From Library Journal
What is it like to be a spy? Anyone who has ever wondered about those shadowy figures (so often described in fiction by Le Carr? and others) can now get a peek into the world of 1950s and 1960s espionage. Mendez worked in the CIA's Technical Services Department for over 25 years, eventually rising to its top position. With the approval of the CIA's censors, he has written a remarkably detailed picture of his work as a document-forger and disguise-maker for undercover assignments all over the world. This is endlessly fascinating stuff, especially for a generation raised on James Bond and George Smiley. Although the book is overwritten in spots, in the end, Mendez spins a good tale. For general public collections.AEdward Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
A recent retiree from the CIA's gadgets department, Mendez parts the curtains on his career in espionage. The CIA cleared every word in Mendez's book, as it does every tome by former employees, perhaps a pro forma task here because Mendez doesn't talk out of school and sports an admiring attitude toward the CIA. Palpably proud to have been a secret agent, Mendez effectively conveys the thrills its practitioners derive from espionage, via an anecdotal accounting of his varied 30-year career. Like many, he answered a vaguely worded newspaper advertisement and started out as a document forger. Ambitious, Mendez broadened his perspective beyond the print shop, mastered disguise and surveillance techniques, and spent a few years abroad supporting operations in Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Thailand. After Vietnam wound down, Mendez's career so prospered that he became the go-to guy for spiriting assets from hostile territories: the reader receives a vivid sense of the clandestine world through his part in the successful operations to extract a KGB defector from India and an Iranian spy from revolutionary Iran. The latter exploit was a prelude to an operation lavishly publicized at the time--the escape of six Americans from the U.S. embassy, seized by Iranians. Mendez divulges the hitherto-suppressed details of the caper, a zanily brazen operation in which the diplomats and Mendez slipped out of Teheran posing as Hollywood filmmakers. Garnished with his efforts to defeat KGB surveillance in Moscow (and glazed, no doubt, by coauthor McConnell), Mendez's memoir is a dish cloak-and-dagger connoisseurs will savor. No surprise the CIA's PR sentinels were all for it. Gilbert Taylor
From Kirkus Reviews
The retired, highly decorated chief of disguise for the CIA highlights his adventurous 25-year career. Mendez is not modest about his considerable accomplishments. He takes credit for ``creating and deploying many of the most innovative techniques in the espionage trade.'' And the remainder of this book (vetted by the agency) is, in one sense, a justification of that claim. In 1965 the author began with the agency as a low-level technicianessentially a graphic artist who specialized in forging documents. Graduallythrough a combination of skill, pluck, luck, diligence, and ambitionhe rose through the agency hierarchy, eventually participating in dazzling cloak-and-dagger operations in some of the world most exotic and dangerous locations: southeast Asia, the Soviet Union, Iran. The most interesting sections describe his endeavors in the mid-1970s to generate techniques to cope with the umbrageous KGB surveillance of American operatives in Moscow and his gripping account (untold in full until now) of the CIA's role in ``exfiltrating'' (removing) six Americans from Tehran during the hostage crisis in 1980. Oddly, Mendez and McConnell elect to record about halfway through the book his ``flawless'' record of 150 successful exfiltrations; this effectively removes from his subsequent accounts of such actions all vestiges of suspensea weird decision, to say the least. Another narrative annoyance is the decision to begin many of the subsections of the book with paragraphs that sound as if they were lifted from, well, bad spy novels. For example: ``This guy is going south on us, fast,' the Chief of Station, Simon,' explained, leaning over his desk and speaking with a crisp but gentle precision that was barely audible above the chugging air conditioners.'' Nonetheless, the coauthors convey with clarity something of this shadow world which requires of its inhabitants hard work, strong stomachs, low blood pressure, and a full measure of creative improvisation. A swift, engrossing summary of a life and a way of life. (8 pages photos, not seen) (Book-of-the-Month Club selection; author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"A rare and unique glimpse into the CIA's Office of Technical Services, and, in particular, into the secret work undertaken to supportclandestine operations. A thoroughly absorbing read for both the aficionado and the layman." --- Nigel West
About the Author
Antonio J. Mendez served in the CIA for twenty-five years and is a recipient of the Intelligence Star for Valor for the Argo operation. He is coauthor of Spy Dust and the New York Times bestseller Argo.
John Pruden is a professional voice actor who records audiobooks, corporate and online training narrations, animation and video game characters, and radio and TV commercials. An AudioFile Earphones Award winner, John has a solid creative foundation from which to draw for his intelligent audiobook narrations.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Master of Disguise
My Secret Life in the CIABy Mendez, Antonio J.Perennial
Copyright ©2004 Antonio Mendez
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0060957913
Chapter One
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 watches 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 Raj 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.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Master of Disguiseby Mendez, Antonio J. Copyright ©2004 by Antonio Mendez. Excerpted by permission.
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