Yeah, baby! Oh, that's really nice. How is that news?
Totally pops. That is sick. Hi, my name is Jonna Mendez.
You may recognize her from our previous Wired video. I was chief of disguise at the CIA. Today, I'm breaking down clips from movies and TV about spies in disguise.
Roll clip. This is a box of passports and the Bourne identity. This is not the reality.
There is no box of passports. There are no huge bundles of money, no guns. This sort of denigrates the... The expertise required to do alternate identity documents. It's painstaking.
It's meticulous. Can you check another name for me? We don't do them just in case.
John Michael King. They're too precious. You do them one by one as they're needed.
They're not waiting for you around the world. I don't know about that picture. I don't know who I am! Dying hair, Homeland.
Traveling alone? Miss Morrisey. I'm sorry? I asked if you're traveling alone. Yes.
Carrie's disguise, which basically consisted of dyeing her hair. Just get it over with, okay? I thought was absolutely ineffective. Still Carrie, with dark hair. Don't you think I know that?
She could have cut her hair and restyled it. That's not necessary. She could have changed her makeup.
I've had a long day. She could have put on some glasses to hide that kind of crazy eyed look that she has that, you know. Tell me. Jumps out at you when you see her character.
What do you mean? Yeah, I didn't think that was effective at all. Why are you doing this to me?
In a similar scene in Alias, she dyes her hair in a bathroom before she goes through security. Can I see your passport? Do you want me to try this one?
I think it's too light for me. What do you think? What she did was absolutely spot on. Thank you.
And she didn't just dye her hair. She dyed it outrageously red and then adopted the whole whole thing that went with it, including chewing gum while she's walking through the airport. And then she has that back and forth with the airline agent. I thought that was a brilliant scene. It's pretty on you.
Thanks. This is a great example of distracting someone. But lipstick hues, I love it. Sweet talking to them. Love it, totally pops.
Getting them engaged and getting them away from the things you don't want them looking at. Window and aisle. We could've used that as a training film.
I know. Long term alias, the Americans. How have you been, Martha?
His disguises were convincing. Tell me what you saw. He was comfortable in them.
His wigs were excellent. Go on. He was never trying to look good.
He was trying to fit these characters that he had built. Right. He came really close to projecting the little gray man that we always would talk about at CIA. That was sometimes, often, that was the goal.
You wanted to be forgettable. We have to safeguard their security. Officers getting into disguise is a lot like method acting. The look is part of it, but if you're gonna wear it for more than a minute, you need to inhabit it. Have you been, Martha?
That's what he does. Big day in FBI counterintelligence. He becomes the guy in the disguise, the. the bureaucrat, the nerd.
Did you get a look inside this time? The actor in him, combined with the disguise, I thought he was brilliant. Thank you. The next clip is Quick Change, Mission Impossible 3. I've talked about quick change previously for Wired.
Quick change is the ability to clandestinely change your appearance. You have 37 seconds to come out with those changes. It was not unusual for us to layer disguises. So you'd have the the true person, and then he would wear disguise number one, and then on top of that would be disguise number two.
We would never let that piece of a disguise fly away. That's evidence. I need you to trust me.
There are three covers that are basically off limits. to CIA and that would be a religious figure, media figure, and Peace Corps. Not that we don't like the Peace Corps, we love the Peace Corps, but it has to stay kind of pure.
You gotta do what's right. It cannot be suspected of harboring CIA officers, can you imagine? No.
Priests are so vulnerable, they're just out there. If they're accused of being a spy, they don't have any structure to protect them, they're too vulnerable. Goddammit. We also don't use the media as a cover, same reason. And it's good.
For another example of quick change, take a look at Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I think the change into the schoolgirl outfit was actually very well done. It demonstrates a great precept.
that we always operated under, and that is that basically the bigger the crowd, the more forgiving they are. If you want to change your clothes in public, you can do lots of things you would never dream of doing. No one pays any attention.
That's the whole point. We use that a lot in our training exercises back here. It was always a way to lose surveillance. You have surveillance and you have to get away from them to do whatever you need to do.
Talk to you soon. Surveillance isn't following her face, they never are. They're following her profile. Profile was a blonde wearing dark rimmed glasses in a pencil skirt and she just removed all of those pieces. It was well done.
Thank you. And so to look at another Shopee quick change, let's look at Baby Driver. There he is!
As you can see, this time the alarms go off. Go, go, go, go! The intent was good. The execution was OK.
But again, you have to ask yourself, would we really recommend that? Because the odds of him getting caught and arrested. for shoplifting are just too great.
If you have everything with you at the beginning and you start revealing it, you start removing things and you have a bag where you can store some things and maybe even a bag to put that bag in, that works. But we don't recommend stealing. Blending in with the crowd, Casino Royale.
He's on the move. He's on the move and he's heading straight for me. Stop touching your ear. Sorry? Put your hand down.
In this opening scene, the man in the crowd was called out for having his hand up. He's holding onto his earpiece. Put your hand down.
And he was so caught up in that motion that he forgot. And it was a giveaway. It started the whole scene. I need him alive. We found a way around that by inventing something that didn't exist.
It was a harness that was body-worn, a receiver that would be in our ear that we never had to touch, and an induction loop that went around our neck so we could receive. transmit to the earpiece was a no hands kind of system. Perfect. Officer choosing disguise, Pink Panther.
I think you will like this one very much. It's very suitable for your face. I'm particularly part of the enlarged pores.
Look at this one right here. Crazy about Adidas? Wearing Adidas guys is not about looking good.
Oh, that's very nice. Adidas, I'm nervous. Although in this scene, it was all about looking good. Are you having those photos?
So the officer didn't get to choose which nose he was going to wear. We would have made him a custom. He didn't get to choose the teeth. We would have made the teeth. Here are some teeth on the house.
Ah. The hair. This will keep you very warm. The mustache. That is too legal.
Too legal. A goatee if it was there. Inky dinky doo.
Inky dinky doo. Inky dinky doo. A lot of that would have been custom made.
Some of it could be off the shelf. What we were interested in is giving him a total look that he didn't have to like, but he had to wear it. We had to feel that he would wear it.
Look what you have done. Nobody left our labs looking better. You're a genius. They left our labs looking different. My dear boy.
The next clip is a worker uniform, 24. I got your back. I got your back. Setting up the Sunday bar. Makes sense to me.
This entire country will know what we look like in the next few hours. People do that with military uniforms. There are a lot of uniforms that are just universally recognized.
There are hundreds of video cameras in there. Oh, those are repairmen. They're fine. Anyone asks, we're working on the air conditioning.
Get into one of those groups and you disappear and your identity becomes the identity of the group and that's a good thing. I didn't agree to this. We don't have stores of maintenance uniforms or military uniforms.
We've got nothing here. We can arrange anything. Fine, let's get this over with. Ben Affleck is playing my husband, Tony Mendez, in the movie Argo. My name is Tony Mendez.
It's a story of an exfiltration, one of many exfiltrations that my husband undertook over the years. More than 30 years ago, we undertook a secret mission to save six Americans trapped in Iran. This was a very successful exfiltration. I'm gonna get you home.
In this particular clip, the six houseguests, as we call them, were using the cover. Of a Hollywood location scouting team. It's okay, it's her job to take photographs. She's a production designer. That was a subject they thought they could easily talk about.
They could talk about Hollywood. I don't know what the hell movie people do. And be believable.
This would be a first. So as a cover story, it was carefully selected. We don't have any alternatives.
They came up with a Hollywood location scouting party. They're a Canadian film crew on a location scout for a science fiction movie. Rather than disguise them, we more restyled them.
These cover identities were created specifically for each one of them. When they were choosing the cover for these six houseguests. What's your father's name?
Howard. What's his occupation? Fisherman.
It was unique because it was a group of people, not just one person. They had to find a cover that all six of them could believably speak about. Believe that you're these people so much that you dream like them.
Looking at Argo gives us an opportunity to look at a real cover story and see how it was executed and see how it was carried off and to see that it. performed its function. Yeah!
Yeah! Masks, mission impossible. This is pure CGI. Of course.
This is what we called an overhead mask. Whoa. We could change your gender.
We could change your ethnicity. We could turn you into almost anything. Of course. But we couldn't guarantee that that mask would animate. Very sorry to hear you say that.
We were stuck with the measurements. that we were presented with. What's that?
Masks are always additive. You can't put a small nose over a larger nose. You have to make sure that your donor and your recipient are well matched.
You're probably right. We had some aluminum molds that came out of Hollywood. They came in large, medium, and small. The size large was an old Hollywood actor named Rex Harrison. So he was taking part in a lot of interesting operations without his knowledge, I think.
Jesus. Let's move on to the second Mission Impossible. Those Mission Impossible ones are really good.
Are you sure about this? You could make a mask with someone underneath it with their mouth taped closed, but I can't think for the life of me of a purpose for doing that. You don't know what you're missing. You can still breathe through. through the nose, but it's always a relief to know that you can also breathe through the mouth.
Stop mumbling! And so by taping the mouth, you really start restricting their air intake. Freddy's got no choice. How did they make these masks? Let's look at Mission Impossible 3. What if I said we had it?
So you know when you go to the dentist and you have a dental impression taken? That's what we did to your whole face. Being very careful to keep your nose open so that you could breathe while this was happening. Stop talking.
The mask that we just saw is a mixture. of lights, CGI again, and they're flipping back and forth from the real actor to the actor wearing the mask, and it's invisible to tell where the real actor comes back in and is animated. It's a trick, wonderfully done.
Thanks. So we'll go to spy, hidden identities. You'll be given a new identity.
Oh, thank God. Oh, no. Your name is Penny Morgan. You're a divorced housewife from Iowa.
You've sold more Mary Kay products than anyone else in your state. It's a pretty funny take on being issued a new identity, certainly not the identity that she wanted. Why do I have 10 cats?
Is that even legal? She didn't get to choose. I'm the vice president of the Ames Garden Club.
I couldn't even be president. The bits and pieces, the identity cards. the things they were issuing to her is what we would call pocket litter.
Oh, there's the tin cats. Those would be the things that any of us would carry around in our bill folder, in our purse. That's a no. There's a similarity here with the Pink Panther clip. She didn't like the identity that was being proposed, but then she didn't really get to choose.
Was Pepe Le Pew not available? Cultural customs and glorious bastards. How many glasses?
Five. Not for me. I don't like scotch. Scotch doesn't like me.
Neither do I. I'll stick to the shampoos. Three glasses.
That ominous look tells you that something bad has just happened. A British soldier counted wrong on his hands. In Europe, when you're counting, you start with your thumb.
One, two, three. Doing it this way showed to him that he was not even European. It certainly wasn't German. It was a dead giveaway.
We know from traveling around the world that every country has its own customs. And it's incumbent on us to learn those customs, to know those customs, and to not violate any of their procedures. Sometimes when you've been found out, there is no escaping. Once you've committed one of those errors, you have outed yourself, so to speak, and you kind of have to go with the consequences, whatever those consequences are. Well, if this is it, old boy.
I hope you don't mind if I go out speaking to kings. Gadget Room, Kingsman. I've had a lot of fun with this.
One of our finest examples of chemical engineering. A poison? The poison in the pen, there's a real history to that. Shut up. We put a lot of things in pens.
They were not equipped and they were not used as weapons. In some instances, they would conceal a camera. But we had a couple of scenarios with agents.
They said, I will work for you. But I would like to actually insist on having an L-pill, which is a lethal pill. Lethal. Because I don't want to give them the opportunity to do what they would like to do to me. Electrocute.
In two cases that I know of, we put L-pills into fountain pens. Remotely activated. And in one case, our agent was captured and he was going to be interrogated. And he said, before I do that, give me my pen.
I will write my confession. And they handed him his pen and he bit down on the tip. They said he was dead before he hit the floor.
Hell. So there's a history to the poison in pens. What about these? What do these do? A couple of the other things in there are less historically correct, but wildly entertaining.
That is sick. The scientists disguise the saint. I'm here to do an interview with Dr. Russell.
I'm gonna expose her as a fraud. He's wearing a disguise that would send most people away from him and his demeanor is so imposing and so frightening in a way. That draws attention and you never want to draw attention so I would rate that disguise as a failure.
Glasses as a disguise Superman. Lois Lane say hello to Clark Kent. Anyone who's ever watched Superman wonders, Lois, can't you see? Lois, have you got a minute? I was wondering if maybe you'd like to have a little dinner with me.
Lois, Lois, maybe we could-Clark is the newspaper reporter and Superman is the superhero. Excuse me. Easy, miss. Physically, they're exactly the same.
Really? Oh, sounds kind of natural. Superman's glasses are-First impression?
Ridiculous. Golly, that doesn't seem to make sense. Poor Lois.
Yeah, poor Clark. Breaking in, be kind, rewind. Freeze! Where's that ladder again? What do you think?
I don't know. It was funny the first time I saw it, but to a professional eye, it looks sloppy, it looks poorly planned. When you plan an operation, you always had plan B. What if it goes wrong? Let's go get some ice cream.
In my office, we had people that specialized in going into places that they should not be in. I can't be here. What are you doing? And doing things there that they should not do, perhaps.
Listen, you don't need me. You're almost there. I'll never speak to you. Our operations were typically just meticulously planned. We never planned to be hiding behind a chain link fence.
Nevertheless, I know some of our people that, not that they were caught, but that they got stuck, where they had to stay in place, maybe for a day or two, before they could leave. Some funny stories. Talking about alias names, Austin Powers. Allow myself to introduce.
Myself. My name is Richie Cunningham. And this is my wife, Oprah. Austin Powers makes you laugh.
Yeah, baby! Yeah! Alias names at CIA are closely controlled. They are managed. They are assigned to you.
My name is number two. You end up with a name for your entire working career. Come again. Your true name is never on paper overseas.
Groovy, baby. Oprah would probably not be. Be one of those names.
This is my wife, Oprah. Any name that really drew attention would not be one of those names. Cunningham, was it?
She Cunningham could be, but we always had a middle initial. Danger's my middle name. You always had three names.
I mean, you could abbreviate the middle initial, but you always had three names. Austin Danger Powers. My name for life, my first name was Faith.
Very shagadelic. And so whenever I see anything that has to do with faith, like keep the faith, baby, I'm like, okay. Obe-hay. Furniture camouflage, Sherlock Holmes. Who delivered this parcel?
Who's Smith? The usual chap. Or did he look peculiar? We never tried to disguise ourselves in the furniture at the CIA, but there is a story about James Comey at the White House.
He was trying to blend into the curtain. behind him, his suit and the curtains were the same blue. Wearing a blue suit was trying to blend in with the blue curtain.
He was trying to hide that way, unsuccessfully. Another furniture camouflage in this next movie called Spy Hard. Great Scott!
We used furniture concealments for a number of things. Technology comes mostly to mind. If you had spy gear in your house and you're in a foreign country and it's a controlled society, you don't want your receivers and transmitters sitting around.
So we would build them into selected pieces of furniture. Trying to remember if we ever had something like that for a person. You can't see that. We had...
some things that we built to exfiltrate people out of the country. Exfiltration containers could be in various configurations. At the International Spy Museum, we have an exhibit from Checkpoint Charlie, where a lot of people exfiltrated themselves out of the East. A lot of them were in car concealments.
They would be special spaces built into cars for the purpose of exfiltrating that person across the border. Undercover accents, 22 Jump Street. Everyone say in the barrio, Sleepy, he like the Mexican Wolverine and shit.
And my partner, he wanna see the product. When he talking? My name is Jeff. First of all, you would speak the language, you wouldn't try and use an accent. I don't know what you're talking about.
We actually pay some people to study the languages, to become fluent in the languages. Diego and Swiper. Swiper? That's a made up name. They seem totally unprepared and you- you sense that maybe they're gonna get arrested or worse.
Disguising voice, the Dark Knight. I want the Joker. You wanted me, here I am.
Batman has a very specific disguise beyond his voice. The voice wasn't really even necessary. I'm not wearing hockey pants.
We tried to change voices. What did you do? We wouldn't use voice modulation technology, but we would try to physically change the palette. The palate of your mouth.
Freak. To our dismay, it did not change your voice. It would just make you list.
You're gonna have to chill forever. And you could consciously try and change your voice. That's like consciously limping.
After a while, you just forget, and your regular voice comes back. We had no success with that. You're the symbol of hope I could never be. Cover story, Fletch. Name's Liddy, Gordon Liddy.
Gordon, take a look at the seventh FETSA valve, will you? I think it's been sticking. Probably.
the humidity. Maybe I should take a look at it. Gordo?
Back here? Well, Fletch has made the mistake of not studying his cover story well enough before he took it on the road. Is that right?
Yeah. We would always pick a cover story that our people could talk about intelligently. It's so simple, maybe you need a refresher course.
Hey! We would never pick a professional area where they were clueless and where they would come off like Fletch did. Gordon. Yeah, I know where it is. I'm just getting a bird's eye view here.
Spy seduction alias. Stories about seduction in the espionage business are legion. Some of them are based on truth.
Who's up? Famous. seductress that worked for American intelligence during the Cold War, who did some amazing things. Went into a couple of embassies and took some ciphers out of some safes. Please let me go.
Most of the stories, though, have to do with the Russians and the Germans. I swear to God. The Russians even had a name for it, and they called them Swallows. Although a friend of mine, Jason Matthews, wrote a book recently called Red Sparrow, and he called them Sparrows. You'll become Sparrow.
The Germans had men who were trained the same way and they called them Romeos. So the use of sex to collect intelligence is not unheard of and it's probably going on today. Give me back my pants. Speaking of Red Sparrow, here's a clip from a seduction scene. Why would a CIA officer fire his gun in the pub?
What do you want, Dominique? According to his story, which he says is based on truth, they had a school where they trained young women in seduction. Here we deal in psychological manipulation. To quite a degree.
Take off your clothes. You can imagine that this was a school that produced graduates. You must learn to love on command. And Jennifer Lawrence is supposed to represent one of those successful graduates. Goodbye, Dominique.
I think it... It presented to a lot of American audiences the idea that that was, you know, that's a piece of the intelligence machine in Moscow. Your body belongs to the state.
It takes it to another level. Now, you might want to ask me if the CIA has a school. I suppose we'll find out.
And I would tell you we don't. We mustn't be so judgmental. This is a typically Russian technique. The state asks something in return.
Clown disguise, James Bond. Hey, is anyone else in there? Dead, defined, human cannonball.
I can't actually say whether a CIA officer has ever changed into a clown suit. Fisker, der Ferle. There was a lot to be said for fitting into your environment, into your surroundings. Suspect's wearing a clown suit, over.
So you looked like one of them instead of an outlier. I'm a British agent. So in that regard, it makes a point.
For God's sake, tell him who I am. During the Second World War, there was an agent named Virginia Hall who disguised herself as a shepherdess with a flock of sheep. to conceal her prosthetic leg, and she was lethal.
General, this man's either drunk or crazy. This kind of catsuit is a popular trope. Let's take a look at the Avengers, 1998. They use climbing gear, but not really black catsuits.
You must be joking. I think the reason is because women look so good in them. Or at least Hollywood women look good in them.
Most of our men, and probably a majority of our women, would not have been caught dead in a black catsuit. Dark athletic clothes are fine. Technically.
But not a black catsuit. I see. Acting drunk with Veronica Mars. How long must a girl play drunk and willing before someone tries to get her to take off her clothes?
I would not act drunk undercover, and I don't think most officers would because it would defeat your purpose. Are you having one? I know officers who have gotten drunk undercover, but they didn't go in meaning to do that.
Oh, I'm having more than one. Because a lot of the work used to be at those black tie affairs. where there was a lot of scotch, a lot of liquor running around.
I think I'd sooner drink Mark McGrath's bath water than drink anything here. We were told at the CIA that there are things that you can drink and eat before you go that will coat your stomach and they'll help. They think I'm drunk or worse.
If you need to appear like you're drinking, you can do that without actually having alcohol. You can just tell the bartender I want seven up. Jackpot.
There are ways to go about it where you don't get drunk. Awesome. Conclusion. Writers and directors do everything they can can to get it really right.
Half the fun for me is watching closely to see what they get wrong. And that's a wrap.