Episode summary
Mel Robbins interviews Jonna Mendez, described as the CIA’s former chief of disguise, on her three-decade career and what she says it taught her about confidence, risk, and reading people. Mendez recounts entering US intelligence after working in Europe, then moving from administrative work into specialised photography, technical operations, and disguise. She describes Cold War-era tradecraft including miniature cameras and microdot techniques, and explains that disguise work extended beyond wigs and moustaches to changing teeth, gait, accessories and personal “character” to avoid recognition.
A central anecdote is Mendez’s claim that she demonstrated a realistic full-face mask to President George H W Bush in the White House, saying the disguise was convincing enough to pass the Secret Service and helped secure funding for a programme. She also alleges that mask technology could be used to create “twins” to divert surveillance and, in her telling, even alter ethnicity or gender presentation for operational needs.
Mendez outlines the “MICE” framework—money, ideology, compromise and ego—as a way she says CIA case officers understood motivations for espionage, making the contentious assertion that Americans can be recruited for money. She recalls personal danger during overseas work and describes CIA hostile-interrogation training involving confinement, fear management and minimal rations. The episode closes with Mendez reflecting on global instability and climate concerns, and with an account of a fatal suicide bombing at a CIA base in Afghanistan that she says killed colleagues, including women in senior roles.
