Spycraft - Melton [224]
CIA officers meeting with assets have often employed light disguise in conjunction with an alias. Such disguises may give the officer a visage that alters his true features. A light disguise might include a wig, glasses, mole, facial hair, dental appliance, or certain articles of clothing. Whether the disguise is realistic or believable is less important than the fact that it prevents the officer from being recognized later. Light disguises would typically be employed when meeting with an unknown volunteer who asks to speak to someone in intelligence. To avoid the risk of exposing an officer to someone who could be a terrorist or part of another intelligence service’s dangle operation, the CIA representative would apply a light disguise before engaging the volunteer. Light disguises are also issued to members of surveillance teams to protect them from recognition by the target or by well-wishing friends whom they might inadvertently encounter while on the job.
As necessary, more elaborate disguises using full or partial facial masks could perform an ethnic or sex change to alter a person’s racial or gender appearance. Among the options are padded clothing to alter body type and weight distribution, sculpted appliances that alter eye color, mouth lines, and affect speech tone, makeup and hair coloring, hand and arm “gloves” to match facial coloring, shoe lifts to add height, and torso devices to create a stooped posture. Individually and in combination, the disguise techniques can affect dramatic appearance change.6
For officers in need of a disguise subject to close attention and durable for hours or days, OTS specialists would spend several hours performing the transformations. These labor-intensive disguises were typically applied on individuals in high-risk situations such as illegal border crossings. Given time, the disguise specialists would alter hair color, apply facial hair, modify jaw lines, improvise dental work, create wrinkles, change complexion, or add glasses and warts to match any photographic documents and thus avoid chance recognition at a border crossing or airport checkpoint.7
The use of disguise to maintain secrecy is a basic means of acquiring information otherwise unavailable. It is also one of the most ancient. The Old Testament describes several disguise incidents in the history of the Hebrew people such as Jacob’s deception of his father Isaac to secure the family birthright. The Chinese strategist Sun Tzu offered instructions for disguising spies in The Art of War with this comment: “Your surviving spy must be a man of keen intellect, though in outward appearance a fool; of shabby exterior, but with a will of iron.” More recently, Shakespeare was famously fond of disguises, incorporating them into the plays, including Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, and As You Like It.
The twenty-first-century spy’s disguise must not only be flawless in outward appearance, it must also reflect his assumed identity in the array of sophisticated documentation safeguards in use throughout the world. Disguise must match a digital persona that includes holographic images and microchips containing biometric data embedded into passports and travel documents. Personal information on the Internet that is compatible with one’s disguise becomes as critical to the modern spy’s identity as the traditional counterfeit beard and eyeglasses.
CHAPTER 22
Concealments
The OTS concealment specialist combines the skills of a craftsman, the creativity of an artist and the illusion of a magician.
—An OTS concealment engineer
In 1586, secret correspondence to Mary Queen of Scots from the French ambassador was concealed inside barrels of beer and smuggled to her at the country estate of Chartley, England, where she was under house