Seeing Is Deceiving ‘”Once upon a time, Antonio J. Mendez, 59, a lifelong student of the “accumulation of millimeters” that form the human identity, could alter your appearance so profoundly that not even your mother could tell who you were.

Though his disguises often had to work only for a day, or an hour, or a split second, his audience could be extremely judgmental. A sloppy job could mean death.

Nine years ago, Mendez, the son of a Nevada copper miner, retired from the CIA after a quarter-century. He had worked his way up from the lowly forgery unit–bogus signatures, altered documents, counterfeit currency and the like–to become head of the espionage agency’s division of disguise, with a rank equal to that of a two-star general.

He created some of the CIA’s most elaborate, if little-known, productions–the ploys, skits, scams, masquerades and sleights of hand designed to dupe foreign agents and enemy surveillance teams. His specialty, he writes in a new memoir, “The Master of Disguise,” was “exfiltration,” wherein endangered persons are whisked away from bad guys and taken to safety.’