- It could keep you safe.
It could keep you from getting shot.
It could keep you alive, a mask could.
People are amazed that there was a job title
called Chief of Disguise,
and most women I know wished they had that job.
Sounded like fun.
Actually, it was fun.
I don't think another intelligence agency
in the world devoted the time
and the budget to disguise like we did.
Disguise became a form of body armor.
In the spy museum, we call the mask Five Second Mask.
They proved invaluable.
You could change your ethnicity,
you could change your gender,
you could change your nationality, and if you needed to,
you could actually become another person.
When I was Chief of Disguise,
we had already begun using Hollywood stunt double masks.
That was a technology that came straight out of L.A.
We worked with a man named John Chambers
who had done all of the makeup for "Planet of the Apes."
- He has a definite gift for mimicry.
- They could spend five hours putting on a mask.
They could spend an hour taking it off,
and they could shoot it again and again and again
'til they got the lights just right.
Our mask had to be perfect in the car.
When you got out of the car, you had to know
without a mirror that you were good.
The point of all of our masks was speed.
You had to imagine that you were gonna be in situations
that you couldn't even anticipate.
An officer somewhere picks this thing up,
just puts it on in five seconds
and knows that it's right, that he's invisible.
If you had to sit and tinker with this thing,
if you needed a mirror,
it wasn't gonna be useful to you at all.
The masks were full-face latex masks.
It allows you to furrow your brow.
It allows you you squint your eyes.
It allows you to speak.
- You talked.
- The specific mask we're talking about
would fit just one person.
The first thing we do is, we make a face impression.
If you've been to a dentist
and ever had a dental impression,
it's the same thing, it's just your face, not your teeth.
So they would've added to his face.
They could rearrange his face a bit,
and give him a new face that would fit perfectly
over his real face.
We never used human hair.
We always used a synthetic.
The idea of a man washing the hair
on his mask and making it look nice when that was all done,
it was never going to happen.
The synthetic hair, you couldn't hurt it, basically.
You could wear your mask in a rainstorm,
and your hair would still be okay.
- Very human.
- The masks, more than once,
were taken off in a moment of terror,
and crushed down, and put under arms, in armpits.
They would fit in armpits if they needed to.
That was part of the design.
The mask is the culmination of a lot of work
that we did at CIA over a period of, I say, 10 years,
developing that technology.
It was a big challenge to come up
with something that finally actually animated and worked
to really fool a person closer than three,
four feet from you, but we did.
- They learn the art.
- We actually brought Hollywood back into our labs
at one point to look at what we had done,
and they were stunned.
They were absolutely stunned.
- Congratulations.
- The fact that we're allowed to show it tells me
the CIA have moved on.
I don't know what they're doing.
I shouldn't know.
I'm dying to know, but I don't know.
- Relax, you'll get to see it all later on.
- So I'm proud to show people how good we got,
to that point, and let them imagine,
so what are they doing now?
- dg