Name: Former CIA Chief of Disguise Answers Spy Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED
Uploaded: 2025-08-31T01:11:08.000Z
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I'm Jonna Mendez, former CIA officer and a founding board member of the International Spy Museum.

I'm here to answer some questions from Twitter.

At SpicyLime415 asks, do 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 1985, 10 of our Russian assets were arrested and executed, 10 of them, in a 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, the level of detail that's required to carry off an operation.

At rosemarychalet1 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 policymakers.

At imkjohnston, has anyone seen the movie Argo?

The story in the movie Argo is really a great demonstration of the kinds of things that CIA may find itself involved in.

A rescue of six perfectly innocent American diplomats didn't have anything to do with except that the rescuer happened to be a spy.

They used Hollywood as a cover in that instance, a cover organization in LA to cover the operation.

If anybody called that office and said, do these people work there?

The 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.

Holton, RVT asks, did you know there's a CIA position titled Chief of Disguise?

I was Deputy Chief of Disguise before that.

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 his description of the American that he met is going to be wrong.

From the hair color, length, is it curly or not?

Does he have a gold chain around his neck?

How do they develop soft skills like situational awareness, social engineering, blending in and creating believable cover stories?

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 in some harder skills, in shooting, in driving, in being in hostile situations.

We have a facility where we train people.

The Farm is located south of Washington, D.C.

They actually put on diplomatic events at The Farm and you are an attendee 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, ask 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.

Seeing someone who looks suspicious once is not such a big deal.

If you see that person again, that's interesting.

But the third time starting to approach confirmation that that person is sticking with you for whatever reason, there were 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 looking different.

We would go into a place and someone looking just like us would come out.

You know the whole spy thing of 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 would do it.

And I do know that cyanide really, really works.

I was a photographer when I first joined the CIA.

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'd have 100 black dots on it after you develop it.

And each black dot would be an eight and a half by 11 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.

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

anxiety

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