1027: Jonna Mendez | A Woman’s Life in the CIA

23:15And even holding that lens, it wants to bob around. You have to be very careful with it. But doing that from a moving airplane at a door, which they had kindly removed so you didn't have to bother with it. And so there's a little wind, there's that lens, there's the airplane bouncing. And the question would be, I think I put in the book, can you resolve the license plate on that truck driving down that dirt road below you at 60 miles an hour. Can you make out the license plate? That was just one of, you know, we were looking at railroad track signals. We were just what kind of intelligence could you capture with your camera from a moving platform like that?

23:53I actually thought that was one of the most fun courses I ever took. I said to the pilot, hello, can you and I go in this plane? And we were like out over the Chesapeake Bay. I could to put my foot out and got my toe wet. Oh my God. That gives me the heebie-jeebies for sure. Oh, and they had painted out the numbers on the tail of the plane. I think they did. I wasn't the only person they ever took on that course, but they didn't want that plane to be identified. So there were no numbers on the tail. It was great fun. And then that evening I went in, I was a secretary when this happened for the director of my office.

24:25And that evening we went to these big photo labs that we had at a place called the farm. And I was the only one there, Turned out all the safe lights on, developing the film and hanging it up, the prints. And I thought, well, hey, this is way more fun than being a secretary. And I decided that night that I wouldn't go talk to the Smithsonian about a job, that I would stay at the CIA and pursue this photo thing. That day was the day that I used to say was the first day I worked for the CIA. My professional career started that day. It was a big deal. Oh, man, it really illustrates how manual intelligence gathering was back then.

25:03Because if you want a license plate now, you tell a satellite to go get it and it'll take a high res photo from space. And here you got to chase a car with an airplane and a whatever. What was it? A thousand millimeter lens while you're swinging around from a vibrating aircraft. And there's a cloud of dust because the car, like you said, is driving 60 miles an hour down some dirt road. And it's just like that was just there was an art to things back then that maybe is different now. Oh, technology has clearly made a huge difference. It's offered a whole new set of tools that can be used by you or against you or for you, depending on what you want to do.

25:37The technology has opened up windows we never dreamed of. It's given us opportunities to do things we never dreamed of. People are very aware of the threat that that technology can play, a threat to American intelligence, threats to American military, and it's true. But people don't stop to think if you turn that threat around, how can you use it? What can it do for you as opposed to to you? And that's where a lot of our technical expertise would come into play even today, maybe especially today. The office that I worked in was like you. We had all kinds of techs. One half of the office was technical.

26:21It was chemists and physicists and engineers, electrical and mechanical. People with such esoteric specialties, you would try and imagine what kind of career they would have outside of CIA. Who else in the world would let one person spend a full career doing nothing but ink? Ink. It was so important. It was the bottom line to a lot of the things we did. Ink had to be just right. So we were like that. The other half of the office was my half, which was people who would deploy those tools, who would take them to the field, who would hand them to James. And we always kind of, sort of an inside joke, we called them all James.

27:00All the case officers, they were all guys. We kind of called them all James. And part of us didn't trust James with our gear because we might've spent$5 million on a program to develop that camera system that fit into a Montblanc pen. And now you're asking us to just hand it to James and he's gonna go somewhere. We usually figured out how to go with him. So if he broke it, we could fix it. If he lost it, we could find it. If he forgot how to operate it, we could refresh him. It was a little inside joke. If he left it on the subway, maybe we could go get it. So we traveled around with James. We not only equipped him and we trained him, but we also very often accompanied him.

27:41That lifestyle must have just been epic. I mean, so tell me, for example, about Berlin in the 80s, the height of the Cold War. That city was just full of spies. It probably, who knows, maybe it still is. just full of spies. There's underground tunnels. People are trying to escape from one side to the other. It's just absolutely bonkers. That place must have just been such a hotbed and so fascinating. It was surreal to actually go there, to be there. It was surreal from the moment they put that wall up. I don't know what kind of a reaction they expected from the rest of the world. I think they expected more than they got.

28:14The world just kind of sat and watched and it's like, well, you know, okay, there's a wall, to keep their people in. That was kind of the big revelation was the purpose of the wall was not to keep us out. It was to keep East Berliners in East Berlin, not let them wander over to the West and God knows betray their country. When I would go up there, going into the East was not an easy thing to do. And every vehicle, every person, every document to cross that border at Checkpoint Charlie or at a couple of other places was administratively, it was just a classy bureaucratic mess. But when I really saw it was when one of our officers, very, very senior officer at CIA, he was up there and I was there at the same time and they had laid on a helicopter tour of the wall for him.

29:05And I went along. We're looking now down at that no man's land from the wall to where civilian Germany started. And it was just guns emplaced. It was dogs on chains that could run half a mile either direction. It was guns that were in the ground. They would shoot a spray of bullets in a 360 degree and they were noise activated. It was just like all the different ways you could kill a person if they dared to put a foot on that ground. we flew over a couple of bridges because the wall crosses a couple of bridges and you'd notice that on each side of whatever crossing there was there there were embedded in the water there were platforms with spikes nails so if anybody was on a train or subway or whatever and tried to jump well they'd be impaled there was no way out of there and the guys and the guns in the towers giving you dirty looks that in themselves were scary.

30:05It was amazing. Well, you'll probably never have a job that's as cool as John and Mendez's job, but you can console yourself with something from the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Constant Contact. If you ever feel like you need a marketing degree to tackle small business marketing, you need to check out Constant Contact. Constant Contact is not just any marketing platform. It's an award-winning powerhouse that has helped millions of small businesses go from blending in to standing out, whether it's firing off engaging emails, managing your social media posts, sending SMS messages, organizing events, it's all at your fingertips.

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32:20I know you're like, I don't need to network or I'm already really good at this. Sure. I taught this to the CIA. I've taught this to MI6. I've taught this to actual spy agencies. If they need it, I'm going to go ahead and say that you need it, even though you think you're exempt from this because you're a lawyer or something. And many of the guests on the show already subscribe and contribute to the course. Come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you, of course, belong. And these are non-cringy, non-awkward strategies, very practical stuff. And it just takes a few minutes a day. If you don't get anything out of it, I will give you a full refund because the course is free.

32:50over at sixminutenetworking.com. All right, now back to John and Mendez. So there's definitely people listening right now who are a little confused. Okay, so when Germany was split east and west, they, the allies and the Soviets, you could say, I suppose, split Berlin in half because it was a major city. And then people were leaving East Berlin, which was the under Soviet control, because, you know, it's like occupied by a sort of Soviet satellite state of East Germany. So they were going to the western side of Berlin that was built nicely, had freedom and freedom of movement and had a lot of goods and everything.

33:22So they decided to build a wall to keep the people inside the eastern side of Berlin. And it wasn't just a wall that you could walk up and touch. You could, if you were on the west side, you could walk up and touch and spray paint. And it's got some famous graffiti and you go see it now. It's really interesting. But on the east side, yeah, there's water, there's a big minefield, gun emplacements, all the things that John is talking about to keep Germans, East Germans, from going out of East Germany or East Berlin. And there's an awesome museum in Berlin that I'm sure you've seen called Checkpoint Charlie Museum that has, by the way, it's my favorite museum in the world.

33:55It's where all the escape attempts, successful and otherwise, are cataloged. And people made like hot air balloons out of bedsheets to try and fly over the wall and out of the city. They made little submarines that had little tanks on them so they could go under the river, around those platforms you just talked about, around the water, try to go from one side to the other. And the reason they have this stuff at the museum is some of these people got caught, others didn't. And there's a whole huge list of names of people who made it somewhat near the wall and then ended up getting shot or ended up getting blown up or I don't know, attacked by dogs and died in the process of trying to get to the other side.

34:27So it's actually, there was one that I remember that is burned into my mind of the stuff you talk about in your book where there's a car and in the seat of the car, they had sewn a person inside the car seat, and then the driver sat on that person, and they drove out of East Berlin. That was one of the more desperate car modifications that I ever heard of. Yeah. But it worked. Yeah. You know, whatever works is what you're after. There were lots of issues with cars, and that's why the cars were examined so carefully. We had thermal blankets, so they wouldn't see body heat if they had sensors looking for body heat.

35:03There were a thousand ways to modify a car. There were lots of ways to try and get people out. But tunnels, tunnels were the choice. The CIA dug a lot of really great tunnels. My office was in charge of tunnels. That was one of the things that we did. But we did not dig any tunnels under the wall. The West Germans, the young students, they dug hundreds of tunnels under the wall. And there's somewhere there's numbers of how many people they got out with their tunnels. It was amazing. Totally amateur, just furious. They had family on the other side of that wall that they wanted to rescue them. They went in and got a lot of people out that way.

35:40But like you said, a lot of other people didn't come out that way, and they died trying to cross that field. I gave a talk once at West Point about the Cold War, the end of the Cold War, about the fall of the Berlin Wall, and we were talking about what brought it down. It was commonly accepted that we didn't pull it down. They pushed it down from the east. they pushed it down and came across. And part of the question was, well, why? I mean, what was it they wanted? And I was pointing out rock and roll music, trying to make a connection. And I thought it was a pretty good connection because there were a lot of big, big bands, the big rock and roll bands, Rolling Stones.

36:16They do concerts in Berlin. They always made a point of having the concerts by the wall. They'd point the speakers, this Western rock and roll music, and they blast it you know, over the wall. And they'd have actually an audience in East Berlin in great places where you could hear the music. They could also see Western TV in East Berlin. And those kinds of things were just, they couldn't touch it. They knew it was there. They could hear it. They kind of see it on TV. They wanted out of there. Yeah. I was an exchange student in the former East Germany back in the nineties. And my host father, he talks about, you'd find out through the grape vine, because of course it would be pretty hard to find out.

36:54I mean, you'd find out the Rolling Stones were doing a concert in Berlin via somebody who heard somebody who heard something on Western radio that they, you know, got from across the border. You take the train and go to Berlin. You'd go to either somebody had an apartment and it was asked to elbow in the apartment or you'd go hang out on the street. But the cops were everywhere. Right. Get out of here. No loitering. Because they're like, we know what you're up to. And you couldn't just sit there and jam. And he also said that him and his friends, they would make these humongous antennas and put them on top of their house so that they could get Western TV.

37:23And it was like technically illegal, but it wasn't really enforced, I guess, because you got to pick your battles. So what if people are watching Western TV? But there was a division of like, I don't know, commie Boy Scouts that would climb up your house with a saw, saw the antenna down, and then you'd have to build it again, because they didn't, I guess they didn't want foreign influence. I mean, it's basically tankies would go up and saw your antenna down. But yeah, those concerts, man, they were something. I mean, you hear about it from like music loving East Germans, like my host father, who really were interested in that.

37:51And the only Germans, ironically, that don't love David Hasselhoff. They all knew kind of when that was going to happen. And it was just like the trains were packed with people to go hang out and do nothing in Berlin because you didn't tell the cops what you were doing. Like, oh, yeah, I'm going to visit my cousin. I'm going shopping. It's like, why are there 3 ,000 kids on this train? I wonder if Taylor Swift had been around. Maybe she could have broken the wall all by herself. Yeah, maybe. She can go try it in North Korea. She can go play at the DMZ and see what happens. When you're abroad, you must know that local and foreign intelligence agencies, they're watching you pretty much all the time, right?

38:22So how do you handle counter surveillance? Because as soon as you get there, someone's trying to make you, right? Well, one way to handle it is with disguise. In my time working in disguise, that was the number one issue. Deniability was what we were looking for, either that you weren't American, certainly that you weren't an American official or an American intelligence officer. With disguise, you can turn yourself into a completely other person from another place, from another nationality, speaking hopefully another language. Over the years that I was working, I worked for 27 years. When I started, disguise was something nice to have.

39:01You'd want to have like a little dop kit in the back of your safe with maybe a wig, mustache, glasses. I don't know. It's a little bit different for each person. The question would come up, you know, would you really use it if you needed it? because mostly men, I disguised very few women. It was men, it was men case officers. And even the foreign assets we're working with were men. And men don't really want to put on a wig. I don't know if you've ever had a wig on. No, it sounds really uncomfortable and hot. Yeah, a U.S. Marine would just walk out of the room if you even mentioned putting a wig on him.

39:33But in the time that I was there, things changed. We started working against different categories of people, Maybe not always embassies or diplomatic events, but now we're talking about terrorists and we're talking about narcotics. And we're talking about people who are armed and have every reason in the world to shoot us if they think we're coming for them. At one point, there's a scene in the book where I'm in Latin America. I think I'm in the drug capital of the world in this town where it was dangerous. I was told I was taken to work in an armored car every day and I was just working at the embassy on that trip.

40:08But it was just considered to be really, really dangerous. I was there to take a group of people who were American and make them look Latin, which is pretty easy. Dark hair, dark eyes, contacts, dark skin, not hard to do. Restyle them a little bit. And out of the street, you couldn't tell our guys from their guys. They didn't all speak Spanish. So those guys were told just to shut up. But then I was walking down the street one night going to a kiosk to get cigarettes. I'm dressed for work. I'm wearing stilettos and a business suit and I'm a gringo. I'm a woman who doesn't belong in that city and certainly doesn't belong in that street.

40:46I was walking down and I bump into this group of guys who were just standing around. There were maybe a dozen of them and you could smell the beer halfway down the block and you could see the guns. They all had guns. And I figured, you know, this is the cartel. Pretty much, pretty sure, this is the cartel. And I knew the cartel care less. So they all turned and looked at me. You could almost hear their brains going like, oh, who's that? DEA sending women now? They weren't concerned at all about CIA. They're worried about Drug Enforcement Agency coming down after them. I don't think they're sending.

41:22I don't think it's DEA, but she's a gringo. What's she doing here? And she's working. And where's she working? And I thought, you know what? They just might just shoot me if they've had enough beer. and if they're worried enough about who I am and why in the world am I walking down the street starting to get dark, I shouldn't be there. Well, I had all these training courses that I used to think were a little silly. And one of my training courses told me in a scenario like that, you don't have any choices. You just do not turn around. You just walk through them. And that's what I did. It's one of the scariest things I ever did.

41:55And then walking away from them, you don't know. You don't know if it worked. So being out on the street, When you go to a foreign country, you have to think it through before you go. If it's a hostile country, then you have to think on another level. If it's a country, if it's just say it's Moscow. Oh, well, Moscow has like dedicated teams for every American in that embassy that would come out. They have a team somewhere in a warming room. If it's winter, they have a team waiting. If their person comes out, they can scramble. If their person's in a car, they've got a car on foot. They're on foot.

42:29And they'll just stay with you. Their goal is they don't really care if you know they're there. Their goal is to keep you from doing whatever it is you have in mind, making a phone call, putting up a signal, putting down a dead drop, or, God forbid, meeting with one of their Russian colleagues and collecting information. Their goal was to keep you from doing anything. So if you're visiting there, you need to have a plan when you come into the country. What are you going to do when you walk out the door of the embassy? Knowing that they're going to be with you. What are you going to do about that?

43:01And we spent a lot of time developing options that they could do about that. Somebody I know who was in North Korea, which is another denied access area with no U.S. embassy, this is not an American. She was saying that every time she left their little compound or whatever where she worked, they would follow her and she'd turn around and they'd be pretending to talk on their cell phone or something really clunky. It's like they don't really care if you see them kind of thing. So what she did is she realized, all right, these guys all have pot bellies. They're smokers. So she decided to jog. She said these guys would follow her and they'd be wearing like dress shoes and a button down and it's hot in the summer.

43:35And she'd go out for a jog in Pyongyang, North Korea and they'd have to run after her. And she said she turned around once and she saw this guy with a cigarette in his mouth, dangling out of his mouth, button down shirt, pot belly kind of hanging out in dress shoes, just doing his damnedest to keep up with her, pretending he's jogging too. And she's just like, it's so clunky. They don't care if they get spotted because it's like this pathetic, there's no cover whatsoever. At that point, he's just chasing her. I love these stories. We had a chief of station in Moscow, famous CIA officer named Jack Downing.

44:05They ended up calling him back from retirement to Langley to help them devise some new scenarios. But Jack was a runner. He was a serious athlete, spoke fluent Chinese, spoke fluent Russian. But when he was in Moscow, he was chief of station. And he set a pattern of running every morning, exactly what you're talking about with your acquaintance. But he was a real runner. I mean, he would run two, three miles in the morning, every morning. He was also an ex-Marine. And so what he did is he set a pattern that his team, they were like, he'll be back in seven minutes. We know this drill. And they stopped following him because, I mean, they didn't have evidently a cadre of runners that they could go every morning.

44:46And so he was able to use that brief time that he'd be away to pick up a dead drop or to put up a signal or to do what he had to do. I thought that was so clever. That is clever. Like, all right, this guy's tricked us enough times. I'm not falling for this. I'm not running three miles this morning. I'm going to keep drinking or whatever. And then it's like, all right, I think I shook him. Here's my, I'm going to stretch on this stump over here and drop something in it. I guess it just shows that the highest trained people can also become complacent at some point. I wonder if you catch yourself still doing counter surveillance stuff while you, I know you're retired, but do you ever go on vacation and you're just like, oh, let me check for a tail real quick.

45:21Or like, haven't I seen that guy a few too many times? It's just like got to be burned into your brain after so many years. You notice who's around you. I'm not worried about surveillance anymore, but I still very much to know who's out there. And that old thing once is an accident, twice a coincidence, three times is an act of war. We used to laugh when we bumped into that. We came up with an idea that was a very handy thing to be able to do. And we demonstrated it once in a podcast. I took my son with me to that one. It was a wired podcast. we were demonstrating what disguise on the run is. And you don't have to be running to do disguise on the run.

45:56It's a way of completely changing the way you look while walking down a city street. And I wouldn't recommend it in China because already we stand out like whatever. Of course. But the demonstration in New York was my son walks out of an office building at lunch and he's just wearing a blazer, a cotton blazer, shirt and tie, got nothing. He walks down the street, he walks into this crowd, and they had a long lens on him from maybe a block and a half away. And they're watching him come through this crowd, just like a surveillance team would. And Jesse, he pulls a bag out of his pocket, one of those grocery store bags, pulls on his tie, comes off because it's Velcroed at the back, rolls it up, puts it in.

46:37Now he pulls on his shirt, his button shirt, which has no sleeves to it because I cut them off. And it's open in the back because I cut it open and it's Velcroed. And he just pulls it straight down, keeps it close to the body, rolls it up, puts it in the bag. He's got on a black sleeveless tank underneath. So now he's wearing the blazer, which is one of those unstructured, just a cotton jacket. He takes that off, rolls it up, puts it in the bag. Then he reaches in his pocket, pulls out another bag, puts the first bag with all this stuff in it in the second bag, reaches in another pocket. He pulls out a beanie.

47:13He reaches in, I don't know where he had the glasses. He had Ray-Bans, puts his Ray-Bans on. He had his AirPods around his neck, pulls them up, puts them in his ears, pulls out his cell phone. He's got his music going. He's in a sleeveless tank. He's got full-arm tattoos, both sides, that I put on him the night before. One of these just outrageously, just big, big watches that doesn't fit his profile at all. And he's just this guy bopping down the street all tatted. And you're wondering, where's his skateboard? You know, so if surveillance was following him, he disappeared. This isn't he did this in about 30 seconds.

47:53All of it. He disappeared. And, you know, surveillance typically doesn't follow your face at all. They follow your profile. Whole point here is change your profile and they won't know where you went and they'll think it's their fault. So it's not provocative. That's so interesting, man. I know there's a bit of a non sequitur, but do foreign intelligence agencies often underestimate women? And can you take advantage of that as well? Like, I can imagine you're in the Middle East and they're thinking, like, women can't do this job. So you're like, all right, good, okay. All female cadre, they're going to get overlooked.

48:25They're all dressed the same as the local women. They're covered from head to toe. I mean, that's got to make things trickier for those guys if they're trying to follow you around. We like to dress them like the local men. Well, and the local women, but show our camis is very forgiven. and you really don't know who's in there, what's in there. So we discovered that our women could move around at night because up to then that was very problematic. The burqa, of course, is the greatest disguise God ever invented. You can put anybody, anything inside that burqa. In Pakistan, and I think in Afghanistan, it's pretty much a shooting offense to try and take a peek.

49:00Even in a truck crossing the border, you've got a driver. He's probably got all kinds of materials in that truck. that he's going to sell on the other side of the border. He's got his wife sitting next to him in the burka. That was just the greatest disguise scenario ever because the border people would never ask that driver to show her face and they would never ask her to speak. It just goes against all their rules. The burka was the greatest disguise. As far as cover stories are concerned, what sort of cover stories could you even be using back then? It seems unusual for anybody back then, let's say the 70s, to travel alone to the Middle East, especially a lone woman.

49:39So what sort of story is good enough to be passable, but also too little to follow up on or be uninteresting enough that people would accept it, but then just not care to ask more? Well, for me, an easy way to do it was to take a bunch of cameras and to be a photographer. That was a natural cover for me. For women that are just traveling, I don't know, you have to put together a scenario, either a business thing or a colleague or a family connection or you have to build something that they can live with. Usually the issue wasn't women because again, our operatives, pretty much men. That was the piece of business that was so denied to the women.

50:19To come up with cover stories for the men was relatively simple. Their businesses, their executives. I know one person we disguised as a Jordanian pipe fitter. It just happened that he could talk about pipe fitting. He actually knew something about it. And all we had to do was change his teeth and change his nose. And he looked like a Jordanian. The piece that's always missing in these conversations is that the real work in our office, in OTS, was solving problems. People would come to us and say, I'm going on a trip. This is where I'm going to be. This is how long I'm going to be there. I'm not sure how to configure this, but I need to be able to do this and do this and meet with this person.

51:01So what have you got for me? What can you give me in the way of documents? You need new documents. My husband, Tony Mendez, was hired on as a counterfeiter forger. He was a fine artist when they hired him, but he could make you anything that you needed. And he could make it as good as it needed to be, or you could cross an international border with those documents. So is it documents? Here's our document guy. If it's disguised, here is we've got labs. We can work with you. We can turn you into anybody you want to be. It's a little bit of a fantasy land. What are the limits of disguise, right? Because in the book, you say, oh, these makeup techniques could help people blend into, say, apartheid South Africa or obscure the presence of a Westerner in North Korea.

51:40Are you saying you can make a white person look like an Asian? Because if so, that is that's really incredible. I imagine you can't turn a white person into a person that looks like they're from Africa, but white to Asian, maybe, I don't know, like you mentioned, white to Latin American. Okay. What are the limits of this realistically? Might be white to Asian. I mean, we had masks, didn't used to talk about masks. They were, they were kind of off limits and it was fine with me. I didn't talk about masks until about seven or eight years ago when for some reason it's okay. The CIA is okay about that.

52:14They're okay about me writing about masks. Tells me that we're not, either we're not using masks or we're not using them in the same way or they're not made the same way. So I can talk about masks. We never made a mask that we could turn a Caucasian person into an Asian person. Think Chinese. The fit around the eyes is one of the most important things with those masks. And the shape and the fit, it wasn't going to work. In terms of makeup, that also wouldn't work with an Asian. So we would probably just not even attempt to do that when I was working there. I never knew that we did. Before COVID, we used to use those face masks that, you know, just the face masks that you would use with COVID, that kind of mask, because those were common in China.

52:59Those were common. I don't know if you remember your history, but there was so much pollution in China. You couldn't see the buildings on the next block because it was just a haze. Everybody was wearing those masks. That was a good start because if that was the case and if it was daytime, you could do sunglasses, you could do dark hair, you could, but our people were too tall. You know, our people would always stand out in those crowds. That was part of the operation. This operation has to somehow accommodate that fact, that our people, not that they'd be recognizable individually, but as a type, we didn't fit into their, and they didn't fit into our environment either.

53:42You mentioned working with local agents and things like that. There's a part in the book where you talk about the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. I assume you're not supposed to get too close to these people, but I wonder if they're ever on your mind years later. Because I'm thinking, if I'm in your shoes, I would be so curious if the people I've trained and interfaced with, let's say in the 90s, were even still alive. In the book, I ended up training this young Mujahideen who was in the States just briefly. I never knew all the parameters of why he was here and what else he was doing. My piece of it was to train him in using a camera with a long lens.

54:19He was out in the desert. He had a reason to be there. That's where he operated. He was on horseback. And of course, like most Afghans, he was bitterly against the Soviets. But because of where he was, he would see the planes coming over. He would every once in a while see some of the weaponry. He was in a great position to take some photographs if he just knew how to do it. We were interested in the planes. So I took him over by Reagan International Airport, Arlington Cemetery, and taught him how to use a long lens, how to pan, how to capture those moving objects, how to do still photography, how to take something universal like a pack of cigarettes or a coin and put it in the picture so we could figure out the size of things.

55:06He was amazed that the CIA would send a woman to train him. You know, he'd been brought up to all the women he knew were behind a veil and couldn't go out without their male sponsors. So we had a couple of long talks. His English wasn't that good, but it got better while he was there. He and his, I think it was his uncle, they were working. They were being paid with medicine. They were being paid crates of medicine to treat their colleagues. There was no money involved. I loved training him. And yeah, I thought about him because the Mujahideen, of course, flipped and then they became our enemy and we were shooting each other.

55:47So after all of that transpired, I ended up going to Peshawar, unrelated to photography. But while I was there, I went into this kind of cavernous room and around the edge of that room were Mujahideen, all of them in their uniforms, all of them with their guns. They're sitting on the floor with their backs against the wall. Half of them were asleep. They had like almost come off of a field, a battlefield. This was a little bit of R &R they were having. And I was just struck and I started thinking about that young kid and wondering if he was in that room. You put them all in the same uniform and had them all the same gun.

56:22They're all kind of the same height. They look a lot alike. But yeah, I used to worry about him. He changed. We wrote a book called The Moscow Rules. And at the front of that book, we list the rules. There are 42 of them. And we added a rule to never fall in love with your agent. And we didn't mean romantic love. We meant don't get too close to them. You can't. It's like you and your dentist or you and your doctor. You have a very pleasant relationship, but it should not get too personal. Not from our point of view, because it could blur your vision. You can make the wrong decisions. Now for something that's not top secret, shout it from the rooftops.

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59:33If you can't find it, the code's not working. You're not sure if it exists. Email me, jordan at jordanharbinger.com. We're happy to surface that for you because it is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with John and Mendez. It seems like you dealt with a lot more than just misogyny and casual sexism during your training. I mean, there was a guy who threw a grenade at you on a firing range. That's pretty intense. And there were a lot of attempts to sabotage your performance while you were at the CIA. For example, the guy who told you, I think he said something like, oh, it's a photo mission, but it was actually a disguise mission.

1:00:06So you came in with a bunch of cameras and film or whatever, and then you didn't have any of the stuff you needed to create a disguise. So you basically had to create stuff out of what was it, stuff people had in their luggage or whatever. And I wonder, and I'm not excusing this behavior at all, obviously, but do you think being challenged like that made you better at what you did in some ways? I think it made me more determined, you know, to not put up with that kind of behavior. It was all around you. And like you said at the beginning of this conversation, this wasn't just the CIA. It's just going on in the American workplace writ large.

1:00:37My mom worked at Boeing her entire life. She had the same kind of thing happening. I picked up Michelle Obama's book somewhere in the middle of writing mine, and she's talking about how she couldn't get a loan or a mortgage. This was in the 70s without her husband. There was a lot of this going on. And a lot of women just decided to tough it out and keep pushing ahead. I don't know. The guy didn't throw a grenade at me. He rolled it at me. And he had disarmed it. So it couldn't hurt me. What it could do is scare me, which it did. The loudest bang I ever heard in my life. But, you know, six of one, half dozen of the other.

1:01:12I just want to make sure I don't have the wrong impression there. Well, it still exploded, right? It wasn't the full explosion of shrapnel, I guess. I mean, but it still exploded next to you. He didn't mean to hurt me. He meant to scare me. And I mean, he did. But he I think he was expecting that I would run. I think that's what he wanted. He wanted just to see me be a girl on a firing range and run. And I didn't run. That's why I didn't. I thought, huh, I saw what he was doing. I had no idea it was going to go off. I just I'm like, he's just trying to spoof me. Then bang. I mean, I couldn't stop shaking for about 15 minutes.

1:01:48I could not stop shaking. It was really scary. The one who my boss who on that operation who told me it was all photo didn't need any disguise stuff because I could do either one. I could do a lot of things. And if I just had to know what to pack because you're on these trips, you're going to places where there there's no Home Depot and there's no anything. There's no there's no place to buy film or fixative or. So he said photo, but it was actually disguised. That turned out to be probably the biggest operation I ever took part in in my life. And I didn't know it. I didn't get to see the paperwork for that operation.

1:02:23He didn't show it to me, which breaks CIA's rules because you never go off on an operation without personally having read what you need to do. But this happened really quickly. And we wrote that operation in a book called, I wrote it in a book called Spy Dust. It's a great operation. I didn't put it in this most recent book because I'd already told the story. Probably should have put it in here and told it again. It was great. It was really great. It was a big deal. I did notice the guy who did this to you, the boss in the book, you call him Smallwood now. Is that his real name or did you give him that nickname because of his consistent little dick energy, as the kids say?

1:03:00That is not his real name. But when I gave him that, I just made it, just pulled it out of the my younger sister, who was the first person to tell me that that means little dick. Honestly, I had no idea. And if I had known, I probably wouldn't have used that. But I didn't know. I thought it was the name of a cabinetry company in England. I'm not kidding you. So the man in my office, after the book came out, would come over and say, I can't believe you called him that. I don't even tell him that I didn't know. I'm like, well, you know, he deserved it. He did. That is so funny. I mean, whatever, the guy deserved it, right?

1:03:42So if he's still around, good. And if he's passed, oh, well, he's not reading the book. I know you worked a lot against the KGB, of course, especially in Moscow, which is the focus of the episode that I'm going to air in a few days here, our Moscow Rules episode. But I'm wondering, what's the coolest piece of tech of theirs that you came across? Because I know that you, working in the office of OTS, Office of Technical Services. Am I getting that right? Surely you were looking at what they were making and going, oh, we have a better thing than that. Or, oh, wow, that's pretty smart. We got to make our own version of that.

1:04:10Well, the coolest thing was not the latest thing. The coolest thing that comes to my mind, it's on display in the International Spy Museum right now. It was a big wooden seal, hand-carved seal, an American eagle, very elaborate carving, just a beautiful piece of work. And it was presented to the American ambassador in Moscow by a bunch of Russian school kids in like the 50s. Group came and they wanted him to have it. He loved it. And he hung it in his office in the embassy. And it's decorative. It's just beautiful. And I mean, somebody would have looked it over to make sure, okay. And they looked on the back, they looked fine, put it up on the wall.

1:04:50Well, it turns out it was an audio bug, but it was a new and novel. It was so interesting that once it was found and it hung in the ambassador's office for something like 10 years, and they had security people come through those offices maybe monthly and they do sweeps, security sweeps. It never came up. I mean, if there's a bug, you should be able to spot it. It never came up. When they found it, They sent it to our audio people and they opened up the back of it. And my God, it's a tuning fork. It's just a long piece of metal. There are no moving parts to it. How can that be a bug? How can it pick up and transmit audio?

1:05:34We couldn't figure it out for the longest time. We called it the thing. And in the International Spy Museum behind glass and prominently displayed, the signage says the thing. It was a new approach to how to capture audio. that was so elegant and so sophisticated and so advanced that our own people couldn't recognize it as an audio device. And this was just a great example kind of of making something with nothing, because Russia back then didn't have a lot, didn't have a really robust technological advantage. But that's when we started having a little more respect for their technical people. Yeah, wow.

1:06:15The only thing I can think of, I mean, I don't know if you know how it works, but if it's just vibrating, the only thing I can think of, and I am no scientist, is it picks up speech and then vibrates at a much higher or much lower frequency than that speech, and then some other device picks up those frequencies that maybe travel easier and decipher that, like sort of brings them back down, you know, six octaves or whatever, and it's just so high that you can't hear it. I can't tell you. I really don't know. I didn't follow that. That wasn't in my area of expertise. Yeah, I mean, I have no idea.

1:06:42I'm spitballing based on how can a tuning fork pick up vibrations and then transmit them, and the only thing I can think of is it vibrates at frequencies people can't hear. And then it goes through walls and windows and somebody outside is picking up those frequencies. And then, you know, they sort of downgrade it. I don't know. Look, if anybody knows how that works, email me because that is so fascinating. That's, I mean, what a cool device. And it was there for so long and it doesn't have a battery, right? So that thing was just probably effective the whole time that it was in there for years.

1:07:09The other thing that was going on back then that took years and years and years to start sorting it out. There was a barrage of microwaves at that American embassy over the years, constantly coming in. And people were worried about health issues and this and that, the other. I've never followed that either because I'm too far away from it now. Not something that piques my interest, but I'm looking right now at Havana syndrome and I'm thinking, huh, I wonder if that has anything to do with the microwaves they used to send into the embassy. There's a lot going on there. Yeah, I'm always very curious how that stuff shakes out.

1:07:43Because it almost sounds psychological, but then you think, okay, they would have probably figured this out by now. It's not like they're not putting any resources towards this. Some of these plots and plans are quite funny. You mentioned in the book, there's a plan to create an Osama bin Laden double and discredit him by going to strip clubs and bars. And I couldn't help but think, that's got to be kind of a funny gig as a CIA agent. Like, okay, put on this mask and glow blow like 20K in a strip club and then just get hammered and start walking around, I don't know, Dubai or Berlin or whatever, bouncing to different clubs.

1:08:11and you would just have a line out the door of guys trying to get that job. That's right. Pick me, pick me. That was Tony and I, we actually wrote a memo after 9-11. We were driving home from New York. I had a yellow line pad and we're just spitballing ideas. What could they do? What could they do? And where we were was the idea of sowing unrest within Al-Qaeda, where they'd start suspecting each other of maybe it had to be someone within this group. How could they possibly know. We were doing all kinds of crazy ideas. Tony had years earlier, at the beginning of Argo, the story Argo, he had made another Shah of Iran.

1:08:54Actually, he made two fake Shahs of Iran. So that would be three that existed, the real one and two fakes. And the idea was, well, if the Iranians were so worried, if they were so upset that their Shah had come to the United States for cancer treatment. Well, what if he left and somebody filmed it? He's not there anymore. So call your revolution off was one idea. But the idea of doing a double or a triple of someone and then using it in an interesting way wasn't unprecedented. We have a picture of Saddam Hussein in a boat with about 10 doubles. So it looks like 11 Saddam Husseins. There's a history of using doubles for this and that.

1:09:32There was also the fact that those terrorists that were actually on the plane and flying it had been in the States and had been going to strip clubs. And we just thought, well, that breaks every rule in the religion and drinking. So yeah, it would have been an interesting, but they didn't want to do it. They didn't want to do it? What? Do you know why? I don't know why. I don't think Tony really got behind it. I think it was spitballing, but I'm not sure that we formally, you know, when he took the Argo story forward, he said the hardest part of Argo was not walking them through the airport. It was walking that idea.

1:10:05Oh, we're going to put on a movie. We're going to make a movie. We're going to have a production company. We're going to have an office in Hollywood. Taking that idea and moving it through the CIA, he said that was hard. For people who don't know, Argo was the operation, the rescue operation of the U.S. and other hostages who were taken at the embassy in Iran. And what was that? Was that 1979? During the revolution there, they took everybody hostage and they escaped. And if you haven't seen the movie Argo, they essentially escaped because a fake movie production company full of CIA agents came in and what, smuggled everybody out somehow?

1:10:35I mean, what's the five minute version of this? You made a good running. Thanks. They took over the Iranians. They had a revolution. They took over the American embassy. They took the staff of the American embassy and held them hostage for 444 days. But six of them got away from the embassy and got outside of that perimeter and ended up at the Canadian ambassador's residence. and then they were trapped. They couldn't go through the airport. There was no way out. The borders were too far away. So Tony Mendez said, I know. We'll disguise them as a Hollywood location scouting crew and I'll be the producer.

1:11:12And we're just coming to Iran because we want to film in the bazaar. We're just checking it out. Then we're all going to leave through the airport. And we've got all the fake documents. We've got everything we need. In fact, that's what they did. And those six people came out and all their colleagues stayed for 444 days in really bad scenario, bad conditions. But the six that were rescued, they were really lucky. They're still around. They still check in. Gosh, what a harrowing story. And stuff like this, by the way, is why whenever you go to one of those countries and you're just on a tour looking at fruit or whatever, there's guys following you around and you're thinking, why are you following me?

1:11:49I'm a tourist. I have a backpack on. I'm wearing flip-flops. Come on, guys. And the reason is because you just never know. sure you're just a kid walking through Central Asia. Well, we want to make sure that you're really just looking at, I don't know, mangoes or passion fruit or whatever, pomegranates. It's like you can just see these. My buddy went to Iran in 2010. He invited me. I wish I'd gone. He said they just followed him around fruit markets and tourist areas all day, all night, 24-7 these, I don't know, IRGC or whatever domestic security guys. And they would just, they would get so annoyed with him shopping in the bazaar that they would just start bumping into him because they were just sick of being in the market and he would eventually leave the market, go back to his hotel, and they'd just be sitting outside.

1:12:27It was like they just got bored of following him. So they decided to make his life more annoying. But it's because of this, right? It's because they're like, you know, do something. Shit or get off the pot, man. Are you a spy or not? We can't tell. We can't leave anything to chance because last time we trusted somebody to be a Hollywood location scout, they brought a bunch of hostages out. Yeah, exactly. Surveillance, if you're the one doing the following, it must become very tedious. I bet. God, you said the agency values ENTJ personality types. And I wondered, Is that a real thing? Because that's my personality type.

1:12:56Did I miss my calling as a CIA operative? What is it about ENTJ that makes those people so suitable for fieldwork? When I mentioned that in the book, I'm quoting Valerie Plame, who is an ENTJ, and said in her book, I haven't tested this, but she said a lot of her colleagues in her training class when she came in, there's like a class every year of CTs, young professional officers that come on board. She said a good number of them were ENTJ, and she thought that that represented the kind of personality that the CIA values. And there definitely is a personality type that they want. I don't know that it's defined to those four letters in Myers-Briggs, but that type of personality does very well at CIA in operations.

1:13:40A person who has serious interpersonal skills, who can engage other people, who has that personality. You meet them and you're really interested in them and you kind of want to be their friend. All of a sudden, those kinds of people, we're looking for those kinds of people. And that's a thing that we can't teach. You know, we can teach you everything else pretty much, how to shoot a gun. We could teach you the geography of the country, send you to school, learn the language. We could teach you everything you need to know. But you need to come in the door. If you want to be an operations officer, a case officer, you need to kind of bring that sort of a personality in with you.

1:14:14It is a title. That's interesting. I do have a lot of introvert tendencies as well, though. I read two books a week. I do tons of research on things. I need me time to recharge here and there. So I don't know. I'm on the fence. And it's definitely too late for me. I'm 44. You're too late to be an operations officer. 32 is pretty much the cutoff. They have so much training to do that by the time they're done, they still want to get their value out of you. I would just say that I share all the tendencies you just mentioned. I read voluminously. I value quiet time. I have to recharge. Yeah, I know we're running out of time here.

1:14:45I know you're getting tired, as am I, speaking to me time. You've been stationed in so many places. What is your favorite? You know, are there any sort of places where, yeah, Paris is great, but Burma is really special. You know, I'm very curious you having lived in so many places. You know, the CIA is a little funny about which places I could say I was in and other places that they didn't want me to name. There was one place I mentioned that there were Toreadors and a pink cape over the suitcase in front of me in line at the hotel. They said, no, no, no, that says where you are. I said, no, it doesn't.

1:15:15I can be anywhere in the southern tier of Europe. They're still doing bullfighting all over the place in France and Portugal. It doesn't say I'm any. So places that I really liked. I really liked Bangkok. I liked that part of the world. That was an amazing place to live at the time. I expect it still is. And the other part of it is I have to call it the subcontinent. If you read the book, I mean, just again and again, you're like, oh, I know where she is. Now I still know where she is, but I went out there for a summer for three months to fill in for someone, just fell in love with that part of the world.

1:15:48When I went out the first time, I was a photo operator. When I came back, I said, I'd like an assignment there. They said, the only job opening up in your timeline is disguise. I said, so train me. Me in disguise training for a year and a half. I completely changed my career field to go there. And I I loved it when I got there. It was a great, great assignment. It must be fun and exciting traveling and living all around the world and all these crazy places. I feel like it would suit me well, but what I'm not sure would suit me well is not knowing any of the real names of the people that I worked with or that I saw on a regular basis or constantly having to make new friends and losing touch with the old ones because maybe you never really knew them in the first place.

1:16:26This is all pre-internet, right? So it's not like you just add somebody on social media or you've got their email, and then when you move from Portugal to Italy or to Bangkok, you can just keep in touch. This is a group of people that you probably can't even call by phone. You have to send a letter to someplace and see if they're even there anymore. You know, I used to collect stationery as a traveling technical operations officer. I stayed in a lot of nice hotels, and I would always take the stationery that's always out. I used it to write home because back then we were writing letters, but I was never writing a letter from where I was.

1:16:58So they got a lot of mail from where I had been, but they never knew where I was, and they never knew where I was going. but they knew that at one point I had been in the Taj Hotel, say in Bombay, and they would admire the stationery. That was just adding to what you're saying. Yeah, you walk into CIA, and you don't know it when you walk in, but a lot of us basically say goodbye to our friends that we grew up with, to where we came from, to our old besties, because over time it's just too hard to live that lie, to live your cover, to kind of obscure where you are. And so you end up kind of cutting those connections and you replace them with CIA people who are, I call them, they're insiders.

1:17:46Your old friends are outsiders, come through a wall. Now you've got a new set of friends. They're insiders. And throughout your career, you'll keep bumping into these people. You'll see them in headquarters between tours. You go on a new tour. Oh, you knew with this person, you worked with them. And that goes until you hit retirement. And when you hit retirement, you walk back through that wall and the people on the inside stay on the inside. And now you're on the outside. And a lot of the connections that you thought were just, you know, typical friendly connections, they don't stand up because, you know, maybe you always laughed and talked to Bill about the job.

1:18:26Well, you can't talk about the job or about your mutual friends. Well, you know, maybe the mutual friends have moved on and he doesn't want to talk about, oh, he's over here, he's over there. So all of your inside friends now are unavailable to you. And your old outside friends have abandoned you because they never heard from you. And in retirement, you kind of have to start from scratch in a way. And a lot of our men, remember it was mostly men, had terrible histories when they retired for longevity. They would die way faster than the normal population. Most of them in my office, the technical types, didn't really have a lot going on outside of work.

1:19:04You know, work consumed us. You might get a little bit of that in the book. We were just living and breathing. That's what we were doing. And you didn't have time for social stuff so much. Our men, 18 months, and they'd have heart attacks. Tony used to say it was like jumping from a moving train or drinking from a fire hose. Pick one, but they would die. So we rearranged, totally rearranged our retirement process. Now there's a six-month, the last I heard, stepping down. They teach you to write a resume, how to use your skills, how to use the skills. You know, what is a former audio guy who spent his career installing bugs?

1:19:42You know, he's a third-story kind of guy. How does he write his resume? Well, we would give them lessons in how to rephrase the work that he knew how to do. Transitioning out must be tough. I know a lot of former CIA operations people, men and women, and I'll say something like, oh, I got pitched by this former CIA guy. Do you know him? And she'll be like, ah, I've never heard of that person. And then I'll send her a photo and she's like, oh, wait, without the hair? You know, I do know that guy. I just didn't know his name was Andrew because that's not what I heard when I was working there. Or I'll say something like, hey, this guy was head of station at this place.

1:20:12You know, I don't know. What does he look like? Here he is. Oh, yeah, I recognize that guy. And I just think that's such a weird thing to do. You don't know anyone's name, but you see them all the time. It's not that they've faded from memory. You just know a completely different version of them. So when they retire and you're retired, you're like, oh, your name's Daryl. That's hilarious. My name's Daryl, too. And you just never knew that, even though you worked together for half a decade. You know, you have work names completely. I have there's a whole personality that's in the file system somewhere at the CIA.

1:20:41It's my file. My name is not in that file. Everything in there is pretty much under my working name. And the working name was mostly for paperwork. because my name would change depending on where I was going and what I was doing. But the idea was if somebody ever overran one of our offices and got into the files and we're looking through the files, you would not be in those files. Your name would not be divulged. I feel like this episode is such a great prequel to the Moscow Rules show that we did a few years back. So again, I'm going to air that one later this week. And if y 'all enjoyed this episode, which I'm sure you did, you will absolutely love that episode, which includes a lot more.

1:21:18I'm going war espionage and other high stakes shenanigans. So, Jonna, thank you so much for coming back on the show. This stuff is always so fascinating. I love the first one. I love this one, too. Thank you. Thank you. If you're looking for another episode of The Jordan Harbinger Show to check out, here's a trailer of our interview with Jack Barsky, former KGB spy who posed as an American in a truer than life version of a Hollywood movie. This is one of our most popular episodes of the show. Jack not only dodged the FBI for decades, but also defected from the Soviet Union, secretly becoming a real American.

1:21:51We'll learn how spies were recruited and trained during the Cold War and what skills Jack used to assimilate seamlessly into American culture. I was untouchable. I was above the law. I was always bypassing customs and passport control. So a young person, it really feels good because I never liked rules. How did you flip to eventually becoming full American? I know they tried to call you home. Can you take us through that? They called me back as an emergency departure. They've done this in the past, they call back an agent, and as soon as they step on Soviet soil, they are jailed or even executed.

1:22:26I was stalling the Soviets, and then one day they send one of their resident agents, and he said to me, you've got to come home or else you're dead. It was a threat. I decided I would defy them and tell them that I'm not returning. I will not betray any secrets and please give the money on my account to my German family. Wow. Tell us how you got caught because the story is just not complete until you, like you said, had to face your past. I was stopped on the other side of a toll gate. It was a state trooper. Just like to check your license and registration. And could you step out of the car? I step out of the car still not having a clue what was going on.

1:23:06Out of the corner of my eye, somebody approaching me from the back. The fellow introduced himself. He says, Joe Riley, FBI, and he showed me this badge. We would like to talk with you. The first question I asked, am I under arrest? And the answer was no. Then I said, what took you so long? For more from Jack Barsky, including how Jack was finally caught by the FBI and what happened after that, check out episode 285 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. Incredible, incredible interviewee. I love her. She's so awesome. One of the first American spies actually was a woman, Agent 355 in the Revolutionary War.

1:23:44I think people, they still don't even know who she is. So talk about top secret. Secret never got out. That's pretty incredible. I could be wrong about that. Somebody looked that up. I couldn't find it. All things John and Mendez will be in the show notes over on the website at jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers, deals, and discount codes, ways to support this show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show. Also, our newsletter, We Bit Wiser, over at jordanharbinger.com slash news. Practical bit every Wednesday. Read it in under two minutes. Something that you can apply right away will improve your decisions, your psychology, your relationships.

1:24:19Well worth the investment. Great companion to the show. jordanharbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Of course, 6 Minute Networking over at 6minutenetworking.com. I'm at jordanharbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

1:24:49Now, if you know somebody who's interested in spy stuff, or maybe women in careers that are traditionally only dudes, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Strictly Stalking Podcast. Hey, listeners, I know there's no shortage of true crime content out there, but I have to tell you about this new podcast to binge on. It's called Strictly Stalking, which is a clever title, I admit. Every Tuesday, hosts Jamie and Jake cover a unique stalking case by interviewing stalking survivors, advocates, and experts.

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1:25:59Jamie and Jake are more than just the voices on the podcast. They're actually trying to make a positive change for survivors of stalking, and they're taking us along for the ride. Glad they're helping bring awareness to the reality of stalking and hopefully help others who are in these types of crazy situations. We've heard those situations on Feedback Friday. They're absolutely real and absolutely terrifying. Check out Strictly Stalking on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Need better internet? Cox Internet has the fast, reliable speeds you're looking for. Perfect for seamless streaming, gaming, and working from home.

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