Former CIA Spy: How to Eliminate Self-Doubt, Build Confidence, and Protect Yourself in Today’s World

Today, the former Chief of Disguise for the CIA, a woman who spent three decades working

undercover, is here in our Boston Studios with a moving, inspiring, and heart-pounding reflection of her remarkable life. Her name is Jonathan Mendez, and she's about to put you at the scene of the most dangerous and scary moments working for the CIA, as she extracts timeless wisdom from this extraordinary career. You're going to hear how she helped intelligence officers assume new identities, and disappear in plain sight. Operations under surveillance in China and

Russia, extracting agents undercover in one particular story about trying to get a family of three across a foreign border that will leave you on the edge of your seat, as the former Chief of Disguise. Jonathan Mendez reveals how she created spy disguises, convincing enough to fool

“even the president of the United States. She'll tell you about the secret gadgets and”

television officers have used around the world, and the telltale signs that someone is lying to you based on their body language alone. What makes this episode so powerful? Are her deep ly personal reflections on the passing of time? The friends she's lost and a profound warning on the state of the world today. But through it all, she offers unwavering hope, reassurance, and practical wisdom to help you find courage, make a difference, and overcome life's

hardest moments. Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast.

I'm so glad that you're here. It's always an honor to spend this time together, and if you're new,

or someone shared this episode with you, I'm really glad that you had play. Because today in our Boston Studios, we have former CIA Chief of Disguise, Jonathan Mendez, and she is going to share the heart-pounding stories and a hard-earned wisdom behind her extraordinary life and career. Jonathan's spent three decades as a CIA intelligence officer ultimately rising to serve as the Chief of Disguise. In that role, she pioneered advanced disguise techniques that protected

undercover officers, concealed identities, and made high-risk espionage operations possible. After retiring from the CIA, she became the author of six best-selling books, including the New York Times best-seller Argo, which she wrote with her late husband Tony Mendez. Argo inspired the award-winning film of the same name starring Ben Affleck, which won three Academy Awards, including Best Picture. She is also the founding member of the Board of Advisors

at the International Spy Museum, and today at 81, Jonathan is sharing extraordinary stories from her years in the CIA, along with the hard-earned lesson she learned about courage, identity, trust, and what truly matters in life. Please help me welcome former CIA Chief of Disguise, Jonathan Mendez, to the Mel Robbins podcast. Thank you so much. I am so excited to talk to you. The office has been a buzz waiting for you to arrive, and you have the coolest life,

“and the most interesting job of anybody I think I have ever met, the Chief of Disguise at the CIA.”

If somebody who's listening right now takes everything to heart, that you're about to share with us from your extraordinary life, what might they change about how they see themselves or the world at large? It's hard to sum it up, but I came out of which it took Kansas. My expectation of what my life was going to look like was very much like, "Oh, my friends, we were going to get married, we were going to have kids, our husbands were probably going to

work at Boeing, because Boeing was a big part of which Doc Kansas back then. We kind of thought it was cast in stone a little bit. I always knew I would get a job, but I always thought that my work was going to be something to do with books, either teaching, or librarian, and then bam,

everything blew up. My friend went to Europe, I went to Europe with her, and I basically never

“went on. It's interesting to see you thought your life was cast in stone. I think a lot of us do.”

But your remarkable story and a lot of the wisdom that you're about to share is going to say

Your life, nobody else is going to do it about you. You get to live it how you want. Well,

“I'm excited to unpack some of these stories and lessons from your remarkable life. You are the”

chief of disguise for the CIA. What did that job entail? Well, you know, I didn't start out as chief of disguise at the CIA. It was an interesting story of how I ended up in that position. How did you end up with the CIA? Well, I came out of which it took hands. I had a sister 13 months older than me. She fled to Aspen. Which I thought was brilliant. Then two years later, my best friend told me she was going to get married in Germany to a military and American military guy.

And what I come being the wedding? I said, yes, I was in college. I was paying my own tuition.

I stepped out of college so fast. You think it was my mother's money. I went to Germany.

“I was in the wedding and then they went to Italy and I was there. So I didn't want to go home.”

So instead, I took a train to Frankfurt, Germany and they had phone books back then in the Bonhoeff and I started calling American banks because this was a big backing down. I made formal calls. They all said the same thing. Oh, you're looking for a job. Do you speak German? No. Do you have a work in a bank? No. Do you have a work permit? No. And three of them said, well, thank you very much. And the fourth one said, well, why don't you just

come on down and talk to us? That was Chase Manhattan Bank. And they hired me. So I got my toe holes. There I had a job. Then I got an apartment. And then I got a boyfriend who turns out with CIA. But he couldn't tell me that he was CIA because he was undercover. And the way the CIA rules were written. He proposed to me on the subway in Vienna, Austria. And I said, yes, that was all very romantic. Then he told me he worked for CIA. He said you're going to love it.

And when we were assigned to another foreign posting, I went looking for a job with CIA and they hired

“me as a secretary because that's what CIA did always. That was what they did. What was it like working”

in the CIA as a woman? Initially, I was a secretary. And I was a very, very good secretary. So I became the bosses secretary. A thousand people, he was the director. I was a secretary. The joke was on me because that's a dead end. There's nowhere to go. There's the highest level you could get to. There was no up. So I told him that I thought I'd go to work for this Smithsonian. I'd go talk to them. He said, well, you know, that would be interesting. But he said, why don't you

consider taking some of our photography classes? I know you're an avid photographer and I'll get you in those classes and maybe you can explore that. And I ended up back in Europe working for the CIA in the dark rooms. And they discovered that I was really good at it. I used to say, you know, to myself, you cannot be excellence. I am excellent at this job. I am good. And they know it. I'm starting to read between the lines because you said he said take a photography class and

now I'm realize a way to minute. He didn't mean good out of the local community college and take a photography class. You got trained to do something. So what specifically does being a photographer

for the CIA in tail? When you say photography at CIA, you're talking stuff you never dreamed of.

You're talking fake pregnancy bellies with a camera in it for women, camera in the bra, camera men's tie, camera purse, cameras everywhere, big camera small cameras. We had cameras that looked a lot like this. It was a momblunk pin, a momblunk would take a hundred pictures, the size of a pin. If you were sending in front of Putin's desk and he looked over towards Lavrov who he was talking to, you can just take your pin because you're making

notes. You just take it and go and take a picture of plans and intentions of the Soviet Union. You wanted the agenda for the meeting. You wanted the minutes of the meeting. We had satellites up there

to know what are they going to do? Like they're nuclear program. What are they going to do?

That little camera was amazing and that was very much my account when that film came in.

I developed, that was one of the hardest things I ever did, developing that film. But in addition to using pins and cameras in strange places, we made micro dots and I brought one in today. A micro dot? What is that? A micro dot is a photograph of a page of text. It looks like a stamp. Well, that's because the dot is hidden in it. It's a picture of that reduced 800 times. Wow photographically and you end up with their two here.

Oh my gosh, it's on the back. It literally looks like a pin prick. It does. It looks like the period of the document. So you can mail it to your foreign agent. Maybe in China. Let's say China. He already has a lens. It looks like a grain of rice and then he gets some spit and he picked up the dot and he put it on the end of that lens and hold it up to the sun and read and hate in half by 10 page text. That's incredible. It was incredible. It's amazing to me that human beings

can be this innovative and come up with such extraordinary solutions. I agree. But photography at CIA was not like photography anywhere else. It was really exciting. I started traveling, training, foreign agents to use some of our very small interesting useful cameras. So I developed a skill

with photography and the guys, I was always guys, would let me do it because they knew I could do it.

Again, it's excellence. If you can do the work in an excellent manner, they will let you do the work.

“There's a couple of things about your story that I think are really interesting and”

they provide a lot of wisdom and advice. One being that you found yourself in this job as a secretary and you were excellent at it and it had a ceiling. And for somebody who feels like they've hit the ceiling of their potential, or their role, what would your advice be? Make a change. I changed more than once. I went in and did the photo thing and I loved it. But I did a trip out to India along the way, feeling in for somebody doing photo work in

India. I fell in love with India, just adored it. So I came back to Washington, found my career person. I said I would like an assignment there. He said there is no photo

“job coming up. The only thing coming up is disguise. And this was a turning point in my career,”

but I didn't know it then. It's like, well, how badly do you want to go to India? And this is, this is probably not a smart thing to do to change your career track in the middle of your career. But it was a smart thing to do. I ended up being a person who could do all this photography stuff. I could also do all of this disguise stuff and a little bit of counterfitting forging over here. That's how I ended up with a disguise piece of it.

For the person who's listening, who's afraid to make a change? What would you say? Some changes are really, really hard. I mean, if it's going to cost you a salary and you have to

“start again, or if you have to move, or if some changes involve more than just changing your”

workday, they changed other things. But I think change is the most refreshing thing any of us can do. You get good at what you do. You love what you do. You do it well. Okay. And you could keep doing it for the rest of your life. And a lot of people do. And there's not a thing wrong with that. But you could say, let me take a look around. What else is there? Is there something as interesting? Something I'd like to fill around with?

Well, what's interesting about your story is it illustrates something that I've always

found a be true, which is yes, the change feels scary. And yes, it can be hard. And yes, it can feel overwhelming because you think you're starting over. But your story proves a truth, which is you took absolutely everything with you. You're never starting over. You're building on that experience.

skill from photography. And then you ended up in this role in India. And it was all the experience and the pivots that positioned you to become the chief of disguise. But we don't think about that fact when we're making the change that we're we're starting over, so to speak, but we're actually not because we're doing it with experience. It's true. What do you say to a woman who's really feeling underestimated? I say, aim high. Hmm. Aim high. Don't underestimate yourself. You know,

the others, the others might do that. You know yourself better than anyone else. I'm higher

“even than you think you might. You might be able to accomplish. But that's how that's how you climb.”

One step at a time reaching maybe maybe you can do it, maybe you can't, but but try it.

There's something I've never really talked about publicly. And the middle of my career, when I was

46, I got married again to Tony Mendez. We want to talk about change. And when I was 47, I had my one and only child when I was 47, changed my life, changed a couple of other lives too. My husband, Tony Mendez, a lot of people know about him from Argo. A lot of people saw the movie Argo. For the person who's listening or watching who hasn't, it's extraordinary and you co-wrote the book that led to the movie. Right. Could you share for the person listening who doesn't

“know the story a little bit of the background about you and your husband and blood to that? How much”

time do we have? Whatever you got to give us. I had known Tony for years and years. I never knew

about Argo. I knew he never talked about Argo. It was something that he had done in the past and we all moved on and we're doing other things. And then George Tenet, a very popular head of CIA. He slipped up. There was a memo under our screened door. We live 40 miles outside of DC, down a one-mile dirt road. And the CIA delivers a memo under our door. And it said, we've been thinking, it's a very quiet moment in America. Things are settled. I've been thinking, this would be a good time to tell

America one good story about the CIA because no one has ever done that. All they ever hear

are suspicions of this or maybe somebody didn't misbehave over here. There's never been a good

story out there. I want to do that. I want you to do that. I want you to tell the story of Argo. And this was like 19 years after it happened. And Tony said, it's classified. And George

“Tenet said, not anymore. There was a purpose to it. And I think it was very clever of George Tenet”

to do that to show him that there's a human side and that there's a lot of goodwill at the CIA. So Tony told the story. And then wired magazine picked it up. And George Clooney saw it. So we're asleep and bed one night, whose black dark out in the country. And the phone rang and it was our agent somebody out in LA said, George Clooney wants to buy the rights to your story. And Tony says, Salat to him. And then the phone rang again, same person who said, Brad Pitt

is interested in it too. Tony said, raise the price. And the next morning, George Clooney bought it. And for the person who hasn't seen the movie, what is the story? It was about the American Embassy in Tehran. It was when the Ayatollah Homeini came back from Paris. The Shah had left the country. The Shah was in Washington, D.C. in the White House, with Jimmy Carter looking for treatment for his cancer. And there are any impopulation out of their minds that the Shah was in the

United States. And it was a revolution up until that point, Iran had been kind of a docile interesting place. And the people I knew that were a sign there. They loved it. They loved the people. They loved the country. They loved everything about it. Well, all of a sudden, it's a revolution. And they came over the walls. And they went into all the buildings. This was a huge compound. The American Embassy. Yeah, the American Embassy, multiple buildings. And they took

everybody prisoner except for one small building. The only one that had an exit door onto the street

And they ended up at the Canadian Ambassador's Residence. "Can Taylor, the Canadian Ambassador," said, "We will protect you. You're practically

“Canadian. We're practically American. Come on in." And you have to give the Canadians”

great credit. We did. Never enough. But we did. So there they were, they were trapped inside of Iran,

a landlocked country. The airports, everything was full of revolutionary guards. The borders were revolutionary guards. And there were all these efforts to get them out. They tried flying Jimmy Carter, sent helicopters to land in the desert. We disguised trucks to carry fake Iranian troops. We made Iranian military uniforms to put on our soldiers. So they could go in. What happened was those six people ended up stuck in the Canadian Ambassador's house with no

way out. So Tony went to Canada and did the obvious. You have to get passports for these people. Tony was kind of a specialist in ex-film trading people that were in trouble that needed to leave

“the country. So I went to Canada. I said, we need genuine passports for this one. We could make them.”

But we'd really like to have real ones. And the Canadians said, "Yes, I would point out that America

would never give another country our blank passports ever." But the Canadians did. Tony put in

new pictures, gave them fake names, stamped the passports so that it showed them leaving Canada. They stopped in LA. They went to Hong Kong. They went, and they ended up in Tehran. They were supposed to be the six people allocation scouting party looking for a place to do a movie. That was the backstory. So Tony went out to LA where we had worked for years with the makeup people. Also with the magic community, the magic builders. Tony had lunch with one of them and said,

"How many people are in a location scouting party?" And John said about six, and Tony said,

“"What would a title speed?" And he went down the list. You know, a location manager, a finance guy,”

the logistics guy, the script writer, the photographer, and Tony put a program. He named the fake movie that they were supposed to be going to make. He named it "Argo." As part of the disguise of the whole thing to be able to extract these American hostages. A whole thing was a disguise. Tony had set up an office out in LA. He was staffed. He had taken out advertisements in the Hollywood Reporter and Variety. Full page ads, "Argo, a cosmic

climb progression. It's going to be a great movie." It turns out when it was all over. The Iranians wanted to check. There were phone numbers. They could call that office. That fake office. And some fake employee would answer and say, "In a fake voice, oh no, they're on a location scouting." They had to understand. That no matter how the Iranians came at this, they would find a genuine, bona fide, office with posters up and people with phones. And they even carried some of those

magazines with it. What Tony did with Argo was he created this fake reality. We had never done

like that before. He created a whole fake world, a universe where everybody was doing their thing. And in front of the professionals out in Hollywood, and it was just so brilliant. Like it's fascinating just to hear about your world. Because part of me is sitting here thinking, wait, this is actually happening. This is crazy. Given that I'm not in the CIA, although it could be lying to you. But no. I don't think coming right out and saying something

that you're not is probably an effective way of disguising yourself, although maybe it is, I'm on the outside. So I can only imagine, okay, what does the chief of disguise do? Is this like mission impossible, born identity? I'm running into an apartment, and there's, you know, five passports and money. Is that what this is? The passports and money would be my husband's. I would be the mustache and the beard. In what, in the little vault in the bank, that he opens

up and he goes slipping through. We gave James whatever he needed. We called them all James. It was not very kind of us. We were, the office of technical service. We were the, the technical people supporting operations. James and his friends, they had a job that I couldn't have done,

their government. I mean, that's, that's a tall order. Sometimes we were looking for charisma when we hired James. We wanted him to be the guy you meet at the bar, and when you walk out, oh my god, you're like his best friend, and you've got each other's numbers, and you're going to stay in touch and all of that. That's the James that we wanted, but we discovered somewhere along the line that that James wasn't going to flourish in our environment, because that James needed attention, and he needed

praise, and he needed applause, and he needed feedback constantly, and in the real CIA none of that happened. There were no, there were no adaboyes, there were no stars, put it on paper for you. There was no thank you. There was okay. The next job now, we're going to go and do this.

“There was no applause. Oh wow. What does it take to be a good spy?”

Or James, if you will. Well, if you're going to be James, that's the code word for a spy, because you don't want to call him by the first name. That's James Bond. That's the operational guy. Okay. The way it works is CIA says, here's our program for next year, in descending order. Maybe the top of the list we want to know about somebody's nuclear program. That's the thing we want to know the most. Okay. So around the world, we all go, does anybody know anybody in that

in that program? Because they don't, we go find someone, and our our James's their job, which I could

never do, is to find those people, meet those people, and convince those people that they want to work

for us. So I always ask new friends. I said, what would it take for someone to come up to you? I don't know, and a friend's house and say, you know, I used to live in Russia, and I have friends there who are really interested in oil production figures out of this particular field here in

“America, and I know you work closely with them. Could you, and all of us would say, get out of here?”

We're not going to do that. James's job was to walk up to a Russian, and make the same kind of pitch. But James had to find a niche, first. He had to find a flaw. He had to find something, something that would engage them. So around the world, the reasons that people will be trade their government, it boils down to four things, and it spells the word mice in my CE. The M is for money, and Americans will do it for money. If you pay us enough, it makes me so

mad, but it's true. Pay us enough. We will be trade our country. The Russians will do it for ideology. Typically, and this may not still apply. But typically, the people we recruited, they had families that were taken apart by Stalin. They had families that were imprisoned by the Russian government. They had all these terrible things that happened to people they knew, and they wanted to pay them back. And for those reasons, they would work for us. MIC is compromised. Maybe they had a secret.

And they didn't want anyone to know the secret. Maybe we knew the secret, so we could use that as a.

But we didn't actually do that too much, because it didn't really work very well. But it was always

there as a possibility. And then E is for ego, and that's like the big one. People that are passed over at work for promotions, people that think their boss is stupider than anybody. People that

“just have these grudges, they walk around with them. Life is not fair. They're not. They're not”

making their way forward. Oh, when we could find those people, we could talk them and spy in for us. So when you look at mice, money, ideology, compromise, or ego, are those all present in terms of how you can defend most people to do anything? You know, usually when you see a spy case and you read the history of it, you find those things are in there very, very frequently. People don't just randomly say, I think I'm going to take all the secret I know and give them to another government. They need a

reason, and they filter down into those reasons most of the time. What are your biggest takeaways and life lessons after spending 30 plus years in the CIA? Wow. Well, one of the first ones would be that you don't do anything by yourself. You don't do anything alone. You form teams,

you form loose knit groups. You are always working with others. It's never a one-off.

You're always part of something bigger than yourself. If you're going to accomplish anything.

anybody I've ever met. And I know there's so many more stories that you're going to share with us,

but first, I need to take a quick break. And while you're listening to our amazing sponsors,

I bet somebody's coming to mind because as you listen to Johnna, I bet you're kind of thinking what I'm thinking. I keep thinking of that character M in the James Bond movies. She was basically his handler and Judy Dench played that role. Holy cow, like I cannot get the connection out of my mind. So as you are listening to a word from our sponsors, share this with all the James Bond fans in your life. Don't go anywhere because when we come back, Johnna is going to put you right at the scene

at the moment where she fooled the president of the United States while they were in the oval office. You're going to hear that story when we come back, stay with me. Welcome back. I'm Mel Robbins and today you and I are here with Johnna Mendez, the former chief of disguise from the CIA. And today she is here with the moving, inspiring, and heart-pounding reflection from such a remarkable life. So Johnna, one thing I was curious about, you said earlier

“that, you know what I mentioned, okay, is this really like mission impossible and born identity?”

And you said, well, my husband Tony does the passports, but I do the wigs. So how do you transform someone into someone else? It's all very specific to a person a place, a time. What they need, what would actually solve the problem. A lot of the time we wanted people to be less seen and so we would make them older. Nobody looks at old people too much. Do you use wigs,

do you? Like do you hear those masks, reels? You always see somebody pulling off a mask and they're

not. And you're like, whoa, was that actually a mask? Is that, I mean, is that how you do it? Where we ended up was they were so real that I could be sitting here wearing it right now. And you just, you wouldn't know. No way. I went to the White House and briefed the president and he didn't know.

“Hold on, you tricked the president of the United States and the secret service. What was your”

disguise? A full face mask with her attached. It was actually a girl that worked with me. Her name was Becky, but I wore her face very nicely and I dropped 20, dropped 20 years in the heartbeat and I thought I looked really good. Anyway, when in and brief the president, now the president back then was George H. W. Bush, who had been director of CIA at one point. And we had done some disguises for him. Mostly for entertainment, not he wasn't out on the streets doing work, but mostly I don't know

for a conference or something. He had a couple of disguises. So I took him to mate my tanglossies of himself and disguise. Because now I'm in my salesperson mode, I'm softening him up because I want him to love this thing. I'm going to show him next and it's going to be a really expensive program and I want his support for that program. So he's looking at the pictures of himself

and he's laughing. I had never seen George H. W. Bush laugh before. I was impressed. And I said,

"Well, I'm here today to show you the best new thing we've got. You're going to love it." And he's behind the resolute desk and he's saying, "Well, where is it?" He's looking, you know, are there bags down on the floor by me? No, there's nothing. I said, "Well, I'm wearing it." And what I'm going to do is just take it off and show it to you. And he said, "No, no." And he got up and he walked to my chair and walked around my chair. And he didn't know it was a

full face mask. I don't know what he was looking for, but he knew that I had on a disguise. And he couldn't find it. So he sat down and he said, "Okay, take it off." And I did that Tom Cruise thing, which is just before Tom Cruise got famous for it. I did that.

“Bush loved it. Everybody loved it. It's, it's a great new capability. Can you show me the photos?”

I think your photos here from this. Well, I don't go far without these photos because this was a moment. Oh, so that's you. That's me on the far right. That's Bush looking at the pictures of himself. Everybody is very calm. That's you and that disguise. Yeah.

but to get it to move. Where you can, I mean, I got through the secret service with it.

“Wow. I know. All right, not to see this one. This one, I'm holding it up in the air.”

It now lives in the basement of this CIA, everyone's in a while. They bring it up. The mask. And there's a big exhibit about this mask in the international spy museum. So the mask has gotten its own, it's own little bit of fame. More importantly, did he fund the program? Oh, yeah. Because, because with this program, once we can take a face, any face, your face, and put it on someone else, we can make your twin. We can absolutely make your twin.

And we, we made twins. It places where we needed them like Russia, where we had so much surveillance. We couldn't walk out of our embassy without a team, just coming out of smoky tunnels and following us down the street. But if you plan it right, they'd follow you down the street.

“You'd step into a kiosk to get cigarettes. I don't know, gum. You come back out, go on down the street.”

And they'd fall in behind you, keep going with you. But it wasn't you. It was your twin. They were following you. Are still in the kiosk. So once that parade is on the next block, you can go do what you needed to do that day. We could also, besides making your twin, we could change your ethnicity and we could change your gender with these masks. We could do anything.

That's incredible. It wasn't incredible. Can you show me the other disguise items that you're

brought with you? Just a few of the things that we would do. This is a store-bought wig for our own officers. We usually didn't use store-bought wig. We had the ability to hand-make exquisite wigs one hair at a time. They didn't look like wigs at all. So this is kind of a stand-in.

“A mustache, if you ever wondered what a good fake mustache looks like. I don't know what these”

costs, but oh, they were good. Yeah, because they, they have almost a mesh underneath them. So it looked a little bit more all about that mesh. These things are like feathers. If you had terrible teeth, we would take a mouth impression. We would make your teeth pearly whites. If you had pearly whites, we could make them all messed up. We could change your teeth. When we changed your teeth, we would change your gumline. When we changed your gumline,

we would change your profile. If you look from the side, it's quite different. We could do all of these things. We'd close some glasses on you. If we needed to change color your eyes, we could some contact lenses in. If I met you and had to go back to my people and say, I met a woman named Mel. And this is what she looked like. You know, she's got long, beautiful blonde hair. She wears striking glasses. She doesn't wear a lot of makeup. She's not wearing a lot of jewelry. She doesn't

seem to have on a wedding ring. She wears a watch like this. I would just describe you and in such fine detail. Then, from the disguise, we would change every piece of that that we could. Wow. You would end up with shorts, a little pixie, wig, dark, wig, lots of makeup. No glasses. We just go on and on and on pretty soon. You're not there anymore. And this other person is there. We wanted everything that we could change with men. It was harder. Why was it harder? It was harder

because men don't fool around with all that stuff so much. We'd put Cologne on a man who would

never wear Cologne. It would be noticeable. A woman would notice it. It's probably wouldn't like it.

We'd put a gold chain on a man who would never wear a gold chain. We'd end button his shirt one too many. So it all of a sudden, all of a sudden, that guy is taking a turn here. He's a different guy. If he had a wedding ring, we'd take it off. Usually, you'd be able to see kind of the impression like, oh, he's married, but he took his wing. Look at that. We'd change his watch out. We just, you know, I'm not even talking about wigs and hair and stuff there. I'm talking about all the little things.

I'm pretty soon. It's another guy. It's just another guy. We would tell our men when we were doing them. We said, you know, someone in your family gave you a shirt in the last 10 years that you just hate. Send them back at your closet. That's your shirt for your disguise. And we'd write up a little character sketch of this guy. This is your guy. This is you and disguise. Everything about and does he smoke? What does he smoke? Does he drink? What does he like? We just make a new character

did that, then we'd send you to the CIA cafeteria for lunch. Where all your friends were,

everybody at your boss, your boss's boss. Everybody who knows you is down there having lunch, and we'd send you into the storm. And they'd come back and say, oh my God, I was sitting next to them. Nobody knew. And then you thought, okay, yeah, he'll use it. That's really cool. What is 30 years in the CIA teach you about body language and projecting confidence? Well, it kind of depends on who you're projecting it to. And what the occasion is, if you're talking to the foreigners who were our,

that was our whole goal is to make them comfortable, to make them believe in what we could do to kind of lessen some of their fear. We would be as positive as we could be. We would praise what they were doing. We would encourage them to do even more of it. We would take pictures and show them. Look how good you look. Look how good this is. It's like in Argo, we built that whole back story, and then we said to them, look at that. Who's got a challenge that? Nobody's going to

challenge that. But, depending on what you're trying to do, if you were trying to sneak somebody

across a border, that was really hard. And you start roleplaying with people who have never

role played before. I'm thinking of one, one, one of them where we took somebody out of a

“border as a man, really important man, and his wife, and their five-year-old daughter, a boy.”

And they were going across a border. We hadn't done that before. This was a very controlled border. And we hired a smuggler. A guy who was back and forth all the time. That was his job. We hired him. We modified his car. We modified the back seat. So you could put somebody underneath it, a husband, and a kid, and we did. That's where they were in the front seat. It had like a bench seat, old style. And the woman had the girlfriend position, which is not by the door, but it's in the middle.

And the smuggler, it was back and forth across that border all the time. This was really important. Getting this man out was really important. And so this was such a funny story. They pulled up to the gate with the arms down, and there's the guy in the uniform, and he's got the clipboard,

“and he's like, and they know each other, "Oh, I hate good to see you." When will you be back?”

What's going on, blah, blah, blah? And there was a tape playing. It was Billy Joel. This is the part of the story that I just couldn't believe. It was the latest Billy Joel tape that was not available over there. And the guard says, "Oh, I like that. What is that?" The driver says, "I Billy Joel." And the guard says, "Oh, my girlfriend loves him. Love him." Where'd you get that? And the driver says, "Oh, I have a connection." The driver says, "I'll tell you what.

Next time, next time I come through, I'll bring you one. I'll give you one." And the guard says, "I'll tell you what. You give me this one." And you keep the one you get next time for yourself, but I want this to my girlfriend. So it takes the tape out, gives it to the guard, and they drive through the border. So this idea, it's everyone, every one of them is different. Every time you do one of these things, it's different. And it's scary.

I got to be honest with you. I don't want to take the break right now, but I have to give our

amazing sponsors a chance to share a few words. Do not go anywhere. Because when we come back,

Janna is going to dig deep into the topic of how to trust your intuition. Because when you serve for the CIA, it's often a matter of life or death. Janna and I will be right back to stay with us. Welcome back, I'm Mel Robbins. And today, you and I are spending time with former CIA Chief of Disguise, Janna Mendez. And she's here giving you a me moving, inspiring, and heart-pounding reflection

“from her remarkable life. So, Janna, what was the scariest moment in your 30 years in the CIA?”

It was in Latin America. Down where the cartels were working. Still are working.

"We'll pick you up in the morning." They put me in a hotel. They said, "We'll be here in the

morning." We'll be here at like 903. Okay. They said, "We'll wait for two minutes and we'll leave." And if that doesn't work out, we'll get in touch in the afternoon. So, I was out there. 903,

“I wasn't going to be left behind. They said, "You have to be very, very careful in this country.”

It's dangerous here." Just randomly dangerous because of drugs. So, I did the work in the embassy that I went down to do. And I went back to the hotel, and I discovered, "Oh, I'm out of cigarettes. It's back where I used to smoke almost two at a time." I had to go get cigarettes. So, I went out down the street, around the corner, to a kiosk, and got some cigarettes, and then I'm walking back to the hotel, and I see there's a shortcut. It's stupid. So, I took the shortcut, and I come around

kind of a corner, and there's like 20 young, drunk local guys, armed. You could just smell the beer.

And I look wrong. I look wrong. The women down there, in that part of the world, dress like a million

bucks, and a red lipstick, and they just look fabulous. And I was not looking fabulous. And I wasn't looking like them, and you could just see that they all turned, and they were like, and I figured later, I said, "I think, I don't think they thought I was CIA. I bet they thought I was narcotics person, American narcotics down there, checking out them. I really thought that they might shoot me. That's one of the few times that I just held my breath.

And I'd had all this training, and my training said to me, "You cannot turn around and

“go back. You have to walk through these guys." Really, why walk through them? Because the”

turn around and go back would reaffirm that something was wrong here. You just had to show confidence

and keep going. So, I did, and they kind of separated, and I walked through them, and then I had to keep going to get out of that alley. And I couldn't turn around and look at them. And I just, I just, I thought, maybe, maybe someone's going to shoot me. And they didn't, so I went in the lobby of the hotel and opened that package and got this cigarette. I couldn't even smoke it. I was just like this. I'm sitting here thinking,

like, I, I had not built for this. Like, I'm holding my breath when you're telling the story about the Billy Joel tape. Like, I mean, I'm just sitting here listening, and I, not even breathing. I recognized that I wasn't breathing as you were in the alley telling me the story. How do you, how did you learn to do that? And how can I in the person listening learn to tap into some

“bravery when life is scary or challenging? You know, I think it's preparation. I think it's”

it's a confidence that comes out of thinking it through knowing what you should do, knowing how to do what you should do. And then you kind of, in these kinds of moments, you kind of have to forget you and you have to go through these motions. It's not bravery. This is born out of experience and out of training. We train for this stuff all the time. If you read my book, you'll say, my God, were you ever not in training? Because they trained us all the

time. They put me through a hostile interrogation course at the CIA's farm. That was one of the worst things that ever happened to me in my life. And in the middle of it, I know it's just a training exercise. I mean, I know that I'm not going to get hurt. I know that nobody's going to let anything happen to me. I'm scared to death. I'm claustrophobic. So they put me in boxes. They put me in a box that I thought of as a mattress box. Because you could only go inside ways.

And you couldn't, you couldn't turn your shoulders. You could barely turn your head. And standing in there for some long time. And I thought, I don't think, I mean, I know this is just a training course. But I'm not supposed to be learning something here. Well, I don't think I can do this in any longer. And I remembered, I learned something. I remembered that we had talked to some POWs from Vietnam. And the POWs had said, we got through years of this stuff. And you get through it

in your mind. You have to find your happy place. You have to build a car, rewire your engine and you're whatever. You need a project. Where did you go in your mind? That's the funniest thing. There's a place back in Kansas called the Flint Hills. It's a tall grass area. It's just beautiful.

And it was just gorgeous. And it was kind of moving. And I was just so happy.

And I did that. I didn't think that would ever work for me. But that's how I got through it. Do you have any advice for how the person listening could find a place like that for themselves? Like, where they're happy place to go to in their mind if their current reality

“is really scary or challenging? I think anybody could do that. I don't think you have to be”

scared to death or, you know, in a really bad place. I think sometimes just the day to day

you need an escape hatch. A place that gives you that kind of warm rosy glow

will have those places. I know at one point in that box, I thought, okay, we'll do, we'll do what it was sandy beach. And there'll be some waves. And I'll be walking barefoot. And the sand will be really warm. So I'm, I didn't have them. And they didn't go there. Couldn't go there, didn't work. But I tried. And they were even the box. I don't know. You do, I was in that course for three days and three nights.

And they, they fed us a half a cup of rice and a cup of water each day. We were in prison. And learned, you know, one or no, what is like to be really miserable? Well here, we're going to show you. What are verbal cues that someone is lying? Hmm. Hmm. I think in general, people fall apart a little bit when they're lying. They get nervous because they know they're lying. They want you to believe it. So they're trying a little too hard. I think direct eye contact

is one of the first things that kind of falls apart. I think watching their facial expression,

the people who are bouncing around in their story who are nervous, who are uneasy, who are trying

“to convince you of this thing and who sometimes won't let it go. That's what I would look for.”

I would imagine after 30 years in the CIA, you have a pretty keen intuition. How do you decipher those moments when it's your intuition, warning you versus just anxiety and fear? Your intuition, for me, it kind of has the beginning and it sort of has an ending. When I have an intuition about something, I stick with it. I follow it a track it like it's a newspaper story. See if I was right. Especially if it's about people. Well, what's interesting is

if your intuition is kind of saying do this or believe this, the fear and the questioning comes right after it. But what if this happens? Like that that's the fear and the anxiety that stops you from trusting it. But the direction that your instincts are telling you is pretty clear.

“Yeah. I think over time, over time you go through enough scenarios like that that you develop”

a trust in your intuition. Here's the way that I think about it. So if I get, if I start having a feeling, if it's my deep intuition, it's a pretty clear statement. If it's fear or anxiety, there's a lot of questioning or what if or just noise this way scattered. Yeah, it's like a statement. It pulls you into which it does. And for me, anyway, if the alarm that's going off is what if this and what if that and what if the other thing? I know that the questioning is more fear and

anxiety. And if it is a very clear direction, move away. Speak up. Yeah, that's intuition. Yeah, you're right. You've given us a story that illustrates intuition versus fear. When you're in that alley, your fear told you to turn around and get out of there. Yeah. And your intuition said walk. Yeah, nothing. It was right. What did being in the CIA, especially as the chief of

was just huge. When I was in school, when I was in college, I was introverted and quite the reader.

And I really thought that my career and my life was going to be spent as a librarian or an English teacher. And that sounded good to me. I thought that'll be an interesting place to park myself. That was the beginning. And then I couldn't, I could not have stepped further away from it unless I joined the circus and become an acronym. You develop confidence in yourself. You develop confidence in your own ideas. You follow them. And there's no map. There's nothing saying you, you should

“end up here. You should end up there. You end up, I think, where you're supposed to end up.”

Janna, given the fact that you were a leader at the CIA for almost 30 years, you have so many colleagues that were killed in the line of service. You have built friendship and allies with people that are citizens of other countries around the world. What are your thoughts on the state of things right now? I'm not sure that this planet is in a good place. Not politics, just this planet. And I worry about the next generation. And what it is, they're going to be facing.

In terms of the health of the planet and global warming and just on the fact that we're not taking care of the planet, I think we've wrecked it. And I don't know how you fix the planet.

I mean, I don't know. Well, here's what I know. I know that if decades ago you could figure out

how to use a pen to take a photo and then shrink it down to a pin prick and then create a lens the size of a grain of rice to be able to magnify that back up 800 times. If we were to put our attention on it, I would bet in human ingenuity and the imagination to figure it out. The ingenuity is there. And the imagination is there. But the will, the will is not there. As a matter of fact, the will is pushing things the other direction is cutting off what

I used to think of as lifelines. We're not funding those lifelines anymore.

“I think a lot of people feel overwhelmed and scared and sad. What is one thing you would recommend”

that somebody do? Well, I'm to heat up of them. And of me, take a breath is first thing. It's

probably in order. Secondly, is taking small steps to fix what you can. Can't fix it all. But if enough people takes small steps, you can fix big pieces of it. What do you think the biggest threat that people aren't paying enough attention to is right now? There are so many. There are so many. It's the political tension. It's not just here. It's around the world. The nature of these states and what they're doing and how they're doing it and an individual

can't keep track of it. We're used to rely on our government to keep track of it for us. We've lost that. There is nobody calling balls and strikes right now.

“Nobody cares about doing that. So I guess we have to call our own. So you have to pick the piece.”

Probably pick your fight. What is it you want to support? What do things to say interesting about listening to your stories? I keep thinking about the knock on the Canadian ambassadors door and the relationships that it seems like we used to have and the allies that we prioritized and both on a global scale and an individual scale, one of the things that I worry about, because I remember it. I'm only 57. When there wasn't this divisiveness. There wasn't this

other thing. There was a lot more working together and collaborating even if we didn't see eye to eye and I worry a lot that we have lost our ability to do that. Yeah. Now I don't know how you get that back, but it'd be worth working on it. I innately believe in the endless potential for change and in people's capacity to grow and learn from their mistakes and to become better versions

on a global scale. I still think as darkest things can feel. There is so much more light out there and there is there are more people that believe what you believe and that want what you want

“than not. I believe that the vast majority of people are good and they want the best for themselves”

and their families and their neighbors and that we all miss being able to work together to solve our problems because we can. That's a wonderful way of summing it up. So if there's one skill if you think back through your remarkable career at the CIA that myself and the person who's listening really needs in order to navigate the world today, what is it? I think the idea of courage is misunderstood. I think a lot of people think that courage is something that you that you walk around with

that it's inherent in us and I think it is not. I think courage comes from confidence, confidence comes from knowledge, from knowing what you're doing, understanding how you can impact a thing.

“I think that's the important. You don't just become courageous. You don't come around a corner and”

there's a bear. It's not like that at all. You don't come around that corner at all.

There could always be a bear waiting for you there but courage is, um, it's a lot more complicated

than that a lot of people think but it's something that everyone can develop. Everyone can have. If I can have courage, anyone can have courage. How could the person who doesn't feel like they have a lot of courage, how could you start practicing that in your everyday life? You could start confronting things that are on your lists, things that scare you. It might even be people. You might start having a conversation with someone that you weren't sure. You could have

“that conversation with them. You have to approach it. You have to exercise it. If to learn courage,”

there is a story near the end of the book that was really hard to read. I'm describing this operational base out in Afghanistan. At the end of my book, I was talking about women. I was kind of summing up about women in the workplace. And what wonderful strides we they have been making. And then I called out this operational base that the chief of the base was the CIA woman. The deputy was a woman. There were like six people there.

And a car pulled in and they were bringing in an Afghan who, oh, they were so excited that they they could bring him in because he was going to tell them everything and he got out of the car and he opened his vest and he was a human bomb and he pulled the cord and he blew everybody up. The women, the men, the chief of the base had three kids. The other woman had two,

blew them up. And I said, is this the definition that I've always talked about women working,

the same as men, living the same as men, having careers the same as men, is this the proof that now we're dying, the same as men. It's really sad. It's really sad. Yeah. But it speaks volumes. Yeah, they were two gals. There are now stars carved in the marble. See, I hear. Jonathan Mendez, what are your parting words? I loved coming here and talking to you. I liked very much having this conversation. You make me think through things that some of them I know

viscerally, but I don't talk about maybe some things that I didn't really even know. So I've been learning

while I've been talking to you. It's always a wonderful experience. Well, I've been learning as I've

been talking to you. There you go. We're so smart. We're smarter now. I just want to say first well, thank you for your decades of service. Thank you. Thank you for that. And thank you for coming and sharing stories and wisdom from your remarkable life. And I know, and I'm sure as you're listening, you know that Johnna Mendez is far from done. That way, do you like it or not? There is another chapter to be written. Well, I kind of hope you're right. I'm ready for one. One, one, one, one final

Well, you did work for the CIA, so I don't expect you to tell me everything. Well, this is, this is true.

Some things have to remain undercover. Johnna, you are a national treasure. Oh, man. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your service. And thank you for being here. And thank you. Thank you for spending this time with us. Wasn't she

amazing? I loved every minute of it. And I loved being here together with you. And in case

“no one else tells you this today as your friend, I want to tell you that I love you and I believe in you.”

And I believe in your ability to create a better life. And I also believe in our ability to do what we can where we are, to start to create a better world together. All righty. I'll see you in the very next episode. I'll welcome you in the moment you hit play.

Oh my god, another coffee. This is great. This is how I'm going to get through today, fish.

You guys sound dangerous. You're about to make it. And that is a best way.

“It's going to be hard to go home. Well, we don't want you to go home. You must know”

anybody there making sure that everything is just hunky-dory. Well, Cameron can keep checking in on you. And you were being her. I'm more in Becky's space and her hairdo. Oh my god, one of my favorite people in the world is Donna. It wasn't the scene at all. He looked up and saw me sitting there holding my head in the air and he went out this little noise. Shriek. Real spuffed. Scared him. It surprised him. It just really did surprise him.

“The only person that didn't really like it was”

they had a CIA his dog. Dogs know dogs don't like hats either. They don't like hats. Yeah, you're right. Why do dogs not like hats? And the mustache. Oh, and a mustache drop. Then I saw. Yeah, I saw carefully. What? Can we send stuff to your son? I mean, that would be hard just kidding. I'm actually hired him. He doesn't want for me. I've hired him. Right here. Now, if we're, if we're, if we're no longer in the air, I'll tell you one more thing.

Awesome. All right. And we don't even care about the lipstick. Oh, no, you look fantastic. It was still on there. I could see it. Oh, and one more thing. I know this is not a blooper. This is the legal language. You know what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I am not a licensed therapist and this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the

advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist or other qualified professional. Got it? Good. I'll see you in the next episode. [BLANK_AUDIO]