IN TRUE FACE

A veteran CIA agent tells…well, some.

Mendez, co-author of Argo and The Moscow Rules, was recruited in the early 1960s, wooed by the “well-heeded martini drinkers” who roamed around Cold War Europe. She signed on after marrying a man who looked for the sort of adventures a CIA agent might expect—and then, it being the early ’60s, found that her own adventures were largely administrative. Worse, when a woman working for the CIA was assigned to the U.S., she lost any seniority or promotions she had earned, distinctions “rendered null and void the moment you returned to or departed from DC.” Male agents faced no such indignities, but Mendez agitated, and as a member of an agency-appointed “Petticoat Panel,” she pressed for equal pay and other forms of equity that were actually adopted, well before other federal agencies made similar efforts. An eager learner, Mendez realized early on that the “soft skills” she and other women possessed, such as listening closely, “were an asset, not a liability.” She racked up plenty of hard technical skills as well, eventually becoming adept at creating disguises and working with highly placed Hollywood artisans such as an Academy Award–winning makeup artist to make masks that “could conceal the presence of mixed ethnicities in apartheid South Africa…or obscure the presence of a western visage in North Korea.” A climactic point in the text comes with the brilliant subterfuge that allowed a number of American diplomats to escape from Iran during the hostage crisis, disguised as members of a film crew—a “caper” that landed Mendez and her husband their own places in Hollywood, even if, in her case, as “a novelty—a female spy who’d risen in the ranks of the CIA.”

Fans of true espionage will enjoy Mendez’s stories of a formative era in intelligence history.