CIA disguise program
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The CIA disguise program is John Kiriakou's account of the agency's disguise and forgery specialists. On his first day he sat between two new hires: a woman recruited from the Falls Church Academy of Beauty to be trained as a master disguise maker, and a man, Sean, recruited to be a master forger because he had drawn a two-panel cartoon in every issue of his college newspaper. He has told the same first-day story elsewhere, placing a hairdresser who trained at the Falls Church School of Beauty on one side of him, she became a master wig maker, and a college-newspaper cartoonist on the other, who became a master forger. Twelve years later the disguise maker flew to Pakistan and spent six weeks building Kiriakou a bald-head mask, matching the color to his skin tone and inserting the hairs one at a time; clear-glass spectacles hid the single seam. The station chief and the ambassador, Kiriakou says, failed to recognize him until he pulled it off.

Kiriakou says officers under deep cover could be assigned any invented identity, a State Department officer, a Pentagon civilian, a wildlife photographer, a museum curator, a businessman, created and maintained by headquarters, which also supplies the training needed to sustain the cover. He says that every time there was a walk-in to the American embassy where he was stationed, he had to wear a disguise, usually a fake mustache and a wig, sometimes clear-glass spectacle frames, and describes one overseas post experimenting with the first-ever bald head and comb-over disguise, which took six weeks to place the hair one strand at a time.

Asked about a viral photo showing a Fox News figure caught wearing a mask, Kiriakou said it was real but not representative of how CIA disguises are made: genuine CIA masks are glued prosthetics extending down to the mid-chest, not pull-on masks of the kind sold on Amazon. He separately describes being recruited for a covert-action program because his height, weight, and body shape matched those of a foreign world leader the agency was targeting; the resulting mask required roughly six hours of daily work by two Emmy-winning Hollywood makeup artists.

See also

- The Farm
- John Kiriakou
- CIA spy tech from Amazon
