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bit of everything in the field.
    Then, in 1974, I was promoted to chief of disguise and asked to come back to headquarters to run the disguise section. At the time I was only thirty-three years old, and some people didn’t take kindly to a young upstart such as myself coming in and telling them what to do.
    In the wake of Watergate, morale was near an all-time low in the Agency. Nixon had just left the White House and the Senate was preparing an investigation of the CIA. Blood was in the water. My attitude was that there were still good people working in the Agency and a lot of work to be done. I was eager to get to it.
    The 1970s were smack in the middle of the Cold War and there were numerous ongoing cases in the works. The Soviet Union was spreading out into the third world, and as they extended their reach we had greater access to their personnel.
    A s I pushed through the doors of Central Building on the morning of November 4, 1979, I could see that the crisis was garnering everyone’s full attention. Despite the fact that it was a Sunday, the building seemed to be under a state of siege, with people hurrying in every direction. Several carried red-striped secret files; everyone carried grim expressions. I had never seen the building so frenetic—it was as though a silent alarm had gone off. The weekend was officially over.
    I headed up to my suite of offices and labs, located on the third floor, to read the cable traffic and meet with my team.
    First I popped my head into the office of the deputy chief of OTS operations. Matt, an intense, conservative, but polite man, was sitting behind his desk, handing out cables and talking on the phone.
    “Hi, Tony. Welcome. Glad you could make it in,” he said, covering the mouthpiece of the phone in his hand and motioning me to a chair with his jacket balled up on it. It was the first time I had seen Matt without his tie. His trademark red hair was uncombed and he didn’t look up from the heap of paperwork on his desk.
    “Sounds like we’ve got something to do,” I said when he got off the phone.
    “Yeah, we are expecting that it’s going to get even more hectic around here. Why don’t you get caught up and we’ll touch base later.”
    I continued on to my section. Most of my team was already there, some working on other projects unrelated to the hostage crisis. Tim, my deputy, came striding in and yanked off his tie; he’d been coming back from church. Without so much as a hello he began brewing a pot of coffee. I paused at the door to the disguise labs, to see who else had made it in.
    When I was first promoted to run the disguise section in 1974, the chief of operations had pulled me aside and tasked me with making the disguise capability of OTS the best it could possibly be, and I set out to make that a reality. At the time, most people thought the disguise branch was nothing more than a group of cosmetologists. The whole concept of disguise wasn’t given great merit within the Agency, especially by officers who’d come of age when disguises amounted to nothing more than ill-fitting wigs, mustaches, and hats. There were people who worked at the CIA during that time whose approach to disguise amounted to sitting a case officer in a barber’s chair and lecturing him or her on the art of disguise, while providing nothing in the way of materials.
    That all changed once I began working with a Hollywood makeup artist in the early 1970s and started to show them what they could accomplish with a little creative thinking. The first such operation involved turning an African American case officer and a Lao cabinet minister into two Caucasians so they could meet in Vientiane, Laos, in 1972. The disguises had been so convincingthat the two men had been able to pass through a roadblock undetected. The episode had opened up the floodgates and changed everything as far as operational disguise was concerned.
    By the mid-1970s, everybody in the disguise branch had to learn to