Good evening.

Welcome to another edition of Inside the Cover.

I recently finished a book with significant connection to Wichita.

And Wichita State University.

I enjoyed it, and I wanted to share it with you.

The book is In True Face by Jonna Mendez.

It is subtitled A Woman's Life in the CIA Unmasked.

It is now time to go inside the cover.

Jonna was born in Campbellsville, Kentucky in 1945.

She graduated from high school in Wichita, and she attended Wichita State University majoring in English literature.

Mendez writes about growing up in Wichita and working at a bookstore and at Wesley Hospital while attending WSU.

She shares how she met her first husband, John Goeser, while she was working at the Chase Manhattan Bank in Frankfurt, Germany.

She had decided that she did not want to leave Germany after the wedding and then return to Wichita and Wichita State.

She writes about her marriage to Goeser and how it eventually ran its course.

After Goese had proposed to her, he told her that his initial story abou being a civilian was a cover up.

In fact, he was a civil servant working for the Central Intelligence Agency or the CIA.

As she writes, ‘I was discoverin that I hadn't married just John Goeser.

I had married the CIA as well.

As Mrs.

John Goeser, she was eligible to be hire as an entry level CIA contract employee or contract wife, as they were then called.

From this extremely humbl beginning, Jonna Hiestand Goeser Mendez went on to have a significant 27 year career with the CIA.

After beginning with clerical work, she worked overseas with a specialty in clandestine photography.

After attending a year lon leadership development program, she was given a choice among various assignments, and she became a specialist in disguise, identity transformation and clandestine imaging.

In 1988 she was promoted to deputy chief of the Disguise Division, and in 1991 she became the Chief of Disguise.

She retired from the CIA in 1993, and she was awarded the CIA's Commendation Medal.

In this book, Mendez writes about the CIA, including its origins in WWII as the Office of Strategic Services, OSS, with the first director, Bill Donovan.

She details many of the accomplishments and efforts of the CIA over the years an during her time with the agency, but she also is quite candid and forthcoming about the agency's negative treatment of women, including herself in this man's world of spycraft.

As I noted at the beginning, Mendez's description of her various assignments and her work with listening devices, hidden cameras, and disguises, including facial mask is something out of books and movies.

In fact, she describes on occasion where she participated in a meeting in the Oval Offic with then-President George H.W.

Bush and former CIA director, disguised as an African American woman.

Jonna Hiestand Goeser Mendez is an extraordinary woman who has lived an extremely full life.

As she noted in the book: ‘It was a career I loved.

I was doing work that mattered, work that made a difference, making history in some small way.

It wasn't a path I'd ever imagined for myself.

I was, after all, just a girl from Wichita, Kansas, seeking adventure.

Never dreaming that would translate into a life that was both covert and trailblazing.

There is so much in this book, I fear I've only scratched the surface for you.

Suffice it to say, I found the book to be a very engaging, entertaining, and informative read and I'm extremely happy to recommend it to you.

That's our show.

Thanks for joining us.

We'll see you next week here on Inside the Cover.