135: Part 1: Jonna Mendez Goes from Contract Wife to CIA Chief of Disguise

Game of Crimes

True Crime

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 4 March 2024

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jonna Hiestand Mendez began her CIA career as a “contract wife” performing secretarial duties for the CIA as a convenience to her husband, a young officer stationed in Europe. She needed his permission to open a bank account or shut off the gas to their apartment.

Yet Mendez had a talent for espionage, too, and she soon took on bigger and more significant roles at the Agency. She parlayed her interest in photography into an operational role overseas, an unlikely area for a woman in the CIA. Often underestimated, occasionally undermined, she lived undercover and served tours of duty all over the globe, rising first to become an international spy and ultimately to Chief of Disguise at CIA’s Office of Technical Service.

In True Face recounts not only the drama of Mendez’s high-stakes work—how this savvy operator parlayed her “everywoman” appeal into incredible subterfuge—but also the grit and good fortune it took for her to navigate a misogynistic world. This is the story of an incredible spy career and what it took to achieve it.

Find out more about Jonna at JonnaMendez.com.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome, welcome, welcome back to the 135th attempt to silence us. We will not go
0:20.4	quietly into the night. This is episode 135 at Game of Crimes. Welcome back. I'm your
0:25.1	host Morgan Wright here with my partner in Crime. Hey everybody, it's Merrif. Welcome back.
0:30.8	You sure? See, Signior.
0:33.0	See, all right.
0:34.0	Welcome back guys.
0:35.0	Hey, before we get started, just some quick housekeeping real quick.
0:38.0	Head on over to Apple Spotify, hit those five stars, helps us out a lot.
0:41.0	You can actually leave comments on Spotify we get a lot of
0:43.5	those comments so please keep those coming in also head on over to our website you're
0:47.6	gonna want to do that today because you're gonna want to see the book of our next
0:51.2	guest coming up and a couple of her pictures from the past.
0:54.8	Formally, probably classified but now we can share with the real world the entire
0:59.8	world. So head on over there, take a look at that. Follow us on that thing they call social media.
1:04.0	At Game of Crimes on Twitter,
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1:08.0	But where you got to be,
1:09.0	Patreon.
1:10.0	Dot com slash Game of Crimes.
1:11.0	We just got through reviewing for our Norklemeter review. We did Wind River
1:14.6	starring Jeremy Renner. What a great movie. It was excellent. Lizz Yolson's in
1:21.0	there Eric Lange, a friend of ours that was in the Markos,
	...

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