Former CIA Chief of Disguise Answers Spy Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED

I'm Johnny Mendez former CIA officer and a founding board member of the International Spy Museum I'm here to answer some questions from Twitter this is spy support [Music] at spicy lime415 asks do spies have anxiety I think all spies have anxiety you want to make sure you're not setting someone up for a situation because you forgot a detail when the anxiety really kicks in though is when one of your people is incarcerated is arrested in Moscow I felt anxiety all the time Moscow I thought was kin

d of scary in 1985 10 of our Russian assets were arrested and executed 10 of them in the summer that kind of anxiety is built into the job there's nothing you can do about it except when you're working make sure that you absolutely respect the protocols that we have to go through and level of detail that's required to carry off an operation at Rosemary Chalet one asks what are CIA handlers what you're calling CIA handlers I'm calling CIA case officers they get the requirement from the government

we want to know about nuclear program in this country a they go to Country a they go looking for people who know the information about country a once they meet them they try and recruit them to work for us and then we get the information back to our policy makers cut and dry at imk Johnston has anyone seen the movie Argo just about to watch it the story in the movie Argo is really a great demonstration of the kinds of things that that CIA may find itself involved in a rescue of six perfectly in

nocent American diplomats didn't have anything to do with espionage except that The Rescuer happened to be a spy my husband Tony Mendez they used Hollywood as a cover in that instance the cover organization in LA to cover the operation if anybody called that office and said do these people work there the answer would be yes six people being rescued were schooled in their cover stories over a period of three days issued every piece of paper with their new name on it and they were whisked out of a

very very dangerous situation Ben Affleck pretending to be my husband that was interesting at s Holton rvt asks did you know there's a CIA position titled chief of Disguise how freaking cool is that person I was chief of Disguise for two years I was Deputy Chief of Disguise before that chief of Disguise has a worldwide staff we always have in the back of our minds this memo that the person The Foreigner is going to take back to his office and say oh I met with this American and everything in in

his description of the American that he met is going to be wrong from the hair color length is it curly or not color of eyes it's going to be wrong does he wear glasses it's going to be wrong does he smoke is he married does he have a gold chain around his neck all of that is wrong it's a disguise and it keeps our officer safe at pybry Pro asks CIA MI6 and KGB FSB how do they develop soft skills like situational awareness social engineering blending in and creating believable cover stories what

combat training do they receive CIA had a paramilitary capability and decided to more or less step away from it after 9 11 CIA stepped back up to paramilitary and has embraced it I know they do train and some of the harder skills in shooting in driving and being in a hostile situations we have a facility where we train people it's called The Farm a lot of people have heard of it the farm is located south of Washington in D.C they actually put on diplomatic events at the farm and you are an atte

ndee all dressed up and there's someone in that room who has information that you're looking for and part of the training is to see if you can narrow it down to that person by just having conversations at Sigma Theory asks what makes a good spy what we're recruiting for when we're looking for spies and we're talking about case officers here is a charismatic intelligent well-educated well-traveled guy mostly but it's more and more women someone you'd meet somewhere and you'd instantly want to be

the friend there are people like this around the world our job is to find them because we cannot teach them that we can teach them everything else they need to know once we get them on board but that Charisma they have to bring it in the door with them at Mary Marciniak asks no signs of me being followed me am I being followed seeing someone who looks suspicious once is not such a big deal if you see that person again that's interesting that's a coincidence but the third time starting to approac

h confirmation that that person is sticking with you for whatever reason there are lots of ways around it we would go into a place and go out another door we would go into a place and come out like different we would go into a place and someone looking just like us would come out next question you know the whole spy thing is cyanide and a fake tooth where they bite down and poison themselves how often do you think those go off accidentally like someone is just enjoying a nice hard candy and then

oops dead in my 27 years I only knew of two instances where we gave out Cyanide and I knew where they were because the steel box containing it was in my safe the Russians floated stories around that if they caught their people spying for America they would feed them feet first into a crematorium alive most people in Russia that spied for us had that in the back of their minds and they thought they'd rather take the cyanide themselves than take the chance that the Russians meant that and would d

o it it was very effective we didn't hand it out like it was candy it wasn't candy it was Lethal and I do know that cyanide really really works at Ginny X asks does anyone know of a good small spy camera I was a photographer when I first joined the CIA that was my gig and this camera was part of my account this pin camera the camera in the end inside of the camera is a film cassette and inside of the cassette is a little piece of film it's about 13 inches long it have a hundred black dots on it

after you develop it and each black dot would be an eight and a half by eleven page of information where the paperwork is lying from his last meeting we only gave these pins to people that could get right up to the person who was making the policy we were after you had to hold it at a certain distance you can take the picture this is a KGB lighter they were actually technically very very good so I can't disparage it but if it was a CIA lighter it would actually light at underscore Rhys asked do

spies get paid a lot of money like people who spy on other countries and the answer at underscore Reese is no they don't pass enough they pay us flat government salaries just like anybody else you work at GSA you work at IRS wherever you work in the government we're on the same pay scale as them now the assets that are working for us the foreigners who are providing us with the intelligence that we need depending on the value of the intelligence they can make big amounts of money there's a man i

n this Museum Adolf talkachev it's called the billion dollar spy because of the intelligence that he gave to the Pentagon while we didn't pay him a billion dollars the Pentagon said his intelligence was worth a billion dollars Adolf talkachev made a lot of money except that he got caught and then they executed him so I don't think he had time to spend it at taku underscore zero underscore zero he says it's crazy how the CIA has three levels of Disguise like it sounds fun to go to level three to

like your high school reunion I basically break disguise down into two levels you have regular disguise and you have advanced disguise regular disguise is what you think it is it's mustaches and wigs and all the accoutrement that you can put on to change the way you look Advanced disguise takes it way up to another level where you're talking about wearing masks we would actually like prostheses this is a sample of a mold of a nose we're going to change a nose on a face using one of these we coul

d change your teeth if we thought it would make a big difference we can change almost anything at will fight for you how many CIA assets and spec ops units do you think the U.S has on the ground in Ukraine right now my answer would be uninformed but a pretty confident many at aaronjack24 says I want to see one of these five second mass in real life it was a breakthrough once we could make those masks we could do a lot of new things that we'd never been able to before we could make your face and

put it on someone else we have one here in the museum it's a mass that I wore in the White House to brief the president of the United States is very effective the design goal was put it on in a car without a mirror in the dark you'd know okay that's it it's on Pat the hair down get out of the car and if you ran into trouble you could literally pull it off in three seconds crumple it down put it under your arm and walk down the street at head funny asks real life spies are never attractive are th

ey it would be detrimental to the job our model of the little gray man which is a model we actually used all the time the idea was we wanted you to be so unnoticeable that people wouldn't even remember if you had gotten on and off of their elevator we we don't want you to attract attention the CIA doesn't use seduction as a tool I have to say on the other hand that the Russians do and they have in the past the East Germans used male swallows they used good-looking men to go into West Germany and

recruit the secretaries of the heads of state they did that successfully at CIA it's actually a firing offense if you sleep with your foreign asset at Jane Gallagher asks what did microdots used to do micro dots were a way of communicating with a foreign agent a very very secure way of doing it they may well be doing it today it looks old school but the security trumps everything else a microdot is a page a normal page of text eight and a half by eleven reduced down 400 times and what you get a

t the end of that reduction is a DOT a tiny black spot there are two of them on the back of this stamp he'd pull his little tiny lens out of wherever he had it stored looked like a grain of rice he'd put it in the hole in the card get some spit pick up the dot put it on the end of the thing and hold it up to a light and he could read an eight and a half by eleven page text it was a very very secure way of communicating with an Asian at Jerry rasanen asks aren't all diplomats spies by definition

all diplomats jiri in answer to your question are not necessarily spies but some spies can be considered to be diplomats for cover purposes diplomatic privileges keep you safe they keep you out of trouble they get you out of a country When Things Fall Apart you are somewhat untouchable when you have diplomatic cover that's a very useful thing to have state department doesn't like our using diplomatic cover because for every one of us using their cover they have one less actual Diplomat there's a

tension there at lawn C Zhu learn when to abort a mission in a book that Tony Mendez and I wrote called the Moscow rules one of the Moscow rules is to listen to your gut always if you're on your way to do anything and it doesn't feel right abort the mission and at CIA overseas in the station the chief of station always knows there's no shame in coming back and saying I can't even explain it it didn't feel right I aborted the mission we'll reschedule we'll do it again it was one of our rules at

Steven to the mask asks I'm very interested in whether or not American spies do have real families and real friends or is everything in their lives a lie you have a choice to make when you are undercover at CIA whether to tell your family or not I think most people do tell their family because it's hard to do a lot of what we do without without a supportive family it's your friends that have become the issue most of us almost all of us have to live our cover with our friends and this creates att

ention over time that different people treat different ways but a lot of people that I know at CIA slowly let go of those outside friendships and we replace them with inside friendships people who know where you work and then they know you can't really talk about it either but they understand admit Dyson asks watching killing Eve makes me wonder how do spies pay for stuff are they issued credit cards for their fake identities do they just carry suspicious amounts of cash we do not carry suspicio

us amounts of cash if we can help it if one of our CIA officers undercover was picked up overseas and his billfold was confiscated everything in that billfold would probably be fake from a driver's license to a credit card and it would be in his cover name not in his true name if it's on paper or plastic we can make it officially for government use in the CIA we can and we do at Drew T Mitch asks do spies get acting lessons do Yale School of drama professors adjunct at the CIA we don't get actin

g lessons so at CIA when we give somebody a disguise for the first time do you like it they always say oh it's great I love it yeah it feels good and then we say good go to lunch in the cafeteria where everybody you know is having lunch in the cafeteria you wear it to the cafeteria then come back and see us and they walk out the door kind of sheepish and they come back usually just amazed they walked right by their boss he didn't know he sat next to the guys he works with they didn't know he was

then we think okay we did good now he'll wear it if he needs it with the disguise you come up with a character that you are when you are in that disguise complete with the call clothing that you wear the shoes that you wear do you smoke all of this you invent a character that doesn't exist and you become that character when you're wearing the disguise at I am Sergio Grant asks how do spies get recruited we run ads in a lot of media we come to college campuses for for job fairs and we set up tab

les and talk to anybody who walks up to us knowing that a lot of the people walk up to us really just to see what we look like my husband Tony Mendez initially replied to an advertisement in a newspaper said wanted to work overseas for the U.S Navy because they didn't want to say in the newspaper back then that it was CIA go to cia.gov and you can apply online at maximum underline Q what is a double agent a double agent is an agent pretending to spy for one country while he's actually acting on

behalf of another when we bring new agents on board at CIA there's a whole process of validating that person that processing and that bringing an agent on board is all about making sure that they're not double agents and then cia's most famous double agent at this point I guess was Alder James who was a CIA officer but he was actually reporting to the Russians over years and that's where the 10 Russians that were executed in Moscow at 85 those were names that he gave to the Russians these are th

e names of your colleagues who are reporting to the CIA and they kill them at nacha regular I want to learn how to do dead drops so bad but I'm scared your goal with a dead drop is to transmit information to an agent that you cannot meet face to face so if we had to transmit something whether it was money or medicine for his kid we would give it to him in a dead drop dead drop is something you're going to leave by the side of the road or buy a telephone pole or by construction site or wherever y

ou two decide and he's going to pick it up at a later date there are a number of dead drops here on display at the Museum everything from aldra James's mailbox there is a dead rat I made a dead drop once that was so wonderful it was a Potomac River Rock that would hold a lot of stuff the only Dead Drop I ever knew that we gave a name to we called It Rock Hudson at Maddie and McKay asks do spies have to go up a pant size to inconspicuously store guns on their backs we don't normally carry guns on

our backs in fact we don't normally carry guns at all but if we did they would be small and they would be inconspicuous at magnify K asks in a world of drones and satellites why use a spy balloon they are easier to control they fly lower they're carried by the wind they also have a lot of built-in deniability and the images that they take are surprisingly good they're often better than the images taken by our satellites the problem is that they're so easy to shoot down the most recent episode w

ith the Chinese shows that this is not the way to go if you're traveling across U.S airspace at kt0213 ask do spies get to choose their own code names no they do not they assign you a code name it's a first name a middle name a last name it's always all in caps when we communicate around the world about a particular employee particular person that's the pseudonym for the person we're talking about it follows you for your career so those are all the questions we have for today thanks for watching

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