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Episode: 425

Former CIA Spy: How to Eliminate Self-Doubt, Build Confidence, and Protect Yourself in Today’s World

Jonna Mendez

Today, a former spy and the former Chief of Disguise for the CIA is taking you inside the heart-pounding world of espionage and the secret life she lived working undercover for 30 years.

Jonna will share the tactics and strategies you need to read anyone and spot a liar, offer a powerful warning about the state of the world today, and give you practical wisdom to find courage and face life’s hardest moments.

For decades, Jonna helped intelligence officers assume new identities, disappear in plain sight, and carry out high-risk operations. 

But what makes this conversation so powerful is not just the spy stories. It is Jonna’s deeply personal reflection on courage, reinvention, trust, loss, and what it means to keep going when life feels scary or uncertain.

After today, you'll understand how to build confidence, trust yourself under pressure, and have the courage to reinvent your life… at any age.

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Change is the most refreshing thing any of us can do. You get good at what you do. You love what you do. You do it well. And you could keep doing it for the rest of your life... But you could say, 'Let me take a look around. What else is there?

Jonna Mendez

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Key takeaways

  1. Courage is not something you're born with. It grows from preparation, knowledge, and experience, so the more you practice facing difficult things, the more confident and brave you become. 

  2. If you're facing something frightening, create a “happy place” you can return to, because focusing your mind on a deeply personal memory can help you endure even the hardest moments.

  3. Your life is never as fixed as you think it is, because one bold decision can change everything, and every pivot builds on your experience instead of forcing you to start over. 

  4. When you feel you've hit your ceiling, don't stay there out of comfort—make the change, keep pursuing excellence, and trust that your existing skills will open unexpected doors.

  5. When life feels overwhelming, trust your intuition over anxious "what if" thoughts, because intuition gives you a clear direction, while fear creates noise, doubt, and hesitation.

Guests Appearing in this Episode

Jonna Mendez

Jonna Mendez is a former CIA intelligence officer who spent nearly three decades at the agency and ultimately served as Chief of Disguise. 

She is the author of 6 bestselling books, including Argo and In True Face: A Woman’s Life in the CIA, Unmasked, and a founding member of the Board of Advisors at the International Spy Museum.

  • In True Face: A Woman's Life in the CIA, Unmasked

    Jonna Hiestand Mendez began her CIA career as a “contract wife” performing secretarial duties for the CIA as a convenience to her husband, a young officer stationed in Europe. She needed his permission to open a bank account or shut off the gas to their apartment. Yet Mendez had a talent for espionage, too, and she soon took on bigger and more significant roles at the Agency. She parlayed her interest in photography into an operational role overseas, an unlikely area for a woman in the CIA. Often underestimated, occasionally undermined, she lived under cover and served tours of duty all over the globe, rising first to become an international spy and ultimately to Chief of Disguise at CIA’s Office of Technical Service.

    In True Face recounts not only the drama of Mendez’s high-stakes work—how this savvy operator parlayed her “everywoman” appeal into incredible subterfuge—but also the grit and good fortune it took for her to navigate a misogynistic world. This is the story of an incredible spy career and what it took to achieve it.

  • Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History

    The true account of the 1979 rescue of six American hostages from Iran. On November 4, 1979, Iranian militants stormed the American embassy in Tehran and captured dozens of American hostages, sparking a 444-day ordeal and a quake in global politics still reverberating today. But there’s a little-known footnote to the crisis: six Americans escaped. And a midlevel agent named Antonio Mendez devised an ingenious yet incredibly risky plan to rescue them.

    Armed with foreign film visas, Mendez and an unlikely team of CIA agents and Hollywood insiders, directors, producers, actors, traveled to Tehran under the guise of scouting locations for a fake film called Argo. While pretending to find the perfect scenery and backdrops, the team succeeded in  contacting the escapees and smuggling them out of Iran without a single shot being fired.

  • Movie: Argo (2012)

    On Nov. 4, 1979, militants storm the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran, taking 66 American hostages. Amid the chaos, six Americans manage to slip away and find refuge with the Canadian ambassador. Knowing that it's just a matter of time before the refugees are found and likely executed, the U.S. government calls on extractor Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) to rescue them. Mendez's plan is to pose as a Hollywood producer scouting locations in Iran and train the refugees to act as his "film" crew.

  • The Moscow Rules: The Secret CIA Tactics That Helped America Win the Cold War

    Antonio and Jonna Mendez were CIA technical operations officers in Moscow during the dangerous final years of the Cold War. Soviets kept files on all foreigners, studied their patterns, and tapped their phones. Intelligence work was effectively impossible. The Soviet threat loomed larger than ever.

    A vivid exposé that reads like a le Carré novel, The Moscow Rules sheds light on the brave collaborations between CIA operatives and Russian informants, and the innovative ways they avoided Soviet surveillance. As experts in disguise, Antonio and Jonna were instrumental in developing a series of tactics—from Hollywood-inspired identity swaps to an armory of James Bond–style gadgets—that allowed CIA officers to outmaneuver the KGB.

    The Moscow Rules is the remarkable story of the undercover spies who risked everything for their country, and a tribute to the ingenuity that allowed them to succeed.

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