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How to sneak someone into any building in the world, fool the US president with a mask, and break the CIA’s glass ceiling: my conversation with Jonna Mendez, former CIA disguise chief and author of “In True Face: A Woman's Life in the CIA, Unmasked” https://t.co/3CgJUgxxBZ
Video Transcript AI Summary
In 2018, Gina Haspel became the first female CIA director, appointing women to top positions. Jonna Mendez, former CIA chief of disguise, shares her experiences in the CIA in her book "True Face." She discusses using water bottles to transport a Soviet defector and briefing President George H.W. Bush with a lifelike mask. Mendez reflects on gender challenges at the CIA and the value women bring to intelligence work. Despite progress, she emphasizes the importance of women in operational roles. Mendez concludes by thanking the interviewer for the conversation.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: In 2018, Gina Haspel became the first ever female director of the CIA. When she quickly named women to run the top 3 directorates of the agency, it was a watershed moment for an organization that had long been a notorious old boys club. Women like my next guest helped break that glass ceiling at headquarters in Langley and its stations around the world. Johnna Mendez got her start at the CIA because her then fiance worked there. The only job she was offered was in the typing pool.
The agency's outdated rules and customs tried to keep her there. But 20 some years later, after a series of extraordinary adventures in the spy trade overseas, Jonna was named the agency's chief of disguise. She tells her extraordinary story in a new book, In True Face, A Woman's Life in the CIA Unmasked. Johnna, welcome. You were once tasked with figuring out how to get a, a would be Soviet defector out of the embassy, and you decided that the answer was water bottles.
Explain. We have a wonderful photograph of it, which which illustrates what you did.
Speaker 1: You know, the the office that I was in, while I was chief of disguise, we represented so many different skills, audio, if you needed a bug, if you needed a concealment, if you needed a microdot, if you needed secret writing, whatever. The idea of what do you do with with the Soviet who might be defecting and coming to your embassy, that fell in a special category of work we did with some magic builders out in Hollywood. Their job is to build deceptions and illusions. That's that's how they get us hooked and and sitting there afterwards saying, you can't do that. We told them our problem, and they came up with this universal, we called it a human transport device, a way that you could take a person anywhere in the world and walk them by, a security service or whatever was there, load them into a truck, and drive off.
And it what we came up with was a a dolly, the the transporting device. Looked like it was loaded with cases of water.
Speaker 0: With 3 crates of water. And I I have to say, looking at the photograph, it doesn't look like it's big enough to conceal a human being.
Speaker 1: Exactly. That is the point.
Speaker 0: That is
Speaker 1: Yeah. You would dismiss it.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Now there's this one great photograph in the book. You're in the Oval Office. You're briefing then president George H. W.
Bush. Explain what's happening because you've got you've got a a head in your hand.
Speaker 1: It had taken us 10 years, maybe a little more, to create an animated mask, a mask that I could sit here with you right now with one on. We could have this interview.
Speaker 0: You And the the lips would be moving. Everything would be
Speaker 1: Everything would be moving. You would not know I was wearing a mask. So that's what I did with the president of the United States. My office director, I I I never intended
Speaker 0: You went in wearing the mask. I Then did. In the middle of the presentation, you take it off.
Speaker 1: I went through security at the White House. I went through the Secret Service in the White House. I went into the office, told him I had something new to show him, gave him some pictures of himself in disguise, the president, when he ran the CIA. He really liked those pictures. I said, well, now I'm wearing something the best we've got.
I'm gonna take it off and show it to you. And I reached to do the Tom Cruise peel, which is misnamed, by the way. And he said, hold on. And, he got up and came and just walked around and was just he didn't know what he was looking for. Sat down.
He said, okay. I took it off, and that's the picture.
Speaker 0: Picture. Now you begin your book with the famous quote from Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks. Was that what it felt like at the CIA?
Speaker 1: I thought she said it so well. Just, you know, back off and let us go about our work. It felt that way. Not every man. I had I had some good bosses who who accommodated my desire to do more to to increase my responsibilities.
But a couple of them really just obstacles in your way trying to shorten your career or or, you know, move you out of their way.
Speaker 0: Do you think I mean, now you there was a point at which after Gina Haspel came in that the 5 top jobs of the CIA were all held by women. Has it completely changed?
Speaker 1: I loved your introduction. I don't I there there's a piece of the CIA, the piece that I was in, the operational, the overseas feet on the ground, meeting with foreigners who are risking their lives in a lot of countries. In Russia, they are really risking their lives. The men thought, no one's gonna pay any attention to us. And then in the sandbox in the Middle East, they said, you can't work there because you have no women have no value in that part of the world.
You think they're going to to think that you can protect them while they're working for us? Those men were wrong. Women can bring a different set of skills to working with these assets, these foreign assets. I think we've proven again and again that we can do that job as well as the men can, sometimes better.
Speaker 0: This is such an extraordinary career. I should, thank you for it and for sharing it with us.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you for for, having this conversation.
@FareedZakaria - Fareed Zakaria
America’s top universities should abandon their long misadventure into politics, retrain their gaze on their core strengths and rebuild their reputations as centers of research and learning. My take: https://t.co/smjkQ9fngE
Video Transcript AI Summary
American universities, once admired for their excellence, have lost public trust due to their shift towards pushing political agendas. This has resulted in a decline in the importance of a college degree and a decrease in the number of high school graduates pursuing higher education. Universities have prioritized political and social engineering over academic merit, as seen in the downplaying of merit-based admissions in favor of racial quotas. The humanities have experienced grade inflation and the emergence of political agendas as academic fields. Lack of political diversity is ignored, hindering the ability to analyze various issues. The culture of diversity has given rise to safe spaces, trigger warnings, and speech codes that limit free expression. Recent protests have highlighted the inconsistency in protecting certain groups. Universities must refocus on their core strengths of research and learning to regain their reputation as centers of excellence.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Here's my take. When one thinks of America's greatest strengths, the kind of assets the world looks at with admiration and envy, America's elite universities would long have been at the top of that list. But the American public has been losing faith in these universities for good reason. 3 university presidents came under fire this week for their vague and indecisive answers when asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their institutions' codes of conduct. But to understand their performance, we have to understand the broad shift that has taken place at elite universities, which have gone from being centers of excellence to institutions pushing political agendas.
People sense the transformation. As Paul Tough has pointed out, the share of young adults who said a college degree was very important, fell from 74% in 2013 to just 41% in 2019. In 2018, 61% of those polls said higher education was headed in the wrong direction, and only 38% felt it was on the right track. In 2016, 70% of America's high school graduates were headed for college. Now that number is 62%.
This souring on higher education makes America an outlier among all advanced nations. American universities It started with the best of intentions. Colleges wanted to make sure young people of all backgrounds had access to higher education and felt comfortable on campus. But those good intentions have morphed into a dogmatic ideology and turned these universities into places where the pervasive goals of political and social engineering, not academic merit. As the evidence produced For the recent supreme court case on affirmative action showed, universities have systematically downplayed merit based criteria for admissions in favour of racial quotas.
Some universities' response to this ruling seems to be that they will go further down this path, eliminating the requirement for any standardized tests like the SAT. That move would allow them to then take students with little reference to objective criteria. Of course, those who would suffer most would be bright students from poor backgrounds who normally use tests like the SAT to demonstrate their qualifications. In the humanities, hiring for new academic positions now appears to center on the race and gender of the applicant as well as the subject matter, which needs to be about marginalized groups. A white man studying the American presidency does not have a prayer of getting tenure at a major history department in America today.
Grade inflation in the humanities is rampant. At Yale, the median grade is now an a. New subjects crop up that are really political agendas, not academic fields. You can now major in diversity, equity, and inclusion at some colleges. The ever growing Diversity devoted to diversity, equity and inclusion naturally recommends that more time and energy be spent on these issues.
The most obvious lack of diversity at universities, political diversity, which clearly affects their ability to analyze many issues, is never addressed, showing that these goals are not centrally related to achieving or sustaining or building excellence. Out of this culture of diversity has grown the collection of ideas and practices that we have now all heard of, safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggressions. As the authors Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have discussed, many of these colleges have instituted speech codes that make it a violation of university rules to say things that some groups might find offensive. Universities advise Students not to speak, act, even dress in ways that might cause offence to some minority groups. With this culture of virtue signaling growing, the George Floyd protests erupted and many universities latched on and issued statements effectively aligning their institutions with these protests.
By my memory, few took such steps even after 911 or during the Iraq War. In this context, it is understandable that Jewish groups would wonder why do safe spaces, microaggressions, and hate speech not apply to us. If universities can take positions against free speech to make some groups feel safe, why not us? Having coddled so many student groups for so long, university administrators found themselves squirming, unable to explain why certain groups, Jews, Asians don't seem to count in these conversations. Having gone so far down the ideological path, These universities and these presidents could not make the case clearly that at the center of a university is the free expression of ideas, And that while harassment and intimidation would not be tolerated, offensive speech would and should be protected.
As CNN's Van Jones has eloquently said, the point of college is to keep you physically safe, but intellectually unsafe to force you to confront ideas that you vehemently disagree with. What we saw in the House hearing this week was the inevitable result of decades of the politicization of universities. America's top colleges are no longer seen as bastions of excellence, but partisan outfits, which means they will keep getting buffeted by these political storms as they emerge. They should abandon this long misadventure into politics, retrain their gaze on their core strengths, and rebuild their reputations as centers of research and learning.