1028: Jonna Mendez | The Moscow Rules (Redux)

1028: Jonna Mendez | The Moscow Rules (Redux)

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[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most brilliant and interesting people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. We wanna help you see the matrix when it comes to how these amazing people think and behave.

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Here with us today on the show, Jonna Mendez, she's a former chief of disguise at the CIA's Office of Technical Service. I honestly had no idea that we still used disguise. I guess it makes sense. Look, apparently it's even more popular than ever. So we wanted to have her on the show. For those of us that have seen James Bond, she was basically Q, but for the CIA.

But Jonna wasn't just in the lab. She was also in the field working with operatives, and she was stationed in Moscow during the height of the Cold War in the seventies and eighties. She's one of the pioneers or innovators of espionage disguise, including concepts like disguise on the run, which is more or less what it sounds like changing while walking, using special clothes and devices in just a few seconds, not just like taking off a jacket, but turning into somebody completely different within seconds.

Walking through a building, for example, the concept of identity transfer, turning one person into another, or cloning people, so to speak. All of this is and was done to avoid confuse or shake surveillance because in the game of espionage, if the asset has surveillance, the operation has gone bad, and you'll hear that during the show today.

They also had to use disguise to make surveillance, lose the agent for a bit so they could do their thing and then come back on surveillance radar deliberately. These disguises were so good that later in her career, a PBS film crew filming her. And recreating an exercise, actually didn't even recognize her.

So they weren't filming even though they were looking for her the entire time. And she told them that she was gonna be in disguise. So that's how good these are. These are not just like, uh, the fake nose, fake mustache and glasses that you're thinking of right now. So come join us for some very high tech and some very low tech innovation in the field of espionage in disguise, as well as plenty of war stories from the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War.

You spent much of your career in the Soviet Union, and I, I would love to know what that's like. 'cause for example, you're under surveillance all the time. That's kind of a given in the Soviet Union. Just being there as a foreigner, you're automatically under suspicion as a spy or they just consider you the same as a spy.

There's no foreign business over there, I assume, right?

[00:02:46] Jonna Mendez: There is foreign business. Um, the thing that drew their attention. Was the American Embassy in particular. We weren't the only ones that had surveillance, but we had, I think we were in a special category. I think we got their top teams and their undivided attention on occasion.

They were very often not sure who might be the intelligence officers, and so they would start out, anybody that was assigned there would get just really strenuous surveillance 24 hours a day. And then they'd sort of lighten up on some people who started looking like more ordinary and they might give special attention to this group of people who they thought looked suspicious.

So our job was always to be in that first group to look ordinary. That was the beginning of a relationship that would color your assignment in Moscow. If they really felt that you were part of the, uh, evil empire, they were just unrelenting. It was a, a smothering kind of surveillance. And that's why we, we invented Moscow rules.

We didn't have like Paris rules or Tokyo rules or this is the only city in the world where the opposition was just so leaning on us so hard that we trained, we deployed. Everything we did there was unique because of that embrace that we were in of, of surveillance.

[00:04:06] Jordan Harbinger: The embrace Tom almost sounds like a nice little KGB hug that you had going there.

[00:04:11] Jonna Mendez: It could

[00:04:11] Jordan Harbinger: kill

[00:04:11] Jonna Mendez: you

[00:04:12] Jordan Harbinger: literally, it

[00:04:13] Jonna Mendez: could kill your foreign agent for sure. You know, and that's what they were after. I mean, they were following us just every minute, or they were watching us, or they were listening to us in our apartments, or they were sitting next to us in the American Embassy in the, in the shape of a foreign national who's working with us to help.

It's really help do the paperwork, help make the shipments come, make everything work. They were everywhere around us, but they weren't really after us. They were after the Russians that were working with us. They were after the people in their country that were committing treason, that were betraying their country and working for us.

And if they could get to those people, they would execute 'em, and they did.

[00:04:52] Jordan Harbinger: That's so much pressure and I, I definitely want to discuss that later in the show. 'cause there's some very specific examples of people that just sound like they either had a tolerance for stress that was well beyond just not even in the same solar system as the level of stress that the rest of us have, or they were wired completely differently.

And I, I wonder what you think about that, but this is 1976 Moscow and what, through like 85, like what time period are we talking about here?

[00:05:18] Jonna Mendez: Runs up to about 89 and I think in the book, I think the first case we talk about was really our first big case there. That was in 63. That was at the beginning when we were unable to basically manage an espionage case in, in Moscow.

That one only lasted 18 months and they found him and they arrested him and they executed him. That was

[00:05:41] Jordan Harbinger: Koski. That's so terrifying. Looking back 89, not that long ago. I mean, it is, but it isn't To have a country that's like this in 1989, so totalitarian is crazy. I've been to North Korea a few times and it, I would imagine it's kind of similar.

North Korea seems, I just can't imagine anything more controlled than North Korea, but maybe it's possible. I'm not sure.

[00:06:01] Jonna Mendez: North Korea is almost in a category of its own. I haven't been to North Korea, so I can't really comment, but I, I've read a number of books about it, about how it operates, about how they controlled their citizenry and I mean, we've all seen little peaks at.

What happens if you step outta line, including if you're an American student over there who pulls a poster off a wall, you know, and comes home basically brain dead. So they, yeah, they know how to keep the lid on and how to keep their people marching in line.

[00:06:30] Jordan Harbinger: What's interesting about this, and I think a lot of people will be like, oh, America's not free either.

And I always get those emails after I do shows like this, but I think what people don't understand is the reason that they were able to keep such a tight grouping of you and a tight embrace on you is because back then they had no semblance of freedom. They could lock down anything they wanted. People had no rights, so they could just absolutely flood the city with state resources and monitor everything and everyone, and that type of thing is just not possible in a free society.

Would you agree with that?

[00:07:00] Jonna Mendez: You know, people who speak that way probably haven't traveled very widely. You almost need to go take a look at the other possibilities, places that you could have been, but you weren't places that you could be living today, but you're not. You're living in the United States. To really appreciate the freedoms that we have.

You know, I, I never wanna talk about politics when I'm talking about Sure. This book, but it ebbs and it flows. There are people who, who would like to tighten up security. There are people who are much more relaxed about security, but even when security is tight back here, it doesn't even begin to approach what some of these foreign countries put their citizens through.

[00:07:37] Jordan Harbinger: I watch documentaries all the time, and I saw one recently on Belarus. There's a group of students that do these plays that are kind of like, Hey, we should have more freedom. And look, they're locking down our internet and they get busted and beat up by cops and thrown in jail and they go missing. It's really crazy to have a country like that in Eastern Europe in 2020.

[00:07:56] Jonna Mendez: You know, there was a rock band in, um, in Russia, what were they called? Pussy Pu Riot.

[00:08:01] Jordan Harbinger: Pussy Riot. Yeah, she was on the show actually.

[00:08:02] Jonna Mendez: Really? Yeah. I'm sorry. I didn't hear that. I'd like very much to hear one of them talk about it, but it was a great opportunity for the government to make a statement and to remind their citizens that this is not allowed.

This is what'll happen.

[00:08:15] Jordan Harbinger: They threw her in prison for years and they had her making uniforms and they were beating her up and assaulting her. She's as tough as nails. You'd have to be to be in that position. She's just one of the toughest people that I know and she's like a, her international notoriety as an artist is for a good reason.

What's strange is, you know, you think, oh, who's gonna commit treason against their own country? They must hate Russia, or they must hate the United States. She actually loves Russia and hates Vladimir Putin. So she's very specific about that. I said, why do you still live in Russia? And she, she said, I would die without it.

I would suffocate without it. I'm Russian. It's Vladimir Putin and is cronies we have to get rid of. So she is just, uh, she's not afraid of anyone. Obviously,

[00:08:53] Jonna Mendez: you know, a lot of Russians have that same visceral attachment to their country. They love their motherland. It's hard to separate them from it. We've exfiltrated some people, we've had defectors come out from Russia.

They come to this country, country, they see all these choices they have in a drug store. You have to choose from like 40 kinds of toothpaste. Uh, they have trouble coping with that. And a lot of them get very, very morose and depressed and they, they discover that they would like to go back.

[00:09:25] Jordan Harbinger: But Russia now, of course, capitalist more or less, I mean, yes, there's a lot of crony stuff going on there, and that's a whole, that's a whole different show.

We talked about some of that with Bill Browder before, but having that kind of environment, I mean communism, like old school Stalinism or whatever, Leninism, I guess it would be called, well, I don't know. I'm not up on that. It's either Leninist or Stalin. North Korea is certainly Stalinist. Having that kind of society with no choice and no, uh, free commerce to miss that is kind of like an alien notion to those of us who grew up in the United States or the western world at all.

[00:09:56] Jonna Mendez: That's right. You know, the mark that Stalin left on, that society carries on today. If you sit down with a, a Russian couple and you say, tell me about your family history and your country. You know, what part of Russia, where they from? How did that go? You'll almost always hear these stories about the purges.

You'll hear stories about. Arrests and murders where there were widows, there were orphans, there were just these tragedies on a scale that we can't imagine. Stalin was just, he was just so brutal isn't even a big enough word for what he did, and he left a mark that continues today. There are people in Russia who can't proceed further in their careers because say their grandfather worked with the Bolsheviks or the white Russians, there's a mark in their personnel files somewhere that says they can't be trusted, they can't be promoted beyond a certain level, and that's one of the things that drives that citizenry into our arms.

They hate that part of Russia. They hate that piece of Russia, and that is a catalyst for them to work with us.

[00:11:03] Jordan Harbinger: I have a friend who I grew up with and went to college with and and lived with, and his father has, I think, two PhDs. And he worked for DuPont and had a pretty darn good career. A guy with two chemistry PhDs.

I said, why did you leave Russia? And they said, well, I wasn't allowed to have a job because I'm Jewish. And I said, but you have two PhDs. What a waste of human capital. And he said, well, now you know why they're doing how they're doing compared to countries that don't deal with that kind of thing.

[00:11:26] Jonna Mendez: Exactly.

[00:11:27] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Yeah. So going back to the Moscow rules, I think it was at a CIA official that you'd quoted in the book that said it would be easier to run an agent on Mars.

[00:11:36] Jonna Mendez: That was Dick Helms, one of, one of our legendary chiefs of CIA. That was his comment, and it was right on the mark.

[00:11:44] Jordan Harbinger: There's something like 50,000 KGB agents in Moscow to counter the CIA and other foreign intelligence agencies.

Just thinking about that, I read that and I wrote that down and as I was going over my notes this morning, I thought I, I think the town I grew up in, which was not that small, had 40,000 people in it now. It was next to other towns, so it seemed larger for that reason. But 50,000 people, you'd need multiple high schools.

That's the size of the University of Michigan campus, including all staff and faculty and you know, all the students from all the different university campuses in the area. That's still more people.

[00:12:18] Jonna Mendez: You know, that number came from Ole Klu and Oleg was a KGB officer. He didn't defect ole lives in the United States.

Now. He transplanted himself. He became disenchanted with KGB and he went into politics in Russia. He was in the Parliament for a while, and then he decided that he'd start a new life over here. They had already taught him as a spy in the KGB perfect English. I mean, Ole came and just fit right in. He's a board member at the International Spy Museum now.

He's our, our Russian representative there.

[00:12:48] Jordan Harbinger: Huh.

[00:12:48] Jonna Mendez: And he was the, the one that gave me the number. I hadn't seen that number until I interviewed him.

[00:12:53] Jordan Harbinger: I interviewed Jack Barsky also on this show who, have you heard of him at all? Yes. Yeah, sure. That kind of story, to know that that's happening is absolutely crazy.

'cause when I look at the people who, let's say defective, which is the wrong word, but the people that go when they move over to Russia, it's like Steven Segal, where we're just kinda like, all right, see you later. Nobody's gonna miss you. It's not some high level parliamentarian who decides to go start living in Washington, DC or Manhattan because they're sick of it.

It's somebody who's kind of generally not super beloved type of person and has maybe a rough or strange past and, and actually prefers authoritarians over normal societies. And that's, I think, speaks a lot. I'm, I'm not anti-Russia by any means. I, I think the place is fascinating and I think the people are brilliant.

The culture's amazing. The food's amazing. I, I pretty much like everything about that. Other than some of these major sort of little tags on the, on the reputation of the way that they treat people, uh, it's hard to say that as an American given our track record, but it, it is different. And I wonder what you think about that because it's definitely, there's, we're kind of not really in the same league.

When it comes to how society functions, in my opinion,

[00:14:01] Jonna Mendez: well, you know, in the thirties and the forties, there were a lot of Americans who were interested in that experiment going on in Russia. They kind of bought into that idea of this capitalist state where you worked as hard as you needed to and, and you would get everything that you needed to carry on.

It was interesting that a lot of people went that way for ideological reasons.

[00:14:22] Jordan Harbinger: You meant communist day, right?

[00:14:24] Jonna Mendez: Yeah. I'm sorry.

[00:14:25] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:14:25] Jonna Mendez: And that, that tapered off entirely. And the ideological flow shifted and the people that ca, that would come to us, were looking for our society, our freedoms, our openness, our our ability to live a life unencumbered by all of the restrictions that you find in Moscow.

[00:14:41] Jordan Harbinger: Now, the embassy in the Soviet Union, they discovered, I guess later, had microphones in all the rooms, surprise, surprise, ceilings. But even in the foundation during construction, I always wondered about this. I thought, how come if we're building a embassy that's obviously gonna be used for intelligence and diplomacy in a country that might be hostile to the United States, how on earth can we build that, where there's no spy gear placed into the actual fabric of the building?

And that obviously happened.

[00:15:08] Jonna Mendez: You know, when I'm talking to a public audience like I was yesterday, and we kind of get to this point if it comes up. First thing I say is, is there anybody here who's worked for State Department? Usually there is not because then I talk about State Department in not the best terms.

The embassy we were given originally an old building. It was an apartment building, and the United States Embassy was in that building for many, many years. It was a fire hazard. It was the electricity didn't work, everything was wrong with it, and it was sprinkled with bugs, of course. Then we decided that we needed a new embassy, and the Russians decided that they needed a new embassy in DC It's always reciprocal.

Whatever we do to one embassy, we can do to the other. They moved forward together, so they started building their embassy in dc We started building our new embassy in Russia, but State Department brokered the whole deal. And State Department for all the wonderful things that they do. Security is not nearly as high on their list as it is at the CIA.

So for starters, they gave the Russians the highest piece of ground in Washington DC and that's where they built their new embassy, which has allowed them to intercept all kinds of microwave signals. I mean, from that kind of point of view, it's an ideal location. They gave us the lowest point in Moscow.

It's almost down in a dip, little bit of a swamp. So we started out on the wrong foot. State Department decided that there was no reason that the pieces of our building couldn't be preassembled by Russian citizens. The precast concrete, the rebar, the big pieces that go into making a high-rise building was all put together in Moscow.

Whereas the Soviets in Washington DC insisted on bringing all their own workers and no American touched anything, not a. So we ended up with a building that.

And I can't speak to their embassy, but I assume that it wasn't nearly the same situation. When they were building our new embassy. They were putting the bugs into the precast concrete. They were pouring the concrete around the bugs so that you could not debug this building. The only thing you could do is tear it down, which we basically ended up doing.

We had to undo that building and then bring in American construction workers start again and build it back up and hope that it was more secure. I'm sure it was more secure, but that was such a fiasco, such a long, drawn out episode, and it was kind of embarrassing that it was even allowed to happen to begin with.

[00:17:45] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that seems like amateur hour. If I'm thinking about this when I'm, I don't know, 15 and watching a spy movie, you'd think somebody who's in charge of building the Soviet Embassy from the perspective of the United States, might have, you know, done a brainstorm session with his teenage kids or something like that, just to make sure that he had all the bases covered.

Geez,

[00:18:03] Jonna Mendez: there was a point with that building as it was nearing completion, and it was becoming clear that we were gonna have to tear it down, where one of the Soviet officials brought to the United States Embassy personnel, a blueprint to show where all the bugs were. Knowing that we couldn't remove them, knowing that we had to remove the building and we were gonna do that, gave us the blueprints just to, I don't know,

[00:18:23] Jordan Harbinger: shove it in your face.

Pretty

[00:18:25] Jonna Mendez: much. I think so. I think so. They're here and they're here, and they're here.

[00:18:28] Jordan Harbinger: That's just unbelievable. The stories you have in the book. The Moscow rules, microphones being sewn into people's clothing and then put back in their closet before they notice. So you leave for the days, KGB comes in, opens up your closet, takes one of your suits out, sows bugs into it, puts it back in the closet, and you get home that night and you.

Hopefully don't notice. Obviously people did notice, which is how we know this is even happening, I assume,

[00:18:50] Jonna Mendez: you know, there's a European tradition all over Europe, but used to be where you'd leave your shoes if you were like in an apartment building or a hotel, leave your shoes outside the door and somebody, the shoe elf would come at night and shine your shoes.

That was just always tradition. And then our people started noticing that there were microphones in their shoes too, so they certainly didn't put their shoes outside anymore. I mean, every opportunity to do a bug they took

[00:19:14] Jordan Harbinger: Unbelievable. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Well, you were brought on because of your talent for art, which by the way, kind of funny nowadays 'cause you never hear that anymore from any company ever.

I feel like, but maybe that's not the case. Maybe CIA still does that. I feel like a lot of people who study art, I mean, isn't it the cliche that they can't get jobs later and here you are working in, in Moscow for the Central Intelligence Agency.

[00:19:35] Jonna Mendez: You know, they hired my husband, Tony Mendez. He responded to an ad in Denver in the Denver Post, and the ad said, wanted an artist to work overseas for the US Navy.

And Tony was an artist, he was a working artist. He had his own galleries, but he was also working with Martin Marietta. He was drawing wiring harnesses for the Titan two missile program. It's not art, but it's a way for an artist to make some money while he's, you know, doing his art in the evening. And Tony was intrigued because he couldn't imagine why they would want an artist in the Navy.

So he responded. And of course it wasn't the Navy, it was the CIA. And what they wanted was an artist with the kind of exquisite hand-eye coordination that Tony had. But not to make art, but to make copies, to make copies of all kinds of documents. This is where I'm always careful with how I word this, but think travel documents.

Tony could make a perfect replica of a travel document or a Visa stamp or of anything. The only thing that he couldn't make, because it's not allowed, couldn't make money if you make the other person's money, it's an act of war, turns out. So CIA did not do that, but we, we made just about everything else and that was his beginning, that was his entry into, into CIA as an artist.

I came in as someone interested in art with, um, some photo skills. Not really highly developed photo skills, but certainly I. Adequate for an entry level and off we went from there.

[00:21:00] Jordan Harbinger: It sounds like kind of a low key job, right? I'm making fake or copies of documents. I guess I'll, I'll use your careful wording here.

I can read between the lines. Um, and, but the test that you said, w would you cross an international border using the document you just created? Because that's, that's the test. This can make kids orphans and wives widows, which that is a lot of pressure.

[00:21:22] Jonna Mendez: Yeah, it really was. And the artists who were doing this work were always very proud of the work that they did and they wanna make it as good as they can make it.

And it became an issue 'cause they wanted everything kind of perfect. And these travel documents that might have stamps inside of them, they're never perfect. I mean, the document is perfect. The stamps are not perfect. The story that we always used to tell there was, um, we were copying travel document and the document we were copying had rusted staples in it.

So our artist who made the duplicate. Shined his staples up, got that rust out of there. And I mean he had this really just pristine document and he gave it to his supervisor to say, is it, this is as good as it can get, what do you think? And the supervisor said, you know, the rust is part of the authenticity of the document.

Without the rust at the border of that country, that person's gonna be pulled into secondary for some questioning. It's something as simple as that. So, I mean, it was really painstaking. And you'd issue those documents and you'd just

[00:22:25] Jordan Harbinger: tighten up.

[00:22:25] Jonna Mendez: You'd be watching. Yeah, you'd just be watching the cable traffic.

You'd be watching the news to make sure that you didn't see that somebody had been detained for that kind of a reason. It was tough work.

[00:22:36] Jordan Harbinger: I can imagine even a lot of people go, oh, they wouldn't notice some of the small details, but it doesn't matter, right? Because if you're looking at travel documents all day and every single one of 'em has rusty staples because the staples last about a month, or you know, six months and you get one with shiny new staples, or the staples go in Rusty 'cause they've been sitting in a warehouse for five years in a communist country, it looks really suspicious when that comes through.

And you may notice that, or I think, and we've studied a lot of brain science and cognitive science here on the show, a lot of people wouldn't necessarily notice the staples. They would just go, there's something weird about this passport, and I don't know what it is, but it's my job to follow my gut when it comes to this sort of thing.

So why don't you step in this room here? It doesn't even matter if they notice the staples, if they just get a, if it doesn't. Just fit the pattern completely. 100%. It can trip somebody's subconscious alarm bells.

[00:23:26] Jonna Mendez: Well, you know, when we were talking about documents, there's an offensive and a defensive side to that.

Because we were in the business of making false documents, we became the experts in detecting counterfeits and forgeries. Back then, this was um, 25, 30 years ago. Back then terrorists were traveling the world on their version of counterfeit travel documents. And they were full of mistakes that we saw.

We'd see generations. You could almost tell, oh, they've got a new guy making them now because he's changed things. Now he's doing this and he's making that mistake. So we published, in my offices, we published something, a little book, and we gave it out to all of our friendly allies for their immigration people.

And it was like, if you're looking at a fake pick, a country, a fake Italian passport, well, when the terrorists are making fake Italian passports, they consistently make this mistake. So the immigration officer, when he had an Italian passport, he would go to the Italian page and see if that mistake was in the document he was looking at.

The last time I looked, they had arrested over 200 terrorists based on that book.

[00:24:38] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, that's so interesting.

[00:24:39] Jonna Mendez: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you have to use the knowledge coming and going.

[00:24:43] Jordan Harbinger: It's like how they've, I think I studied this as a kid. There's all these little things in the dollar bill, right? That little, there's a frog on the leaf in the background.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's fascinating. That's fascinating. I would imagine the mistakes are not necessarily visual things though, right? It could be like the string that's in the paper on the cover is slightly tan, and this is not,

[00:25:01] Jonna Mendez: could be anything. It could be anything. If you're replicating something, it's hard for you to find all of the security features in that document that you're copying.

You can find maybe 95% of them, but it's that 5% that you don't find. That's what we put in our book, and then what would happen is. The terrorists would find out that, oh, we were stopping those passports. And so they'd start, they'd do a new run and they'd make another mistake. And so we'd update our book.

So we were always chasing behind them trying to call out all the errors.

[00:25:34] Jordan Harbinger: They're kind of like Q from James Bond, but it's the CIA and you create, did you create gadgets as well as items, or was that just kind of different departments?

[00:25:43] Jonna Mendez: We absolutely, we were q we provided the same services to the CIA. We were modeled after military models and after that British model, the CIA was sort of brought along by our allies in the uk.

And so a lot of the things we did were things they had tried, you know, that worked. So in my office, this is my larger office called the Office of Technical Service, and that's what this book Moscow Rules is about, really is the broader office, not just disguise, not just documents, but the people that did bugs, the people that built them, the people that turned into third story, guys that would go in and install those bugs.

It's about the people that did all the research r and d on batteries for their entire careers. They're trying to make those batteries smaller and smaller and stronger and stronger so that we can pack more batteries into a a bug so it'll last longer. Because once you put a bug in place, say it's a woodblock underneath the conference table in somebody's seventh floor conference room, you'll never get back in to change the batteries.

When the batteries die, you're, you're done. That's it. Your operation is over. So the length of time that those batteries would last was just hugely important. We worked in, um, clandestine photography. That was an area that I worked in extensively using very, very unique cameras, very unique. They were film cameras back then working with low light level video, which is kind of where that technology came from.

We needed it before the American consumer needed it. We needed to be able to do video in low light level. We could also do 35 millimeter photography in the dark without any light whatsoever. We invented things that nobody else really needed, but we needed, we were chemists, we were physicists, electrical, mechanical engineers, and then a lot of very, very narrow technical specialties that formed about half of our office and the other half.

We operations officers like me, like my husband, Tony, like a lot of other people out there, and we went and deployed the equipment. Half of us built it, the other half of us deployed it or trained people in how it worked.

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[00:30:15] Jordan Harbinger: If you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing people for the show, it is about my network, the circle of people I know, like, and trust.

I know you're not booking for a podcast, but if you have a job or you have any sort of semblance of a social life, building your own network is a great idea. It is. We know it's the greatest thing for relationships. And if you're a spy, it might even save your life. Although I'm guessing that specific market segment is a little small for this podcast.

Six Minute Networking is our course that will teach you all of this, any a non cringey, down to earth way, no awkward strategies or cheesy tactics, just practical stuff that'll make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend, a better peer. And I've taught this to spy agencies around the world.

Yes, that is true. Uh, in six minutes a day is all it takes. I spent slightly more than six minutes teaching this when I do it in person, uh, which I will probably never do again because it's painful. And many of the, many of the guests on our show subscribe and contribute to the course. Come on and join us.

You'll be in Smart Company where you of course belong, and you can find the course for free over@sixminutenetworking.com. Now back to Jona Menez. It is funny to think about tiny cameras being kind of the height of technology in the age of satellites, right? We, we have a man has walked on the moon. We have satellites orbiting the earth for communication and espionage, but it's like, Hey, can you make a camera that can take pictures in the dark?

You don't think about that 'cause you think of that almost as old technology, but it's, it really isn't.

[00:31:34] Jonna Mendez: It's very handy if you can do that, if you can be non alerting while you're collecting the intelligence. So if you back up for a minute and you look at what our main mission was, it was to collect intelligence for our policy makers in Washington on the plans and intentions of our enemies.

That's distilling it down, just about as clear as you can get it. We wanted to know what are they gonna do next. So today, somewhere out at Langley, they put together a program for all CIA around the world and one of the, one of the priority items in our next year program will be. What is Kim Jong-un, what's he doing and what's he going to do?

And another piece of it will be, what's Putin doing? What's he going to do? And it gets specific. What about their nuclear program? Where is it? Where is it going? And country by country it's, it's a program call. And then CIA spreads it out and says, who has access to this information? Who in the world knows the answers to these questions?

Okay, let's go recruit them. Let's go get them on our side. Let's go find them and meet them and see if we can't get some of them to work for us. That's kind of how, how that whole thing plays out. Our job at OTS in this Q Office was to provide our case officers with whatever they needed to further their recruitment effort or if they had an operation that was going live to help keep it clandestine.

A really big part of it for me was also to protect those foreigners that are working for us, keep 'em alive. They will provide as much intelligence as they can, and then if we need to exfiltrate them, if something goes wrong, if there's trouble, we always had agreed upfront when we recruited them that we will come in, we'll get you, we'll come and get you and your family, and we will get you out.

That was the deal.

[00:33:30] Jordan Harbinger: A lot of people might not realize that a lot of slash most intelligence, or at least the human intelligence was gathered by people who lived in the country that were Russians, for example. I think a lot of folks have a spy movie kind of idea of what the CIA does, and they're thinking, you're an agent, you're trained and you're running around, flown in from Virginia and now you're in Moscow running around taking photos of documents.

But it's the people that those people recruit that work in the place where the documents are stored, maybe for example, that are taking the photos and then handing them off. And I think a lot of folks actually don't realize that. So that's to clarify for the audience. That's what I think you know is important here because those people are taking a huge risk.

If someone who's flown in from Virginia and has diplomatic immunity and they have diplomatic cover, they get arrested, they get booted outta the country persona non grata usually. Right? So they can't come back. But if somebody who's Russian or Soviet citizen gets caught, they get shot by a firing squad.

I think if they're lucky,

[00:34:23] Jonna Mendez: they do.

[00:34:23] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah,

[00:34:24] Jonna Mendez: they do. They get executed. And their families go through hell. I mean, their families are then marked for the rest of their lives, can't get good jobs, can't get much of anything because they were part of the family of the traitor serious business.

[00:34:38] Jordan Harbinger: The engineers at CIA in the seventies sound kind of like tech startup engineers of today.

So eccentric, a little, maybe, sometimes awkward. Brilliant. Very focused

[00:34:48] Jonna Mendez: kind of nerdish. Yeah.

[00:34:49] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I wasn't gonna say it, but go ahead. That's, they were,

[00:34:52] Jonna Mendez: they were lovely. I, they were, um, I'm not sure how we hired some of them because back then, and maybe this is true today, we, because we were government agency could never offer, say the engineers the same salary that they would get from some big corporate office.

We could not compete with those salaries. And I used to go on some of the recruiting efforts. So what we'd have to do is find just the right people and we'd say, look, we can't actually tell you what you'll be doing, but you'll be working in your field. You'll be on the cutting edge of your field. You will be inventing new technology.

You'll be helping us solve some of these requirements. It's work worth doing. Why not do something that matters? Why not do something that makes a difference? And so some of them would come to us. I tend to think that some of the most interesting ones came to us because our technical officers went on to win awards and invent technology that didn't even exist yet.

I mean, they were, they were into bubble memory long before the private industry was. We were looking into areas that the small batteries, for instance, that eventually spilled out into the commercial market and they're in hearing aids and our watches and our phones and all of that stuff. Today we were pushing technology to solve our problems and I think, um, some of the people that were helping us do that were just amazing.

I mentioned one in the book, uh, his name was George and he, he was our battery expert. And I used to laugh 'cause I would say, you know, short of being a urologist, I can't think of a more boring profession than to be a battery expert, but. I mean, he made a huge difference in the commercial technology, made a difference at CIA and then went on years later to some fame and, and glory.

Um, he kept his career when he was part of the team that saved the Hubble telescope.

[00:36:45] Jordan Harbinger: Ah,

[00:36:45] Jonna Mendez: and that telescope was having a power source problem, and George was part of the team that that figured out, you know, how to fix it. So we just kind of stand over on the side whenever we hear one of our guys has done yet.

One more wonderful thing and we applaud. We had amazing talent.

[00:37:00] Jordan Harbinger: I know one of the things you worked on primarily was disguise. I thought that was kind of funny. 'cause when I think disguise, I think early 19 hundreds or like black and white silent film, Charlie Chaplin mustache, you know, I don't really think 1973, which is according to the book, kind of when disguise really started to be taken seriously.

You got help from Hollywood. Why is it important then, or why did it start to really take off then?

[00:37:24] Jonna Mendez: You know, a lot of what we did in disguise that was above and beyond wigs and mustaches was for Moscow because it was such a tough place to work. In some parts of the world, you don't. Need that much in the way of disguise.

In some parts of the world, you might wear a wig and a mustache when you're meeting, maybe you're having a drink with your agent, your foreign agent, or maybe you are out in a park and you're just walking talking. But, but you don't wanna be seen with that agent. But the thing you're worried about more than security in that country is that maybe your next door neighbor from pick a place where, from New York City, from Manhattan, maybe the next door neighbor in the apartment down the hall from you is also in Paris and he's gonna walk by and see you and come over and wanna talk and you can't talk.

You can't be Bill that night, even though your real name is Bill, because the person you're you're with, he thinks your name is Jean. And that happens so often. It sounds odd, but it did. That was a reason to wear a disguise. So we would give, those were called traditional disguise and everybody had a traditional disguise just in case they needed it.

When terrorism started. Happening. We started getting walk-ins at our embassies around the world, terrorists coming in. They wanted to see what the inside of the embassy looked like. So they'd show up, they'd show up at the Marine Guard at Post One, and they'd say, I wanna talk to an intelligence official.

And if they really wanted to, they'd say, I have some information that they would want. So the Marine Guard would have to call us. Somebody would have to go down and talk to them. There was a protocol for who would go, and there was a protocol for how to manage this. But on a lot of occasions, all the terrorists wanted to do was see what the CIA guy looked like.

And then they were gonna set up outside. We were gonna wait for him to come out in his car and they were gonna follow him home, see where he lived. Did he have a wife, did he have a dog? Did he have a kid? And maybe start planning something that was gonna be really uncomfortable for that family. So those traditional disguises started becoming a little bit like body armor, and our guys started using disguise in much more frequently than they had before.

They didn't even care if the terrorists knew that they were in disguise. They just didn't want the terrorists to be able to identify them. That was a push in the area of disguise that started at about that time in about the seventies.

[00:39:38] Jordan Harbinger: That makes sense. I can imagine somebody being like, I don't have time to put this disguise on.

They're like, just wear the hockey mask from the Friday, the 13th guy. At least he won't know what you look like. Or like, go down, here's a kangaroo mask. Go down there with your Richard Nixon mask on or whatever. It makes sense that you would wanna not let somebody who you don't know who's acting shady, just find out what you look like and follow you home in Iran or whatever.

[00:40:01] Jonna Mendez: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. There were a lot of incidents. I. It encouraged our men to use their disguise, and that made their operations safer. It made everybody safer. So that was kind of, um, a moment when disguise started becoming more of your operational planning in Moscow. It became sometimes, frequently the only way you could do your job was to use some form of disguise, some operations, some deception, some illusion, some.

And that's when we, we went out to Hollywood and we talked to the magicians. Actually, we talked to the magic builders, the people behind the magicians who create these moments on stage that we all look at and with our mouths hanging open. Like just a minute. There was an elephant there a minute ago. And then he walked in that box and now they've opened the box and the elephant's gone.

Where? Where's the elephant? And you look at these kinds of illusions and you say, your logical mind says the elephant has to still be there, but your eyes, your eyes are saying, no, no, he's gone. There's no elephant on that stage. There is no elephant. We wanted to learn how to hide an elephant among other things.

We had things we wanted to hide. Might not be that big, but we wanted to know how do you pull that off and off we went, and that was all for Moscow. There's no other city in the world that we needed it.

[00:41:17] Jordan Harbinger: I heard that you disguised an African American and an Asian man is two white guys, which that is super impressive.

I mean, I, I can almost see how you could do it the other way around, you know? But like, doing it that direction seems even more complicated somehow.

[00:41:31] Jonna Mendez: Well, it was, uh, for a car meeting and it was in a kind of a dicey situation. So the, the idea of having, uh, the African American and the American diplomat in the same car at the same time was gonna draw some undue attention.

So in that particular operation, we didn't use a fine, fine, finely crafted mask. We used the equivalent of a stunt double mask. I mean, that's what it was. And it was a stunt double mask for Rex Harrison, the movie star.

[00:42:00] Jordan Harbinger: Ah,

[00:42:00] Jonna Mendez: we used his face. I can't tell you. How many times we could make his stunt double mask and then we would paint it.

You could paint it to be dark, you could paint it to be Caucasian. You could put a wig on it. You could turn it into a woman. Although she was not a very pretty woman, but that wasn't the issue. You could do a lot. You couldn't get too close to it. But in a car for a car meeting or my husband had this story when they first started using them, the agent and the case officers were in the car.

The agent had on the stunt double mask, they're both Caucasian. Now. My husband had made diplomatic ID cards for them because he could do that. And they came to a roadblock and this is like, oh my God, they didn't On that, they came a roadblock, stopped car up, their diplomatic id. The guards looked in the window, looked waved.

This was just euphoria back at headquarters. Oh my God. That works so well.

[00:42:59] Jordan Harbinger: Somewhere. There's this old Russian guy who's talking about the time he met Rex Harrison in Moscow.

[00:43:06] Jonna Mendez: Probably.

[00:43:07] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. You get, I saw that movie Star guy today. You guys aren't gonna believe who drove through the checkpoint. Uh, what?

That doesn't make any sense. Yeah. Yeah. He's got a twin brother. Um, yeah. Yeah. The idea of identity transfer takes a big part of the book. Can you tell us a little bit about what this is? It's not just hair samples, facial imprints, but it's like creating a model. I'm trying to explain this like a, you're creating a model of somebody else that exists so that you can kind of clone them.

Put them in different places so that maybe if you're cloning me, I have plausible deniability because I'm on camera at the, at the Lakers game, but really I'm at a meeting with an agent or something like that. Is that kind of what's going on here?

[00:43:46] Jonna Mendez: That went to our more advanced mask technology. Not stunt double masks, but masks that came out of Hollywood, came out of their Hollywood.

There was a man named John Chambers who won all kinds of Oscars for makeup, and he had done the masks for Planet of the Apes. Well, we didn't want that, but we were very interested how he fitted those eyes because the eyes were just right on and they could express emotion in those masks, and that was the direction we wanted to head.

What we ended up with was something that was actually, it was just, it was amazing. They were animated lifelike masks. We could create any kind of character over your face. We would fit it to your face, but we could also make your face for another person. So we could make a twin for you. For instance, if we had two of you, there'd be a donor and there'd be a recipient.

So the case officer would be the donor, the recipient would be someone about the same build, same height, same weight. Generally, we'd put the case officer's face on the recipient. So now you had two people that looked strikingly the same. And this is what happens in the magic industry out in Hollywood.

And this, this is what explains a whole lot of tricks that take place on stage that they're, they're not twins, but they're very similar. They're always women, they're always blonde. I a a. You're in Moscow, then you can pre-position one of those people who wouldn't be getting huge surveillance because he's not a CIA officer.

You could position him maybe in a shop, in a cafe somewhere and you could have our case officer come along on foot and he could step into that cafe or whatever it is, and come out with maybe a menu, maybe a book of matches, maybe a poster about some music on it, whatever it's, so surveillance sees him, he goes in and he comes right out with something in his hand that explains why he stepped in that doorway and he goes on down the street.

But that's the double that comes out. And they follow the double all night long. And the real case officer is now without surveillance and can go do the things he needs to do, which would be to put down a dead drop, to pick something up, to put up a signal, to mail something, to make a phone call, maybe to meet with someone.

Those things that you cannot do if you have surveillance.

[00:46:13] Jordan Harbinger: That makes sense. So if you see me on video doing really bad karaoke, it's not me, it's my body double. I'm on a spy mission for the CIA

[00:46:21] Jonna Mendez: and and this is the dork they put in my place,

[00:46:24] Jordan Harbinger: right? Yeah, yeah. This exactly. He looks like he's had too much to drink.

You gotta work on your recruiting folks. Um, I think for me, if I were in a disguise, I'd be so paranoid that other people could see it. It would be like, that time I had tried marijuana in college, I'd be like, they know I'm in a disguise. Everyone knows they can see me. You know, I would be weird. I would act weird.

[00:46:45] Jonna Mendez: You're absolutely right. I mean, that's how it is. I remember the first time I put on a disguise, put it on the disguise Isn't the hard part. What? The hard part is wearing it in public. I went into a, it's back here. It's called seven 11. I went into a seven 11 in my disguise. And I just kind of browsing and I thought, oh God, they're gonna think I'm gonna steal something.

I mean, they're gonna come over.

[00:47:04] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:47:05] Jonna Mendez: And you, you do get paranoid and that's why when when we were disguising someone for the first time, they'd come in initially and we'd figure out what we're gonna do and then they go away and we'd have the hair goods made and whatever we're putting together. Then they come back for like a final fitting and put everything on.

We'd say, is it feel okay? Yeah. Is it comfortable? Yeah. You think you're gonna use this? Yeah. We'd say, great. Go down to the cafeteria and have lunch and then come back. This is at ccia, a headquarters where everybody knows everybody in the cafeteria where your office probably has a table where your boss is gonna be there, where everybody's gonna be there and they would go and discover that no one paid any attention to them.

It's empowering once you get through. You know, I'm hiding in plain sight and no one even knows I'm here. That is so cool. And it was only after we went through that process with them that we thought they might use it when they went overseas. Without that initial exposure, they would have put it in some sort of a little DOPP kit and put it in the back of their safe drawer and never use it.

[00:48:10] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I can see that. You have to kind of be able to go to Starbucks, grab a coffee, do a walk outside, go to the gym, do a light workout, sit around and read, drive home, and basically forget you have the dang thing on. Almost.

[00:48:23] Jonna Mendez: That's the point you wanna get to. You don't want it to get in the way of whatever you're doing.

You don't wanna be distracted because you've got this outfit on. You wanna be unencumbered, you wanna be incognito and fully aware of what you need to be doing.

[00:48:37] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I would imagine you also have to learn how to like eat and drink with fake facial features that don't end up with you dribbling everything down your chin and not notice it.

Well, you

[00:48:45] Jonna Mendez: know, there are, there are limits. What you can do. You can't do everything. You can brief a president of the United States, but it's hard to drink through a straw. It has restrictions, but it also has freedom.

[00:48:57] Jordan Harbinger: That's funny. I never even thought about that. Right. You can do all these amazing, super complicated things, but man, if you want to drink a diet coke through a a straw, you are outta luck, man.

You are. You gotta wait till you get home.

[00:49:08] Jonna Mendez: We thought they could live with that.

[00:49:09] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I think it's a fair trade. We do read about all these old school dead drops. You mentioned a dead drop, like a fake wooden log that holds messages or a used milk carton with fake vomit on it, on the ground. I wonder, is all this stuff obsolete now because of technology and encryption?

Like, do we just send them encrypted emails and we're good now? Or is low tech even more necessary now maybe because of advanced electronic surveillance?

[00:49:32] Jonna Mendez: And here we go into this hall of mirrors? I don't know the answer to your question 'cause I'm not there anymore and I don't need to know. My common sense would tell me that a lot of this is still used, but in a different configuration than what I knew otherwise.

They're not gonna let me talk about it or write it in my book. And by the way, just for your peace of mind, they're not gonna come and get you. Mm-Hmm. Because every, everything that we're talking about is in that book and has been cleared by CIA two years ago we, we never would talk about masks. We never did.

We've been gone for a long time. We've never, ever mentioned masks, all of a. So it may be that the form that their masks or their identity transformations, they may be changing the way they do it. I simply don't know.

[00:50:20] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that makes sense. I would imagine that it's not even worth speculating. We're never gonna find out, so it doesn't matter.

And even if we did, nobody could confirm whether or not we were right or wrong.

[00:50:30] Jonna Mendez: Some days someone will be arrested somewhere and there'll be something in a paper and we'll read it closely and we'll go, oh, that's what they're doing.

[00:50:36] Jordan Harbinger: Right. That makes sense. Yeah.

[00:50:37] Jonna Mendez: That's how we'll find out.

[00:50:38] Jordan Harbinger: How do you evaluate incoming assets or volunteers?

So the people who work for a foreign government, or maybe they're like in the Soviet Union, a Russian scientist knocks on the window of a car and you had the story of this guy who kept trying to get people's attention and over and over and over, and whoever was. Getting, whoever was being approached by him just kept thinking, this guy's obviously KG B.

It's so obvious he's knocking on my car window. He is showing up at my door. How do we evaluate these people? How do you know if they're crazy and delusional or if they're the real deal? How do you even begin to test someone for that? That

[00:51:11] Jonna Mendez: guy that you're describing was Adolf Toch. He was probably the most brilliant spy we ever had.

He was known as the billion dollar spy for value of the intelligence that he gave us back then. It would be double, triple that. Now, there was a real fear of, of what we call dangles, of double agents being sent to us, claiming they wanted to work for us, when in fact they didn't. They just wanted to, to learn about us and see who would meet with them and see what kind of questions we would ask them, because that would tell us where the holes were in our intelligence.

I mean, they could, by running a, a double agent against us, they could learn a lot. tok, hv, it took him five tries. To get through to us. And it was just almost crazy. Stanfield Turner was the head of CIA back then. He almost shut down Moscow station. There had been some incidents and he didn't want any more incidents.

There were a lot of reasons. There's James Angleton back at headquarters. He was our counterintelligence person and he was a little, he was a little over the top on all of that. But one, our chief of station at the time finally just decided that we had to meet this man and see what he had. What he had was just pure gold.

It was the equivalent of their pentagon's future plans for radar. This was the, the beginning of it for ground-based and airborne radar systems. Their new technology that they were gonna start producing and they were gonna have operational in 10 years. And we had that information 10 years before they built it, enough time for the Pentagon to build the countermeasures.

So by the time it came out. We already could defeat it. It was amazing.

[00:52:48] Jordan Harbinger: That is amazing.

[00:52:49] Jonna Mendez: Absolutely amazing. And this man was amazing. He was, uh, you know, he loved his country. It goes back to this thing about Stalin and the purges and, and his, both he and his wife had these terrible stories of what had happened to their parents, to their families during the purges.

They could never, ever forgive what happened. We offered to Exfiltrate Tolkachev, he said, no, he didn't wanna leave the country. He wanted to help the west work against his country. And he was arrested and he was executed. There's a man in the middle named Trigon, the third case. There are three big cases that we talk about in that book.

Trigon was one of the few who asked for an L pill. He was a really valuable agent. He said, I'll work for you on one condition, and that is that you give me the ability to take my own life. If they ask me, I don't want them to be able to do what they're gonna do. And there were all these terrible rumors about what they were gonna do.

He knew that execution would certainly be part of it, but the question was how will they do it? And the rumors were that they were feeding people into these crematoriums feet first alive. So nobody knew if that was true, but he was hedging his bet and he said, if, if they arrest me, I want to be able to make the decision myself.

So they arrested him. Eventually, everybody eventually got arrested. They stripped him down to his briefs in this room and they took every piece of equipment he had with him and they said, we want you to write your confession. And he said, well, comrades, I will write my confession, but I wanna write it with my moon blanc pin over there on that table with my clothes and everything else.

So they brought him his moon blanc pin, and we had put that L pill we gave him in the cap of the moon blanc pin. We had milled it out so that it was just paper thin that cap, and he knew where it was. And he bit down on it. He took the pen and he just put it in his mouth and bit down on it. It was cyanide.

The Russians in their report to their supervisors said he was dead before he hit the floor, which is the way he wanted it at Tov. The one that gave us the information on the radar. He was, the other one wanted an L pill. Those are the only two cases I ever knew of where they asked for it and they both had to fight to get it.

We didn't wanna be giving out suicide pills to anybody, but if that was the last straw, we would do it. Tolkachev had a one of those pills, but it wasn't with him when he was arrested. It was home in his desk. He didn't have it with him, so he couldn't use it.

[00:55:18] Jordan Harbinger: That's horrible. I know. It's straight outta James Bond.

Like this is dark and I'm not trying to make light of somebody having to take their own life, but if that's the first time this type of thing was used, this is kind of like the OG suicide to pill story, right? I mean, you see it in spy movies. It's a cliche now, like you have this suicide device or the suicide pill in a necklace or something like that.

Is that where this comes from?

[00:55:40] Jonna Mendez: I think this probably comes out of some sort of a military. You know, before the CIA, there was OSS before OSS, there were even some earlier forms of intelligence agencies turned into the CIA. But I think during, uh, world War II, probably it came out of that kind of, um, climate.

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Now for the rest of my conversation with Jona Mendez. If you get a walk-in like a Soviet engineer scientist, somebody from the Soviet Pentagon who's stealing documents, they have no clandestine operations training. How do you train them in what they need to know to avoid counter-surveillance by the kgb?

I, I would have no idea how to stay covert while stealing documents and taking photos of them and delivering them. I, and you can't fly me to the United States from Moscow, train me for two months and then plop me back at work. So how does it work?

[00:58:30] Jonna Mendez: It's actually very simple. If you have a real operation, you have someone who has access to the information and is willing to work with us, and we have a case officer there who's gonna run it out of some situation, that foreign agent should not have surveillance.

If he has surveillance, you don't have an operation. He has to be just a member of the, the masses. Wherever he's working. If he's working in an aeronautical company, if he's working in a chemistry, if he's working at their nuclear plant, wherever he's working, he has to be. He will be just a normal guy who goes to work every day and comes home.

No one will follow him. He's not suspicious. If he's suspicious, you don't really have an operation. So that's all set up when you do the recruiting, when you find the person that you think can give you the information, they're willing to give it to you, they have access to it, and they can do it in a way that is not alerting, and they can use my little tiny cameras so that they won't be seen taking photographs, they won't be fingered.

That way you set it up to protect that foreigner and let him get the information that we want. And then the risk is the American going to meet with him. 'cause the American will have surveillance, not the foreigner. The way that they're found out is if we lead them, if we lead surveillance to them, and that's where all these tricks about disguise and identity transfer and pop-up dummies in cars and all of that technology comes in to keep the KGB from following our case officer to meet with the agent.

And for 10 years, we would not meet with an agent in Moscow. It was too dangerous. No matter what we did, we didn't think that we could guarantee that. We wouldn't somehow tip them off to who the Russian was that was working for us. So we didn't meet them face to face. We did it all with dead drops. We would take our tasking memorandum, our letter, whatever form it took.

It might be on film, we would conceal it in. You mentioned a couple of them. We conceal it in a fake brick. Or a fake rock or a fake tree limb or a crushed can or an old dirty glove from a construction site covered with grease. Or like you said, the, my favorite, the, the milk carton with vomit on the outside or a dead rat.

Those were concealment devices made so that we could put them down in a very particular place and the foreign agent knew where that place was. And then we would do that. We would place it, say, by a telephone pole. We had to get away from surveillance. In order to even do that, we had to absolutely know that we did not have surveillance when we put that thing down by the telephone pole.

And then we had to go and put up a signal, a particular signal. It might be a chalk mark, it might be lipstick scratched on something. It could be take many forms and the signal would mean, 'cause the agent would walk by that site every day, or he'd drive by, say it's a mailbox. The agreed upon place for the signal is on the mailbox.

He would drive by every day. He'd drive by that mailbox on his way to work, and one day he'd see a white stripe on it. Ah, he'd know they put something down for me, and I know it's gonna be by that tree, so I'll go get it. And then after he picks it up, then he has to put a signal up somewhere where we drive by.

It means I got it. It's not lying out there in the open anymore. I got it. This is what if you can't meet with them face to face? This is what it turns into and it's tedious and it's very carefully done because. If you make a mistake, I mean it's a big mistake.

[01:02:11] Jordan Harbinger: I can, the, the amount of pressure these people are, I mean you're under pressure, but these people are under absolutely insane amounts of pressure.

I know you had the car, the popup doll I guess you would say in the car to make it look like somebody was still in the car. Yeah. When they weren't. It sounds like the singing mannequins at Chuck E. Cheese, you remember those? No. Well, maybe we're a different generation, clearly. I dunno, maybe, but like you, maybe you've seen these, so there are these like mannequins that would be in a rock band and they could kind of talk and move around and obviously someone was controlling them and they had little cameras in them.

This is like in the eighties. It sounds like this sort of automated people and they look kind of real, especially if you're not right next to it. And I know originally you'd started using, what was it, like sex dolls and inflating them using gas canisters concealed in briefcases. The popup silhouette, that's what it was called.

Right.

[01:02:59] Jonna Mendez: Yeah. In in, in the book, it was Tony's story. He was, um, he was somewhere in the Middle East finishing something and he's sitting outside having a beer with a friend and they said, we need, you know, for car surveillance, we need a new idea. And they came up with this idea of a pop-up dummy, and they called it a jack in the box, a jib.

And initially it was the sex assaults that I'd never heard of. So somebody had to walk me through that, right?

[01:03:20] Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

[01:03:20] Jonna Mendez: They sent a cable back home to headquarters and said, we need, we need about a dozen of these things. And so two of our little young engineers with their high water pants and their, all their pins in their pockets and, you know, these kind of dirty little guys, they went down to Al's Magic Shop down by the White House, and they bought a dozen sex dolls.

And they came back and they said, don't ever send a surrogate.

[01:03:43] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I have a, the good news is I have a punch card and the next one is free, but please don't make me go back there.

[01:03:49] Jonna Mendez: Oh, that is the best. Well, that's what they started with, gas inflated. They thought they had something, but they put them in briefcases.

One of them was being tested behind the Iron Curtain in Warsaw. It was by one of the wives just to see, 'cause the driver of the car would deploy it. This was a popup. Dummy would start out in a briefcase on the floorboard. The case officer would step out of the car. The wife would hit a button, or the driver would hit a button.

This dummy would pop up wearing the wig, wearing the same clothes as the guy that had just left trailing surveillance would come around the corner and there's still two people in the car and they'd follow that car all night. They never knew. This was always one of the goals. They should not know. 'cause then if they ever figured it out, they'd think that they goofed up.

Not that you escaped, but that it was their fault. What we. Anyway, when she was doing that, the gas came out of the canisters. It was so cold because of the compression that it froze the plastic sex doll, and she exploded. And the wife evidently just freaked out. So we, we went out to Hollywood to our magic people, and we said, is there a better way to do this?

And oh, there was such a better way to do it in the book. The first deployment of it, the first operational deployment, it was in a birthday cake. Uh, the chief of station was driving. The passenger needed to get out of the car. The chief of station's wife was in the backseat, and the birthday cake was in the backseat.

So when the person stepped out of the car, the cake went on the passenger seat, somebody hit the button, the dummy popped up. It was perfect. It worked really well. I mean, they, they are behind you. They don't drive up next to you and peer at you. They're being a little discreet. You know, they're there and they know, you know, they're there, but they're not gonna come up and like wave at you through the window or anything.

But the head on, that dummy turned so it could turn to the driver. And then it could turn and look out the passenger window. It was fairly realistic. That's how Ed Howard, who was one of our huge traders at CIA, he gave away all our secrets, and then he fled to Russia years ago. That's how he escaped. He went to his local hardware store and bought the supplies to make a homemade jack In the box.

He used a plunger like you used with a toilet. He used a styrofoam head that we used as a wig block. He put his wig that we gave him on it. He put his safari jacket that he always wore on it. And he fooled the FBI in Santa Fe and escaped to Moscow where he lived the rest of his life.

[01:06:17] Jordan Harbinger: I always wonder if people like that who went behind the Iron Curtain, got there and after a few months were like, oh shit, this was not a good move.

[01:06:25] Jonna Mendez: You hope that, don't you?

[01:06:27] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, totally. Because you'd think like, wow, you cost a lot of innocent people their lives and. In exchange for what? Like not a whole lot. I mean, you don't see a whole lot of people fleeing to North Korea across the DMZ. Exactly. Right. For example. That's a

[01:06:41] Jonna Mendez: good example. Yes, that's absolutely true.

[01:06:44] Jordan Harbinger: So yeah, who knows? I'm, I'm just always so curious. It's like I've, and I've made this call out on the show before, if anybody knows any Americans who defected to the Soviet Union in the eighties, I'm dying to talk to them. 'cause I'm so curious, you know, what they think and now they can probably speak a little more freely.

I'd love to hear a balanced version of that besides the one I've built in my head, which is that they regret it. Right.

[01:07:03] Jonna Mendez: I don't follow Snowden. I know he pops up on screens. He's, he talks, I'd really be interested to know how he's feeling about his decision.

[01:07:10] Jordan Harbinger: Sure. If I were him, I think I would be pretty worried to say anything because.

If they decide he can't live there anymore, he's in even deeper trouble than he's already in. He is, yeah.

[01:07:19] Jonna Mendez: Yes, he is.

[01:07:20] Jordan Harbinger: The amount of pressure these, these assets are under though is beyond stressful. The guy, was it Toce who put the cyanide pill under his tongue every time his boss said, can you come to my office?

Yes. Because he thought he was gonna get arrested. Yes. And he burned like hundreds of thousands of dollars. 'cause he thought, oh, they're gonna find this evidence. And it just turned out to be a false alarm, which is like setting millions of dollars on fire when you make $200 a month or something in the Soviet Union.

[01:07:44] Jonna Mendez: Yes.

[01:07:44] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:07:45] Jonna Mendez: Yeah. Not everybody can handle that kind of pressure. And these guys that were doing it, they knew, uh, there were consequences that they were caught and they knew what the consequence was. And you know, the other thing is that they typically, their families didn't know what they were doing. They couldn't trust them with it.

Not that the families would rat them out, but that the families might slip up. Make a mistake. Mistake. And so most of the people that worked for us like this were on their own. They were doing this completely separate from their real lives. This was just a category of work that no one knew about. But the CIA and there's a, I don't have a copy of the book with me now because I gave it to someone this morning.

There's a comment from Gina Hasell in the book. She's the current head of CIA and she's talking about how the CIA is the keeper of the human intelligence source. That means people of people and that no technology can replace these people. They need to be met and they need to be reassured and they need to look you into the eye and be told how important what they're doing is, and that it's worth the risks that they're taking.

And she kind of pulls that out of the air and says that you can't do this job without, without these human beings that are willing to take these risks. It's absolutely true.

[01:08:57] Jordan Harbinger: I'm confused though. He, there was something where he was supposed to exfil but his wife was too large, that he was worried she couldn't fit into the plane.

Is that

[01:09:04] Jonna Mendez: what I understood? Uh, that's what he said. I think that he just didn't wanna leave. You don't wanna stereotype, but mostly they did not wanna leave. They'd rather take a chance. Then leave. But he did say that his wife was too heavy.

[01:09:16] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. Yeah. I never saw

[01:09:19] Jonna Mendez: a picture of her. So I don't know. But there was one other case, just real quickly in the book where an author here, back here in the States had written a book that had, I don't know if he meant to, but he had identified one of our Russian sources who was no longer working for us, no longer doing what he did, but it was very clear to anyone who read the book, who he was, and our chief of station in Moscow decided that we had to alert this guy and offer to move him.

We were always ready to move them. We actually had document packages for all of these people. Ready, passports, everything they'd need. To get outta the country. But our chief of Station couldn't get rid of surveillance and he wasn't a man who was out on the street a lot. So he, he was maybe not as clever at working this surveillance thing.

He wanted to go meet the Russian and say, your life is in danger. This book has been published. We couldn't stop this book. It's gonna be out. They're gonna come and get you. They're gonna execute you. So he was trying to get to the door to knock on the door, and he couldn't get out of the embassy. But my husband had been there about a year before and had left behind a contingency disguise.

It was called the Carroll Disguise because there was a woman in the embassy had nothing to do with us who liked to ice skate, and she had this distinctive big blonde hair, kind of Dolly Parton hair. And so the way we got to that agent to warn him was our chief of station dressed up like a woman, and this is a real man who did this, put on the dress, got Carol's ice skates, put them in his lap, put on Carol's wig, got Carol's husband to drive in Carol's car.

They drive through the gate to the embassy to go out. These were people that were never followed because they just weren't out. They couldn't be spies. So our chief of station dressed up as a woman, went, ended up knocking on the guy's door and saying, you know, there's nothing we can do except we can rescue you right now.

You wanna go? The guy said, no, I'll take my chances. And he stayed. And because he was a war hero. And a very celebrated war hero in Russia. They didn't kill him, so he got, so he, it's a good ending. It's one of the few, yeah, it's one of the few good endings.

[01:11:23] Jordan Harbinger: So he was so decorated that if it came out he was a spy, it would've just been damaging to the country's morale.

Like, well, if he's a spy, maybe this place is going to hell in a hand basket. That kind of thing. I

[01:11:33] Jonna Mendez: think it's that kind of thing. I think that's what it was. But he knew, or he thought he knew. He said, thank you. Actually, he said some things that were really profane, but they were just heat of the moment. No way in hell I'm gonna leave the motherland.

[01:11:48] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. I mean, those guys have brass balls. You all do, honestly. Like it's really reading the book. You're like, oh gosh, what's gonna happen next? Please don't kill the, oh, he got killed. You know? It's like really upsetting and, and the risk level is so high. Even like you said before, you don't even meet these agents for years and years and years because it's too dangerous to do.

There was one situation in which I think the guy had done something with the wax of the ink and it, he had spilled the decoder stuff on it, and it, it obscured the message. What if you destroy the coded message? What do you do? You have to explain in the next drop, like, Hey, sorry, warthog seven HQ spilled coffee over that thing.

You just risked your life to give us. Can you just make another one and drop it off real quick? Like what can you even do?

[01:12:32] Jonna Mendez: I think that was the hairiest moment in the book. That was a, an operation that my, my husband was, he happened to be in station when that happened. This message came in. The message was, uh, the agent had prepared the message wrong.

He had used it. It sounds ridiculous. He'd used the wrong kind of paper. He used paper. It had a wax like butcher paper. A butcher might put some meat in it, so it's waterproof. That's not what you're supposed to do. He had written it in cursive instead of block letters. Cursive is harder to read if you're doing secret writing.

He had just sent this message and when they went to develop it, this is secret writing and it's not lemon juice and heat or this is very sophisticated system, but the developer had alcohol in it. So what? You take the letter and you basically float it in a tray of liquid that has alcohol in it, that and only that will develop the message.

So the man that's developing it, not my husband, but another man, he puts it in the tray and you do it by inspection. You watch it and he's looking and he, he sees the message, he sees it come up. It's just like developing an old photograph so he can see the message. It's all in Russian. He can't read it, but he can see it.

And he goes to pull it out of the, the liquid and the letters just float off the page and dissolve. And it was a nightmare because this particular message was so important. This man had just come into country and it was the one chance, are we gonna meet him or not? Is he gonna meet with us or not? 'cause a lot of agents, you meet them outside of the country and they're like, oh sure, yes, I'll work for you.

I would do this. Not a problem. And when they get back to Russia and they look around, they go, well, I don't know. This looks pretty dangerous. So we're, we're never really sure if they're gonna show up once they return to their country. His message. They worked night and day to develop that message. They used photography, they pulled out all the old writing in his file, compared it to the little shreds that were left and they put together, uh, what they thought was a message, but it was still in Russian.

It was my husband working on this, so he didn't know what it said. He didn't even know if it said anything if these were really letters. And the chief of Station came and leaned over him and looked and it said, I will meet you. And it was, you know, big cheers all around. He was gonna make that meeting, he was gonna work with us, and he turned out to be, that was the agent that bit down on the lethal pill eventually and killed himself.

In between the letter and the lethal pill, he gave us some amazing, amazing intelligence.

[01:15:03] Jordan Harbinger: I can only imagine, I just, the level of risk, you wouldn't do it for money, you'd think anyway. I guess some people do, but there's just, it seems like there has to be more to it. And even when people betray their country, like when we look at some of the leaks from the United States, when they finally do get caught and go to prison, it's almost always like revenge, ego, vanity.

It rarely is it just purely financially motivated.

[01:15:27] Jonna Mendez: There's always, uh, ego in there somewhere, one way or another. It's always part of it. Aldridge James, when he, uh, betrayed the United States, it was mostly money. Bob Hansen, when he retraded the United States was mostly Eagle. And these Russians, when they, they come out, they come up to us for ideological reasons, but then when you talk to them for a while, the Stalin, like I said, Stalin always comes up.

There's a history always. I don't think there was anyone in Russia that wasn't touched by Stalin, whose family wasn't touched by Stalin. And it's a mark that I don't know that it'll ever go away.

[01:15:58] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It's kind of like, like the Holocaust people Yeah. Now are still alive, but there's gonna be people who've never met the people that went through that and that are gonna have that imprinted, it becomes part of the family.

Yeah. Legacy in history that gets passed all the way down. Like where did we come from? Oh, we don't know. 'cause Stalin murdered everyone in our family and then moved us to the middle of nowhere and here we are. Exactly. And that's where grandma and grandpa were born. Like that kind of thing. I heard that you used to use handwriting analysis.

Is that even real? It sounds like such pseudoscientific bologna, honestly.

[01:16:26] Jonna Mendez: Well, it's because we use it as pseudoscientific baloney here in the states. Ah, okay. It's got a long history in Europe. It's respected. Uh, years and years ago when I first went to Europe, before I even knew what CIA was or that it existed, I was working for Chase Bank in Frankfurt.

And as part of my application, I gave them a page of handwriting. It was part of their process. Our handwriting analysis was put together by a European woman who was very well respected in Europe. There's nothing casual about her approach. It was a series of measurements. It was, it was a very scientific approach.

We used it extensively with our agents. We would have them write some, you know, their messages. We would send them for analysis. This was all in a computer too. This wasn't really eyeballing it so much as you were using the computer, but we would discover that people were sick. We would discover that people were lying.

I mean, that was our first indication. And then you go explore that and find out, oh yeah, they are sick. Oh yeah, they are lying. We discovered that combining handwriting analysis and polygraph, and there was a personality sort of test that we would give a psychological assessment test we would give to our agents.

And if you had those three pieces of information, you had a pretty good handle on who you were dealing with. It was very useful.

[01:17:44] Jordan Harbinger: Well, this has been very enlightening and I'm very thankful for your time. There's one last little bit and nobody can really settle this, and I don't even know if we'll get an answer today, but I was talking with a friend who is also really interested in espionage and things like that, and he had said, well, you know, I heard that since there were so many leaks back and forth between the CIA and the KGB, everything just kind of evened out.

So maybe the whole thing was awash, which I think is kind of ridiculous. His argument was there's no point in even doing it because everything evened out. But obviously if one side's doing it and the other side's not, then that wouldn't end up like that. But what do you think from being on the inside, are you able to sort of see any sort of scoreboard and go, we definitely got one over on them in the end, or is it actually kind of six of one half dozen of the other?

[01:18:27] Jonna Mendez: I dunno that it's about getting one over on them, but it's about did did we receive any usable intelligence, any actionable intelligence? Did we learn anything that made a difference? There was a Cold War conference held at Texas a and m George Bush's University some years ago, maybe it was 20 years ago.

And the question was, who won the Cold War? And we had all kinds of, you know, scholars and we had lots of different intelligence people and we had Ole Cogan at the very end. We had Ole Cogan on the stage with a CIA officer named Paul Redmond. It was just two people. It was like everybody else had made their, made their cases.

And now we're down to two people. Paul Redmond was chief of counterintelligence and Ole Cogan was an XKGB General. So the question was, who won at the end of the conference? It just kept boiling down. Boiling down. And finally Coogan said, I would say that for every penetration we had of American intelligence, we had five of ours.

So it was five to one. And there's silence. 'cause everybody in that room is thinking, yeah, but you killed them all. Alder James gave them to you about a dozen. You wiped them all out. You killed them all. So that score five to one didn't really make any sense if they were all executed. So, you know, it, it's just, it goes on and on.

We had a great run back then. We had amazing intelligence coming in. Did make a difference. What Tolkachev gave us with their weapons programs made a huge difference. What Trigon gave us was the bottom line for the Soviets and the Salti talks. He told us where they were willing to go and wouldn't go any further.

So we went into negotiations with the Soviets about strategic arms limitations. Knowing their position before we even walked in the room. Things like that. They do make a difference. They do.

[01:20:18] Jordan Harbinger: Johnna, thank you so much. This is fascinating and I really appreciate you doing it with a very sore throat. I know what that's like from personal experience and uh, I really just want to say thank you so much.

[01:20:27] Jonna Mendez: This is a really good interview, I must say. I'm just really impressed with what a nice interview you do. Not Nice, nice is the wrong word. Very intelligent, very informed. Very, I really like doing this.

[01:20:37] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, this was fun. I wish we could have done it in person, but you know, I, it was that or wait for three years when I'm, whenever we're in the same neighborhood, so I chose this.

Yeah,

[01:20:46] Jonna Mendez: I think this was good.

[01:20:49] Jordan Harbinger: Imagine facing a rare, incurable disease and finding out that AI could repurpose an FDA approved drug as a potential cure. That's the breakthrough achieved by Dr. David Feum and the mission of his company. I

[01:21:00] Clip: will never forget. The doctor walks in the room and says, David, your liver, your kidneys, your bone marrow, your heart and your lungs are all shutting down.

That's it. Like we've tried everything. There's, there's nothing more that we can do. I. I was terrified. I was like, had my last rights read to me. Course, you know, no one thought that it was even possible that I could survive. You're dying from this horrible disease, chemotherapy just gave you a little bit of a window, but it's probably gonna come back.

So, you know, what's your game plan to prevent this thing from killing you? Well, the only way to get back is to use the tools that you have. Within reach. I'm like, shit, I've got this horrible disease and the only way that like I might be able to save myself was if I can find a drug that's already at the CVS.

And so my mission then became could I figure out what the hell's going wrong in my immune system? So then maybe I could find a drug that already exists that could treat it. I'm not supposed to be here, like my drug wasn't made for me. It saved my life. It was always there. I am completely on fire about this idea that there are drugs at your nearby CBS, your nearby Walgreens that could help more diseases and more people.

But the incentives aren't aligned for us to do that. So we created every cure a couple years ago because we believe that every drug should be utilized for every disease it possibly can, regardless of, you know, whether it's profitable or not. 80% of our drugs that can help people today and tomorrow, no one's doing any research whatsoever to figure out more uses for them.

[01:22:28] Jordan Harbinger: Tune into episode 1005 of the Jordan Harbinger Show to explore how existing medications are bringing new hope to those confronting elusive illnesses. Great. Big thank you to Jona Mendez. The book title is The Moscow Rules, the Secret CIA Tactics That Helped America Win The Cold War. There's actually an exhibit on Jonah at the International Spy Museum in Washington dc.

I definitely plan on going to that spy museum by the way. If anyone's been there, let me know how that is. It sounds amazing. She told me off air that they actually brought babies on surveillance operations because babies are not suspicious. It's funny 'cause that sounds so obvious, but again, we're playing on unconscious bias.

If I'm looking for somebody who might be suspicious, the woman with a baby is not high on my list. Right? It's just really not. Oh, you're out for a random walk in a random place. Well, you have a baby, you're probably tired and you're trying to get the baby to sleep. Like that would never occur to me even if I were looking for it.

She also told me they had to disguise vehicles, so they had a, like a fake Tony's pizza surveillance van, which now of course we've seen that in every spy movie. But back then, that was pretty novel. She actually took the sign from the van home when she retired, which I can, I can assume it's either in the garage or maybe in an office somewhere, but that's pretty rad.

Other uses of this. Guys that didn't make it on the show, they used to dress up some agents like Embassy wives and drove them past security. Uh, or they would clone the intelligence agent, have the agent drive out past security and then just sit at a cafe somewhere while the actual operative was somewhere else doing something.

So this is really cool stuff. The whole cloning people and just kind of sitting there at your local cafe having a cup of coffee because you know that that person's being watched. But the other person who was actually up to something who was the real version of that person was out there doing their thing.

So really, really cool. The security box with the police outside the embassy, especially in the Soviet Union, was often to monitor coming and going, not necessarily to keep the embassy itself safe. It's amazing how bad things got over in Moscow for the CIA at one point, they had no foreign or Russian employees to drive cars, build offices, do anything.

They fired all the Russian staff because they were nearly all KGB informants or agents. They just really had to go back to the stone age here. They were using ballpoint pens to write in legal pads 'cause they couldn't use typewriters 'cause the typewriters were bugged. They were flying memos to Germany to be typed up and sent back to the states pens would freeze 'cause it was so damn cold when they had the temporary office space 'cause the other embassy got caught on fire.

That was a whole story with fake firemen coming in that were KGB firemen. Just an unbelievable tale. So they're working outside in like 30 below zero weather. The pens are freezing just bonkers. Talk about a rough assignment. They've really invented some cool stuff, even vans that let other cars drive into them using a ramp so they could be concealed.

It's like straight out of Spy Hunter if you ever played that game back in the, in the eighties. I love that game as a kid. We're also gonna link to a cool video from Wired about Jonna and Disguise. We'll link that in the show notes as well. Also in the show notes, there are worksheets for each episode, so you can review what you learned here today from Jonna.

We've also got transcripts for each episode, and those can be found in the show notes as well. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using systems and tiny habits. I have taught this two intelligence agencies, so if you're interested in this kind of thing, check out the six minute networking course, which is free.

Over at Jordan harbinger.com/course. It really is sort of some spy stuff, but you know, apply to civilian life at least for the most of us. Dig the well before you get thirsty, folks. Jordan harbinger.com/course. And by the way, most of the guests on the show actually subscribe to the course and the newsletter, so come join us.

You'll be in smart company. In fact, why not reach out to Jon and tell her you enjoyed this episode of the show? Show. Guests love hearing from you, and you never know what might shake outta that. Speaking of building relationships, you can always reach out and or follow me on social. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram.

This show is created in association with PodcastOne. This episode was produced by Jen Harbinger and Jason de Philippo, engineered by Jay Sanderson. Show Notes and worksheets by Robert Foggerty. Music by Evan Viola. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Our advice and opinions and those of our guests are their own.

And yes, I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. I'm sure as heck not a doctor therapist or SP as far as you know. So do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show. And remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting.

So if you found somebody who's into spy stuff, this is one for them. Hopefully you're finding something in every episode, so please share the show with those you love and even those you don't. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time.

[01:27:04] Clip II: Hi everyone. This is Jillian with Court Junkie. Court Junkie is a True Crime podcast that covers court cases and criminal trials using audio clips and interviews with people close to the Cases. Court Junkie is available on Apple Podcasts and podcast one.com.