One of the big take-aways from reading Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes is how incredibly inept the CIA is. Weiner excoriates the CIA from top to bottom. Very few people escape his critical eye. One that does though was Antonio Mendez. You might know Mendez without actually knowing him. If you saw the movie Argo, Ben Afleck, portrays him. I found out he wrote several memoirs about his time in the CIA including The Master of Disguise which was drawn on for Argo.
Mendez was born to a poor family in the west and first worked as an industrial drafter and graphic designer. In the late 1960s he answered an add for a job as an artist that turned out to be the CIA recruiting artists to forge documents for their agents. He got the job and so began a decades long career in the CIA.
Mendez details a lot of the operations that he worked on including creating false documents for agents in China and all over Southeast Asia during the Vietnam war. In some cases aspect of his stories are still nominally classified so he alludes to geographic locations only vaguely. Rather than detracting from the stories it ups the cloak and dagger feel of the book. As he moves up the career ladder he helped create new methods for disguising agents and potential defectors to help them slip through hostile security checks. The climax of the story is his description of the events surrounding the Argo operation.
Although he acknowledges many of the miss steps of the agency he is still very much a supporter of their role in the world. He works very hard to highlight the many talented people he worked with throughout his career. One short coming of the book, which is no fault of the author, is that a lot more has been declassified since Master of Disguise was published in 1999. A lot of the over arching strategy behind his activities is missing but available in other sources. However he is a great story teller so the reader will still enjoy it.
