The CIA's former "chief of disguise" is very impressed with The Americans

The Washington Post

Jonna Hiestand Mendez spent 27 years working on CIA operations around the world, including foreign assignments with her husband. In fact, she and The Americans creator Joe Weisberg, a former CIA officer, went to the same tradecraft school and learned the same lessons. "The Americans gets the tradecraft and the technology of the 1980s generally right, at least the way it worked when Ronald Reagan was president," she says. Mendez also praised The Americans' makeup artists for their dead-on work. "It is universally recognized that women wear disguises more easily than men do," she says. "Women have been disguising themselves from their early teens for generations; men, not so much. Convincing a male CIA officer that he should wear a wig and a fake mustache was one of my first challenges in the disguise business. I went on to become chief of disguise at CIA, and had other, more compelling disguise materials to offer, but the men were never a natural fit. (Matthew) Rhys makes the case, however, for disappearing under nothing more than a knit cap and a pair of glasses, a scruffy mustache and a messy wig. He becomes the consummate little gray man, invisible, the one nobody can remember was even on the elevator." As for what doesn't ring true, she says, "the sex and violence are over the top and gratuitous but probably deemed necessary by the writers."

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