https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-offbeat-genius-of-a-great-american-spy-11548478837?mod=hp_lead_pos10
In 1976, the CIA’s Moscow station heard some excellent news. One of its most prized sources, a well-placed Soviet diplomat who’d turned on the regime, had been transferred back to Moscow.
The asset, code-named TRIGON, had already been supplied with the T-100, an experimental CIA camera concealed inside a pen, and was in a perfect position to copy scores of classified documents.
The only challenge was getting in touch with him.
Armed with a seemingly limitless budget, the KGB had put an estimated 50,000 spies on the streets of Moscow, wrapping the city in an impenetrable surveillance blanket. Any CIA officer who left the U.S. embassy would be followed by highly-trained teams of 20 or more.
So many CIA assets had been exposed and killed over the last decade that the station had all but stopped trying to arrange face-to-face meetings. Some spymasters in Washington viewed Moscow as a lost cause. The station chiefs had only one card left to play.
When he arrived in Moscow in 1976, Tony Mendez had spent 11 years at the CIA but had little experience in covert operations. He’d originally been recruited as an artist. Now he ran the agency’s disguise branch.
Mr. Mendez met with every field officer in Moscow. He logged their exact clothing and shoe sizes, collected hair samples and color-matched their skin tones. A few months later, he returned from his laboratory with some unusual cargo: enough masks, wigs, dental facades, prosthetics, makeup palettes and made-to-measure costumes to put on a magic show. If the CIA wanted to operate freely in Moscow, its agents had to disappear.
Mr. Mendez and his team trained operatives to apply disguises in layers and showed them how to radically alter their appearance on the street, changing from a man in a suit to an old woman in a shawl in less than 45 seconds. To help them bail out of moving cars undetected, CIA technologists invented the “Jack in the Box,” a briefcase containing a spring-loaded inflatable dummy that popped up in the empty seat.
As far-fetched as it sounds, this experiment in deception and illusion became the central pillar of a unique operational mindset known as “the Moscow Rules.” By learning to outfox the KGB, the Moscow station not only connected with TRIGON, it scored some the biggest espionage coups in American history.