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.[1][2] 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.[3][4] 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.[5][6][7][8]
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.[9] 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.[10]
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.[11] 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.[12]