Their shadowy world

Tony Mendez is on the phone, his voice muffled by a hissing connection that’s a couple of wavelengths shy of pure. At least he says he’s Mendez. And the hiss, once you get to thinking about it, might actually be from an eavesdropper’s equipment.

You never know.

“Absolutely yes,” Mendez says with a laugh when asked about the likelihood that the line is tapped at his Maryland farm. “Assume nothing.”

Mendez and his wife, Jonna Mendez, are anomalies -- decorated veterans of the CIA’s espionage wars officially sanctioned to talk about their lives in “the mist” and training other spies in the arts of espionage, disguise and prevarication.

Well, they can talk about some of it, anyway, and they will from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Saturday in a program at UCLA’s Dodd Hall called “Espionage 101: Overview of Spycraft,” co-sponsored by the privately owned International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.

The museum, which opened in April 2002 billing itself as the only such organization dedicated to espionage, often sponsors special exhibitions in its own space near the FBI headquarters, including the current “Spy Treasures of Hollywood.” But “Espionage 101” is only its fourth off-site program, designed to expand both awareness of the museum and the history of espionage itself.

“We provide an expertise that very few people in the country have,” says Anna Slafer, the museum’s director of exhibitions and programs. “With our educational mission, we’re trying to reach out to as many people as possible.”

The museum tries to twin off-site programs with regional interests, such as a recent program at Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center on Benjamin Franklin’s work as a spy.

“We look for a partner whose mission matches the audience and message,” Slafer said.

In L.A.’s case, it’s a matter of taking the museum to its fans. More out-of-region visitors to the D.C. museum are from California than any other state, and about 2,000 people in the L.A. area joined a museum list saying “they wanted to learn more,” says Slafer, a former Angeleno.

Saturday’s program, arranged through UCLA Extension, costs $70 and consists of several presenters, including Danny Biederman, a writer and expert on espionage as portrayed in novels, film and television; Marthe Cohn, who received the Croix de Guerre and other French honors for posing as a German nurse to spy on Hitler’s military; and Timothy Naftali, director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum and author of “Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism.”

The topic of spies and spying holds an endless fascination for people despite the sense that it “seems anti-democratic, covert, illegitimate,” says Toby Miller, a UC Riverside professor and author of “Spyscreen: Espionage on Film and TV From the 1930s to the 1960s.”

The James Bond-style gadgetry and TV shows like “The Avengers” helped “to lift espionage out of the sense of 1950s repression and dark corridors and put it into a stylish world of fashion and technology,” he says. And there’s romance too. “Sexuality is very much part of its history, ever since Mata Hari in World War I.”

The main draw in Saturday’s program are the Mendezes, founding members of the Spy Museum’s board, who lived the cloak and dagger existence from the 1960s until they retired in the early 1990s. When the CIA decided to celebrate its 50th anniversary in 1997, it asked the Mendezes to be part of it, sharing -- a few of -- their experiences to illuminate how the usually dark agency works.

Tony Mendez is also one of the CIA’s 50 honored “Trailblazers” for, among other accomplishments, creating an elaborate Canadian movie-production scam to rescue six U.S diplomats during the Iran hostage crisis in 1980. A Canadian diplomat was given the public credit for the operation to distance the CIA’s involvement, Mendez says.

When Mendez turned the diplomats “over to the State Department in Zurich and walked away, they didn’t know me by my true name,” Mendez says. “Only later when I ran into one of them on the street did they find what my true name was. I held that secret for 17 years.... I thought I would take all my good stories to the grave.”

Instead, he and his wife have become unofficial ambassadors for the agency. They work independently and without oversight from the CIA, but then vetting isn’t really necessary. The couple do not see themselves as tellers of tales the agency still wants kept secret.

“We bought into their plan and we continue to do so,” Mendez says.

Mendez’s autobiography, “Master of Disguise,” and the nonfiction memoir “Spy Dust” the couple wrote together are recommended reading for CIA rookies -- and Mendez has been involved with more than 20 documentaries.

It was an uneasy transition for someone trained to stay out of the limelight. Getting on the telephone with a journalist still never quite feels right.

“I’m absolutely in dread fear right now,” Mendez says, only partly in jest. “Every time you have a conversation like this, you always think afterward, did I go too far?”

And if they do?

“If we go too far,” he says, “we hear from them.”

It could be “they” already know. Was that a whisper on the line?

*

‘Espionage 101’

Where: Room 175, Dodd Hall, UCLA campus, Westwood

When: 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Saturday

Price: $70, pre-register with UCLA Extension. Walk-ups allowed if space permits.

Contact: www.uclaextension.edu, register for course No. S24861, or call (310) 825-9971.