Jonna Mendez has detailed how she once fooled President George H.W. Bush and his Secret Service detail with an ultra-realistic CIA mask during a White House briefing.
Mendez, 79, who served as Chief of Disguise in the CIA’s Office of Technical Service, recounted the 1990 demonstration during an interview with Mel Robbins that was shared on TikTok. The former spy entered the Oval Office wearing a full-face mask modeled after a female colleague named Becky, with hair attached, and successfully deceived everyone in the room except CIA Director William Webster.
“I wore her face very nicely,” Mendez joked during the interview. “And I dropped 20 years in a heartbeat.”
The mask represented years of CIA technical development. Unlike theatrical disguises that required hours of makeup application, this technology could be donned and removed in seconds. Mendez explained that making a mask look realistic was not the difficult part — the challenge was making it move and animate like a real human face, a problem her team had solved by that point.
President Bush had previously served as director of the CIA, which made the demonstration particularly significant. Mendez noted that her team had created disguises for him before, though mostly for entertainment purposes at conferences rather than operational street work. “He wasn’t out on the streets doing work,” she shared. “But mostly, for a conference or something. He had a couple of disguises.”
During the briefing, Mendez recalled telling the president: “Well, I’m here today to show you the best new thing we’ve got. You’re going to love it,” She continued, describing his confusion: “He’s behind the Resolute Desk and he’s saying, ‘Well, where is it?’ He’s looking. I said, ‘Well, I’m wearing it’.”
Mendez said she was going to “take it off and show it to you,” to which the president responded, “No, no.” He then rose from his desk and walked around Mendez’s chair searching for the disguise, unable to detect it. After failing to spot anything amiss, he sat back down and told her to proceed.
After the president told Mendez to “take it off,” she removed the mask in seconds, performing what she called “the Tom Cruise thing” from the 1996 film Mission: Impossible, where Cruise’s character dramatically peels off a realistic mask. “Bush loved it. Everybody loved it. It’s a great new possibility,” she said.
The meeting also included national security advisor Brent Scowcroft and Bob Gates, who later became CIA director himself. None of the officials, nor the Secret Service protecting the president, had any inkling of the disguise until Mendez revealed it.
In the viral moment that has circulated widely on social media, Mendez described the tension of wearing the mask in such a high-stakes environment. She had originally considered disguising herself as an African-American man for the demonstration but abandoned that approach because her voice would have given her away. Instead, she borrowed the face of her female colleague, a choice that allowed her to speak naturally without breaking character.
The mask technology Mendez demonstrated was developed over approximately a decade and represented a significant advancement in espionage tradecraft. Agents could apply these masks without mirrors in as little as 10 seconds, even “in a parking garage without a mirror in the dark,” she said Mornings in a separate interview this May.
Mendez spent 27 years in the CIA, rising from secretarial duties to become one of the agency’s foremost technical experts. She worked in some of the most difficult intelligence environments of the Cold War, including Moscow, East Germany, and Cuba, where her team matched wits against the KGB, the Stasi, and Cuban intelligence services. She was promoted to Chief of Disguise in 1991 and retired in 1993 with the CIA’s Intelligence Commendation Medal.
Since leaving the agency, Mendez has become an author, lecturer, and consultant on intelligence matters. She co-wrote “Argo” with her late husband Tony Mendez, the CIA officer portrayed by Ben Affleck in the Academy Award-winning film about the 1980 rescue of American diplomats from Iran. Her memoir “In True Face: A Woman’s Life in the CIA, Unmasked” was published this year.
Mendez has continued to discuss disguise technology publicly as it gains renewed attention through the Mission: Impossible franchise. During her CBS Mornings appearance, she addressed whether modern facial recognition technology has rendered such masks obsolete, noting that the CIA had developed masks capable of changing an agent’s apparent gender and ethnicity. “You would not notice unless you told a really hysterical joke and the person couldn’t laugh hysterically,” she said, acknowledging the disguises’ limitations while emphasizing their remarkable effectiveness.
Mendez is scheduled to appear at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. For continued discussions of her career and the evolution of espionage technology.