The Master of Disguise

Antonio J. Mendez, Malcolm McConnell

• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061865305
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Historische Biographien

From the author of Argo comes an unforgettable behind-the-scenes story of espionage in action. In the first ever memoir by a top-level operative to be authorized by the CIA, Antonio J. Mendez reveals the cunning tricks and insights that helped save hundreds from deadly situations.

Adept at creating new identities for anyone, anywhere, Mendez was involved in operations all over the world, from "Wild West" adventures in East Asia to Cold War intrigue in Moscow. In 1980, he orchestrated the escape of six Americans from a hostage situation in revolutionary Tehran, Iran. This extraordinary operation inspired the movie Argo, directed by and starring Ben Affleck.

The Master of Disguise gives us a privileged look at what really happens at the highest levels of international espionage: in the field, undercover, and behind closed doors.

1 A Letter Slipped in the Door

Delicate indeed, truly delicate. There is no place where espionage is not used.

—Sun Tzu

The Blue Ridge Mountains, Maryland, August 21, 1997

• The anxious memories returned to haunt me that summer night, keeping me from sleep once more…

It is past midnight near the time of the monsoon. I wait tensely on the concrete observation deck of the sweltering airport terminal, peering down at the tarmac through a thickening haze. The TWA flight from Bangkok is already two hours late. I have watched Swissair arrive from Riyadh, Lufthansa from Bangkok. An Aeroflot IL-62 arrives from Tashkent and lumbers up to the gate directly below.

My pulse suddenly surges. The appearance of the Aeroflot is an ominous sign. The operations plan called for the subject and his CIA escort to have left on the continuation of the delayed TWA flight at least an hour ago, for a very good reason. We wanted them out of here before the Aeroflot landed, with its inevitable ground retinue of KGB gumshoes.

The subject is a KGB defector who simply walked into our Station ten days earlier. Now, waiting down in the steamy, crowded departure hall, will he panic and run when he hears the Soviet flight announced?

I glance over the mildewed cement barrier. All the gates are full, but there is no American plane. Then, out of the gloom, the TWA Boeing 707 materializes. It lands, taxis down the runway, and finally stops at the far end of the poorly lit parking apron.

The haze thickens—“smit,” the old Asian hands call it, ground-hugging “smoke from shit” from the millions of cow dung cooking fires burning in villages across the subcontinent. I squint, but the TWA plane is hard to distinguish. I wait.

The disembarking TWA passengers grope their way through the murk and stumble into the terminal, where the humidity and stench of clogged W.C.s will certainly overpower the smit.

I cannot leave the platform. My task is to confirm that our subject and his escort officer “Jacob,” my partner in this operation, safely board the continuation of the TWA flight. But in this miasma, how can I see whether they reach the plane? If I don’t catch sight of them coming out of the terminal with the other passengers booked for the same flight, it could mean they have run into trouble at passport control. That is where the alias documents and disguise I’ve helped create will be tested.

Passengers emerge from the terminal, headed for the TWA plane, but I still don’t see the subject and his escort. Is it possible that they have already bolted to the two getaway cars sitting at the dark end of the parking lot with their engines running?

Whatever the outcome of the exfiltration operation, I have to pass a signal from the phone booth at the bottom of the stairway. Tonight, we will use an open code with an ostensible wrong number. Is Suzy there? (They made it.) May I speak to George? (Something went wrong.) The rest of the plan will unfold based on which of these two things happens…

Finally, I sleep, but I have no rest. Even in my dream, my mind cannot let go of the scene at the airport. I find myself descending the stairs with their chipped paint and wedging myself into the oven of the phone booth. I lift the receiver of the clumsy red Bakelite phone, put a brown coin in the slot, strike the cradle bar and release it. No dial tone. No coin drop. Damned colonial phone, a legacy of British rule that probably hasn’t been maintained since the King folded the Union Jack.

Again I jiggle the cradle. The fat copper disk drops into the coin return slot. I jam the coin back in. A hiss, a click, a weak dial tone. Receiver held between ear and shoulder, I dial quickly, scanning the number scrawled on the hotel matchbook in my other hand. Clicks and pops, finally a coherent double whir. The phone is ringing at the other end. I press the receiver tightly against my ear. Four rings…five…Pick it up, Raymond. I slam the phone down after ten rings.

Why doesn’t he answer? I look at my watch: 3:07, an hour past my scheduled call time. I know he’s still at the safe house. They’re expecting me to pass the signal. I suck in a deep breath of humid air and release it slowly to ease the tight band across my shoulders and the drumming in my ears. I have to call. I insert another fat copper coin and dial. A pause. A click…the coin drops through again. The phone is dead.

BLINKING AWAY SLEEP, I open my eyes to the wispy dawn spreading over South Mountain. The August sun brushes the treetops behind our garden teahouse. I blink again. Is that smit swirling among the azaleas? No, only mist.

The intensity of the dream dissolves slowly. I’m not in South Asia on an operation twenty-seven years in the past, but in the master bedroom of our house in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Still, as the cardinals start to sing, I am gripped by an anxious lethargy, the helplessness of the dream. Unable to return to sleep, I watch the colors in the garden change with the sunrise and quietly reflect on my life.

I’ve considered myself an artist since childhood. For a long time, I also saw myself as a competent spy. Since 1990, when I retired after a twenty-five-year espionage career in the CIA, I have once again been painting full time.

During these seven years of normal life, the recurrent dreams of the world I inhabited for so long have only slowly subsided. But one day, a totally unexpected event occurred that unleashed an avalanche of long-suppressed memories.

I LIVE, WORK, and show my paintings on forty acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western Maryland. Our post-and-beam house, and the surrounding studios on this lushly wooded property create a harmonious atmosphere similar to that found on a New England farm. A hundred feet down the grassy slope from the house stands a two-story studio, a red saltbox carriage house, and several sheds. Dominating the studio and stretching back toward the house is a large enclosed pavilion with a third-story tower perched in the center of the roof. The pavilion’s second floor is a main exhibit area above a large office at ground level. My writing studio is now in the tower. This complex of wooden buildings is my personal work in progress, built by the hands of family, friends, and myself over the years since 1974.

Surrounding the studios and house are terraced gardens that my wife, Jonna, claimed as her personal domain when we married in 1991. Maple and oak trees cover most of our rolling property, on the base of a Blue Ridge summit west of South Mountain.

Late on Thursday, August 21, 1997, Jonna and I drove up the winding gravel track with our four-year-old, Jesse, asleep in the backseat of the red Pathfinder. From the garage bay beneath the studio, we passed the door of the office. A white envelope had been slipped into the screen door.

“What’s that?” Jonna asked.

I got out and retrieved the envelope. “FedEx letter,” I replied.

While Jonna tucked Jesse into bed, I examined the contents, a single-page letter on heavy bond stationery bearing an official letterhead:

THE DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
WASHINGTON D.C. 20505

The letter was addressed to me and signed by George J. Tenet, the newly appointed and just confirmed Director of the CIA. Its purpose was to inform me that I had been selected by my peers as a “CIA Trailblazer.”

The Agency had established the Trailblazer Award as part of its fiftieth anniversary celebration. Fifty Trailblazers or their survivors would receive commemorative medallions during a closed ceremony at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, scheduled for the anniversary date, September 18, 1997. I would be among the “CIA officers who by their actions, example or initiative helped shape the history of the first half century of this Agency.”

Tenet noted that veterans of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the Agency’s World War II predecessor, as well as former CIA employees, had nominated three hundred candidates to be honored. A select panel had “worked very hard” to narrow the list down to the present fifty.

I read the letter again slowly, finding it hard to grasp that I was one of those selected.

Jonna poured herself a glass of cold water. “Anything interesting?” She assumed the FedEx was related to our art business.

I handed her Tenet’s letter. “Take a look at this.”

“Amazing,” she whispered, shaking her head. Jonna herself had retired from the CIA in 1993 with twenty-seven years of service, so she recognized the significance of the award. Tens of thousands of people had worked for the CIA in the past fifty years, hundreds of them virtual legends in the intelligence community, but most unknown to the public.

Jonna read aloud from the letter, noting that I had been one of the people chosen out of all those “of any grade, in any field, and at any point in the CIA’s history—who distinguished themselves as leaders, made a real difference in CIA’s pursuit of its mission, and who served as a standard of excellence for others to follow.”

I couldn’t sleep that night, despite the cool breeze and the soothing chirp of crickets from the garden, so I got up and climbed the staircase to my small studio, to reread Tenet’s letter.

On shelves around the desk were mementos of my CIA career. The dim light glinted off the tarnished silver of a Hmong necklace. I glanced at a framed picture of a boxy little Zhiguli sedan, driven along the Moscow embankment by a surveillance team from the KGB’s Seventh Chief Directorate and reflected in the slush-spattered side mirror of an Embassy Ford. But one object stood out from the others. I reached up for a small case and removed the bronze Intelligence Star I’d been awarded for “courageous action” during a highly sensitive mission to Tehran at the height of the hostage crisis. It was a journey made in alias, using false documents—a hazardous and difficult assignment successfully accomplished, but never described in any unclassified publication.

Hefting the cool weight of the medal, I considered the closing comments of Director Tenet’s letter. “Your achievements and those of the other forty-nine CIA Trailblazers probably will never be known in their fullness by the American people.”

As I replaced the Intelligence Star in its velvet-lined case, I pondered the improbable sequence of events that had led me to this time and place. In some ways, I realized, I had been destined from childhood for a career in the shadow world of espionage.

I WAS BORN in 1940 in Eureka, an old mining town snuggled into the Diamond Mountains in central Nevada. As Route 50—“the loneliest road in America”—entered Eureka, it passed through a gap in a black wall of slag, the detritus of the enormous tonnage of silver and lead ore smelted earlier this century.

When the World War II boom hit Nevada, my dad, John G. Mendez, was hired at the nearby Kimberly copper mine. He was only twenty-three when he was crushed between two ore cars deep in a mine shaft. He lingered three days, then died on October 24, 1943, three weeks before my third birthday and the day after Mom’s twenty-fourth. He left behind a young widow, four children, and a token insurance settlement. After the accident, we moved in with Mom’s mother, Ina Bell, in Eureka.

It was in Grandma’s old frame house that I learned of the family’s pioneering history. My great-grandfather, Cristoforo Giuseppe “J.C.” Tognoni, one of the legends of Nevada’s gold bonanza earlier this century, had been born into a big family in the mountain town of Villa di Chiavenna in the northern Italian region of Lombardi. J.C.’s father died in 1872, and the boy struggled to help his family survive before immigrating to America at age fifteen.

Somehow, he reached the United States and traveled west to Nevada to join two of his brothers. J.C. already possessed a skill highly prized in mining towns: In Italy he’d begun learning the secrets of the carbonari, who transformed wood into the high-grade charcoal needed to fire smelters. It was working in the mountains as a young charcoal burner for pennies a day that J.C. gained his intimate knowledge of the land forms and rock formations of Nevada. Still a teenager, J.C. headed off to seek his fortune prospecting in the Comstock Range.

A year later, he married Jesse Myrtle, a twenty-seven-year-old widow who worked as a cook on the mule-train line between Eureka and Tonopah. For the next fifteen years, the couple struggled, with J.C. working a succession of hard-rock mining, ranching, and freight-hauling jobs to stake his next prospecting expedition.

In May 1903, J.C. rode a horseback circuit to the top of a volcanic extrusion called Vindicator Mountain and studied the jumbled landscape below. After twenty-five years in Nevada, he could identify not only promising rock face, but also see from the narrowing of the washes where water might be found to work any claim. In quick succession, J.C. registered claims on a series of sites near a settlement known as Goldfield. These claims were among the richest gold strikes anywhere in the West. Within two years, J.C. became one of the wealthiest men in the state.

In 1916, my grandparents, Joseph R. Tognoni and Ina Bell Cates, eloped in Goldfield when she was just a teenager and moved to the Tognoni family’s ranch. Although the cattle operation was making money, old J.C. was typically restless—“stubborn as hell,” as Grandma always told us.

When he had sold some of his Goldfield claims in 1904, he had turned his prospector’s eye to a likely spot at Black Rock Summit in the Pancake Range. Almost sixty, he pulled a horse trailer behind his Dodge Brothers truck until the dirt track petered out, then rode higher into the mountains. Beneath an eroded volcanic lip, he found a rich vein of reddish “ruby” ore and promptly named the claim Silverton. J.C. was convinced that he could make this remote mine pay because the silver vein appeared to run thick and deep through the volcanic ridge. So he began investing. But Silverton became the opposite of a mother lode: J.C. put hundreds of thousands of dollars into the claim, but did not take out a penny.

The banks eventually gave him an ultimatum: He could choose between foreclosure on the ranch or on the mine. J.C. chose to save the mine. He died at sixty-seven on August 9, 1932. No one ever did figure out how to make Silverton pay off. The old man was buried beneath that stark desert ridge, in a private cemetery where many of his descendants also now lie.

Eventually, my grandfather, J.R., took his family north to live in the old home in Eureka, but the stress of their financial collapse was too much for his heart, already weakened by childhood rheumatic fever. He died in February 1936, leaving Grandma with four children.

There wasn’t much welfare in those days, and county assistance was especially slim in Nevada mining towns. So she and her kids learned to live by their wits and hard work in order to survive. Grandma had never driven her husband’s ’28 Dodge stakebody truck when he was alive, but that tough old vehicle soon became the family’s principal source of money. Grandma bid on a “Lone Star” route, delivering mail to outlying mines and ranches, over washboard roads that switchbacked up stony mountainsides and crossed wide alkali flats. Her route led through some of the loneliest terrain in the state, and she drove through some of the most severe weather in North America. I grew up with eyewitness accounts of Ina Bell burrowing under her truck stuck in a snowdrift and cinching on her wheel chains before a sheepherder or passing busload of miners could stop and lend a hand.

My mother relied on Grandma’s example to help her through the shock, grief, and fear that followed my father’s sudden death. Mom went to work as the editor of the county newspaper, the Eureka Sentinel. She and Grandma pooled their money so that Mom cou...