Flexing instead of curtsying

Jonna Mendez broke a record for the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) as a keynote speaker at the 35th Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, this past June. Her memoir, “In True Face: A Woman’s Life in the CIA, Unmasked,” sold out at the ACFE’s bookstore within an hour — the first time that’s ever happened at an ACFE Global Fraud Conference.

The line of people eagerly waiting to get their copies signed by the former CIA chief of disguise snaked around the Las Vegas Strip’s Aria Hotel and Casino’s convention center exhibit hall, and it seemed doubtful she’d be able to get through all of them. But she signed every last one with time to spare a bit of wisdom to some of the many female fraud fighters who queued up for her autograph.

Like her record-breaking book sale, Mendez blazed trails and defied the odds throughout her 27-year career in the CIA. Her memoir delves deep into the life of a woman in one of the world’s most formidable intelligence-gathering agencies. It wasn’t an easy path to traverse. From an openly misogynistic boss to a rivalry with one of her male colleagues, Mendez pushed past all of it to rise through the ranks. She started out as a low-level secretary hired because her first husband was an agent, but she found her footing as a clandestine photographer, then later as chief of disguise, where she created convincing costumes to conceal the identities of her fellow agents abroad in hostile territories across the globe. Mendez tapped into the expertise of Hollywood movie special effects and costume design to create the perfect camouflage to hide spies in plain sight and make quick getaways undetected. In later years, she and her late husband, Tony Mendez, wrote books together detailing some of their operations, including the book “Argo,” which described the daring 1980 rescue of six U.S. diplomats from Iran. The book was later adapted into a movie that won an Academy Award in 2013.

Fraud Magazine caught up with Mendez after she’d finished signing her sold-out books for a discussion on what women in the anti-fraud field could learn from her career in the CIA. She also discussed the art of creating disguises and the differing goals of fraud examiners and those who work in the intelligence community.

Cops and robbers

During her keynote speech in Las Vegas, Mendez told conference attendees she didn’t think fraud examiners and spies had very much in common. In fact, as Mendez described it, the two groups have diametrically opposed goals. “In your world, we would be considered the fraudsters. We used to say, comparing ourselves to the FBI, that they were the cops, and we were the robbers.” As Mendez explained, spies are breaking other countries’ laws to carry out their work. “We were fraudsters. We were breaking rules, but we were breaking rules overseas. We were breaking them for a good cause, which was collecting intelligence for our policymakers to make informed decisions.”

She further expounded on the differences between cops and robbers during her interview with Fraud Magazine. “They [the FBI] want to find the person they’re looking for and put him away, make him stop doing what he’s doing,” says Mendez. “We don’t want to arrest anybody. We want to find out who’s doing what, follow the information and find out who he’s talking to, and we want to work with that.”

Yet while CIA agents might have more in common with fraudsters than they do with fraud fighters, the experiences of women in both professions are more closely aligned. Looking at numbers alone, the covert lives of female spies and the overt lives of female fraud fighters are well matched. Women make up about 40% of the CIA’s professional workforce. (See “What It’s Actually Like Being a Woman in the CIA,” by Valerie Plame, Foreign Policy, Jan. 6, 2024.) According to the ACFE’s 2022 Compensation Guide for Anti-Fraud Professionals, female fraud examiners made up about 38% of respondents in the survey. In the 2020 compensation guide, 40% of respondents were women. And women in both realms have made notable strides in leadership positions. In 2018, longtime operative Gina Haspel became the first female director of the CIA. (She was replaced by William J. Burns in 2021 after Joe Biden became president.) In 2019, women headed the top three CIA directorates. (See “Women head the top three CIA directorates for the first time in history,” by Emma Newburger, CNBC, Jan. 16, 2019.) The ACFE’s current Board of Regents is majority female. Chair Natalie Lewis, CFE, told Fraud Magazine in this issue that she’s personally observed more women involved in leadership roles in the anti-fraud field. (See “Ready for the future.”) Women are active members of the ACFE, too, with more than 1,000 members in the organization’s Women in the Anti-Fraud Profession online community. The ACFE has also made important inroads to reach female fraud fighters across the globe with its Women’s Initiative and annual Women’s Summit. This year, the ACFE promoted three women to its C-suite.

Women make the change

When Mendez first joined the CIA in 1966 as a secretary, women in the U.S. faced many obstacles on the path to leadership and financial independence. For example, a bank could deny a woman from opening an account without a husband’s or father’s signature. A single woman, even with the financial resources to do so, might be rejected from buying a house on her own. This wouldn’t change until 1974 when President Gerald Ford signed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act into law. The act prohibits discrimination based on race, color, religion, national origin, sex, marital status or age in credit transactions. The law had its roots in a landmark U.S. Supreme Court Case, Reed vs. Reed, in which Sally Reed,  an Idaho woman separated from her husband, was denied executorship of her son’s estate after he died. Under Idaho law, only men could hold such a position. A young lawyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, co-wrote the brief on Reed’s behalf, and, in 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court decided unanimously in Reed’s favor. Ginsburg would later become a Supreme Court justice herself in 1993. Mendez dedicates her book in part to Ginsburg, whom she cites as a personal hero. (Mendez also dedicates her book to late CIA agent Eloise Page. More on her in a bit.) [See “On the Basis of Sex: Equal Credit Opportunities,” by Jessie Kratz, U.S. National Archives, March 22, 2023 and “In Memory of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933-2020),” by Anthony D. Romero, ACLU, Sept. 18, 2020.]

When Mendez first joined the CIA in 1966 as a secretary, women in the U.S. faced many obstacles on the path to leadership and financial independence.

Many of the women who worked in the CIA when Mendez first joined were hired because their husbands were agents. As she explained to Fraud Magazine, it was common practice for the CIA to employ married couples in tandem. The men would get overseas assignments, and their wives would come along with them and work at a CIA station, usually as a secretary. But Mendez says many of the women weren’t happy with this situation — men were rewarded with promotions for their work overseas; the women weren’t. Mendez explains that many of these wives were highly educated and skilled. Many held professional positions before they joined the CIA. Mendez herself graduated from Wichita State University in Kansas, and before joining the CIA, she worked for Chase Manhattan Bank.

“You come back to the states. He gets promoted because he was overseas, but the secretary comes back to be a secretary in the states. Why would the wives keep doing that? So, they [the women] stopped doing it,” Mendez tells Fraud Magazine. “They’d say, well, we’re not going anymore. I have a really good job down at Merrill Lynch, or I have a really good job with a real estate company. And I make good money, and it’s a profession I can grow in, so I’m not going to go.”

But the CIA was starting to change — slowly — in this era. And Mendez played a role in some of those changes. She recounted to Fraud Magazine how she was a member of a committee to change the rules on assignments for husbands and wives. The committee proposed that if a CIA wife accompanies her husband on his assignment, she gets an equivalent job in both pay and status to the one she left behind in the states. “That’s still how it operates today,” says Mendez.

Beyond secretaries, women have played an important role in the history of U.S. intelligence. From the U.S. Civil War to World War II, the Cold War and beyond, women have served as spies — equal parts brave and skilled. During World War II, women were code breakers. Virginia Hall led operations in France, narrowly escaping Nazis on her trail several times. (See “A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II,” by Sonia Purnell, Viking, 2019.) Eloise Page (one of Mendez’s heroes) defied the sexist culture of the CIA in the 1960s and ‘70s to become the first woman to head an overseas station. (See “How the CIA’s top-ranking woman beat the agency’s men at their own game,” by Liza Mundy, The Washington Post, Oct. 21, 2023.) In more recent times, women made up the majority of analysts at “Alec Station,” the unit of the CIA on the hunt for Osama bin Laden, mastermind behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Virginia. The women of Alec Station passed information about bin Laden’s whereabouts to the Navy SEAL team that killed him in 2011. (See “Hunting Osama bin Laden was women’s work,” by Robert Windrem, NBC News, Nov. 14, 2013.)

Mendez tells Fraud Magazine how it’s the women of the CIA who have always sought the changes to ensure their place in the organization. In 1995, the CIA agreed to pay more than $1 million in back pay and salary increases to settle charges of sex discrimination filed against the agency by female agents. (See “C.I.A. Settles Suit on Sex Bias,” by Robert Pear, The New York Times, March 30, 1995.)

Mendez recounted what she’d told some of the women in line for her book signing. “I always thought there’d be a generational change with a wave of young men who’d come in who were better informed and more sensitive and educated. I realized that this wasn’t how it would be managed,” says Mendez. “I had it in the back of mind that the cavalry was coming, but they never came. What came instead was a new generation of young women who wouldn’t put up with that.”

A flex, not a curtsy

One of those women from the new generation was a young chemist named Trish. Mendez shared a story about the time she accompanied Trish to lunch. Trish was attractive and garnered lots of attention from the men. One man, Bill, an audio guy who placed bugs, learned the hard way that Trish wouldn’t put up with sexist behavior. “Here comes Bill and he’s one of those creeps,” Mendez recalls to Fraud Magazine. “He talks like a construction worker in New York.” Bill approaches Trish and Mendez, and Trish, in a loud voice, hurls an expletive at Bill and tells him to go away. “That’s the first time I think I ever heard a woman say that word and I thought, oh my god, it’s not the young guys, it’s the young women who are changing,” says Mendez.

Another female chemist shared Trish’s profane vocabulary. And she was unafraid to speak her mind to male CIA employees. “The guys would just kind of step back from her, and so, as I said in my book, she preferred to flex rather than curtsy,” Mendez tells Fraud Magazine. “That became my little trade saying, flexing not curtsying.”

Mendez advises women not to sit back and wait for what they want. “Make it happen. Put your hand in the air. Be forward leaning,” Mendez says. “Just get out there. Don’t wait for them to offer it to you. Take it.”

Mendez did plenty of her own flexing in the CIA. In her memoir, she recounts a confrontation with a boss on one of her overseas assignments, a man with some very old ways of thinking about women. Mendez describes Tom Smallwood (not his real name) as a misogynist, and they didn’t like each other all that much. “He was like a buzz saw, set on eviscerating my career,” Mendez writes. On that morning, Mendez writes that she could smell Cointreau wafting from his coffee cup when she walked into his office to confront him about telling another boss that he wanted to send her back to Washington, D.C., before her tour was up. “That would translate into a curtailed assignment, a failure, and a stain on my increasingly rock-solid reputation.” One male colleague told Mendez to seek the help of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), but Mendez had witnessed what had happened to other women who sought its help. “I had seen that scenario play out with two female officers, both highly qualified technical professionals who won discrimination cases only to lose their careers.”

Before she walked into the meeting, Mendez had sought the advice of some of her allies, including her first husband John, who told her to directly challenge Smallwood. “Get right up in his grill.” On this particular morning, as Mendez confronted Smallwood, she thought he seemed “more butter knife than bludgeon.” This time, he retreated, but Mendez says their rivalry would endure.

Smallwood wasn’t the only man Mendez would confront during her years in the CIA. Henry, a fellow classmate in a year-long training program, would also become a nemesis. According to Mendez, Henry was vocal in his opinion that she was receiving special treatment in getting a promotion during the course. At a bar and fed up with Henry’s behavior, Mendez poured her beer over his head. At the time, she says she felt pretty good about her action, but Henry would respond several days later during explosives training by rolling a grenade in her direction. The grenade wasn’t live, but the incident gave her fright. (See “In True Face,” by Jonna Mendez.)

Master of disguise

Mendez consistently stood out among her peers, receiving several promotions throughout her CIA career. She went from being a secretary doing clerical work in overseas stations, to traveling back to the U.S. for various operational trainings, to discovering her skill as a clandestine photographer. But she didn’t stay working as a photographer for long. She’d developed a strong professional relationship with Tony Mendez, who ran disguise operations for the CIA. Under Tony’s tutelage, she grew as a professional who could create disguises that would even fool the president of the United States. In an anecdote she recalls in her book, Mendez met with President George H.W. Bush in the White House. She walked into the Oval Office disguised as a Latina woman. (Mendez née Jonna Hiestand is a white woman born in Kentucky.) The big reveal of her true identity greatly impressed the president — a former CIA director himself — and several other government officials present at the meeting. In 1988, Mendez was promoted to deputy chief of disguise and reached new heights when she was promoted to chief of disguise in 1991.

Creating disguises that could safely conceal someone depending on where they were stationed and the ethnicities of the people who’d be surrounding them required a great deal of innovation. Mendez and Tony would turn to Hollywood for the solution. They learned from John Chambers, prosthetic and makeup artist for the movie “Planet of the Apes,” how to create realistic masks and gloves that would fit perfectly over an agent’s face and body to transform them to appear as any other ethnicity. These innovations created the perfect cover for someone running an operation in a country where they’d most definitely stand out from the locals. They’d also create disguises for agents who needed to make a quick change during an escape. These disguises acted like layers an agent could peel off as they were on the run. Mendez’s creations allowed for many a spy to slip out of harm’s way.

Mendez told Fraud Magazine about some of the important considerations that go into creating the perfect disguise. “A rule of thumb for beginning is to imagine that the officer you’re going to disguise is meeting someone from the opposition,” says Mendez. Let’s say it’s a Russian. He goes back to his office and says, ‘I met with this American guy and here’s his name, but here’s what he looked like.’ We want everything in that list to be wrong.” From hair color and length, facial hair style, teeth and eye color, Mendez says that they want everything the opposition thinks they’re seeing to be disguised. They also brief the agent on how to behave and walk. According to Mendez it’s all about trying different variations of appearance and seeing what you can do with that person.

Not every agent can pull off a disguise with aplomb. “We always said you can take the best disguise that you’ve got and put it on someone, and if they don’t wear it well, if they’re nervous, if they’re paranoid, it doesn’t work,” says Mendez. “Or you can take just some basic stuff and give it to someone who wears it, who commands it, too.”

“I loved to have a bald man come in because while most guys don’t like to wear disguises, bald men like to wear wigs,” Mendez tells Fraud Magazine, recounting a bald agent who once took to an $8,000 wig she procured for him. “He looked great with his wig on, and he said, ‘I’ll tell you what, I’m going to wear the wig every day. For this assignment, for two years, I’m going to wear it every day. They’ll know me as the guy with brown hair and when I need a disguise, I’m going to take it off and put on these glasses and wear a gold chain and too much cologne and take off my wedding ring so everybody can see that I’m married but I’m not wearing my ring.’”

Seen and respected

When we discover work that adds meaning and purpose to our lives, it could be our willingness to go for it, despite whatever steep odds we may face, that counts most in the end.

For many people focused on a career — whether it’s in espionage, fraud examination or something else — finding a job that suits you, where you fit in, where you can grow as a professional and find satisfaction in your work can be like finding the keys to the castle. Sometimes those keys can be found in a boss who admires your work and wants to see you succeed. And finding that champion, especially in a profession where you’re the minority is monumental. Mendez found that in Tony. As she writes in her book, Tony, who died of Parkinson’s disease in 2019, made her feel “seen and respected.” They worked together as equals and spent time planning and discussing their operations together. Of course, they eventually fell in love, got married and had a child together. But Mendez tells Fraud Magazine that before they decided to spend the rest of their lives together, the bottom line was that Tony was an exceptionally good boss. Mendez says that in part, what made him stand out from some of her other bosses in the CIA was that Tony respected women. “Tony was just broadly a good boss,” Mendez tells Fraud Magazine. “But he was always really good with the women who worked for him. And I saw that from a distance. I saw that when I didn’t even work for him.”

When asked about how to find that person who’ll support you throughout your career, Mendez admits that she doesn’t know if it’s something you can easily do on your own. However, she does have some advice for developing a better relationship with a boss. “Don’t come to your boss with a problem without bringing them a suggestion for a solution,” she says.

She closed her memoir with a thought about the meaning of finding a fulfilling career and about women’s place in the workforce. She writes that thinking there’s “men’s work” and “women’s work” isn’t based on fact. “When we discover work that adds meaning and purpose to our lives, it could be our willingness to go for it, despite whatever steep odds we may face, that counts most in the end.”

Jennifer Liebman, CFE, is editor-in-chief of Fraud Magazine. Contact her at JLiebman@ACFE.com.