When Cold War spies wanted to disappear, they went to see Tony Mendez, the master mask maker, the Central Intelligence Agency's chief of disguise.

Mendez has now doffed his mask of anonymity. At a secret ceremony Thursday at the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Va., as part of the agency's 50th anniversary, he was named as one of 50 all-time stars of the spy trade.

Mendez worked with Hollywood makeup men and hardened CIA case officers to perfect the craft of creating counterfeit people.

He helped create the escape plan, the false identities and the disguises that got six Americans out of revolutionary Tehran while others were held hostage in 1980, say veterans of the intelligence agency. He was the man who helped CIA officers disappear into the world's back alleys.

"It's not just the makeup," Mendez said. "Disguise is not just the face you present. It's the 6,000-year-old secrets, the capability to create illusions. The essence is illusion and deception."

After 25 years of a secret life, he retired in 1990.

CIA veterans such as Mendez say the agency used to be a lot more fun when the Cold War raged against the Soviet Union, no holds were barred and covert operators were free to be a kind of legal criminal.

"The culture is different now at CIA," he said in an interview this week. "Some of the wind was taken out of our sails by the Senate investigations in the '70s. Some of it was taken out by Vietnam.

"When I talk to guys who are there now, they say it ain't fun. There's no enemy that you love to hate, like the Soviets or the Iranians. Everybody could relate to the bad guys you love to hate. Now, you're looking for a mission."

In 1965, he was an illustrator for an aircraft company in Denver when he saw a newspaper ad offering a job with the Navy. He responded, and the man who called back was the CIA's regional recruiter in Salt Lake City.

Mendez took a job with the agency's technical services staff.

These were the people who in the 1950s and '60s, under the direction of Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA's chief of technical services, tried to kill Fidel Castro with a poisoned wet suit, tested LSD on unsuspecting Americans, experimented with mind-control techniques, devised an electric pistol with poison pellets, and wired a cat with microphones and an antenna for use as a mobile eavesdropping unit. (The cat was run over by a taxi in a field test.)

In hindsight, Mendez concedes, this all looks odd.

"There's a line that you don't want to cross," he said, "but there was a war mentality during the Cold War that influenced everyone's behavior."

In any case, Mendez's talents lay elsewhere. He developed a special talent for disguising traveling CIA case officers.

In the early 1970s, he had to help an African-American officer meet an Asian diplomat working for the CIA in a Southeast Asian city under martial law and Soviet surveillance.

He said he asked a Hollywood contact to send him masks of the stunt doubles of Victor Mature and Rex Harrison.

He transformed the two men into elegant Caucasians. They sat and chatted in a purring State Department limousine in that Asian capital, oblivious to roadblocks and checkpoints.

Nowadays, Mendez said, the CIA's mask making is better than Hollywood's--so good that sophisticated disguises can be made and applied in less than a minute.

He is particularly proud of the escape plan he created to help six Americans flee Tehran, while their countrymen were held hostage by Iranian militants.

He created the false documents and the disguises that a CIA officer, posing as a businessman, smuggled into revolutionary Iran and delivered to the Canadian Embassy, where the six were hiding.

A medal from the CIA, the Intelligence Star, sits on his shelf underneath a photograph of himself and President Jimmy Carter taken after that covert action.

In the early 1980s, Mendez ran a graduate course for spies that he devised with Jack Downing, once chief of the CIA stations in Moscow and Beijing and now the agency's chief of covert operations.

The idea was to help the agency's officers move undetected in the capitals of the Soviet Union, China and Cuba.

Edward Lee Howard, a fledgling CIA officer dismissed from the agency as an unsound man, had passed the course.

In 1985, under surveillance by the FBI in Santa Fe, Howard fashioned a dummy--a toilet plunger with a mannequin's head and wig--and left the house with his wife by car. He jumped out at a bend in the road while she pushed the dummy up in his place. He turned up in Moscow, telling all to his new friends in the Kremlin.

The graduate course had to be rewritten.