Former CIA Chief of Disguise Breaks Down Cold War Spy Gadgets | WIRED

surveillance in moscow was the most difficult kind of surveillance that we encountered around the world we didn't have paris rules or buenos aires rules there were no other rules except moscow rules because it was such a difficult place for us to work hi i'm johna mendez i'm the former chief of disguise for the cia today i'm going to talk about some of the cia's gadgets that we use during the cold war i worked for the office of technical service at the cia we used to always think of it as cia's cue we were the gadget people everything that we did in moscow had to be done clandestinely you couldn't overtly go out and collect intelligence we all had surveillance 24 hours a day seven days a week it didn't matter where you were if you were in your apartment which would be in an embassy compound you'd have surveillance in the walls and it would be live surveillance we had something of a breakthrough in uh determining whether or not we had surveillance and that was a piece of equipment that we called the srr 100 it was actually composed of three different pieces one was some small phonak ear devices that went into your ear they were ear pieces and they were actually commercially available but we would mold your ear and create a new inner ear for you that would sit in on top of the phonak we would paint them to match your ear there was a neck ring that went with it it was an induction piece of technology and then there was a receiver itself those were tuned into kgb surveillance frequencies and we had a fairly comfortable sense that if we had surveillance following us they were using radios we were on their frequency that we would be able to hear them that we would be able to correlate if we turned right or if we turned left that we would hear them calling that out he's turning right he's turning left it wasn't foolproof but it was enough to give us a very good sense of if there was anybody back there knowing that you were being watched would mean that that day all you would do is perfectly innocuous things you would not do anything operational that day because you were under surveillance another method of losing surveillance was using one of our sams one of our semi-animated masks it was a mask that would allow you to apply different disguise materials all at one time which would allow you to get in the car wherever you were wearing your true face and somewhere along the way putting on your new face your sam mask and after you'd taken two right-hand turns and stepped out of the car when surveillance came down the street they would see what maybe looked like a russian man walking toward them and the car they were following still up ahead of them they would go right by you so that if you were a blonde unshaven unmustached young man and needed to wear a disguise that night that might have a dark beard dark mustache dark hair maybe a different skin tone instead of having to sit in front of a mirror and assemble that on your face you would just take your sam mask and so it had a nickname the five second mask five on five off but there was one last piece it had to crumble down to almost nothing and fit under your armpit if you were being pursued and you had to take it off and had to turn into your real self you had to be able to conceal it another technique that we used with the masks was an operation called line doggo we had a couple getting ready to go to moscow and we asked them to buy a dog and take the dog with them a very large dog a particular dog we went to our wick maker we showed the wig maker a picture of the great big dog and she made not a wig but she made a dog just a covering that looked like a dog that you could put in the back seat of a car and it would look like your dog was asleep in the back seat that couple would set a pattern of every i don't know how often but every so often they would leave the embassy compound with their dog and so the man at the gate would get used to seeing them go through the gate with their dog in the back seat not always asleep sometimes asleep and then when we needed operationally to move a person that person would get in the car under the dog concealment and go through the gate and the milly man would blink twice and that was a way to move a person around we had a device called the jack in the box or a jib when we use the jib a dummy would pop up out of a concealment device replacing the officer who had just stepped out of the car and so the way it would typically work is the driver would get in the car the passenger which would be the case officer who needed to get out of the car and go do his operational stuff he'd be in the passenger seat and so they'd go out through the gate and their surveillance team would pull in behind them and they'd go on a pre-determined route one that they had planned specifically to do a car escape they would find a right turn followed by another right turn they would have disconnected their brake lights the officer would open the door step out of the car the driver would take the purse the attache set it on the passenger seat push the button thing would pop up surveillance comes around the corner there's still two silhouettes in the car moving down the street not too fast and our officer would be free to go and do an operational act this was a very important tool and once an agent loses their surveillance and is absolutely certain that they have lost their surveillance they can do anything a dead drop is the way we would package the information that we were giving to the agent where we could put our questions for the agent in some sort of a concealment device and put it on the ground somewhere or in a tree or wherever the proper place was determined to be and they on the other hand could give us the answers to our questions by doing the same thing it could be a list of requirements we could be passing to him medicine for his son who was sick it could be money whatever we needed to pass to the agent had to be concealed so that it wasn't apparent what it was because we were going to put it down somewhere and leave it unattended and put up a signal so he'd know to come and get it a signal to an agent it's a prearranged so the agent knows what to look for it could be a lipstick mark on a telephone pole it could be a light in a window it could be moving a flower pot on a balcony from one side to another it was an endless supply of possibilities for signals the dead drop that that has gotten the most attention over the years is the dead rat we determined early on that a dead rat was pretty much untouchable in any country in any religion by any people no one will pick up a dead rat they just won't so we did we picked up dead rats and we took them to the taxidermist and they tidied them up and they velcroed their tummies oh and they dipped them in tabasco sauce the tabasco was in case an animal picked up your dead rat you could fit more in a dead rat than you might think if you were determined to get a certain number of rubles or a certain number of questions or maybe some old antique jewelry if you roll dollar bills up real tight with rubber bands you can get a lot of dollar bills in or rubles i think i liked one that we put down for trigon early on over rodnik over rodnik was his soviet name trigon was his code name he was giving us information on the strategic arms limitations talks it's called the salt talks this was salt too he was giving us a soviet bottom line on negotiating what they were willing to do and below which they would not go which is like if you're playing poker it's like having the other guy's cards in your hands and we left i believe it was his first drop and we left it in in a dirty construction glove just one just on the ground by phone booth that was the first thing he picked up from us we devised many concealment devices in ots and some of them were used for escape scenarios the false scrotum is a really interesting story we were always interested in the possibility of our officers being captured and maybe being held prisoner around the world our officers needed to be able to hide some tools so that they could make an attempt to escape if that happened to them and the theory is that the false scrotum was one such concealment device the question about the false scrotum is whether it was ever actually used if you were going to be in a situation where you would be strip searched you might in advance knowing that you were going into a life and death situation prepare yourself like houdini to have some escape tools the rectal tool kit was a little bit like a suppository it just you put it in case you needed it it was important that it be very well made that it be very smooth surface that it not caused any injury coming or going but inside of it were small tools that could be used in a variety of ways it was not a bad idea so some of these agents that worked for us knew that there was not a good ending if it ended and they said will only work for you if you give us cyanide pills the first two that i know of we gave out in pens in writing pens they were in the cap of the pen what we're looking at here is a cyanide pill that was put in the bow stem of a pair of glasses and the way it was constructed is that the agent in order to access the pill would just take off his glasses and just [Music] bite down on the earpiece there was a glass ampoule inside with the cyanide in it it was a desperate measure but they were desperate times and these men knew that they didn't want to go through the interrogation and the torture that the kgb had in mind before they were executed trigon was arrested at home in his office the kgb came in they had found all of his tools all of his supplies he had nowhere to go and so they had him stripped of his clothes he just had on his skivvies and he said to them i will write my confession but i want to write it with my pen my pen he wanted his mom block pen and they gave it to him and my office ots had milled out the cap so he he took the cap off and he put it on top and he looked at them and he just bit down on it the russians said he was dead before he hit the floor i hope that's what he wanted working in moscow really was a life and death operation all the time you were risking the life of your agent you made a mistake you were always worried if your equipment wasn't working if your trade craft wasn't what it should be whenever someone got caught you went home and thought oh god is it something that i did did i make the mistake while these devices were primarily used during the cold war some version of these devices is in use today the business of meeting with spies and collecting intelligence and transmitting the intelligence those things don't change how we do it might change but it's still the same work you

Channel: WIRED

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Rating: 4.9494767 out of 5

Keywords: spys, jonna mendez, cold war, the cold war, cold war gadgets, spy gadgets, real spy gadgets, spy masks, cia spies, cia spy, masks for spies, jonna mendez spy, jonna mendez wired, wired jonna mendez, jonna mendez interview, jonna mendez spy gadgets, gadgets spy, cold war spy gadgets, jonna mendez spies, jonna mendez wired spy, fake scrotum, moscow cia, cia gadget, spy breaks down, real spy, real life spy, cia operative, cia disguise officer, cia disguises, wired

Id: DD841NmJbjM

Length: 12min 34sec (754 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 25 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Very interesting. “You can fit more in a dead rat than you may think”. Thank you for sharing!

[u/Godzilla_]

I was a little surprised to hear doggo used

[u/OttoDerPilot]

Hearing her recall the one agent killing themselves with the pen was intense. It really helps visualize just how desperate each state was to maintain surveillance and information supremacy.

[u/StripeTheTomcat]

So she has already done a video on spy disguises as portrayed in films/TV series, which I found even more interesting than this one.

Former CIA chief of disguise breaks down 30 spy disguises

Her husband also worked for the CIA. He was Tony Mendez, the dude portrayed in Argo by Ben Affleck.

[u/Competitive_Rub]

[This video is not available in Russia]

[u/raphus_cucullatus]

No such thing as former CIA. She’s only telling a very selective narrative. The CIA should be abolished for war crimes.

[u/ElectricMollusk]

Wow, makes mission impossible make more sense with the whole weird mask thing.

[u/Theministryofplenty]

Imagine this was you granma. Bet she has some wild stories at the dinner table

[u/titstirtytit]

Gotta love some Jonna Mendez!