Publishers Weekly
01/08/2024
Mendez (The Moscow Rules), the CIA’s former Chief of Disguise, details her fascinating career in this gripping memoir. Mendez began working for the agency in the 1960s, after traveling across Europe in her early 20s and falling for fellow American John Goeser, whom she met while working at a German bank. After she accepted his marriage proposal, Goeser revealed to Mendez that he was with the CIA. Her ambition and knack for espionage—including her skills in developing clandestine film quickly and accurately—helped her move beyond her initial assignment as a “contract wife” tasked with helping Goeser maintain his cover. Her true métier turned out to be designing disguises, and her skills landed her hazardous assignments in risky locations including Russia and East Germany, where she matched wits with the KGB and the Stasi. (The realistic face masks she designed so impressed then-CIA director William Webster that he had her wear one to a meeting with President George H.W. Bush before peeling it off to reveal her true face.) Mendez’s accounts of her high-pressure field work are enhanced by the more quotidian aspects of her service, including her struggles to take on as much responsibility, and make as much money, as her male counterparts. It adds up to an entertaining and enlightening glimpse inside the opaque world of spycraft. Agents: Grainne Fox and Christy Fletcher, UTA. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
Engaging and enlightening, In True Face [is] an important addition to the canon of nonfiction books about an institution encrusted in myths created by movies, television, novels, hostile intelligence services and, occasionally, the agency itself.” —Washington Post
“Mendez details her fascinating career in this gripping memoir… an entertaining and enlightening glimpse inside the opaque world of spycraft.”—Publishers Weekly
“Fans of true espionage will enjoy Mendez’s stories of a formative era in intelligence history.”—Kirkus
“An extraordinarily brave and entertaining book. Jonna Mendez shows us that one of the CIA’s biggest secrets was its treatment of women and the consequences not only for its officers, but the nation it was supposed to serve.”—Sonia Purnell, New York Times-bestselling author of A Woman of No Importance
“Few outside the intelligence community understand the pressures and deceptions involved in spying. Even fewer know what it means to navigate this world while also fighting against discrimination. But all that secrecy can take a toll. In this book, Jonna Mendez takes a risk that she never could in her spying days—to tell the full and unvarnished truth.”—Valerie Plame, bestselling author of Fair Game and Burned
“Who can imagine James Bond without secret weapons, tricky cars and disguises? Meet Jonna, the CIA’s version of Q and the first woman to master the many skills of deception and spy craft. With more than a decade of undercover operations, I had met only a few of the Agency’s rare, but storied technical officers — the ones responsible for many of the most sensitive, elaborate activities. In True Face had me glued to the pages until I finished in one sitting! This is a rare glimpse at the Spy-vs-Spy that won the Cold War and wages still. A must-read and inspiration to women who fear not.”—Mary Beth Long, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs
“In this refreshingly personal account, Jonna Mendez uses stories from her amazing 25 year CIA career to shed light on everything from clandestine photographic operations to decades of sexism at the Agency to mind-blowing disguise technology. A must-read for anyone interested in intelligence.”—David Priess, former CIA officer and author of The President's Book of Secrets
"I loved the book. Part adventure story, part real-life espionage novel, and part life journey, the book comes alive with Jonna’s rich vignettes of a life and work overseas for the CIA. Most importantly, Jonna battled terrible institutional misogyny to rise from a contract spouse to Chief of Disguise at CIA, where she was a critical component of the CIA’s espionage activities against our nation’s toughest adversaries. Jonna’s experiences will no doubt inspire the next generation of female CIA officers.” —Marc Polymeropoulos, former CIA operations officer, MSNBC national security analyst and author of Clarity in Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the CIA
"In True Face: A Woman's Life in the CIA, Unmasked ranks as one of the great CIA autobiographies of all time. It is a must read for anyone interested in the CIA's unique mission and what it was like for a woman rising through the ranks to a position of great importance. Jonna Mendez's story of her career is inspiring. It is also filled with vignettes of espionage, as well as the humor and the challenges of daily life serving in the world's best intelligence service, that make it a page turner. Thanks to Jonna for sharing her career with all of us!"—Michael Morell, former CIA deputy director
“Engaging and enlightening… This consistently absorbing book is a wonderful memoir that offers more than simply a compelling life story.” —BookPage
“In her best-selling new memoir, In True Face, the agency’s onetime Chief of Disguise makes her 27-year intelligence career sound like a gender-switched Bond movie.” —The Week
“Engaging… full of fascinating details.” —Foreign Affairs
“Jonna Mendez’s In True Face is more than just an autobiography; it is an essential piece of intelligence literature that provides a nuanced view of CIA operations through the eyes of one of its most innovative officers. As we turn the pages of her life story, we are reminded of the enduring impact of those who operate in the shadows, their legacies shaping not just the history of espionage but also the very fabric of international politics.” —Times of Israel
APRIL 2024 - AudioFile
Barbara Benjamin-Creel's clear voice and strong performance bring Mendez's memoir to life. Mendez began her nearly thirty-year career in the CIA as a "contract wife"--an administrator who was the spouse of a CIA agent. Embarking into this "man's world," she used her brains, grit, and persistence to become an intelligence agent herself and eventually rose to be the chief of disguise. All of this makes for a most interesting account, and Benjamin-Creel is a splendid match of narrator and text. Her voice is never strained or melodramatic, she narrates at an easy-to-follow pace, and her inflection and expression are appropriate. Her skills propel the listener through this audiobook. M.T.F. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2024-01-13
A veteran CIA agent tells…well, some.
Mendez, co-author of Argo and The Moscow Rules, was recruited in the early 1960s, wooed by the “well-heeded martini drinkers” who roamed around Cold War Europe. She signed on after marrying a man who looked for the sort of adventures a CIA agent might expect—and then, it being the early ’60s, found that her own adventures were largely administrative. Worse, when a woman working for the CIA was assigned to the U.S., she lost any seniority or promotions she had earned, distinctions “rendered null and void the moment you returned to or departed from DC.” Male agents faced no such indignities, but Mendez agitated, and as a member of an agency-appointed “Petticoat Panel,” she pressed for equal pay and other forms of equity that were actually adopted, well before other federal agencies made similar efforts. An eager learner, Mendez realized early on that the “soft skills” she and other women possessed, such as listening closely, “were an asset, not a liability.” She racked up plenty of hard technical skills as well, eventually becoming adept at creating disguises and working with highly placed Hollywood artisans such as an Academy Award–winning makeup artist to make masks that “could conceal the presence of mixed ethnicities in apartheid South Africa…or obscure the presence of a western visage in North Korea.” A climactic point in the text comes with the brilliant subterfuge that allowed a number of American diplomats to escape from Iran during the hostage crisis, disguised as members of a film crew—a “caper” that landed Mendez and her husband their own places in Hollywood, even if, in her case, as “a novelty—a female spy who’d risen in the ranks of the CIA.”
Fans of true espionage will enjoy Mendez’s stories of a formative era in intelligence history.
