ARGO AND THE EXPLODING GRENADE: JONNA MENDEZ’S CIA CAREER

 

SD METRO Associate Editor Douglas Page interviewed former CIA Chief of Disguise Jonna Mendez. She’s also the widow of Tony Mendez, the CIA operative who, with help from Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor and his staff, extricated six U.S. Embassy staffers from Tehran in 1980 during the 1979 – 1980 hostage crisis. Academy Award winning actor Ben Affleck portrayed Tony in the movie “Argo,” which was about the rescue. Jonna’s new book, In True Face, details her 27-year career in the CIA. This transcript was edited for brevity and clarity. The full interview can be watched on our website, sandiegometro.com

SD METRO:    How do you see your CIA career?

Jonna:              Tony and I were immersed in the work. In our office, which was mostly men, their average lifespan was 18 months after they retired. They died of heart attacks. They didn’t have a life outside of the CIA. Their friends and everything they cared about was in the CIA. Tony and I had two very, very active lives, so we survived. But we didn’t leave espionage. We started working with the International Spy Museum (in Washington DC) when they were building it.

SD METRO:       There’s a good chance many people don’t know what the value of the CIA is. Can you describe what the CIA brings to the United States?

Jonna:              What we do, we do in silence, behind the scenes. The CIA’s job is to discern the plans and intentions of our country’s enemies. What are they going to do? When are they going to do it? We get the information and bring it back to the policymakers, so they have something to work with when they’re making decisions. We send briefers to the White House every morning with the president’s daily brief, giving details about the hotspots, showing what’s going on and what’s coming behind it.

SD METRO:       Sometimes agents put their lives very much at risk and sometimes the consequences aren’t so good.

Jonna:              The Moscow rules were rules of comportment if you were operating in Moscow. We added another rule about four years ago, and it’s never fall in love with your agent. It didn’t mean romantic love. It meant don’t get too close. They’re counting on you to protect them. We’re doing everything we can to keep them safe; even then, we still lose some.

                        They get arrested, they get executed. We lost one, it was so tragic. Everyone who worked with that man loved him and we added the last rule when they arrested him. They were forcing him to write a confession. He said, “I’ll write the confession, but I want to do it with my own pen.”

                        They brought him his pen. He’s at a desk. He takes it out of the case, puts it in his mouth, bit down on the end of it, where we embedded what’s called an L-pill. It’s a cyanide pill. He said he would only work for us work if we gave him a way to take his own life if arrested. Initially, the CIA said “no,” and he said, “Fine, I won’t work for you.” We caved and gave him a pen. We never thought he’d use it, but he did.

                        He was Russian and the Soviets put a rumor out — it was very powerful — that if they caught any of their fellow countrymen betraying the motherland, after the trial, they were going to put them into a crematorium feet first – alive. He believed it. That’s why he wanted a cyanide pill.

SD METRO:       You talked about the work environment you entered. What were the differences between the work environment you entered and the time that you retired?

Jonna:              The organization was primarily men when I came in. We worked for the men. We were basically clerical. We were secretarial. I found my way out of that category and into professional occupations. It’s still not anywhere near an equivalency, but it’s improved.

SD METRO:       One of the things that many might not know about the CIA or its predecessor, the OSS, is that there were women who made serious contributions. What makes Eloise Page stand out?

Jonna:              She was my role model. She was Bill Donovan’s administrative assistant at OSS during World War II. Eloise ended up in Europe at the end of World War II, chasing Nazis and seeing that they were incarcerated. She was a ball of fire. She also became our first female chief of station.

SD METRO:       What about Virginia Hall and her exploits during World War II?

Jonna:              She was another amazing woman. She went to Europe. She had languages. She had an accident at some point where she lost a leg prior to the war. She applied to the OSS, and they wouldn’t hire her. She went to work for the British as a Special Operations Executive. They dropped her into Nazi-occupied France.

                        The Germans eventually realized she was up to no good. She had a radio operator. They had to move every day. They had to broadcast out of barns, out of all kinds of obscure buildings, and the Germans were out there with their direction-finding equipment, trying to find them.

She wrecked hell through southern France. She came back to the United States and the CIA hired her. She’s celebrated at the International Spy Museum.

SD METRO:       Did their actions change any of the thinking at the CIA about what women could do for the agency?

Jonna:              Changed mine. If you asked the men who were of Eloise’s generation and worked with her, they would call her “That old battleax.” She was fierce and while that might be commendable in a man who’s in a position of authority, it was considered not becoming of a woman who was in a position of authority. Those kinds of nuanced opinions have shifted considerably. And I would point out that in the upper levels of the CIA, women rule. Gina Haspel (director of the CIA from 2018 – 2021) wasn’t one of a kind. There are a group of women at the top tier of CIA that have and continue to do wonderful jobs of guiding that organization. It’s a little further down and especially in the operational area that women have so much resistance.

SD METRO:       You described the section where you worked, the Office of Technical Services, as having entrenched misogyny. Was this all over the CIA or just in your section?

Jonna:              What I found in OTS was a large group of very, very capable men, most of them with technical credentials.

                        Tony Mendez, my husband, came in as a forger. A lot of women didn’t come in with those kinds of skills. That didn’t mean that you couldn’t find your place.

                        Sometimes these men came in with film they needed developed. They gave it to me. What I didn’t have, in terms of a degree, I think I made up for it in just being fastidious in the work.

SD METRO:       It’s probably hard for many to believe today, but many years ago, pictures were developed in a darkroom.  You mentioned seeing nude pictures on one of the walls in the darkroom and you pulled them down. Can you describe your emotions and what you were thinking and how you felt after that?

Jonna:              I’d been trying to be one of the guys, thinking that’s the way forward. That didn’t work. I had worked there for some time and those pictures had been up on the wall for some time. And I just got sick of it. I put them in the trash. The men never said a word about it.

SD METRO:       Was there a change in behavior or attitude from the men you were working alongside?

Jonna:              You built respect when they discovered that you could do what they could do and do it just as well. When you got to that level, there was a certain equality in how you were managed, and I got to that level. There was no reaching out, like, “Come on in.” You had to push your way in.

SD METRO:       Sometimes you woke up not knowing if you’re going home that night. How unsettling was that?

Jonna:              I loved it. When I talk to women, they say, “How did you do that with kids?” And I tell them, “I didn’t have children.” And then you can see young women thinking, yeah, well, that would be a catch. With children, you’d either figure out how to make it work or, perhaps, that wouldn’t be the career for you.

SD METRO:       Given all your travel, did you ever find it wearing or look upon any particular destination with just drudgery?

Jonna:              No. I could always find something that I liked, just about anywhere. There was a city where it was hard to find that place — Dacca, in Bangladesh.

SD METRO:       What was it like to live incognito?

Jonna:              You didn’t always have the same name, and you didn’t always have the same story, and so you just developed a group of habits that no matter who you were, it would work. And that works like on an airplane. If somebody said, “Where do you work?” You would just turn it back to them. So, if you’re talking to a heart surgeon, you don’t want to be telling them that you’re a heart surgeon too.

                        You always had identities that had accompanying paperwork, maybe some documentation, and you’d be able to talk about in some depth.

SD METRO:       You talked about the Career Development Program and the hand grenade. Describe what happened.

Jonna:              That was an elite program. We were at a military training facility learning how to do some paramilitary things. Two of the people in the course were CIA employees with military backgrounds. So, they knew a lot about weapons. And we were on the firing range, and they taught us. They were showing us how simple it was to make a bomb. You’d go to Home Depot and buy a little plastic soap container and get some fertilizer and three ingredients and you got a bomb, and then we’d blow up a truck.

                        Part of it was fun. Part of it was scary, but working around live ammunition had a certain protocol. You never smoked when you were close to that stuff. You never had matches in your pocket. It was serious. I got promoted while I was there. The boss flew in to tell me. I had dinner with the boss. One guy in the class was not happy because he was not promoted. And he thought they were showing favoritism to me. He said something about it and was sitting with some Navy SEALs. I walked up to him and poured a beer on him.

                        So, the next day, on the range, I heard this voice, and it was him. He said, “Hey, Jonna.” And I turned around and noticed he had a grenade. He rolled it toward me. They don’t roll straight, they zigzag. And I thought, he wants me to run. He’s trying to embarrass me. I decided not to run. I stood there and the thing rolled, and it went off. Now he had taken out any shrapnel. It couldn’t hurt me. But it scared me to death. I couldn’t believe that he did that, and I thought, would he do that to one of his male friends?

                        He apologized the next day. But I never forgave him. I saw him recently, and he’s forgotten this. I know because he came up and gave me a big hug and told me how good it was to see me.

SD METRO:       You mentioned a training program that prepared you for a hostile interrogation where you are the prisoner and you’re being subjected to some harsh treatment. What was the biggest takeaway about yourself as you came through that exercise?

Jonna:              They put us through the most severe training scenario they imagined. It was a very tough course, and on that day two, you almost forgot that it was a training course and you felt like, “Oh my God, can I last another day?”

                        We had had some POWs from Vietnam talk to us about how they dealt with long-term stress. One of them said, “Everybody had a project. Some played chess, some built the engine of cars; some built houses.” He said, “I could just leave that confining place and go somewhere in my head. If you’re in enough trouble, you can do that.” So, they put me in a box, like a mattress box where you couldn’t turn at all. It must’ve been like eight inches deep. You could go in sideways and come out sideways, and they closed the door and I had told them that I’m claustrophobic.

                        That’s why they put me in that box. I was in there and I thought, “I can’t stay in here. This is not going to work. How will I tell them that I need to leave the course?” And then I remembered that man and I started thinking, “Okay, if I could be somewhere, where would I be?” I went back to Kansas, where I’m from.

                        It got me through that exercise. It was excruciating.

SD METRO:       You talk about how Tony Mendez got the idea for the masks — from watching a very popular movie, “Planet of the Apes.” It would seem few would believe such an idea would come from a movie.

Jonna:              He became a friend of John Chambers, the Oscar-winning makeup artist that made those “Planet of the Ape” masks. Tony was an artist, so he was very interested in the creative process. We were already using stunt double masks from Hollywood. Our best mask was Rex Harrison.

                        He never knew we were exporting them all over the world. They proved useful. When we made full-face animated masks, we could have you in your blue shirt, your tie, brown hair and glasses. And we could take someone of a similar size and weight, stature and put your face on person number two, put him in a blue shirt and a tie and brown hair, and then we can do what magicians do.

                        And we can play by having two people instead of one. It gave us enormous flexibility when we were working against surveillance teams. They thought they had you the whole time. They thought you never left their site. And our guy is somewhere else.

SD METRO:       You also mentioned that in certain cases, if you were wearing one of these masks, you need to be a bit of an actor, too.

Jonna:              The more advanced the disguises were, the more you needed to exercise the mask. You needed to wear it in public. You get out there wearing them. Even wigs and mustaches, and you think people are going to look at you funny. And so whatever kind of disguise we gave people, we insisted that they wear it in public.

SD METRO:       You become the chief of disguise. What sort of pressure did you feel in that position?

Jonna:              I was elated. First, I didn’t want the job. Then I was elated to get the job. Then it became a different ball game. It was about going into finance meetings and battling for money and battling for slots and all kinds of things that I had tried to avoid. Taking care of your employees, making sure that they were getting the training. I had an amazingly good team, but part of me wanted to be overseas doing the work and meeting with people, making a difference that way.

SD METRO:               What was it like to go to the Oval Office and meet President George H.W. Bush?

Jonna:              I went with the head of CIA, Judge William Webster, who was very enthusiastic about our masks. Initially, they wanted me to go as an African American man. That was the first mask that I showed him. I put on a man’s suit, put on a mask, put on gloves and met the director of CIA and he said, “Oh my God, we have to go to the White House and show this to the president.” I said, “I don’t have any identification. Shall we make something?” He said, “Oh, no. You’re with me. You won’t need any ID to get through the Secret Service.” So, we thought about it, and thought still the Secret Service might, if they wanted to, talk to me, and I don’t have a man’s voice. He finally said, “Well, it’s okay. We’ll have you go as a woman, a different woman. Wear a female mask. It’ll make the same impact.”

                        I was going to be the first one to brief the president that morning. There was a horseshoe of people, including me, Judge Webster, Chief of Staff John Sununu, and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft.

                        I told the president, who had been a director of the CIA, “I brought you some photos. Here’s you in disguise. Remember these?” And he’s going through these big, glossy pictures, and it’s like, that was so good. He’s enjoying that. And I said, “So I’m here to show you what we’re doing now. It’s quite different from what we did with you.” I said, “So I’m going to show you this lady’s disguise.” I said, “I’m going to remove it and show it to you.” And he said, “Oh, don’t remove it. Hold on.” And he got up and he walks over and he’s walking around me and he doesn’t know what I’m wearing. He doesn’t know it’s a mask. And I don’t know what he was looking for. He was looking for a seam, but he was looking for an edge, right, or whatever it was.

                        He couldn’t see it. So he set it out and he said, “Okay, take it off.” So I did that and I was holding it up in the air for him to see, and he was very, very cool. Sununu hadn’t been paying any attention. He had a little pad and was making notes because he was going to talk next. When I took off the mask, I heard this little squeak come from him. He was startled. He looked up and I’m holding what looks like a decapitated head in my hand. The president loved it.

SD METRO:       You become a mom at 47. What’s more challenging — working in intelligence or being a mom?

Jonna:              I’m not sure how to compare them. It was another challenge, another new beginning. I was up for it. The thing was, I thought we were finished with espionage. Tony had retired. He was painting. I retired when Jesse was four months old and started doing fine art photography. We had big art gallery. We had huge shows twice a year, we were doing art, and then here came espionage sneaking around the corner. They opened the International Spy Museum in DC. We were founding board members for three years before it opened, helping it organize what it would be. We started teaching to the various intelligence agencies.

                        Then came “Argo,” the movie, and we had to write the book, making sure that people who saw the movie understood they hadn’t chased the airplane down the runway.

SD METRO:       In your book, you quote Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path to leave a trail.” How does that apply to you and your career in the CIA?

Jonna:              What I was doing was unusual. I wasn’t the only woman trying to push my way forward and make a new path. I wasn’t thinking so much of women at that time. I was just bemoaning the fact that there wasn’t an open track for me. I was laying a new trail. Eloise Page did it. There are others. I was very aware that it was uncommon what I wanted to do and did. Maybe that made it a little sweeter. I’m not sure, but I sure liked doing it.