Yeah baby!

Oh that's very nice. Now there's a nose.

Totally pops.

That is sick.

Hi my name is Jonna Mendez.

[Narrator] 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 and disguise.

Roll clip.

This is a box of passports in The Bourne Identity.

[dramatic music]

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 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.

[Jason Bourne] John Michael Kane.

They're too precious. Yeah.

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 Morrissey?

I'm sorry?

I asked if you're traveling alone.

Yes.

Carrie's disguise, which basically

consisted of dying her hair.

Just get it over with, okay?

I thought was absolutely ineffective.

[Carrie scoffs] Still Carrie, with dark hair.

Don't you think I know that?

She could have cut her hair,

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.

Well what do you mean?

Yeah, I didn't think that was effective at all.

God, 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.

[energetic music]

May I see your passport?

You ever try this one?

I think it's too light for me, what do you think?

What she did was absolute spot-on.

Thank you.

And she didn't just dye her hair.

She dyed it outrageously red, and then adopted

the 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.

What lipstick do you use, 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 or aisle?

We could've used that as a training film.

[Jonna laughs] I know.

Longterm alias, The Americans.

[bag rustles]

[doorbell rings]

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.

[Philip stammers]

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 in 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.

How have you been, Martha? And that's what he does.

Big day at FBI Counterintelligence.

He becomes the guy in the disguise,

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 III.

[dramatic music]

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 true person,

and then he would wear disguise number one,

and then on top of that would be disguise number two.

[speaks foreign language]

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.

God damn it.

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.

[upbeat music]

I think the change into the schoolgirl outfit

was actually very well-done. Really?

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.

Cheese!

No one pays any attention, that's the whole point.

We use that a lot in our training exercises back here.

Great.

And 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.

Oh, thank you.

So to look at another shopping quick change,

let's look at Baby Driver.

[exciting music]

[alarm beeps] As you can see,

this time the alarms go off. Go go go!

The intent was good, the execution was okay,

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

Freeze! Stealing.

[guns fire]

Blending in with the crowd, Casino Royale.

[crowd cheers]

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.

[crowd cheers]

We need him alive. We found a way around that

by inventing something that didn't exist.

It was a harness that was body worn.

Thank you.

A receiver that would be in our ear

that we never had to touch, and an induction loop

that went around our neck. Right.

So we could receive and it would transmit to the earpiece.

It 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 proud of the enlarged pores.

Look at this one right here.

Huh? Eh...

I wasn't crazy about it either.

Wearing a disguise is not about looking good.

Oh that's very nice. Now there's a nose.

Although in this scene it was all about looking good.

You have a nose for noses.

So the officer didn't get to choose

which nose he was going to wear.

We would have made him a custom nose.

He didn't get to choose the teeth,

we would have made the teeth.

Here are some teeth, on the house.

Awe.

The hair.

This will keep you very warm.

The mustache.

That is too legal. Too legal?

Yes. A goatee if it was there.

Inky dinky do.

Inky dinky do. This will inky dinky do.

A lot of that would've been custom made.

Some of it could be off the shelf.

What we were interested in was giving him a total look

that he didn't have to like Oh!

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.

Oh, my dear boy!

The next clip is a worker uniform, 24.

[Mother In Crowd] Hang onto your buddies.

Yep, hold hands.

We're going to go to the ice cream shop.

They're setting up the sundae bar.

Make 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!

But we can arrange anything.

Fine, let's get this over with.

Cover story, Argo.

[crowd chatters] At least I look good.

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 overtook 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 house guests,

as we called them, were using the cover

of a Hollywood locations scouting team.

It's okay, it's her job to take photographs.

She's the production designer.

That was a subject they thought they could

easily talk about, they could talk about Hollywood.

You don't know what the hell movie people do.

And be believable.

This would be first.

So, as a cover story, it was carefully selected.

[Tony] We don't have any alternatives.

They came up with a Hollywood locations scouting party.

They're a Canadian film crew

on a locations scout for a science fiction movie.

Rather than disguise them, we more restyled them.

[Tony] These cover identities were created

specifically for each one of you.

When they were choosing the cover

for these six house guests

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.

Yes! Yes! Woo hoo!

Masks, Mission Impossible.

[tense music]

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.

[epic music]

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 steal breathe through the nose

but it's always a relief to know

that you can also breathe through the mouth.

Stop mumbling!

And soo, by taping the mouth,

you really start restricting their air intake.

Afraid he's got no choice.

How did they make these masks?

Let's look at Mission Impossible III.

[Mission Impossible Theme]

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 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.

[Penny] Well, there's the 10 cats.

Those would be the things that any of us

would carry around in our billfold or in our purse.

That's a no.

There's a similarity here with the Pink Panther clip.

Eh...

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, Inglourious Basterds.

[speaking German]

That ominous look tells you

that something bad has just happened.

[gun cocks] [speaks German]

British soldier counted wrong on his hands.

[speaks German]

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, certainly wasn't German.

It was a dead giveaway.

[speaks German]

We know from traveling around the world

that every country has its own customs.

[speaks German]

And it's incumbent on us to learn those customs,

to know those customs, and to not violate

any of their procedures.

[speaks German]

Sometimes when you've been found out, there is no escaping.

[guns fire]

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 I go out speaking the King's.

Gadget room, Kingsman.

I've had a lot of fun with this.

One of our finest examples of chemical engineering.

The 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 scenarioses with agents,

they said, I will work for you

but I would like Poison.

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 her. In two cases that I know of,

we put L-pills into fountain pens.

Remotely activate. 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.

[beep] ing 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. [epic music]

[knife clangs] That is sick.

The scientist disguise, The Saint.

I'm here to do an interview with that 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 You have very pretty eyes.

imposing and so You're a pretty lady.

frightening, in a way. She's boring the life

out of me. That draws attention

and you never want to draw attention,

so I would rate that disguise as a failure.

Oops.

Glasses as a disguise, Superman.

Lois Lane, say hello to Clark Kent.

Hiya. Lois Lane, how're...

Anyone who's ever watched Superman

wonders, Lois, can't you see?

Lois, have you got a minute?

Because I was wondering if maybe

you'd like to have a little dinner with me?

Lois?

Lois maybe we could-- [door slams]

Clark is the newspaper reporter

and Superman is the superhero.

Excuse me.

[woman screams] Easy, miss.

Physically, they're exactly the same.

Really?

I always thought I was kinda 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!

There's that ladder again.

[Officer] What do you think?

[Partner] 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. [man shouts]

When you planned 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.

[metal clangs] We never planned

to be hiding behind a chain link fence.

[man growls] 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.

[electricity crackles] Ah!

Before they could leave. [chuckles]

Some funny stories. [electricity crackles]

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! [funky music]

Alias names at CIA are closely controlled,

they are managed, they are assigned to you.

My name is Number 2. 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 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? Richie 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 shag-a-delic.

And so whenever I see anything that has to do with Faith,

like Keep the faith, baby I'm like, Okay.

[chuckles] Oh, behave!

Furniture camouflage, Sherlock Holmes.

[Watson] Who delivered this parcel?

[Mary] The postman.

[Watson] The usual chap or did he look peculiar?

We never tried to disguise ourself

in the furniture at the CIA.

But there is a story about James Comey at the White House.

He was trying to blend in to the curtains behind him.

His suit and the curtains were the same blue.

[News Anchor] Wearing a blue suit,

was trying to blend in with the blue curtain.

He was trying to hide that way unsuccessfully.

[dog huffs]

Another furniture camouflage

in this next movie called Spy Hard.

[man farts]

Great Scott!

We used furniture concealments

for a number of things. [woman screams]

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's saying Nebario's sleepy,

he's like the Mexican Wolverine and shit.

And my partner here, he wanna see the product.

Why ain't 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?

It's a made up name.

They seem totally unprepared

and you sense that maybe they're going to get arrested

[knife clangs] or worse.

[man shouts]

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 pads.

We tried to change voices.

What did you do?

We wouldn't use voice modulation technology,

but we would try to physically change the palate.

The palate of your mouth. Freak.

To our dismay, it did not change your voice,

it would just make you lisp.

Be in a padded cell forever.

[criminals laugh] 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.

Gord, take a look at the seventh flexor valve, would you?

I think it's been sticking.

It's probably the humidity.

[man laughs] That's funny.

Maybe I should take a look at it.

Uh, 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.

Hey Gord!

Yeah, I know where it is.

I'm just getting a bird's eye view here.

Spy seduction, Alias.

[whip cracks]

[speaking foreign language]

Stories about seduction in the

espionage business are legion.

[speaks foreign language]

Some of them are based on truth.

[man moans] [camera shutter clicks]

There's a famous seductress that worked

for American intelligence during the Cold War

who did some amazing things.

[whip cracks]

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. We'll become Sparrows.

The Germans had men who were trained the same way

and they called them Romeos. Nein!

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 a public park?

What do you want, Dominika?

According to his story, which he says

is based on truth, they had a school

where they trained young women in seduction.

[Instructor] Here we deal in psychological manipulation.

To quite a degree. Take off your clothes.

If you could 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 Dominika.

I think 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 judgemental.

This is a typically Russian technique.

The state asks something in return.

Clown disguise, James Bond.

Hey!

Is anyone else in there?

[Announcer] And now for the

death-defying human cannonball.

I can't actually say whether a CIA officer

has ever changed into a clown suit.

There was a lot to be said for fitting in

to your environment, into your surroundings.

Suspects wearing a clown suit, over.

So you looked like one of them instead of an outlier.

I'm a British agent! What?

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 with a shepherdess

with a flock of sheep to conceal

her prosthetic leg and she was lethal.

[Officer] 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.

[ominous music] [electricity crackles]

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.

[cable snaps] Oh [beep]!

Dark athletic clothes are fine.

Technically. But not a black catsuit.

I see.

Acting drunk with Veronica Mars.

[Veronica] 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.

Aren't 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.

[Veronica] I think I'd sooner

drink Mark McGrath's bathwater 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.

[Veronica] They think I'm drunk, or worse.

If you need to appear like you're drinking,

[Veronica screams]

you can do that without actually having alcohol.

You can just tell the bartender, I want 7UP.

Jackpot. There are ways to go

about it where you don't get drunk.

Awesome!

[Narrator] Conclusion.

The writers and directors do everything

they can to get it really right.

But half the fun for me is watching closely

to see what they get wrong.

And that's a wrap.

[crew claps]