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We always talk about disguise as though it's an onion.

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Whether you're building it or whether you're peeling it off.

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It's almost transparent layers.

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And when you get enough of them going, you disappear and this other person is in the room.

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My name is Jonna Mendez and I was Chief of Disguise at the CIA.

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In my role as Chief of Disguise, my major concern was always protecting people.

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Protecting our case officers who were going into situations that might be dangerous.

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But importantly, protecting the foreign people that we were meeting with.

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Who were very often risking their lives.

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If you were working in Europe and you were meeting with a clandestine source at a cafe,

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your biggest concern might be that your next door neighbor was going to wander into that cafe at that moment

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and say, hi Bill, when you weren't Bill.

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And that kind of casual stumbling upon people was an issue.

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And so you'd wear what we called light disguise.

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Light disguise can be something as simple as a wig, maybe some facial hair, maybe some glasses.

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Not a big deal.

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The other extreme is advanced disguise.

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That you would use for up close and personal for an extended period of time.

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Or the person you were talking to would have no idea that you were not in true face.

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One of the things that was going on when I was Chief of Disguise was an enormous research program into the new advanced disguise system.

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It was basically the masks that everybody always wondered if we used masks and this was the beginning.

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This is a series of photographs of when I met George H.W. Bush in the Oval Office.

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And revealed to him that I was briefing him wearing a mask.

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When you go to disguise a person, the general idea is that you're going to meet with someone in this disguise.

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And they're going to write a memo of the person that they just met with.

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We want every item in that memo that describes you to be wrong.

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If we're looking at a man and we want to change the way he looks, start at the top and the first thing that comes up is hair.

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What's he got and what do you want to do with it?

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If he has curly hair, you want to go straight.

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If he has dark hair, you might want to go light.

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If he's young, you might want to throw in some gray.

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If he's old, you might want to cover up the gray.

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Do you present with facial hair?

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If you don't, maybe we're going to give you some.

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If you're going to be somewhere for a while, maybe we're going to have you grow some.

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We have made prostheses on occasion.

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You could actually change cheekbones.

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You can add something here.

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You can add a forehead.

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You can do a nose.

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We could do what we call dental facades.

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We can change actually the shape of your face with the right dental facade.

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This piece is called a plumper because it increases the plumpness of your gums.

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And when it does that, it changes the profile of your face.

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The last thing is artificial palettes.

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We take an impression of the top of your mouth.

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They can change your enunciation.

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They can cause a slight lisp.

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It's a little bit different with everybody who wears one.

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But if it's enough, it's very useful.

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We very often discover that older looking men are considered less threatening than younger

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looking men.

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So we like to age a person.

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With women, you have a broader range of what you can do.

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You also have one extra step.

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You could turn a woman into a man.

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I would mention that it's almost impossible to turn a man into a woman.

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What we do is always additive.

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We can make you taller.

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We can make you heavier.

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We can make you older.

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We can't go the other direction.

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You want to be the person that gets on the elevator and then gets off.

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And nobody really remembers that you were even there.

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That is a design goal at the Disguise Labs at CIA.

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Disguise isn't just all about the facial oval.

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It's about how you dress, how you present yourself in a public environment.

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Americans are oblivious to what it is that reveals them to a foreign crowd or a foreign intelligence

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service when they're out in public.

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In terms of behaviors, there are a lot of small actions that give us away the way we eat.

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Europeans use the fork in their left hand and it doesn't travel back and forth to the right hand,

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whereas we're constantly putting down our knife and moving utensils back and forth.

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The way we smoke, we put it between our first two fingers.

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They tend to hold a cigarette between the thumb and the first finger.

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When an American stands, they tend to support themselves on one foot or the other.

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In Europe, they stand straight up.

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They don't lean on anything.

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Their weight's equally on their feet.

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Changing the way that you walk requires some amendment to what you're doing.

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You're going to need a physical apparatus to make you walk differently.

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You can't possibly say, okay, now I'm going to limp.

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To change my walk, I put a little piece of gravel in my shoe.

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Just a little thing that pinches my toe.

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And it changes my walk whether I want to or not.

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You can put a bandage around a knee.

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Something that restricts you will change your walk.

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Disguise can be applicable to you and your everyday life in terms of traveling around the world and staying safe.

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I would use Paris as an example.

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Anytime you approach Notre Dame Cathedral or those bridges that cross the same,

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those are places where there are groups of people that either want to pick your pocket or they're going to make some kind of trouble.

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And they cluster at these choke points.

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And if they can tell from your sneakers, if they can tell from your baseball hat or a lot of other behaviors that we exhibit that you are an American, you become a target.

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If you just want to play it safe, there's nothing wrong with stopping in a local store and buying some local clothes.

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If you smoke, get some local cigarettes.

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You can always add a pair of glasses.

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You can always add some kind of hat.

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Just back yourself off from that American imprint that we all carry with us in so many ways.

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You know, all these things that we do are unconscious and they are hard to change.

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If you have some friends who are thoughtful, you could probably sit down with a friend and say,

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what is it about me that is just a dead giveaway?

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And they're going to tell you things like, oh, it's your laugh.

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Or it's the way you sit, how do you always slouch down in a chair?

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They can help you find those pieces of your visual personality that are easy to get rid of once you know they're there.

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People have expectations of what you're going to present to them when you're being you.

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We try and brush those away.

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Quick change is the ability to clandestinely change your appearance.

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Typically, when you're out on the street, you're using the crowd as a mask.

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When we're doing this, we measure it in the number of steps.

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And then we rehearse whoever's going to do it.

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You're going to go in the gap.

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You have 37 seconds to come out with those changes.

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The goal of the quick change is to disappear.

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If you had surveillance and they discovered that you were gone, you didn't want them to think that you had escaped.

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You wanted them to think that they had lost you.

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It was their fault.

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It was their fault.

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The 1 and 2, 1 and 1 is impossible for her to go to the middle school and get involved.

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Blending in is situational, it depends on where you are.

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You need to understand what the commonality is there,

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what this tribe is that you want to join.

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And once you join that tribe, you can typically move around freely because there's no suspicion.

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No suspicion.

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You can't summon up a disguise in the middle of an event.

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But going to the event, you can say to yourself, I think I'll leave my baseball cap and my

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sneakers and I'm going to leave all that in my room.

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And you can realize that being out on the street as an American is sometimes dangerous.

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One of our officers, probably working out of the American Embassy, would have surveillance

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24 hours a day.

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They'd have teams of people following them.

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But they had work to do.

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They had to communicate with people clandestinely.

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And the extremes that we would go to to disguise those people was the most interesting and the

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most challenging part of the job.

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What's going on here?

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What's going on here?

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What's going on here?