commendation Medal, and she's a founding member of the Board of Advisors at the International Spy Museum in Washington DC.
Johna Mendez's Career and Insights
00:02:24
Speaker
With her late husband, Tony Mendez, Johnna is the bestselling co-author of Argo, The Moscow Rules, and Spy Dust. In her latest book, In True Face, she recounts how determination and some good fortune helped her build an incredible career in the face of limited opportunities and some misogynistic expectations when it came to women in frontline intelligence work. The book is out now from Public Affairs Books, and we'll make sure we include it in the show notes. So Johnna, thank you very much for joining us.
00:02:54
Speaker
Happy to be here. Thank you. Well, we're particularly excited about this episode because we always ask our guests the same question at the start. And that's how did you get into your line of work? And having read your your autobiography, it's it's a hell of a story. So I'm really excited to ask this question. how How did you get into your line of work? I always think that my answer disappoints the people that ask the questions.
00:03:17
Speaker
I was not recruited out of some you know Ivy League ah university. They didn't come looking for me at all. Well, let's back up just a moment. I grew up in Kansas. The minute I could get out of Kansas, I did. I went to Europe to be at my best friend's wedding, and off they went to Italy, and there I was in Fulda, Germany, and I decided I didn't want to go back to Wichita, Kansas.
00:03:44
Speaker
So I went to Frankfurt, Germany instead, and in the train station, I made a series of phone calls. The first one was a mistake. I called the American consulate. They said, no, dear, we don't, we don't do jobs. But then I called three American banks. Chase Manhattan bank was the third bank I called.
00:04:05
Speaker
I said, I'm looking for a job. I'm an American over here right now looking for a job. And they said, do you speak German? I said, no. Do you have a work permit? I said, no. I said, have you ever worked in a bank before? I said, I have not. And they said, well, why don't you come down and talk to us? And I did, and they hired me. It was amazing.
00:04:29
Speaker
So that was my putting the door. I had a salary, I got an apartment, and it was the beginning of being in Germany. While I was working at that bank, I have to say this was back in the sixties and it was like the American army owned Germany. This is still after the war. It was ever just, it was a huge American presence there, lots of soldiers. And there were these, um, this young group of American guys that came in the bank that I couldn't help but notice them. And one in particular was kind of interesting and we started dating.
00:05:08
Speaker
And over time I discovered his parents were in Vienna, Austria, and we traveled back and forth to Vienna. And ah he proposed to me a year and a half later and I said, yes. But I thought I was dating a civilian who was working in that American melange, but it was actually, he was not a civilian with military. He was an undercover officer with CIA.
00:05:37
Speaker
And he told me that after I had said I would marry him. And he said, this just makes it better. You'll love this. it's It's a lot of travel. It's very interesting work, blah, blah, blah. And so off we went. I was married to a CIA officer in Europe.
00:05:53
Speaker
And I needed a job because I always worked. And I discovered that as as a wife of a staff officer, I could have a job in Europe as a contract wife. I didn't know that this was like the bottom category of female employment in the universe, but I became a contract wife, did some typing, did some filing, did all kinds of interesting small things.
00:06:17
Speaker
And that was how I got into the CIA. I didn't set out to join. I had no career ambition to be there. It should have just fallen a apart of its own lack of weight, but it did not. That was my entry into the agency. It turned out that I was a pretty good secretary and people wanted to keep me. So even when we went back to the States,
00:06:43
Speaker
And then I became a real secretary, not a contract wife, but a real secretary. I very quickly rose to ah the highest level of secretary, worked for the director in my office. Again, that was, that was another pivotal point. I didn't want to be a secretary. I wanted to do something, to be something.
00:07:06
Speaker
I'm not sure how far you want this to go, but I was going to leave the CIA, my top tier secretarial job. And I told my boss this in a very conversational way. I said, you know, I think the Smithsonian museum might have a job for me. Something I remember, I'm embarrassed now, something was substance to it where I could, you know, I could grow. And that boss, he always had known that I was an avid amateur photographer.
00:07:37
Speaker
And he said, well, what if you took some of our photography courses here at work? and These courses, these were unique courses using unique equipment given to our case officer, Codre. We didn't offer them to just anybody. So it was quite nice that he said here, take one of our photo courses, take a lot of our photo courses, just don't go. And that oddly was the entry point Or maybe it was the exit point from being a secretary and and going into something that my heart could embrace. And what a truly inspirational career and story that you've just told us there. That's that's really fascinating. And you were a pioneer at the CIA and the first woman to hold the position of chief of disguise as well. And having described your first role as a contract wife, what were the most sort of challenging aspects of being a woman in an operational function for you?
00:08:34
Speaker
In your book, True Phase, you describe a system of glass ceilings, automatic demotions that are designed to block women from progressing essentially. Is there any advice that you would have for women who are trying to make it in the field of intelligence and espionage these days? To all women in all fields these days, I have a couple of things I would say. I would say aim higher. I think women undersell themselves and I think I certainly did.
00:09:05
Speaker
you hit this misogynistic wall, which is does not just CIA, it's wherever you are. and and A lot of people just kind of cower. like oh So that's where that's where they draw the lines. I don't care what career field you're in. There's a line there and there or there's a wall there, and I wonder how to tackle that. Well, I would you know i was methodical I almost worked myself to death deciding that I was going to be as good as any of the men at whatever it was I was doing. So when I was in photo operations, I started out in the dark rooms. Well, nobody wants to be in the dark rooms. You don't want to go to work in the morning, get you a cup of coffee, go through that circular door and end up in in the dark for the day. ah So my my first job was to get out of the dark room and I worked with a group of men
00:10:02
Speaker
who were actually back then I thought of them as friends a couple of them I still do today. But I'm not sure how they they didn't see me as ah as a threat they didn't see me as an equal they saw me as someone just yeah to hand stuff that they didn't want to bother with.
00:10:21
Speaker
So I took it and I even made the job harder because i and i I suggested and then I insisted that they bring in this huge machine. It was a Royal print processor for color. We didn't do color. We did black and white photography.
00:10:36
Speaker
were We're photographing identities and and targets and documents and we didn't have a huge need for color but i thought if we could do color we can give our. Are case officers much better product and so i made a deal with the guys that if we could get the color processor.
00:10:55
Speaker
that I would be in charge of the care and feeding of this machine, which meant every Friday, um I dressed down, I put on gloves and apron boots, and I've changed the chemistry, and it was huge. And I never, ever complained.
00:11:12
Speaker
And we had color photography and our requirements increased and our capacity increased. And it was nothing but a win-win-win. And all it cost me was a little bit of elbow grease. So that's kind of an example, I think, of leaning, leaning in, leaning forward. I didn't have any kids back then. So when things would come up, who can stay late, who can come early? Me. Who can go this very second, who can fly to Egypt this morning right now?
00:11:43
Speaker
me, you know, I go into this somewhat in the book. Actually, i've I spend enough time on it. Just saying, uh, it's another, it's another thing I tell young women, put your hand in the air, whatever needs doing, be the one that does it. And then pretty soon before you, before it even is offered, they know that you will do it and you, you just kind of start building a reputation.
00:12:08
Speaker
I always used to think that I wanted to be the person that they brought questions to. If they needed to know something, ask me. Now I'm working with with men who were graduates of ah Rochester Institute of Technology. They're a photo piece. It is a technical institution.
00:12:28
Speaker
the right next door to where Kodak used to be and ah these guys knew all of the chemistry, all of the the how to plot the the the toe curve of the film that we were working with. I knew none of that. But they ended up knowing that as they brought in a piece of film and they weren't sure what it was, they would hand it to me because I would develop like a little quarter of an inch at a time until I found, oh, here it is. This is it. And then we developed a whole piece of film.
00:12:59
Speaker
Now, none of that applies today because nobody's using film, but whatever people are using and whatever technology you're addressing, you know, get smart about it.
Clandestine Skills and Techniques
00:13:11
Speaker
Let's talk a little bit more about clandestine photography and how that's changed over time. I'm really interested to learn about this. yeah what What sort of things do a clandestine photography team have to think about when they go out in a you know hostile country and and start taking covert photos? How how does that even work?
00:13:28
Speaker
It starts with the requirement, and I would just mention, as an aside here, when I talk about photography at CIA, I am not pretty much talking about 35 millimeter single lens refront flex cameras. I'm talking about things that are not even recognized as cameras concealed in other things that you'd never dreamed there could be a camera there. but The whole thing is just tilted remarkably to one side and the other. But how do you decide what you're going to do? How do you decide what you're going to need?
00:13:59
Speaker
The first thing you have to do is figure figure out early on who you will travel with, because usually you go out in a team. We are positioned overseas so that we can quickly respond from overseas to overseas. All of our work is overseas. If you start out in Washington, DC, you spend the first week getting an advance money, getting tickets, getting permissions, getting sign-offs.
00:14:23
Speaker
before you can actually head to the airport if you're overseas you can be at the airport like in a couple of hours. So so who you gotta go with and and you're always doing up a kind of a vetting of the people you work with like if if we become a team if we're gonna go the two of us and do this thing do do i have to compensate for something do i have to fill a piece of this job that he doesn't ever feel do i have to double check his packing list.
00:14:49
Speaker
Because we would get to places where, if you didn't have it, you couldn't buy it. It didn't even exist there. Countries where any advanced film material is zero. Countries where developer and fixative, which is the way that you make your photographic image permanent, is not available in the local bazaar or market.
00:15:11
Speaker
So you always have this idea in the back of your head of who's your team? Where's your team? What is your team? Second thing is what is what is the requirement? And that dictates what you take. What exactly do you need to do the job that's being presented? Understanding that sometimes the job will change and grow as you get there. It may end up being something that you're not quite prepared for.
00:15:36
Speaker
You have to be really flexible so that you can respond to those kinds of off the wall things that show up when you get where you're going. One of the jobs that I remember doing, it's in one of our books. I don't think it's in this most recent one. I went to um a very third world country and we had to disguise and document a man we were working with as a, as a local in another name in another job. So I had to make him an ID card out of nothing. I had a camera.
00:16:06
Speaker
and I photographed a document and then we changed the document, photographed it again, found a place to laminate it, laminated it. I ended up with a ah new ID card for this guy with his photograph on it and and in his disguise. that i all of that We did all of that. But what I ended up with was an ID card that looked like it was brand new.
00:16:29
Speaker
and it didn't fly. This whole town, everything, everything there was smudged and dingy and you couldn't have this bright, shiny thing. So I spent a morning pouring coffee on the document and then rubbing it across the driveway of this building and just trying to abrade it, trying to age it, not in a sophisticated way, but but trying to age it like it had been around for a couple of years. and It worked at the end of the day. It worked great. and In that operation, this man actually at a critical moment had to flash that ID at a person. It made a huge difference.
00:17:10
Speaker
so you just You just mentioned making a fake ID, trying to make it look less new. And our episode today, of course, is about how to fake your identity. So what does the process to fake your identity look like? Where do you even start? Who's involved in all of that? Is there a very dedicated team for this, helping all the field officers with their disguises in the CIA, for example? Well, even when I was working, technology was starting to intrude on a lot of the things that we we wanted to do, things that we did.
00:17:39
Speaker
Tony and I used to sit and just kind of mull it over where to go next. It was clear to both of us that you can't do espionage from your armchair. It was also clear that it's ah it's a human endeavor. It's human. It's a person to person exercise. It begins with the case officer finding a source of information that he needs. and And then you establish a relationship with that person. And then you establish an understanding with that person that it's to his benefit and to our benefit that we exchange that information. When you're doing that, that whole scenario,
00:18:19
Speaker
You end up reassuring the person that you're recruiting that we will have his back and that he can trust us. That's what it's all based on is that trust. That's why he'll take a risk, not just a risk to himself, but sometimes a risk to his family. So you have to convince him and you have to mean it, but if it goes badly, we will come and get him.
00:18:44
Speaker
and his family, we will fix it. Once you get to that kind of place, then you can start talking about having an operation. But once we reached that agreement in our office, what would happen is we would set up a whole new file cabinet on this person and their family and their kids and their travel documents, their passports, their vaccination cards, their identities, and we would have them ready to go.
00:19:15
Speaker
Over the years of an operation, and this could be 20 years, these kids could be growing up and he would bring us new photos. I always say it was almost always he, he would bring us new photos of his family. We would update his documents. And then when we, when something went wrong, when we had to move someone, we had pretty much what we needed to instantly move them across the border.
00:19:43
Speaker
Big piece of our business was staying on top of what were the requirements? What what are the requirements today? We do this today. We did this during our go we were sending probes in and out of Iran in and out of that airport in and out what are the controls were those revolutionaries doing with the controls to the even know what the controls are these are young students with guns and they're running the airport, send our people in and out. We'd examine their documents. What did it look like coming in? What does it look like going out? That's just one country. We did that for almost every country in the world. So then if we have to move, go back to Argo.
00:20:24
Speaker
Argo the documents that were given to the Argo, the six house guests that were rescued, they had entry shops and exit shops that had gotten them from Canada to, I think they went through Hong Kong, and then they were in Tehran. The people that do the chops in those documents had to be able to go back to the date that they, theoretically, that group had come through Hong Kong.
00:20:52
Speaker
To the flight that they had come in on, because they also have tickets. So who's the immigration officer on duty that day? And what did his signature look like that day? And what was the color of his ink that day? And we had to replicate that. This is like running, I don't know, but we did it and we
Crafting Disguises and Espionage Tactics
00:21:12
Speaker
could do that. And I, I'm kind of confident today that we can do that. So these border controls are, they look insurmountable.
00:21:21
Speaker
They're not insurmountable, but they have to be approached with incredible precision and a knowledge base of of how those systems work. Speaking of of knowledge, you know in the book there's ah ah a really interesting anecdote of you flying through a smaller regional airport and and you describe you know using it as a kind of test to to see what the controls are like. and you kind of One would imagine these these tiny out-of-the-way airports would probably have very little controls, but you just you you describe it as you know they're almost like, oh my God, there's a a european visitor here that we never have and so that they're fascinated and going through in absolute detail ever everything in in your in your bags and and as a result you know your your kind of responses this is probably not the place for us to go one of the
00:22:08
Speaker
The kind of things that I really liked about the book is it's full of these really, really fascinating anecdotes of of these kind of operations. and And one thing you talked about a lot throughout it is kind of descriptions of prosthetics and masks. And they sounded pretty convincing when there's an anecdote and I won't spoil it for readers because I really encourage them to go read this. it's It's a brilliant story of you getting somewhere that's pretty hard to get to, is all I'll say, wearing prosthetics.
00:22:34
Speaker
And I would imagine that requires a pretty sophisticated setup. And, you know, reading it, I'm imagining almost a kind of Mission Impossible style, you know, skin like mask. You know, how how does that work? What are the, you know, what are the most sophisticated disguises out there that are available to you? And and how do how do you go about building and designing these things? Well, you don't do it by yourself. That's a fact. You have a group of people working on a problem like that.
00:23:04
Speaker
The mask that I and think we're talking about was the culmination of actually a 10-year research and development program, R and&D. We had people internally working on it. We had a facility in disguise where we could create multiples of things like that. But they had to be had to be imagined outside of our walls. So we had a lab set up at ah at a contract facility, and a gentleman there who brought to the fight a thing that we almost couldn't, and that was this lab-like environment. We, on the other hand, at Langley, we had a lab and
00:23:48
Speaker
Things were coming in and going out and operations were hopping off and people were getting tickets and flying away. We did not have the regimented approach when we were looking at materials. What kind of materials were we going to use for this mask, this animated mask we want to make? You have to go through a process. It's a scientific process of testing various materials under various scenarios, temperatures, humidities,
00:24:19
Speaker
We had that completely outside of our operational group. It took 10 years for them to find what what we needed. and And we had to have a good sense to just leave them alone and let them do it. not Not go busting in through their door saying, oh my God, we have an emergency. Put down what you're doing and help us do that. Now, at the end of the day, when we did that mask that I that i wore to the improbable meeting,
00:24:46
Speaker
We did go busting down the doors and we went in and said, stop everything. We have a really, really important moment coming up for our program. Part of it was if we could successfully demonstrate in that meeting the utility of this, this mask that we were making, we would have ah support from the highest levels of the United States government to proceed with our process, which is going to be really expensive, really expensive, seriously expensive.
00:25:17
Speaker
And we, and we got that. But when I went to that lab, when, when, when we knew, Oh, we have two weeks to do this, to get the final version. I went there like on day three, I walked in the door and I could smell the aroma of burning rubber, like tires. We've all smelled this smell is horrible. And it was my new face. Something had gone wrong in the, in the curing and the temperature had gone haywire and it had burned up. So we had to start all over.
00:25:47
Speaker
Again, so we had more than one process. We had operational people at Langley who were perfectly capable of working with these materials, but didn't have the environment that it required.
00:26:02
Speaker
and Then we had a contractor facility that was just like Nirvana. It was just out there. and and They kept specific records and lab books and measured everything. We could replicate their experiences. We needed both of those things in order to create the thing that we that we actually made.
00:26:25
Speaker
So then we, then we had it and it was time to demonstrate it. And that was, that was a whole other thing. Wearing that outside of our buildings for the first time, wearing it to, to the heart of Washington DC and demonstrating it to one of the most important people in the world. And what about when you don't have a lab handy, how would that work? I mean, we've talked about all of these very elaborate operations that involve meticulous planning, a lot of precision.
00:26:54
Speaker
What about more simple disguises? ah Any tips for anyone who's you know looking to hide themselves in a hurry or doesn't have all that other that backup available, all these teams working for them to help them? You know, when we were creating a disguise for one of our officers, not at Langley, where you did have a little bit of leeway time-wise, but when you're overseas and you're in your office and something's going to happen right now and someone needs a disguise. I think there's an example of that in the book.
00:27:23
Speaker
Somebody showed up. I just happened to be visiting the station. I was there to do a photo job and something came up and all of a sudden, all hands on deck, it's a disguised job and we had nothing. We didn't have, I mean, nothing sophisticated. And so this is the heart of it. And and this actually answers your question. What do you do? What do you do when you need something kind of quickly?
00:27:50
Speaker
The rule of thumb for just a regular normal disguise. Somebody would walk into my office, tell me where he's going, tell me what he's going to be doing, why he needs a disguise, how he's going to use it.
00:28:04
Speaker
And i I could very easily come up with something that would serve most of his purposes. So we used to say, imagine someone's going to meet you and a kind in a cafe for ah for coffee. And then they're going to go back to their KGB headquarters, and they're going to write a memo describing you. I just met with an American. This is what do he looked like. He had everything in that memo, everything that he used to describe you. We wanted it to be wrong.
00:28:31
Speaker
start at the top. He had brown hair. Wrong. ah He had blue eyes. Wrong. He wore glasses. Wrong. He had a mustache. Wrong. just it's just It's just endless. Just yeah up up and down the person. He smoked. No. He wore kind of loud polone. No. He was married. No. You want everything that they put into that memo. This is that American that I met.
00:28:57
Speaker
And i'm probably I'm hoping to see him again, but this is what he looked like. The idea was to make everything in that memo. Facial hair, yes or no. Curlier straight hair, yes or no. Did he have a pierced hair or did he not? Just endless, endless, the details that people would pick up on. So that's kind of a broad approach to disguising someone.
00:29:21
Speaker
But then there are things like mannerisms, like it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what you do to me. If people who know me see me walking, they have a block away. ah They'll say, Jana, because I have evidently a unique walk, which I've never been able to characterize, but they say I do. So, the the you know, if you, if you use your hands all the time, we'll give you something to do with your hands.
00:29:43
Speaker
That's the basic approach to disguise. change Change those things that you can change. There are a lot of things you can't change. If someone like me is is going through photos saying, is person A, is that person L, are they the same person?
00:30:02
Speaker
There are distances on a face that if you sit down with calipers which we used to do. This is before facial identification came along we did it with calipers the distance from the outer corner of your eye to the out outer corner of your mouth distance between your eyes the set of your ears. Are they higher they lower the out of the end stuff like that.
00:30:22
Speaker
And we used to be able to narrow it down pretty much, but I think but somewhere in the book, we're chasing Carlos, the jackal. And I never got two pictures of him from the same angle, you know, the same time of day. They were always too grainy. He was always moving. It's hard to do photo comparison today. If you're trying to be facial eye identification, if you're trying to beat the camera on every lamppost in London.
00:30:51
Speaker
ah You have your work cut out for you because you need to obscure these po points that are removable with things like glasses and things like hair goods and things like hats and things like beards and mustaches and and and all of that to take away as much as you can from that camera so that maybe the camera isn't sure. But I think it's a very hard thing to fool those cameras.
00:31:16
Speaker
So it sounds like there's a lot of challenges in disguise operations. is Is there one thing that stood out for you that you would say is the most challenging part of this, that that you know you really kind of worried about when you were doing these operations? so When we were disguising civilians, that means people who aren't used to wearing disguise. We knew that we could put the best disguise that we could come up with on that person and really, really change the way they look. But we could not change their demeanor they had to change their demeanor and if they were nervous. If they were uncertain if they were if they had that kind of vibe about them like I get a store you start acting. Well hokey cuz you're wearing in disguise you're gonna have some sales for keeping an eye on you because you look like a shoplifter.
00:32:07
Speaker
and That happened to me once wearing wearing wearing a mask in Georgetown. I actually left the store because I thought I'm acting suspicious and I knew it, but I had to. so silent um That demeanor piece of it, we have no control over that. We can rehearse people and we do rehearse them. We have them walk up and down long hallways wearing their disguise. Do it again. Let's see. you know If their walk is an issue, we can change their walk. You can put a pebble in a shoe. you can put and A Spanish on one knee, you don't want anybody limping, but you can you can change a walk, change what they do with their hands. There are things that we that we can't deal with, and height is a thing that we cannot deal with. um I know when we first went into China, when when the whole world went into China, we discovered that we were too tall.
00:32:57
Speaker
And even even if we looked really tall, really Chinese, we we still looked too tall and it would draw it would draw attention. So the rule of thumb back then was sit down either on a bike. And because of that, maybe we ended up with collapsible bikes that you could have in the trunk of your car. They could just click into place and you could pedal off. That's absolutely fascinating.
00:33:23
Speaker
We've been speaking to John Amanda's about how to fake your identity and after the break we'll talk about how content intelligence teams try to thwart disguises and false identities.
00:33:40
Speaker
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00:34:24
Speaker
Let's dive right in again with John Amandas talking about how to fake your identity. What does the detection side of things look like? What sort of controls do adversaries put in place to try and catch out intelligence officers that are operating undercover? Oh, where to start? There's so many countries, so many obstacles in your in in your way. What you always want to do when you are in alias,
00:34:53
Speaker
is just not to attract any attention at all. No, undo attention. And so you, you're just every, everything you do is, is low key. You want to hide in the crowd. You you don't ever want to stand out. You don't want to have undue attention brought to you. Usually when we would travel in alias, we didn't pick our name. We didn't always pick our nationality.
00:35:21
Speaker
We had there was a big office back home at Langley who was in charge of that making sure that aliases weren't bumping into each other that there was only one of you and they knew where you were at any time and they knew what your documents looked like.
00:35:38
Speaker
Tony Mendez worked in the docs section. He was hired into documents when he first came on board. He was hired as a practicing artist, a fine artist, and he came on board with his art skills. That's what they were most interested in. He couldn't figure out what in the world the CIA wanted with an artist.
00:36:01
Speaker
Well, what they wanted basically was someone who could ah manipulate some documents. And, and we always kind of steer it clear of some of these words like forgery and counterfeiting and alternate documents. And, but I mean, in fact, there is real genuine need for documents, uh, someone who can create them. It turns out the person that can create them is one of the best at detecting them. That makes sense, right?
00:36:31
Speaker
So I remember one case that we were involved in, the artists worked in kind of a bullpen, a big open room, and everybody's got their projects and their busy at work at their drafting tables. And Tony went in and one of the artists was working on a document that he was creating, that he was replicating, and he was burnishing ah staples.
00:36:58
Speaker
that held the document together. And Tony said, who but what are you doing? He said, oh, I'm just tidying this up. Tony said, no, no, no. What you're doing is you're destroying it because the rusted staples are part of the bona fides of that document. They always, always use rusted staples. Not huge, but there's a little rust on those staples. That's one of the signatures. That's a real document. And without it, it's not.
00:37:29
Speaker
We also would would find some of the artists, when they're when they're putting that back stamps into various documents, they had a tendency to want it to be pristine, kind of sharp and clear. But if you go look at your passports, your travel documents, you'll you'll see all kinds of smudges and smears and People in a hurry, they just slam it into your passport and off you go. And we had to ensure that our people that were creating documents or even altering documents had that that point of view because just really shiny new bright crisp stamps almost jump out at you in a and a travel document like that. We were so interested in finding the errors
00:38:16
Speaker
in say terrorist passports because they produced a lot of travel documents. All those terrorists moving around the world, most of them were traveling on fake documents and they had like almost factories that would produce them. What we discovered early on is that those documents were full of mistakes and because they were so quickly produced, they kept replicating their own mistake.
00:38:45
Speaker
And so we ended up doing a booklet that we would hand out to friendly liaison countries for their immigration officers. The idea was it was page by page for the immigration officer.
00:39:00
Speaker
what What are you looking at? Oh, a Jordanian passport. You go to the Jordanian section and it would say these are the five most common errors we're finding in forged Jordanian passports. So the immigration officer could take the one man standing across from him and just scan down that page to see if if it was fake. In that regard, that's one of the few times I'm ever aware of that fake document thing became really built into the the process.
00:39:30
Speaker
And we built it in.
Experiences and Anecdotes from the Field
00:39:32
Speaker
In true face, you describe being in Paris on vacation and realizing that someone is telling you that you're being surveilled. How do intelligence officers go about identifying something like this? And most importantly, how do you lose a tail? Tony and I were um we' responsible for training a lot of our officers getting ready to go to denied areas and make the conversation simple. Let's just say Moscow. Denied areas are countries where you're going to have surveillance. You're going to have a lot more than surveillance, but you're going to have surveillance. And we formed our own 40 person surveillance team.
00:40:11
Speaker
And the people that were getting ready to get on the plane to go overseas, we'd take them out one final time, one final night and say, see if you can detect surveillance this evening. Our team is going to be out there. See if you can see them. So it just doesn't get simpler than this. And Tony and I, it would be a pre-arranged route. We're in Washington DC. We go down into Georgetown, which could be any busy street on any busy European capital.
00:40:40
Speaker
And we plan where we're gonna stop for a stop at the four seasons hotel and have drinks. And we're gonna go over to this place, we're going to go to this place and then we'll meet up at the end of the evening. We all knew where we were gonna meet up.
00:40:52
Speaker
and we We got to watch our team in action and we got to watch our CIA officers getting ready to go overseas and and their ability to to see our team. It was always just always fascinating. We'd go into um um a bar, the Mayflower Hotel was a favorite.
00:41:12
Speaker
going to the bar of the Mayflower Hotel and we'd sit down and have a drink. And we knew that our team was outside. We also knew there were six entrances and exits to that hotel. We knew they had to cover all six of them. We knew that the team would get nervous if we took too long and we knew they'd send somebody in. That was the tell. So we'd be sitting in the bar having drinks and we'd see one single person, usually a guy, would walk in, stand at the bar, order a drink,
00:41:41
Speaker
Pay for it cash because he's ready to go if we go we can go he's paid these goodies and then the idea was to see if our two people getting ready to go overseas if they can see that they've been trained to see that. When i was in paris the last thing in the world that trip last i've been gone for some years i got remarried so my name had changed.
00:42:09
Speaker
And while I'd been in Paris a million times, it was always as Jana Gazer. That was my first marriage. And now I'm Jana Mendez. And we'd been in the South of France. We'd been with this princess. She gave music concerts. We traveled to Europe with her a lot. So I'm in Paris by myself. She had said to me, oh, because she'll be in Paris over the 4th of July, I want you to check with the embassy and see if they open the gates.
00:42:37
Speaker
And they, I've been in embassies where they have opened the gates before. So I called, they said, no, we're not doing it. I said, thank you very much. fine up And then when I went out that day with, I had a tripod and a couple of cameras clearly doing photography. I'm walking down the river and it's just like a sixth sense. It's just like there were these two guys. It's not always guys, but this, it was two two guys and they're on the other side.
00:43:06
Speaker
on the other side of ah the road and no child is behind them. And I saw them and I just, I just knew that that was surveillance. So what I did was I put down my tripod, got my camera ready and they're still walking and they're walking and they're walking. And I took a picture of them with no child in the background. They couldn't get out of the picture.
00:43:30
Speaker
And they they couldn't break cover like that. They couldn't try to get out of the picture. So I had a picture of these two surveillance in Paris. And I remember thinking that's A, it's odd that I've got surveillance. B, it's even odder that I could see them because the French are so good at this that you don't see them. So I decided, well, it's not their A team. This is their B team.
00:43:57
Speaker
But still, what why are they looking at me? So I'm walking around behind the Musee d'Orsay because i I don't know what's going on. i'm I'm kind of done. And there they are on the sidewalk. And one of them has, this is back back then, it looked like a brick. It was a cell phone. And he's talking to someone and he saw me coming and I saw him see me. And we just like passed each other on the sidewalk. He couldn't put the phone down and I couldn't, I couldn't turn.
00:44:25
Speaker
So I thought, well, that's interesting. Kept walking. Two more people showed up. Two more people showed up and we we ended up on the other side of the river and then they disappeared. And I never thought about it afterwards. I just thought that's just, I bumped into something. I don't know what, but it's just interesting that they came out to see me. And then I found out.
00:44:51
Speaker
From the princess about a month later, she said, you know, they had a huge bomb threat at the American embassy in Paris. I said, when did they win? She said 4th of July. And all of a sudden ding, ding, ding. That phone call of mine, an unknown person asking if the gates were going to be open on the 4th of July. They didn't know who I was. And they just decided to come out and figure out who I was. I could have been a terrorist. And that's what that was.
00:45:21
Speaker
so You talk about you know the kind of B team here, that the mistakes people make. What about on the the side of folks who are trying to stay undercover? are there any you you know you You mentioned earlier the way people walk, for example. Are there any visual cues that counter-intel teams might look for when they're trying to spot someone faking their identity?
00:45:41
Speaker
The kind of clues they might be looking for aren't going to be, I'm trying to imagine a scenario where where your physical movement would give you away and I can't imagine one. They're not just randomly looking at crowds, trying to find a particular person. Now, for instance, i'm thinking I'm thinking of Boston, the Boston Marathon. There was a bombing. And in that instance,
00:46:07
Speaker
It's one of the few that come to mind when the whole world is looking at the footage of that crowd and they're looking and they're scanning. They're looking for the odd that the tell what, what they don't even know what they're looking for. Looking for the bomber, but how, how would they recognize him? And I don't know if, if you followed it there like we did here, but, but they very quickly found a backpack.
00:46:37
Speaker
And then the backpack is on the ground. And then they could go back and find the backpack again and find who was wearing it. And then they went after those two brothers and they caught them. To me, that was just such a one off scenario that your movement in a crowd, that your movement at a time like that could have actually led to identifying you as the as the target, as the person they're looking for. But in general, that what's going to give you a way is it's going to be more interactions with people that that just don't come off as genuine or you don't come off as genuine or maybe you're wearing a disguise and and you're uncomfortable in it. And because of that, you could look suspicious or maybe you had someone to document that doesn't seem quite right. I don i don't know.
00:47:32
Speaker
airports scan the people moving through those airports and they have people in airports looking to see who's, who's out of place, who doesn't belong, who to pull aside in some reason, the people that are going through luggage it when you're, when you're coming through the airport, they're certainly skilled in all of that. But, but I think for a person really trying to just for espionage officer,
00:48:00
Speaker
You would not get caught up in more of those scenarios. You would avoid those situations. you know We try not to go through an airport in disguise. it's That's a dangerous place, as far as we're concerned, if you are wearing a disguise. And it's not that the disguise is going to give you away, but your behavior might.
00:48:21
Speaker
let's Let's continue a little bit on this because this is fascinating and and this theme of interactions in particular, you mentioned how dangerous ah dangerous it is to go through an airport in disguise. What if you have to do it? You did mention some interrogation resistance training that you went through. um You mentioned that in your book. Are there any particular tricks that counterintelligence teams or for example, border offices at the airport would use to detect someone who's traveling under a fake identity?
00:48:49
Speaker
something other than sort of the detection through a poorly done fake identification document or something like that. You mentioned already sort of the behavior. right can we Can we go a little bit more into this? I think what you might see at an airport where if you're when you're pulled into secondary, which is the name of it, you don't want to be in secondary. That's when they say, could you and please step over here with your suitcase? We'd like to have a chat. and In that chat, if you're an innocent person,
00:49:17
Speaker
you're perfectly willing to have the chat because you're not going to incriminate yourself because you've done nothing wrong. You don't have to have your defenses up. There's nothing to guard. There's nothing to hide. But if you are say bringing in a pound of cocaine or, or, or, you know, a hundred thousand dollars in your socks or, or all these other things that are illegal that you could, you could be bringing then, or if you're on fake documents,
00:49:46
Speaker
Then you're going to be nervous. And that nervousness is is going to be like the first thing they look for. Because if you're not guilty of something, there's just simply no reason to be nervous. So your demeanor, again, gets out ahead of everything else. Like, what's what's wrong with this guy? Why is he? Why is she? What's making her nervous? And that just that just encourages whoever's going to do an interrogation to kind of drill down and see what they can find.
00:50:16
Speaker
And what they find may not be what they're looking for, but but they they can have maybe some confidence that they're going to find something or else you wouldn't be behaving the way you are protesting. You know, I'm going to call your congressmen just endless. These conversations are endless. So you have to be careful in airports, just in general.
00:50:46
Speaker
and If you're an intelligence officer, you know um Tony Mendez had a story. isn' it's it's ah It's an interesting story because that's it was before Argo, but it was around the same time as Argo. Tony went into Tehran six months before Argo to rescue one person. And it was a very senior person, a member of the Shah's Savak organization, which was a dreadful organization, just, just full of outrageous behaviors and
00:51:20
Speaker
Anyway, the Savaka guy was our agent and he was reporting to us on what was going on and we had had the conversation at the beginning. If anything happens, if if you need to be rescued, we will come and get you.
00:51:34
Speaker
And um what happened was the revolution happened. um The Shah was deposed. The Ayatollah came in. Everybody was looking for this one member of Savak because he was some senior. And if they found him, they were going to kill him. So Tony met with him. This is him this is in a book called The Master of Disguise.
00:51:57
Speaker
met with him in a and an attic of an old building and made a disguise for him, turned him into a totally different man with a fake nose and he became a Jordanian dealer in in pipes for oil fields. Took him to the airport in his disguise with his documents, had trained him, you know,
00:52:22
Speaker
What are the names in your in your documents? What's your father's name? What's your mother's name? Blah, blah, blah. And ah Tony had a colleague take him to the airport and take him into the waiting area. And then Tony's colleague came to a glass door and said, I've lost him. I don't know where he is. He's in here, but they're boarding his flight and he's not here. So Tony is my fast thinking and husband.
00:52:52
Speaker
goes to the Swiss air desk and says, excuse me. I just dropped off my grandfather and he's getting ready to board your Swiss air flight to wherever it was, but I forgot to give him his heart medicine. Can you, can you walk me through so I can give him his heart medicine? He needs to take it. He needs to take it the next hour. And so the Swiss air guy is like, Oh my God, yes, sir. Come with me. Took him through security.
00:53:22
Speaker
Took him through, took him through, took Tony, turned him loose in the, he said, you can find him, he's he's in here, they haven't boarded it yet. So Tony now is free and he goes in, the guy isn't there. So Tony goes to the restroom, the men's room, and there's a stall in one door, it's closed. And Tony's like, Mr. Curie, that was his fake name. Mr. Curie, they're boarding your flight. He says he sees this eyeball looking through a slit in the door.
00:53:51
Speaker
He said the guy was just just you know just petrified. he'd he just he so Tony got him, got him back out, got him to the gate, got him with his colleague who was there, took him on the plane, and off he flew it, and they saved his life. But is it's it's that thing, it's you know demeanors. The guy couldn't, he just folded under the pressure. This was a big John Wayne kind of guy. this was not This is not just a little bureaucrat. I just want to stay on that theme of pressure. This is a question I've been dying to ask you. you know in In the movie adaptation of of Argo, there's a really tense scene at the airport and and you know the Revolutionary Guard are kind of grilling the group as as they go. Now, and in the book, you you mentioned this was added purely for entertainment value, and you you know that this was Tony's favorite scene, so I was really enthused to hear that.
00:54:46
Speaker
But did you and your career ever have close calls like that that really got the heart racing? Because that sounds like a really stressful situation. The one that comes to mind is is doesn't compare. I was in Havana. I had just gotten off a flight. I was checking into a hotel. This was when we weren't supposed to be. Americans weren't traveling to Cuba, but I needed i needed to be there.
00:55:12
Speaker
and i ah I'm at a check-in desk and it's three in the morning because that's when the flights went. They went in the middle of the night. Continental Airlines changed their uniforms and and we went to Cuba. and I'm standing in her desk and I'm really, really tired. It's the middle of and the night and I slide my passport across to her at registration and realized at the same moment that I couldn't remember which passport it was.
00:55:44
Speaker
but now she's got it and I've got the registration form and she wants me to fill it out.
00:55:52
Speaker
So what do you do? I pulled out my my pen. It was a ink pen and on purpose I just splattered ink all over my registration form and my hands and the desk. I just made this huge mess.
00:56:14
Speaker
I said, we're going to have to start over. And I was like, I need to go wash my hands. And, and, uh, I said, let's just start over. So she gave me back my passport. I went and washed my hands. She cleaned up the desk. She covered it with something. And then I filled out her form, but it was just like, I couldn't think, I couldn't think, how did you get your passport back? Excuse me. Can I see my passport just for a moment?
00:56:45
Speaker
I want to check something, my name. That's as close as I ever got. I mean, mostly mostly, you're just on top of this stuff. You're on top of this stuff. But then every once in a while, you're not. That sounds really incredibly stressful, and it ties really nicely into this next question, which we like to ask all of our guests before we wrap it up. What kept you up at night when you were in the field?
00:57:10
Speaker
ah The thing that kept me up over and over always, always, was had I done everything, every step, had I taken every precaution, had I been careful. Because every once in a while, one of our one of our agents, our foreign agents would get caught somewhere. And when they did, it was just like in the heart, like, oh my God, did I do something? Did I cause that? that was your night That was your nightmare. And depending on where they were,
00:57:38
Speaker
it really would be a nightmare because to have to be arrested in some parts of the world was you know years in prison or worse. and So just making sure the whole time I was working, people said, why did you stick with disguise so long? I said, because disguise when I went into disguise, it was um um a nice to have, maybe maybe you'll need this disguise that I'm going to give you, maybe you'll use it, maybe you won't.
00:58:04
Speaker
That's where it started. But once we started working with counter narcotics and counter terrorism, disguise became a form of body armor. It would protect you. It would keep you safe. It would, it would maybe do more than that. Here's, here's my final story. I was at a cocktail party about a month ago at the international spy museum.
00:58:28
Speaker
um that Some old spies like me were there and a bunch of outsiders who supported the museum were there and were having drinks. It was really, really, really nice. and This man walked up to me in a suit and tie with a drink and he said, Johnna, he said, do you remember me? I said, no. He said, well, I remember you. He said, I came into your disguise lab years ago.
00:58:59
Speaker
There was an operation. You made a disguise for me. He said it was pretty good disguise. He said, I always wanted to find you again, to tell you that that disguise saved my life. And I had a drink in my hand and I almost dropped it. I was, no one has ever, no one, I've met people afterwards.
00:59:27
Speaker
I usually don't remember them, but no one has ever told me he's the only one. And I was so stunned by that that I didn't, I didn't say, let's go, let's go over here and sit and talk. Tell me what happened. I didn't do that. I just said, that's the most amazing thing anyone has ever said to me. So I saw pictures from that event and I have a picture of him and I know.
00:59:49
Speaker
Who he was there with, and I'm going to track that man down because now I need to know that story. But I mean, that just, uh, that was kind of a wrapping up of, uh, um, a career in disguise, someone to walk up to you and, and say that it's probably happened more than once, but just to have this tall, good looking guy tell me that I saved his life was, was a wonderful ending to his story.
01:00:14
Speaker
Wow, what a sort a story. All I'll say is if you are that mystery man and you're listening to this episode, please do get in touch and we will we will connect to you guys. Johnna, thank you so much
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
01:00:27
Speaker
for joining us. This has been an absolutely incredible discussion. We really appreciate you joining us.
01:00:34
Speaker
You've been listening to how to fake an identity with John Amendez. John's books, In True Face, Argo, The Moscow Rules, and Spy Dust will all be linked in the show notes, and they are truly fantastic books, so we really encourage our listeners to grab a copy of them.
01:00:49
Speaker
Our producer for this show was Edwin Tran. To all our listeners and our Patreon supporters, thank you so much for supporting How To Get On A Watch list. If you'd like to become a Patreon subscriber, ah head on over to patreon dot.com forward slash encyclopedia geopolitical to support the show. Thank you very much for listening.
01:01:08
Speaker
If you enjoyed this show, please consider checking out our other content at Encyclopedia Geopolitica. We'd also appreciate it if you could subscribe to the podcast, leave a review, or support us on Patreon. Thanks for listening.