It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And today on the show, nothing is as it seems.

JONNA MENDEZ: We called it hiding in plain sight. Being able to transform - I always found it to be a very powerful thing, the fact that you were there and nobody knew it but you.

ZOMORODI: This is Jonna Mendez, the CIA's former chief of disguise. Her undercover career spanned 27 years, from 1966 to 1993, taking her to some of the most difficult operating areas of the Cold War, from Moscow to Havana to Beijing. She is and was a true master of disguise.

MENDEZ: Oh, yeah. Everything we touched, we disguised.

ZOMORODI: In 1987, Jonna was working as a disguise and photo operations officer somewhere in southern Asia.

MENDEZ: I have to be a little vague.

ZOMORODI: 'Cause if you told me, you'd have to kill me.

MENDEZ: Well, the CIA would really get ticked off at me.

ZOMORODI: Jonna was sent on what she thought was a routine field visit in a neighboring country when an urgent mission came up. She quickly needed to disguise several officers, but she hadn't brought her usual kit.

MENDEZ: So here I was in a foreign country, and I have nothing. I have no disguise materials - nothing.

ZOMORODI: So she had to get creative.

MENDEZ: So I went into the office. I asked all of the case officers to go to the wives. And I wanted all of the makeup that all of the wives had. Everybody send me your stuff. And they just jumped all over this. So I got, like, four or five bags of makeup. And someone sent in a can of Dr. Scholl's foot powder, and I liked that a lot.

ZOMORODI: Jonna needed to disguise a local agent as a guard.

MENDEZ: I showed him the can of Dr. Scholl's powder, and I said, this is for your hair. You're going to love this. And I turned him into an old man. He had gray hair. The more Dr. Scholl's I put on, the whiter it got. We used a little bit of aluminum foil to give him a silver tooth. It was just - you know, it was improvising.

ZOMORODI: Disguised as an old man in a security guard uniform, this agent was going to help his colleagues sneak into the Soviet Embassy to steal a piece of crucial communications equipment. But first, he needed to get rid of the real security guard.

MENDEZ: The night of the operation, we went into this compound. Our local guy, the man I had disguised, went over and spoke to the gate guard, handed that man enough money for him to take his extended family and retire in the mountains for the rest of his life, never to be seen again. And then our local guy became the guard that stood behind the gate. He opened the gates. We drove in - three guys in the van, me and the driver were all in disguise. We backed up to the main building. The three guys ran into the building. They had on special shoes that were quiet and soft and wouldn't leave footprints. And they went up two flights of stairs. And then here came that machine that we were stealing. They lowered it down on ropes. They put it in the crate, sealed the crate, put the crate in the van, and we drove it out.

MENDEZ: This turned out to be one of the most amazing operations because that machine was such a critical piece of equipment.

ZOMORODI: Oh, it's, like, so nerve-wracking and exciting. But you later learned that this operation was actually a cover for another mission?

MENDEZ: Yes. About a month later, I was in Washington at a conference, and my boss came over. And he said, let me tell you something about your operation. The reason you were stealing that machine is not the reason you thought you were stealing that machine. On the other side of the world, there is a Russian who works with that machine, and he's an agent of the CIA. And it's getting a little dicey for him. People are starting to look at him like, hmm (ph).

ZOMORODI: Oh, so there's a Russian double agent who the KGB is starting to suspect is working with the Americans.

MENDEZ: Yes. And so the CIA wanted that machine stolen just to make it look like we were interested in understanding it. It'll take all the heat off the guy on the other side of the world giving us all the information. And that's what they call the wilderness of mirrors part of espionage.

ZOMORODI: Spies live in a world of disguises, deception and lies, where nothing is as it seems and no one can be trusted. But these days, with technology, it's becoming easier for all of us to transform our identities, to choose how we want to present ourselves to the world or to hide our true selves, maybe even become invisible. Do we ever really know who we're dealing with? Well, today on the show, incognito - ideas about the benefits, psychological impact and ethics around posturing as someone you're not, from artificial intelligence to virtual reality. Listen carefully. Don't be fooled by what you hear. But before we explore the current state of disguise, let's go back to the CIA's Jonna Mendez. Jonna knows better than anyone that even the people we're closest to might be hiding something from us.

MENDEZ: I met my first husband in Europe and dated him for, oh, a year and a half. And it wasn't until shortly before we got married - I mean, days before we got married - that my first husband advised me that it was actually the CIA that he worked for. So I was not recruited into the CIA. I came in a side door. I was a wife. And I ended up back in Washington, D.C., working for the director of our office. And I was bored. I told my boss that I thought I would leave and go find a real job. And my boss said, well, why don't you take some of our advanced photo courses? So I ended up back in Europe a photo operations officer.

ZOMORODI: Yeah, what is a photo operations officer? - because it's actually far more sexy than it sounds.

MENDEZ: That meant that I could leave the confines of our office, go out and meet with foreign agents, train them how to use some of our proprietary camera equipment, some of our unique films. I also taught them how to do things like microdots. I taught them how to retrieve them.

ZOMORODI: Wait. What is a microdot?

MENDEZ: The microdot was a photograph of an 8 1/2 by 11 piece of paper reduced 400 times...

MENDEZ: ...So that it ends up a black speck. So we would send them, say, a copy of maybe Time magazine. And they would know that on page 47, in the 11th paragraph, the third sentence, the period at the end of that sentence had a microdot stuck on top of it. And the foreign agent we were sending the dot to would have a lens. And he knew that he could take, like, a piece of cardstock and he could poke a hole in the cardstock and put his lens in that hole, pick up that dot, put it on the lens, hold the cardstock up to the sun, and he could read an 8 1/2 by 11 page text. It was a very cumbersome but very secure way to communicate with an agent.

ZOMORODI: And what would it say? Like, meet me here at this time or...

MENDEZ: It could say anything. It could say, here are the intelligence questions we are trying to answer. It was a one-way system. It was from us to him. But there would be a way for him to respond to us, probably by doing a dead drop - by putting his information in some sort of fake rock or fake tree branch or fake anything. We used fake dead rats.

MENDEZ: Well, they weren't fake. They were dead rats. But we had people that would clean them up and put Velcro in their tummies. And we could put a lot in a dead rat. And then we could leave it somewhere, knowing that no one was going to pick up that rat except our person who was looking for it, or maybe a dog or wild animals. So we dipped them in Tabasco. So if an animal picked it up, he would drop it...

MENDEZ: ...And probably run off howling.

ZOMORODI: So it wasn't just people you were disguising. It was punctuation in articles. It was rats. But if you had to say, you know, the rules around disguise, what makes a disguise believable? What makes it blend in and, I mean, go unnoticed? Because that's actually, you know - that's the goal, right?

MENDEZ: Well, there are many reasons to wear a disguise. When you're working with terrorists or counternarcotics, counterterrorism - becomes body armor. It's deadly serious. Somebody might shoot you if they think that you're an American in a lot of scenarios. But the - backing off from that, it's not just the facial oval. Disguise is all of you. And we always said that we could take the most mundane, small pieces of equipment and give them to you. And if you had the inner confidence to wear it, your confidence would carry the day. There's a certain acting skill that goes with it. You need to become that character. You need to believe that you are another person, and then it works.

ZOMORODI: Did you have, like, a favorite - I don't know - a trick or something? Like, how do these - how do you make it so that makeup doesn't come off on a hand if someone else touched your face? Like, how do you actually do all that?

MENDEZ: You know, you'd sit down with the officer and get very specific. Where are you going to use this? How are you going to use this? But as far as eating, we'd make sure that, you know, the adhesive was fabulous. And we'd style it - if you were going to be wearing it for a week - and sometimes they were - we'd make sure that it didn't really get in your way. We were always working on, you know, refining our products and making it all work better.

And, you know, we're able now to talk about some of it because it's old. They don't send us notes saying, oh, now you can talk about this. But things like - we had never talked about the use of masks before. That was off limits - always off limits. And then all of a sudden, it wasn't off limits anymore.

ZOMORODI: When? When was that?

MENDEZ: It was about four years ago. Once they say, yeah, you can put that in a book, then we assume, OK, they're not using that anymore. The philosophy at the CIA - as technology was moving forward and we would look at the next great thing and say, oh, my God, how will we deal with that? We would take something that looked to us like a threat and find out a way that we could use it ourselves.

ZOMORODI: That's Jonna Mendez, the CIA's former chief of disguise. You can see her full talk at ted.com. Today on the show, incognito. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

Copyright © 2022 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.