Of all the missions Walter McIntosh undertook in his long CIA career, buying life-size rubber sex dolls in a Washington, D.C., porno shop was maybe the most memorable.

It was all for a good cause, of course. And deadly serious, not just for McIntosh, who headed the CIA’s disguise unit from 1977 to 1979. The agency’s Moscow operatives were in desperate need of something—anything—to trick Russian counterspies into leaving them alone, if only for a few minutes, so they could meet their secret agents without fear of being arrested. A key operation was in peril.
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Enter the inflatable sex doll. Tricked out with an ersatz vagina and mouth, the life-size rubberized playthings have been pleasuring lonely men for a century. Modified to a male likeness, appropriately clothed and rigged up with primitive airbag technology to pop them out of a container, the “jack-in-the-box,” or JIB, the CIA thought, could be adapted for the espionage war between it and the Soviet KGB.