The Washington Post Book Review

The CIA’s former master of disguise tells her story

Pathbreaking CIA agent Jonna Mendez takes off her mask for her autobiography, ‘In True Face’

The Washington Post Book Review

Review by Tim Weiner

Jonna Mendez dances on the SS United States while sailing to New York.

The CIA is the world’s most famous secret intelligence agency. Its directors, in retirement, write best-selling memoirs. Reporters detail its covert operations when they go wrong, and sometimes when they go right. Scribes like me write history books about the CIA, interviewing spies who have spent their lives undercover. And its veterans write autobiographies like Jonna Mendez’s engaging and enlightening “In True Face,” an important addition to the canon of nonfiction books about an institution encrusted in myths created by movies, television, novels, hostile intelligence services and, occasionally, the agency itself. This book, written with Wyndham Wood, is filled with adventures and operations whose details, somewhat to my astonishment, have escaped the gimlet eyes of the censors at the CIA’s Prepublication Classification Review Board, remaining unobscured by their inexhaustible supply of black Magic Markers.