OPINION:
My late wife, Kim, always made Halloween an especially joyful holiday for our family because she brought her accomplished hair and makeup skills, which she honed while working as a CIA disguise technician, to designing our children’s costumes.
Our sons always appreciated her creative handiwork, reflected in the boatloads of candy they received from our duly impressed neighbors. When I’m asked, fairly often now that I’m retired, to recount the greatest highlight of my CIA career, I always answer that it was not some cloak-and-dagger espionage operation but rather meeting the woman of my dreams in the most unexpected of circumstances, when Kim was randomly selected to complete my disguise package before I deployed overseas.
No one, not even our adversaries’ highly trained spy catchers, could recognize my true persona when I was operating in one of Kim’s disguises. I’ll never forget practicing quick changes from one disguise to another in downtown Washington without anyone noticing. I even went to a meeting with one of my bosses, who had no idea who I was until I removed my disguise.
Those disguises enabled a lot of open-field running during clandestine overseas operations.
On one occasion, when I was serving in a Middle East war zone, one of my CIA colleagues, then a junior officer with a bright future, recruited a sensitive source with the assistance of his CIA teammates. Before even the first in-person meeting took place, we rallied to plan together. Our team included subject matter experts, a linguist who immigrated to the U.S. from war-ravaged Lebanon years ago, and a security team responsible for ensuring high-threat meetings went off securely without a hitch.
The junior CIA officer held multiple post-recruitment clandestine meetings with the source, whose intelligence reporting was critical to a daring rescue of another high-value source, who, after saving countless American lives, had been captured and detained.
This lifesaving operation, one of the most memorable and consequential I have ever witnessed, would have failed without the extraordinary skill, determination and teamwork our cohesive and close-knit team exhibited.
Most unforgettable to me was that our small team of CIA officers operated under alias personas and disguises. One member of the team was a female counterterrorism officer disguised as a man because, in this Middle East country, it would have been wildly out of pattern for a female to be out on the streets.
Disguises have long been key arrows in the CIA’s quiver, going back most famously to the Argo operation, during which the CIA exfiltrated six Americans out of Iran by disguising them as a Hollywood film crew.
Therein lies the secret of the CIA’s success: a supremely dedicated, talented and diverse workforce.
At the CIA, I was struck by the brilliance and extraordinarily wide range of skills, education and backgrounds of my fellow officers. My cohorts hailed from cities all across the U.S., and some had been born overseas.
There were doctors, lawyers, analysts with Ph.D.s, historians, economists, scientists, cybersecurity experts, retired law enforcement and U.S. military personnel. I studied foreign languages with exceptional teachers, all of whom were first-generation immigrants from Russia, Finland, Estonia and Pakistan. There were even some former professional athletes and a musician who had played in a popular grunge rock group.
What brought us together was the deep honor we shared of serving the CIA’s sacred mission to detect and preempt national security threats to America. We had a profound understanding from years and years of relying on our colleagues that successful CIA operations required teamwork.
CIA disguise technicians are an eclectic group. My wife owned a beauty salon before choosing government service after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Some of her colleagues had worked in Hollywood and others on popular television shows. Years ago, Kim enjoyed a lengthy conversation with actor Jon Voight after the host of the reception we were attending told him that Kim had been a CIA disguise technician who “did stuff way more cool than ’Mission Impossible.’”
I’ve seen the “Mission Impossible” movies and worn the CIA disguises. No hyperbole in that statement.
For my sons and me, there is arguably no more fitting day than Halloween to take a moment to remember and celebrate the CIA disguise professionals, including Kim and her amazingly talented co-workers, without whom so many of the CIA’s greatest accomplishments would not have been possible.
• Daniel N. Hoffman is a retired clandestine services officer and former chief of station with the CIA. His combined 30 years of government service included high-level overseas and domestic positions at the CIA. He has been a Fox News contributor since May 2018. He can be reached at danielhoffman@yahoo.com.
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