If you ain’t Audio, you ain’t shit…
—“Schraider”
South Building, August 1974
• “We want to make the disguise capability of the Office of Technical Service the best it can be, Tony. Absolutely second to none.”
“Big Arthur,” the Chief of Operations, leaned across his desk on the second floor of the South Building, while my immediate boss, “Tim,” the Chief of Authentication, and I absorbed this Olympian pronouncement. After all, the Soviet bloc opposition had about a forty-year head-start on us. But the Agency believed that the KGB and its allied services had nothing even approaching our inventive GAMBIT disguises. Since Big Arthur, Tim, and I had all just returned from overseas assignments and were new to our current positions, these lofty ambitions seemed appropriate, despite of the shaky morale and anxiety we felt all around us.
The mood in the Agency was uncertain. The previous afternoon, a few of the employees had trooped out to the Mall to watch Marine One, President Nixon’s helicopter, clatter off the south lawn of the White House en route to Andrews Air Force Base, in his last official flight as Commander-in-Chief. Some felt that with Nixon’s resignation, the Executive Branch was destined for hard times. He had dragged the Agency into the Watergate scandal, and many ambitious people in Congress were eager to score political points by kicking us as we reeled from the media’s blows. I immediately noticed that some of the old Far Eastern hands, catching an after-work drink in O’Toole’s, no longer had their CIA ID cards on neck chains tucked into their shirt pockets—once a brash statement that they were players on a top-ranked team. They were losing the esprit de corps that had always bolstered their commitment to the relatively low pay and bone-crushing work schedule underpinning the James Bond fantasy world of espionage. Of course, this negativity could have been attributed just as easily to the disaster in Vietnam.
One member of the disguise group had been directly entangled in the Watergate investigation, so keeping morale high in my section was another potential challenge I had never faced before. Since I was now in charge of what many saw as the most unpredictable form of operational tradecraft, I was in a delicate position; however, I reminded myself that my superiors had given me the go-ahead to press on, and I intended to do so.
One of my first assignments was to review a list of “questionable activities” that new DCI Bill Colby was preparing for the Senate investigation of CIA. This list included sensitive secrets dating back to the Agency’s birth in 1947. Soon to be known as the CIA’s “family jewels,” these secrets were subjected to even wider scrutiny by congressional committees and the press. The Agency’s Inspector General was already hard at work collecting data on such delicate subjects as Agency-sponsored assassination attempts against Fidel Castro and leftist Congolese premier Patrice Lumumba, among others.
With the Ford White House distancing itself from the CIA, Colby was in a lonely position. The CIA’s blood was in the water. The New York Times investigative reporter Seymour Hersh discovered that the Agency had helped run counterintelligence operations against certain American antiwar groups in the 1960s and early 1970s on U.S. soil, in violation of the CIA’s charter forbidding domestic spying on American citizens. Hersh wanted to interview Colby about these operations—known as CHAOS—and Colby agreed.
Begun in 1967, CHAOS had been conducted, in cooperation with the FBI, on the direct orders of President Johnson and continued under Nixon. It had been based on a valid premise but was of questionable legality: The Agency had reliable information that Soviet bloc intelligence services were lending material support to a few of the most radical antiwar groups protesting our involvement in Vietnam. But the FBI, which had a legitimate charter to conduct such a counterintelligence operation in the U.S., did not have access to the CIA’s sources. Therefore, it made sense for the two agencies to cooperate to meet the White House requirements.
The Hersh story on CHAOS was on the Times front page on December 22, 1974, under the headline HUGE CIA OPERATION REPORTED IN U.S. AGAINST ANTI-WAR FORCES, OTHER DISSIDENTS IN NIXON YEARS. The article described CHAOS as a “massive illegal domestic intelligence operation.” It was technically illegal, but it was not massive: Just over seven thousand out of the millions of American antiwar protesters had been briefly targeted, then cleared. Of these, several hundred suspected of channeling East bloc resources into the most radical groups operating in the United States were placed under more intensive surveillance. As in any counterintelligence operation, the CIA-FBI methods appeared unsavory, including infiltration of agent informers, mail intercepts, electronic eavesdropping, and street surveillance.
William Colby noted in his memoir, Honorable Men, that the Hersh article “raised the specter of a government agency running amok, becoming a Gestapo, violating the fundamental constitutional rights of the American people.” He added that the article was just one blow in a long string of accusations since 1947 that brought the CIA to the depths of despair. “Politicians, editorialists and ordinary citizens demanded an end to the CIA’s heinous practices. Devastating charges were hurled; the Agency was termed a ‘rogue elephant’ out of control, a threat to the nation’s fundamental liberties, a Frankenstein monster that had to be destroyed.”
Such was the prevailing atmosphere when I plunged into my Headquarters assignment in 1974.
By its very name, the new Directorate of Science and Technology signified a not-too-subtle shift away from the traditional practices of espionage involving case officers and agents—Human Intelligence (HUMINT)—toward a much greater reliance on technical methods of intelligence gathering, many of them involving some form of electronic eavesdropping by satellite, “overhead” imaging with spy planes and satellites, and over-the-horizon radars tracking Soviet bloc military aircraft. How would the small elite team of Clandestine Service mavericks fare in this arcane environment?
For the Agency, there was a definite political advantage to shift to technology. From the media’s perspective, electronic equipment was less malevolent than “renegade” officers: Satellites did their work without the potential embarrassment of human espionage.
The growing emphasis on technical collection, combined with the mounting national scorn for covert operations, meant some audacious and resourceful case officers might become too cautious. Such an escalating state of paralysis and loss of HUMINT would have been catastrophic at that crucial point in the Cold War. We were reeling from the effects of Watergate, the loss of the war in Indochina, and blatant Soviet attempts to subvert legitimate postcolonial struggles. Soviet bloc intelligence services and military missions had never been so active on a worldwide scale. At the same time, the conventional and nuclear war-fighting capability of the Warsaw Pact was being upgraded, while the KGB was running scores of black propaganda and subversion operations designed to undermine the NATO alliance. It was not just a coincidence that well-funded and well-organized urban terrorist groups flourished in Western Europe at the time.
The United States and its allies desperately needed the skills and resources of the CIA’s Clandestine Service, and I was determined to do my part. Riding the little blue bus back from Langley to Foggy Bottom one day, I suddenly recalled a mantra my mother had taught me as a child when times were rough. “Focus on the task at hand, be of good cheer, and things will sort themselves out.”
WHEN I GOT ready to work in OTS’s disguise facility, which occupied a suite of four small rooms on the third floor of the Central Building, I sensed that some of the office’s senior managers held a cynical view about disguise tradecraft, even though most were interested in expanding the practice.
One manager summarized the prevailing attitude among veteran case officers, especially those who had earned their rank recruiting and running agents in European cities and westernized capitals elsewhere. “Even those who have fairly effective disguises say they really don’t need them and almost never use them,” this official told me. These officers had matured professionally, he explained, when disguises amounted to little more than blatantly phony wigs, mustaches, and dark glasses. These experienced “first team” officers considered a disguise an amateurish crutch. But a lot of them hadn’t worked in Eastern Europe or in third world cities, where the allies of Soviet bloc security services blanketed the ground with surveillance networks.
In South Asia, for example, the security services could use the incredibly rich diversity of street life to their advantage. I once saw a photograph of one service’s annual disguise competition from this period, which I studied with amusement and admiration. There were scores of men, women, and even children garbed in outlandish outfits: water wallahs with their bulging goatskin bags and tinkling brass cups, snake charmers with billowing pantaloons, elephant mahouts, pseudo-leprous beggars, and harijan (untouchable) sweepers. These individuals would have been invisible to everyone, including old hands among the station officers. Vigilant surveillance had already compromised several of our intelligence networks, and just the constant threat of surveillance served as a deterrent to citizens who might have been tempted to sell interesting intelligence to the CIA. Therefore, creating robust and flexible disguises for both station officers and their assets was in fact a mounting and unmet need.
But other case officers, the official added, especially station chiefs under pressure to recruit more assets using fewer resources, felt OTS was “pushing” disguises instead of answering their need for other “hard” technical devices and countersurveillance equipment.
I felt strongly it was very important to have disguises prepared, ready to use, even if the officers’ immediate situation did not require them. We could never predict when an officer or an asset might suddenly need to pass close scrutiny undetected. But the prevailing philosophy was that officers should wait until they arrived in the field to assess their disguise requirements, then send for an OTS specialist if necessary. Therefore, one of my priorities was to educate as many case officers as I could about all types of disguise techniques, both traditional and innovative, as well as the tradecraft necessary for their optimal use.
“We’re going to have to start out at the Farm,” I told Big Arthur one snowy afternoon in December. “The name of the game is planning for the future. The Agency’s future obviously lies with the Career Trainees taking the Operations Course at Camp Swampy. This is the group we have to inspire.”
Big Arthur squinted reflectively. He understood my logic: If we could overcome the initial psychological resistance to disguises early in an officer’s career, these newly minted professionals would become our best clients when they reached the field.
We both realized, however, that this aversion to disguise was deeply seated in us all. The public still thinks that American case officers and foreign spies gleefully pull on “Mission Impossible” masks three or four times a day to trick the opposition. The reality was exactly the opposite. Most of my colleagues dreaded the idea of drastically altering their appearances, and occasionally even their sex, as part of their tradecraft training. I knew the best way to overcome this hesitation was through peer influence, cultivated in the structured environment and classes of the Farm’s Operations Course. I envisioned a workshop where all the trainees received friendly but effective disguise instruction from OTS experts, delivered in an atmosphere in which each disguise could be critiqued and improved without the intimidating pressures of the pecking order that prevailed among the old boys at Langley.
That winter I met with the DO’s top training officers on the fourth floor of Headquarters.
“There’s a real gap in disguise tradecraft training out at the Farm,” the Operational Training chief conceded, “and more of our operations and agents are being rolled up in the so-called ‘benign’ operating environments abroad.”
His superior dragged the informal ledger he always kept nearby to the center of his desk. As in any bureaucracy, The Budget was sacrosanct. “Let’s begin by sneaking in a line item for FY 76 and see if anybody dares to shoot it down.”
With that straightforward discussion, a wedge had been placed in the door of DO tradition. Eventually, after several years of dealing with Headquarters politics, I saw my goal met: All new case officers learned disguise techniques and their related tradecraft at the Farm, and already had a second-or third-generation disguise by the time they went to the field.
I OWE MUCH of the success of this effort to one of my Agency mentors, a battle-hardened case officer whom I’ll call “Bull Monahan.” When I’d first met Bull in the Far East, he had the reputation of being a “technophile” who totally immersed himself in any new operational gadget or piece of hardware that TSD produced. For example, during a European tour in the early days of the Cold War, Bull had become fascinated with microdot agent communications, and he soon was one of the Agency’s most successful practitioners of this esoteric technique. In the Far East, he became engrossed with locks and picks and ran a number of audacious “quick plant” audio operations against hard Communist targets, such as the hotel rooms and offices of Soviet bloc diplomats.
He was in his lock-picking phase when I met him as a young technical officer newly arrived from the States. I entered his office one morning to find him hunched over his desk, a jeweler’s loupe on one eye and his nose almost touching the gleaming steel clockwork of a complex tumbler lock. He didn’t even look up to greet me and merely answered my questions with his trademark grunts.
Six years later, while I was experimenting with GAMBIT disguises in Bangkok, I encountered Bull Monahan again. He immediately saw the potential of these improved disguises, and I did some experimental work for him and his case officers. Bull’s fascination with the “gee-whiz” aspects of espionage technology did not blind him to the complexities of what he called the “operational stage”: all of the elements impinging on the problem at hand, such as locale, level of surveillance, and people involved.
“A disguise is only a tool, Tony,” he told me. “Before you use any tradecraft tool, you have to set up the opposition for the deception.”
I was reminded of the magic tricks I’d performed on those long winter nights around our wood stove in the parlor of the old house in Caliente. I had learned then a powerful lesson: You had to misdirect the attention and interest of the audience to execute a believable illusion.
In the Far East, for example, Bull had enjoyed great success running both local and Soviet bloc agents, even though he was often under surveillance by the best of the local services and the KGB. He went to a provincial tailor who sewed him a reversible raincoat, beige on one side, dark gray on the other. Dressed in the coat and a tweed cap, lugging a bulky shopping bag, Bull would travel around the center of the city on the subway. Then he would duck into carefully selected cul de sacs, reverse the coat, pull on a beret and glasses, and deflate the balloons inside the shopping bag that gave the illusion of weighty solidity. Less than twenty seconds later, he’d reappear in the subway corridor, limping with the aid of a collapsible cane, and watch surveillance stream by.
Only when he was certain that he had shaken his tail would he continue on his path to an agent meeting.
I was fascinated to learn that Bull Monahan employed an equally elaborate degree of preparation when he went back to Headquarters on shopping expeditions. From his years as a successful case officer and senior manager of case officers, Monahan knew that the man in the field could best seize the attention of the lethargic giant that was Headquarters by peppering Langley with a barrage of carefully crafted “rockets”—cables designed to attract the attention of the appropriate powers and incite them to action.
Monahan’s rockets were always marked high priority, usually IMMEDIATE, and sometimes even NIACT. They were rarely lost in the Agency’s daily avalanche of incoming paper. Monahan unleashed this barrage in the weeks before boarding the plane for Headquarters consultations, ensuring that he’d have a number of urgent meetings lined up to address the items on his agenda. That way, he could put aside more mundane business, such as budget reviews and other administrative drudgery.
In a sense, Monahan was throwing himself into the middle of the playing field like a runaway kick-off returner, forcing the opposition to chase him. He’d practiced this routine for years and it was usually successful, partially because he worked important cases and needed assistance, whether it meant budgetary support, more personnel, or stronger technical aid on an urgent basis. Monahan’s genius was coupling the power of networking with the occasional grandstand play. With hard work and strokes of exquisitely timed good luck, he was a remarkable figure to observe.
As I watched him consistently acquire the most-qualified case officers, rare financial assistance, and advanced OTS gadgetry for his stations, I realized Bull Monahan was a grand master at a Headquarters game I privately came to call Pinball.
The object of Pinball was to place the ball (your idea) on the table (the operational venue inside or outside the corridors of power) and keep it there as long as possible to see how high a score you could rack up. Although Monahan worked in the serious world of espionage, he taught me that back at Headquarters, competing for budget, staff, and technical resources was, in fact, a game. If you took it too seriously, you’d tighten up and lose.
East Building, August 1975
• “We need to put three round-eyes into that building along with the local landlord…in broad goddamned daylight,” “Schraider” said, glaring malevolently across his desk at me in the manner that had earned him the nickname “Darth” among his elite cadre of audio penetration officers.
Schraider was the Chief of OTS Audio Operations and was another Agency legend. The fact that I had been granted the privilege of a personal meeting, rather than being issued a requirement memo, told me that Schraider had an important operation planned, and that he’d also heard positive news about the Disguise program and wanted to test my mettle. He sat behind a massive walnut desk that might have belonged to Allen Dulles when he’d occupied this same suite as DCI. Schraider’s cold blue eyes were probing, and he slapped the desk with a swagger stick for added emphasis as he spoke.
On the dark paneled wall behind him, Schraider had displayed his trophies of the shadow wars: an AK-47 mounted above a menacing arrangement of exotic weaponry, including a Meo flintlock, a Yao crossbow, a glinting Ghurka “ball-cutter” knife, and a Pygmy spear from the Congo’s Ituri Forest. At the center of the desk, facing any visitor of the Chief, sat a brass placard on which was boldly engraved IF YOU AINT’S AUDIO, YOU AIN’T SHIT.
That statement summarized Schraider’s philosophy. For him, audio penetration was the epitome of espionage. Infiltrating his teams of audio officers into seemingly impossible targets, such as Soviet bloc embassies and foreign government offices, including the headquarters of hostile third world intelligence services, was his life’s work. He had taken the Watergate debacle especially hard on a personal level: Although ex-Agency officers Howard Hunt and James McCord, and former FBI Special Agent G. Gordon Liddy of the White House Plumbers had never been members of Darth’s elite team, he felt that their bungled Watergate penetration had brought shame on the CIA’s audio operations.
Missions in the field demanded risk-taking, even in the midst of this politically charged atmosphere. An enterprising case officer in the Far East had recruited the landlord of an important Communist embassy in a South Asian country. The building was temporarily unoccupied because the embassy staff had been evacuated during one of the region’s border wars, and the landlord was willing to “host” Schraider’s audio team, provided they could enter the compound with him in daylight. The chokadar night guard had not been recruited into the scheme, and the local cops kept a close watch for burglars after dark. The Communist diplomats were not scheduled back in the capital for several weeks, giving Darth’s audio wizards ample time to seed the building (including the living quarters of all the staff) with listening devices.
He had succinctly outlined the problem, but was leaving the solution up to me. “Take your pick of these assholes,” Darth said with a proud smile as he pointed his swagger stick toward a half dozen officers seated around the cavernous office on the overstuffed brown leather furniture, which could only be found in the executive suite of a supergrade officer.
His manner made me acutely aware of the fact that I was just a lowly disguise officer who could hardly be expected to drive a hard bargain with such an Agency icon. Yet when I’d heard of his pending operation, I had suggested my disguise team work with Darth’s section on equal footing. It was my first foray into big-league Pinball; the opportunity had been there, and I’d seized it.
A quick scan of the room confirmed that I was not a member of their fraternity. I looked into the hard eyes of some of the best electronics experts and second-story men in the business. I recognized the Chief of the Surreptitious Entry Unit and his deputy, whose expertise involved swiftly defeating any lock or safe known to man. Among the other burly men, I identified several crack audio officers, renowned for operations in which they’d slipped over high walls or scaled icy rooftops in the Soviet bloc under cover of darkness to penetrate target buildings. They had sometimes remained inside for days, while they installed hidden microphones and transmitters designed to eavesdrop undetected for years.
Unknown to the public, the men in this room were the glamour boys of OTS. Their equipment was beyond state-of-the-art in terms of electronic miniaturization and power-source duration. They could plant a bug that hopped across a range of frequencies almost impossible to detect, yet consumed less power than a quartz watch. Their esprit de corps and autonomy were legendary. They earned promotions rapidly arid routinely received commendations.
I opened my briefcase and removed an 8 X 10 photograph of myself in a new generation of the GAMBIT disguise that could easily transform any of them into whatever persona was required for this operation. I had used this disguise to quickly change into a bazaar wallah, right down to the kurta and the soiled white turban. “I wore this rig a couple of times in the field,” I said, “tailing and photographing a KGB officer who was trying to pitch a code clerk from a friendly embassy. I think you’ll agree I don’t look like your typical American.”
The hardened audio officers seemed impressed.
“Imagine that you’re wearing one of these in the cab of a repair van that the landlord waves through the front gate of the embassy compound,” I said, then turned to Darth Schraider. “Broad daylight presents no problem.”
I sensed that the atmosphere of skepticism was gradually changing to one of credibility and rapt attention.
“We can procure and prepare all the materials you’ll need, and, if you have the resources, we can use the best consultants,” I told Schraider. “But I’ll ultimately want my most experienced disguise officer on site with the team. And he has to be prepared to go into the target if necessary to maintain the integrity of the materials, especially in the monsoon with no air conditioning.” I was imposing an unprecedented condition. Darth’s people operated alone. But they all recognized that my recommendation provided the operation with added insurance. “We can get to work right away ordering custom materials and making the disguises and have at least three of your officers ready to travel by Friday.” I smiled benevolently at the audio boys, then looked back at Darth with what I hoped was youthful innocence. “I assume, sir, that you have the budget to make all this happen.”
Ten minutes later, I strolled into the office of my boss, Tim, on the second floor of the Central Building. “I just got another fifty thousand dollars for disguise development,” I said, trying to keep a straight face. Tim heard my words, but their meaning did not immediately register. How could I make a simple verbal request, not supported by countless memos and endless meetings, and score fifty grand? In my head, I heard the big Pinball board clank and chime—I was learning to play the game.
Two weeks after the meeting in Schraider’s office, his audio penetration team, accompanied by one of my best disguise officers and the local landlord, entered the Communist embassy compound early on a steamy monsoon Sunday morning. They came out three days later. The devices they planted would continue to transmit valuable intelligence for years to come.
Headquarters, April 1976
• By the mid-1970s, the serio-comic confrontations between Bull and the technical gurus at Headquarters had reached epic dimensions. But the dynamics of conflict between the case officers in the stressful world of field HUMINT and the technical experts in the sterile laboratory or workshop would soon give way to a system of demand and supply that improved the performance of both sides. Through bold looting forays back in Washington that Bull and his like-minded, workhorse chiefs of station conducted, a more flexible, cooperative relationship between OTS and the field eventually developed.
The new watchwords were no longer “operations first” or “can do.” Instead, the key question was, “Is this operation worth the expense in both money and technical expertise?” OTS officers were trained to ask: “What is the operational goal?”
When challenged to justify the need for his often outrageous technical demands, for example, Bull would produce elegantly formal request memoranda, with all the proper operational and bureaucratic bows neatly tied. These requests evolved into a system to justify not only the technical support but the field operation itself within the larger scheme of Agency programs. Ironically, it was a traditional Agency case officer like Bull Monahan who would help transform high-stakes Pinball into a mini-revolution in the Clandestine Service, opening the path for more programmatic thinking. The “old boy” system was replaced by a more level playing field, and we began to plan ahead.
This shift was fabulous for my business. Bull Monahan, a near-genius brimming with ideas, loved the world of disguise. We reached a tacit understanding that he would keep applying the pressure on OTS for improved disguise technology. In turn, I would discreetly keep him informed of any progress we made on promising new technologies that he might include in his request for field support.
To set this process in motion, I arranged a meeting between Bull, the ultimate user of the most innovative disguises, and Jerome Calloway, the ultimate source.
Burbank, California, May 1976
• Bull was straining to remain still in the makeup chair, while I did my best to finish applying the delicate FINESSE material on his left cheek. Always impatient, Bull insisted on talking to Jerome, who was poised nearby, seated backward astride a tall lab chair. We had been working for almost an hour in Jerome’s private makeup studio in the three-car garage of his home.
Jerome leaned forward, his hairy forearms across the back of the chair, holding a smoldering Salem between the tar-stained thumb and forefinger of his left hand. The brilliant southern California spring sunshine flooded Jerome’s lush garden outside the open garage doors.
“This is the material Jerome began using a while back for these subtle adaptations,” I explained to Bull. “He’d forgotten about it till I told him the idea in your last tasking cable. Then he found the stuff in a cigar box up on that shelf.”
Bull’s restless mind had hatched yet another audacious concept: We did not realize it at the time, but he was upping the ante on the FINESSE materials and would help lead us to another, more effective breakthrough, which would later be code-named DAGGER.
Jerome took the cigar box from his workbench and held up some of the makeup material. “I came up with this working on Kid Gallahad,” Jerome said. “John Garfield was always trying to push the visual envelope of his character so we had to invent things on the fly. Garfield wanted a close-up of blood spurting out of his broken nose when the stunt man hit him. So his makeup guy came over here between takes and we threw together this particular formula. Worked like a charm.”
We all laughed. Garfield’s portrayal of a battered prize fighter was considered revolutionary for its gritty visual realism.
“In fact,” Jerome continued, gesturing at the racks of shelves stretching from floor to ceiling, holding hundreds of lab jars with makeup devices that looked like the body parts of monsters, “most of this stuff was invented that way. The actor and director need something, I do my best to provide it.”
Jerome puttered around his storage shelves, selecting some choice examples of humanoids and various facial appliances that had distorted the well-known faces of Hollywood’s greatest icons for several decades. “The other makeup men in town come over and buy the extra pieces I cast from my molds,” he said. “This workshop is the motion picture industry version of a boutique.”
Bull chortled, his heavy jowls shaking. Luckily, I managed not to smear his makeup with my adhesive brush. “Yeah, we have our own version of a boutique in the spy business, too, don’t we, Mendez?”
Bull was in a fine mood. He and Jerome had hit it off immediately. Both men were second-generation Irish-Americans, proud of their heritage. To my surprise, Bull had revealed that he had done his undergraduate degree in theater arts and was a “frustrated actor,” probably an ideal education for a spy. His daughter would graduate that June with a degree in theater, and Jerome had graciously offered to arrange some auditions.
I gave Bull a hand mirror and pulled off the barber’s cape so he could stand up and examine himself in the three-sided tailor’s fitting mirror near the lab bench. Bull leaned forward, then did a slow pirouette, carefully checking his profile from all angles. “This looks pretty good, but I want the cheekbones and the chin much more prominent to distract people from other things I might be doing.” I had already transformed Bull into a near-gargoyle, but he wanted an even more outrageous appearance. As always, he had a firm grasp of the larger operational issues involved: In Bull’s part of Western Europe, it was considered the ultimate faux pas to stare at people with unpleasant features or physical disabilities.
Knowing Bull, however, I was afraid he would want to push this social reality to the extreme. “I’ll try,” I stalled, “but we don’t want to get ridiculous, either. Let’s see how long you can wear it comfortably out at lunch. Jerome and I will watch how the light works on this new material.”
It was a short drive from Jerome’s home to the Universal Studios cafeteria. I held back a grin as I watched Bull, who seemed more nervous wearing his new face among these celebrities than he would have been shaking surveillance in China or Berlin. We were indeed subjected to some close scrutiny from “big names”; as an award-winning member of the industry, Jerome had to pass a gamut of shmoozers on the way to our table.
When we climbed back into Jerome’s gleaming yellow Pontiac Brougham after lunch, Bull seemed thoughtful. In effect, he’d just passed an operational test, eating a Caesar salad and tuna filet in full disguise in front of the world’s experts on illusion. “You might suggest to your chemist that they put a little more elasticiser in their formula, Tony,” he said, shifting his strained jaw from side to side. “If we’re going to make the chin and cheekbones more prominent, the whole rig’s going to have to be a lot easier to wear for extended periods.”
At Jerome’s garage lab, Bull opened boxes and jars, fingering the strange collection of colorful materials as he hummed a tune off-pitch. “When I come back this summer, I’d like you to be prepared with a whole new disguise…glasses, teeth, the works. And I want to learn how to actually make those new pieces and apply them myself.”
That was classic Bull Monahan, always making grandiose requests. But I realized he would be one of my strongest allies, especially if his energetic disguise initiatives helped pull off an ambitious operation he was not authorized to discuss, due to the need-to-know principle.
Bull wandered restlessly through the lab. “And, Jerome, maybe you could get me one of those cobweb machines you mentioned this morning.” He rubbed his hands in delight. “That’s just the gadget we’ve been looking for to cover our entry into an audio target through a wine cellar door that hasn’t been opened in fifty years.”
Jerome shared Bull’s pleasure at the prospect of American spies using another movie illusion. “No problem, Bull. The special effects guys sell one in a nice little carrying case. It’s basically just a quarter-inch electric drill with a fan blade hooked up to a dispenser of special glue. You can cover a whole room with cobwebs in a couple of minutes. Let me know if you need anything else,” Jerome added. “Maybe you’ll want to make a snowstorm, or part the Red Sea.”
“You never can tell,” Bull said with a wicked grin.