A former CIA intelligence officer who travelled the world training special agents in the art of clandestine photography is to share her stories in Bermuda.

Jonna Hiestand Mendez worked for 27 years with the Central Intelligence Agency’s Office of Technical Services, which is often compared to the “Q” Branch in the James Bond movies.

She will discuss her illustrious career at the TEDx Bermuda conference at the Fairmont Southampton on Saturday.

Ms Mendez, who rose to the position of Chief of Disguise, earned the CIA’s Intelligence Commendation Medal on her retirement.

In her TEDx presentation, she will talk about The Moscow Rules, a book she has co-authored with her highly decorated husband Antonio Mendez, who was also a CIA officer.

It tells how they were instrumental in developing tactics including identity swaps and magician’s evasion techniques to outmanoeuvre the KGB.

The pair also co-wrote the Academy award-winning film Argo, which was based on Mr Mendez’s rescue of six American diplomats from Tehran during the Iranian revolution.

Speaking of her time with the OTS, Ms Mendez told The Royal Gazette: “We were the technical piece of the CIA and we did ‘Q’-type things.

“We did all of the gadgets and tools. I started with tiny film cameras that were concealed in key fobs, lighters or pens, we made bugs if you needed a bug in a tree or under a conference table, and communication devices that would be encrypted.

“We did all the disguise work and alternate identity documents. We could change who you were. We did microdots, secret writing — everything you would need to run a clandestine operation.”

Ms Mendez says that Moscow during the Cold War was “the worst-case scenario” for anyone involved in clandestine operations. In the book, they outline the rules of doing espionage in “the toughest place in the world”.

“You try to be boring and predictable,” she explained.

“Your surveillance is always there and you just want them to relax. When they relax they hang back a little and they give you a little bit of space.

“That was the room we had to play with — it was called the gap.

“With disguise and some magicians’ tricks, we could deceive them and, when the time was right, we might allow them to find us and then they would relax again because they didn’t have to report it.

“If you could carry on like that you could indefinitely keep your operations going.”

Ms Mendez said there was one occasion that she feared for her life.

“In Europe, if something had gone wrong and someone had come through the door during one of my training sessions, the agent would probably be arrested and I would most likely be persona non grata — they would throw me out of the country. But in the Middle East and Moscow, it was dangerous.

“Towards the end of my career when I was in the Far East, I thought I was probably going to be shot.

“There was an incident with terrorism where I found myself in a hotel looking at this man that we knew had brought down a plane.

“He was between two other men and they were heavily armed. I inadvertently made eye contact with the terrorist. You are never supposed to do that. He looked at me and I looked at him and I thought, ‘oh, he knows I am from the Embassy’.

“They didn’t shoot me but he did tell the person he was meeting that he had seen four of us and had called them out. I was one.”

• TEDx Bermuda, which this year has a theme of “Capacity and Curiosity”, takes place at the Fairmont Southampton on Saturday from 1pm to 5pm. Tickets are available for $75 from ptix.bm