The Master of Disguise: My Secret Life in the CIA - Hardcover

Antonio J. Mendez

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688163025 ISBN 13: 9780688163020

Publisher: William Morrow, 1999

Synopsis

Tony Mendez led two lives. To his friends, he was a soft-spoken, nondescript bureaucrat working for the Department of Defense. To the leaders of the CIA, he was their master of disguise--an undisputed genius who could create an entirely new identity for anybody, anywhere, anytime. Combining the cunning tricks of a magician with the analytical insight of a psychologist, Mendez shows us how he helped hundreds of people escape potentially fatal situations.

From "Wild West" adventures in East Asia to Cold War intrigue in Moscow, Mendez was there. He earned the CIA's Intelligence Star of Valor for his role in engineering the escape of six Americans from Tehran in 1980. On the fiftieth anniversary of the CIA, he was named one of the fifty all-time stars of the spy trade, honored with the Trailblazer Award, and granted exclusive permission to tell his fascinating story--all of it. Here he gives us a privileged look at what really happens in the field and behind closed doors at the highest level of international espionage: some of it shocking, frightening, and wildly inventive--all of it unforgettable.Tony Mendez led two lives. To his friends, he was a soft-spoken, nondescript bureaucrat working for the Department of Defense. To the leaders of the CIA, he was their master of disguise--an undisputed genius who could create an entirely new identity for anybody, anywhere, anytime. Combining the cunning tricks of a magician with the analytical insight of a psychologist, Mendez shows us how he helped hundreds of people escape potentially fatal situations.

 

About this title

About the Author

Tony Mendez is a retired CIA officer who worked undercover for 25 years, participating in some of the most important operations of the Cold War. He earned the CIA's Intelligence Medal of Merit and was chosen as one of 50 officers to be awarded the Trailblazer Medallion.

He is an award-winning painter and the author of The Master of Disguise and Spy Dust, which he co-wrote with his wife Jonna Mendez, also a retired intelligence officer. His most recent book is Argo, which tells the story of the operation he ran to rescue six Americans hiding in the Canadian Embassy in Tehran during the hostage crisis. The operation inspired the Warner Brothers feature film of the same name. Mendez currently lives and works in his studios and gallery on his farm in Maryland with his wife.

From "Wild West" adventures in East Asia to Cold War intrigue in Moscow, Mendez was there. He earned the CIA's Intelligence Star of Valor for his role in engineering the escape of six Americans from Tehran in 1980. On the fiftieth anniversary of the CIA, he was named one of the fifty all-time stars of the spy trade, honored with the Trailblazer Award, and granted exclusive permission to tell his fascinating story--all of it. Here he gives us a privileged look at what really happens in the field and behind closed doors at the highest level of international espionage: some of it shocking, frightening, and wildly inventive--all of it unforgettable.Tony Mendez led two lives. To his friends, he was a soft-spoken, nondescript bureaucrat working for the Department of Defense. To the leaders of the CIA, he was their master of disguise--an undisputed genius who could create an entirely new identity for anybody, anywhere, anytime. Combining the cunning tricks of a magician with the analytical insight of a psychologist, Mendez shows us how he helped hundreds of people escape potentially fatal situations.

 

Reviews

Former CIA chief of disguise Mendez was an award-winning spy (yes, they have awards). Here, given unique permission by that agency to write about his career, he offers an entertaining and action-filled, though restrained, memoir of his Cold War clandestine service, emphasizing the gritty, complicated realities of intelligence work. Experienced as an illustrator and seeking a little excitement, in 1965 he answered a newspaper ad for navy artists to work overseas, and soon found himself signing on with "the Company" as a graphics specialist in the technical services division. Mendez effectively conveys the tension of forging documents on short notice and knowing that an agent's life depended on his accuracy. The ambitious Mendez quickly sought overseas transfer; this, coupled with his innovations in the then nascent fields of alias creation, countersurveillance and disguise, made him into a sought-after specialist who was brought in to numerous hot spots to perform daunting tasks. The book is packed with these stories, but the detail on espionage techniques his team developed can be excessively dry, and Mendez at times turns abruptly circumspect to avoid divulging current components of spycraft. Mendez offers a balanced and humanized portrait of life within the CIA, acknowledging the strain on agents' families, and grounds his tale in the Cold War era's historical realities, producing a volume with appeal for both spy buffs and the simply curious. 8 pages of photos not seen by PW. 6-city author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The retired, highly decorated chief of disguise for the CIA highlights his adventurous 25-year career. Mendez is not modest about his considerable accomplishments. He takes credit for ``creating and deploying many of the most innovative techniques in the espionage trade.'' And the remainder of this book (vetted by the agency) is, in one sense, a justification of that claim. In 1965 the author began with the agency as a low-level technicianessentially a graphic artist who specialized in forging documents. Graduallythrough a combination of skill, pluck, luck, diligence, and ambitionhe rose through the agency hierarchy, eventually participating in dazzling cloak-and-dagger operations in some of the world most exotic and dangerous locations: southeast Asia, the Soviet Union, Iran. The most interesting sections describe his endeavors in the mid-1970s to generate techniques to cope with the umbrageous KGB surveillance of American operatives in Moscow and his gripping account (untold in full until now) of the CIA's role in ``exfiltrating'' (removing) six Americans from Tehran during the hostage crisis in 1980. Oddly, Mendez and McConnell elect to record about halfway through the book his ``flawless'' record of 150 successful exfiltrations; this effectively removes from his subsequent accounts of such actions all vestiges of suspensea weird decision, to say the least. Another narrative annoyance is the decision to begin many of the subsections of the book with paragraphs that sound as if they were lifted from, well, bad spy novels. For example: ``This guy is going south on us, fast,' the Chief of Station, Simon,' explained, leaning over his desk and speaking with a crisp but gentle precision that was barely audible above the chugging air conditioners.'' Nonetheless, the coauthors convey with clarity something of this shadow world which requires of its inhabitants hard work, strong stomachs, low blood pressure, and a full measure of creative improvisation. A swift, engrossing summary of a life and a way of life. (8 pages photos, not seen) (Book-of-the-Month Club selection; author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

A recent retiree from the CIA's gadgets department, Mendez parts the curtains on his career in espionage. The CIA cleared every word in Mendez's book, as it does every tome by former employees, perhaps a pro forma task here because Mendez doesn't talk out of school and sports an admiring attitude toward the CIA. Palpably proud to have been a secret agent, Mendez effectively conveys the thrills its practitioners derive from espionage, via an anecdotal accounting of his varied 30-year career. Like many, he answered a vaguely worded newspaper advertisement and started out as a document forger. Ambitious, Mendez broadened his perspective beyond the print shop, mastered disguise and surveillance techniques, and spent a few years abroad supporting operations in Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Thailand. After Vietnam wound down, Mendez's career so prospered that he became the go-to guy for spiriting assets from hostile territories: the reader receives a vivid sense of the clandestine world through his part in the successful operations to extract a KGB defector from India and an Iranian spy from revolutionary Iran. The latter exploit was a prelude to an operation lavishly publicized at the time--the escape of six Americans from the U.S. embassy, seized by Iranians. Mendez divulges the hitherto-suppressed details of the caper, a zanily brazen operation in which the diplomats and Mendez slipped out of Teheran posing as Hollywood filmmakers. Garnished with his efforts to defeat KGB surveillance in Moscow (and glazed, no doubt, by coauthor McConnell), Mendez's memoir is a dish cloak-and-dagger connoisseurs will savor. No surprise the CIA's PR sentinels were all for it. Gilbert Taylor

What is it like to be a spy? Anyone who has ever wondered about those shadowy figures (so often described in fiction by Le Carr? and others) can now get a peek into the world of 1950s and 1960s espionage. Mendez worked in the CIA's Technical Services Department for over 25 years, eventually rising to its top position. With the approval of the CIA's censors, he has written a remarkably detailed picture of his work as a document-forger and disguise-maker for undercover assignments all over the world. This is endlessly fascinating stuff, especially for a generation raised on James Bond and George Smiley. Although the book is overwritten in spots, in the end, Mendez spins a good tale. For general public collections.AEdward Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0688163025
• ISBN 13: 9780688163020
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 351