In magic, as in spycraft, nothing is quite as it seems. Deception and illusion are tricks of both trades.
Distracting the adversary, concealing intentions, donning disguises, making evidence disappear, and escaping unnoticed… CIA has been applying the magician’s craft to the world of espionage for decades.
The arts of misdirection, sleight-of-hand, and recognition signals are all conjurers’ tricks used for covert intelligence operations.
Just ask Tony Mendez, CIA’s former Chief of Disguise, who championed the use of illusions in a variety of intelligence operations during the Cold War. The most famous operation was probably ARGO, which was made into a Hollywood blockbuster. Mendez was played by Ben Affleck.
Mendez—along with his close associate Ed Johnson—snuck six Americans out of Iran by disguising them as a Hollywood film crew.
According to magician Jim Steinmeyer, the ruse worked because, “Mendez’s illusion came down to meticulous detail. He actually established a Hollywood production company, with a script, artwork, job descriptions, and trade ads announcing their upcoming project. This was matched, in detail, by the forged documents and disguises for the six Americans. It was an indulgence that was the dream of any magician. Mendez’s improvisation was performed within carefully rehearsed scenes, meticulous paperwork, backstopped stories, and exhaustive research. If the six Americans seemed to saunter effortlessly through the Teheran airport, it was because the stage had been beautifully set and the scene masterfully presented. It was a demonstration of Kellar the Magician’s famous boast that, once he had an audience under his spell, he could ‘march an elephant across the stage and no one would notice.’”
Mendez, throughout his career, was a huge advocate of adopting the tricks and tools of magicians and applying them in intelligence work. He even sought out Hollywood disguise and special effects artists to better the Agency’s techniques and illusions.
But he wasn’t the first at CIA to take an interest in magic for intelligence purposes.
“Magic and intelligence work would appear on the surface to be an unlikely combination, but as the partnership between the dark arts and the Agency evolved, the craft of magic and the CIA’s need for clandestine operations locked together like the last two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.”
Former CIA Chief of Disguise
Tony Mendez
The Missing Magic Manuals of Langley
“Magic and espionage are really kindred arts,” or so wrote former CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin, an amateur magician himself, in the forward to the book, The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception, by Keith Melton and Robert Wallace.
This book, created from two long-lost training guides designed to teach Agency officers how to integrate elements of the magician’s craft into clandestine operations, revealed that the CIA’s connection to the world of magic was decades old.
In the 1950s, the Agency hired magician John Mulholland to teach young officers techniques of deception suitable for the field, such as sleight-of-hand brush passes and smuggling assets out of East Germany during the Cold War in vehicles that resembled the magic boxes used in stage illusions.
| “Counterintelligence officers—people who specialize in catching spies—work in a part of the profession so labyrinthine that it is often referred to as a “wilderness of mirrors”—a phrase, of course, with magical overtones.” |
| - The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception |
As part of his contract, Mulholland compiled his Houdini-like advice into two training manuals; “Some Operational Applications of the Art of Deception” and “Recognition Signals.”
The magic manuals were thought to be lost to history. However, in 2007, while going through some unrelated documents, Robert Wallace, a former director of the CIA’s Office of Technical Services, discovered references to the manuals and tracked down poor-quality copies of each that had miraculously escaped the shredder.
The manuals were no longer classified, so Wallace worked with intelligence historian and collector, Keith Melton, to publish them in their entirety.
“Analysts must be as familiar as magicians with methods of deception, because analysts are almost always working with incomplete information and in circumstances where an adversary is seeking to mislead them—or in the magician’s term, misdirect them.”
Former Deputy Director of CIA
John McLaughlin
Tricks of the Trade
The tricks and tools of spycraft borrowed from the world of magic and illusion are vast. They include things like twinning and teaming—deploying look-a-likes as decoys and setting the roles of trickster and assistant—to using props and gimmicks such as invisible ink, hidden compartments, and forged documents.
Creating believable and plausible stories are vital to many illusions, as are skills like timing, body position, and the art of distraction.
Here are some of the ways magic and intelligence mingle, creating illusions, deceptions, and trickery that could fool even the most skilled of spies.
Sleight-of-Hand
An effective sleight-of-hand technique employs psychology, misdirection, and a natural sequence of steps to create an illusion, according to the Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception. The hand is not quicker than the eye, and for deceptive purposes, an illusion is primarily mental, not visual. “When magicians and spies fool the minds of audiences, eyes observe only what the performer intends.”
Sleight-of-hand techniques can be used in several deceptions.
Striking a match to light a cigarette draws onlookers’ eyes to the flame, while the other hand can subtly place a surveillance bug. Conjuring paraphernalia like “flash paper” or “water soluble paper” used to pass secret notes can be quickly destroyed by tossing it nonchalantly into a fire or glass of water.
Props made from common objects like coins, pencils, lipstick, or cigarette cases can conceal espionage devices and intelligence, because to an onlooker they appear both ubiquitous and inconsequential.
This coin may appear to be an Eisenhower silver dollar, but it is really a concealment device. It was used to hide messages or film so they could be sent secretly. Because it looks like ordinary pocket change, it is almost undetectable.
Recognition Signals
A recognition signal is the use of a sign or signal that is visible either up-close or at a distance but isn’t noticed by the average person. It must be recognized by both the person doing the signaling and the person being signaled to, and there needs to be a way to covertly communicate that the message or signal was received. It’s a technique used both by intelligence officers and magicians for communicating information surreptitiously without being observed.
In spycraft, it could be as simple as a flowerpot sitting in a particular window of a building, or a specific piece of clothing or accessory, like a flower in a lapel. It could also be something missing, like a button on a jacket. Sometimes spies even used the pattern of lacing a shoe to signal one another. The important thing is that the signal or sign blends in, so it goes unnoticed by anyone except the intended recipient.
“Just as a magician’s methods must elude detection in front of a closely attentive audience, so an intelligence officer doing espionage work must elude close surveillance and pass messages and material without detection.”
Former Deputy Director of CIA
John McLaughlin
Misdirection
Both magicians and intelligence officers use the art of misdirection to hide objects in plain sight, conceal an action, or manipulate an object to make something appear, disappear, or transform into something else.
Think of the now infamous technique seen in most Hollywood spy movies, the “brush pass.” An asset and an intelligence officer casually walk past one another and hand off information or a package without anyone noticing. When done well, the brush pass is practically invisible. It originated in the magician’s community.
A key to the trick is misdirection. An obvious larger movement—like looking at one’s watch or moving a coat from one arm to the other—draws attention away from the other hand, which is slyly dropping a package into the grocery bag of the passerby.
“A little deception, a little illusion. You think you’re looking at what you see, but you are not.”
Former CIA Chief of Disguise (and wife of Tony Mendez)
Jonna Mendez
Concealment
Both magicians and spies make use of concealment devices: something made to look like something else.
These can be ordinary objects that hide secrets or objects that look like one thing but are actually another. Everyday objects like coins, pens, and lamps can hide listening devices. And even a dead rat can conceal vital intelligence.
Dead drops are a common form of concealment device used by CIA officers and their assets in the field, especially in high threat areas where it’s too dangerous for them to meet in person. The officer would place a message or item into the concealment device, and then drop the device in a predetermined location—a dead drop—so that their asset could find it. Or vice versa.
A dead drop should be something so common that it will blend in with its surroundings or make it so disgusting that no one would ever think to pick it up. Like a dead rat.
Disguises
“Magicians regularly employ doubles, identical twins, full disguises, or disguise paraphernalia to create effective illusions,” according to the Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception. So do intelligence agencies. Some disguises are meant to be temporary and simple: like a wig, glasses, or article of clothing. Other disguises need to pass close scrutiny and are more elaborate, including changes in ethnicity or gender. Sometimes these disguises involve things like custom clothing or prosthetics that alter body shape. Other times, technologies to change facial features or even voice might be used.
| Did you know… In the late 1970s, Hollywood makeup artist John Chambers worked with CIA technicians to create a new generation of face masks using techniques developed for the hit movie, Planet of the Apes. His masks blended articulated facial elements to appear “lifelike” when individuals talked or blinked their eyes. |
| - The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception |
Disguises aren’t just about changing one’s appearance, however. They’re about changing a person’s persona. According to two CIA disguise experts, interviewed on an episode of The Langley Files podcast, “We like to think of disguise not as the materials, but as a skill set.”
It’s how you walk, how you talk, and how you interact with the world that helps create the illusion.
Conjuring the Future
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Arthur C. Clarke
The tricks and techniques needed to create believable deceptions will inevitably change as technology evolves. Things like artificial intelligence, ubiquitous surveillance, and biometric data are already changing the intelligence landscape.
Just as the art of the magician has evolved over the years—incorporating more advanced technologies with the tried-and-true techniques of illusionists’ past—so too does the art of spycraft. With the help of magicians, CIA will continue to conjure the tradecraft necessary to keep our nation safe.