Peggy Carter (Earth-199999)

Margaret "Peggy" Carter was a British spy for the Strategic Scientific Reserve during World War II and one of the founders of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Biography

Project Rebirth

In the late 1930s, Carter was a spy for the United Kingdom known as Agent 13. She was assigned to infiltrate Hydra, the Nazi research and weapons division. She covertly filmed footage of advanced weaponry that Hydra was developing and utilizing against Spanish rebels that allowed a soldier to essentially pilot an anthropomorphic weapon. In 1940, Carter posed as a simple serving girl to infiltrate Hydra leader Johann Schmidt's castle in the Bavarian Alps. Schmidt had violently coerced Abraham Erskine into using his super-soldier serum to make Schmidt more powerful—the results were disastrous, leaving Schmidt with horrible scarring that would garner him the moniker of Red Skull. Schmidt nonetheless did become incredibly powerful as a result of the serum, and his inherent malice made that power all the more dangerous. Carter rescued Dr. Erskine, freeing him from Schmidt's dungeon and fighting her way out of the castle and escaping via extraction plane. Carter became aligned with the Strategic Scientific Reserve, an organization founded by the United States government to counter Hydra's increasingly advanced technology. Colonel Chester Phillips and machinist Howard Stark were the key minds at the center of the SSR—the two of them, Carter, and Dr. Erskine established Project Rebirth, an effort to use Erskine's super-soldier serum properly to create a valiant American soldier. Erskine and Carter both realized that finding the correct subject—one motivated by honor and courage rather than ambition—was imperative, lest they become another Red Skull. Phillips proposed twenty candidates, all of whom Erskine rejected out of hand.

There was a rigorous testing process with several more physically viable candidates, but Erskine remained adamant throughout that the clear choice was a small, sickly young man named Steve Rogers. Rogers proved that his bravery, selflessness, and wits were head and shoulders above the other, more bluntly powerful candidates. Phillips resisted, but eventually couldn't deny Rogers's singular character. Carter fully supported Erskine's choice, and grew fond of Rogers for his simple and unassuming demeanor. Rogers was led to an underground facility in his home borough of Brooklyn, where Erskine's experiment went perfectly and Rogers emerged dramatically taller, stronger, and faster. Unfortunately, a Hydra spy named Heinz Kruger had infiltrated the proceedings, and shot and killed Dr. Erskine, preventing the serum from ever being recreated. Rogers gave chase, but the spy committed suicide before he could be taken into custody. With the Hydra threat suddenly much more pressing, President Roosevelt ordered the SSR to take the fight to Hydra in Europe. Phillips pushed Rogers out of the fold, not believing in the ability of one "super soldier" to turn the tide in the war. Instead, having garnered media attention chasing Kruger through the streets, Rogers found himself touring the country as a mascot for war bonds and general patriotism dubbed "Captain America."

Carter regretted that Rogers had been relegated to a "dancing monkey." After he'd finished a performance for the troops in Italy in November 1943, she assured him that he deserved better. She informed him that the soldiers there were what was left of the 107th infantry after a battle in Azzano—unbeknownst to her, Steve's best friend Bucky Barnes had been assigned to the 107th earlier that year. Rogers confirmed with Phillips that Barnes was unaccounted for, and learned that Barnes and the rest of the 107th, if they were alive, would have been taken 30 miles behind the front lines to a Hydra camp in Krausberg, Austria, making an official rescue mission utterly unfeasible. Rogers stormed off, desperate to do whatever it took to rescue his friend. Carter tried to talk him out of it, but saw his determination. Rather than let him simply drive there and likely get himself killed, she contacted Howard Stark, who agreed to fly them there in his own plane. Rogers parachuted into Krausberg, and Stark returned Carter to the camp to await the result.

By the next morning, there was no sign of Rogers. Phillips had learned of what had happened, and chastised Carter for taking a chance that would likely mean the end of the division. Moments after Phillips had dictated Rogers's condolence letter, Rogers arrived at the edge of the camp with every single missing member of the 107th in tow. Red Skull himself had been at the base, and had self-destructed it and escaped after Rogers sprung a revolt. After singlehandedly saving hundreds of lives and dealing a significant blow to Hydra's manufacturing line, there was no more denying "Captain America's" enormous value to the Allied war effort. Even Phillips changed his tune upon Rogers's arrival, declaring that no disciplinary action would be necessary. Having previously admired Rogers, Carter now found herself quietly falling for him. As Rogers and the others celebrated in a pub that night, Carter obliquely suggested to him that they should go dancing when the war was over.

Phillips tasked Rogers with taking down the remaining Hydra weapons facilities while the SSR tried to pin down Hydra's center of operations. Rogers insisted on teaming up with a group of men from the 107th, who would come to be known as the Howling Commandos. The Commandos stormed across the countryside for months on end, dealing blow after blow to Hydra. In 1945, on a mission to apprehend leading Hydra scientist Arnim Zola, Bucky Barnes fell from Zola's train to the Alps below, seemingly to his death. Rogers blamed himself, but Carter comforted him, assuring him he had done all he could. In any case, Zola had been apprehended, and Phillips interrogated vital information about Schmidt's plans out of him. Red Skull had become obsessed with divine power, and planned on destroying major cities across the world, including much of the United States, to demonstrate his might. Hydra's final base was in the Alps, 500 feet below the surface—Captain America's plan of attack was essentially a simple, full-fledged frontal assault. He went alone on motorcycle straight to the front door of the base and got himself captured, allowing the other Commandos to burst in some time later and begin the attack proper, followed by an infantry unit led by Carter and Phillips.

Red Skull fled for the Valkyrie, a large plane that he would use to bomb his many targets around the world. Phillips and Carter drove Cap to the Valkyrie as it prepared to take off, and Carter kissed him for luck. Cap boarded the Valkyrie and confronted Red Skull in the cockpit. He used the power of the Tesseract, a mysterious artifact that Schmidt had been using to power Hydra weaponry, against him, sucking Schmidt into space and effectively neutralizing him. The Valkyrie remained on course however, and was sure to crash and kill countless people if something wasn't done. Carter, Phillips, and the other ground forces secured a communications area, and Carter tried to assure Rogers that she would find a way out of the situation. Cap was grimly confident that the only way to save everyone was to crash the Valkyrie into the icy north Atlantic. As Carter slowly accepted the sad truth, the two comforted each other by making a date for their first dance the next Saturday. Cap's radio went dead, and Carter burst into tears. Captain America would be remembered as a hero for generations, while Carter for years would struggle to come to terms with his (apparent) death.

After the war

Saving Howard Stark

Carter continued to live and work undercover with the SSR in New York following the end of the war. To her friends and acquaintances, she kept up appearances by saying that she worked at the phone company. Her sex proved to be a complicating factor, as her uniformly male colleagues and overseers treated her with varying degrees of condescension and harassment. Agent Daniel Sousa seemed to be her only ally—he was disgusted with the others' tendency to talk down to her, though she politely requested he allow her to handle them herself. For her part, Carter showed no hesitation in responding to any mistreatment with biting rejoinders. In April 1946, Howard Stark came under scrutiny for allegations that he had sold weapons to foreign states. Stark denied these allegations to Congress, and Carter attempted to vouch for him within the SSR, but he remained a target for the Reserve. One night, as Carter ate at a diner, she returned to her table to find a message on a napkin telling her to be in the alley in five minutes. There she met a man with a car behind him who told her to come with him. Sensing danger, she punched him out and ran away from the car, but the driver stepped out to reveal Howard Stark—the man had been his butler, Edwin Jarvis.

Stark explained to Carter that someone had broken into the vault beneath his office and stolen a series of inventions that he'd deemed too dangerous for public use. He asked Carter to investigate the truth and clear his name. Carter reluctantly accepted, realizing that she was putting herself in jeopardy by associating with him. Stark himself was off to investigate some of those creations elsewhere, while Carter agreed to look for one object that was said to be appearing on the New York black market soon, Stark's formula for molecular nitramene. Stark explained that even a pinch worth of nitramene could detonate a city block. He encouraged Carter to take advantage of Edwin Jarvis's services as well.

The next morning, Agent Jack Thompson had traced the nitramene formula to a high-end club owner named Spider Raymond. Carter overheard this information while bringing Thompson and other agents coffee, and requested a sick day from Chief Roger Dooley as a means of subterfuge to scope out Raymond herself. That night, she went to the club in question incognito—with a blonde wig and an American accent—and used feminine wiles to work her way into Raymond's office. She attempted to flirt with him to learn the location of the nitramene formula—he proved even more receptive than expected and kissed her, but her sleep-inducing "Sweet Dreams" lipstick knocked him out in seconds. She broke into his safe and found that he possessed nitramene in the form of a glowing, grenade-sized orb, constituting an extremely dangerous explosive.

Carter called Jarvis for advice, and he consulted Stark's notes to inform her that rendering it inert would require a solution of sodium hydrogen carbonate and acetate. A bouncer came in to check on Raymond, and Carter was forced to knock him out with a stapler. Carter mingled on the dance floor of the club, trying to avoid the attention of Thompson and two other agents who had walked in. Meanwhile, the man to whom Raymond had arranged to sell the nitramene went up to his office and shot him dead. Thompson and his men found Raymond's body soon after and ordered the exits closed, but Carter managed to slip out in time. Back in her apartment, Carter utilized a series of household materials in the bathroom to successfully neutralize the nitramene while her roommate Colleen O'Brien slept in the main room. As she walked back out, she found that a gunman had shot Colleen in the head. The man attacked her, and she flung him through the window in desperation—upon looking out, she found that he had quickly escaped despite falling multiple stories. The man also had a conspicuous scar on his throat.

Carter consulted with Jarvis about figuring out who could have weaponized Stark's nitramene formula. They visited Anton Vanko at Stark Industries, who advised that the only refinery in the area still capable of such a thing belonged to Roxxon. He also informed them that the nitramene was still emitting small amounts of vita-radiation. Carter instantly recalled that vita-rays had been used in Project Rebirth. She and Jarvis went to the Roxxon refinery under the cover of night to find it suspiciously heavily guarded. Carter infiltrated the building and indeed found a pair of scientists working on creating nitramene bombs like the one Raymond had had. She knocked out one and chased the other to a van packed full of the bombs. The man had a scar on his throat identical to the gunman's and spoke by way of an electrolarynx. Carter asked him at gunpoint about the gunman, and he claimed that he no longer had a name. The man ominously warned her that "Leviathan" was coming, and threw a nitramene bomb at the ground. Gas began to pour from the bomb, and the man told her as he fled with the van that she had 30 seconds to escape. Carter urgently radioed Jarvis and the two escaped by car with moments to spare as the refinery went up in a violent explosion. The next day, the two met at the diner and Jarvis told her he'd scour Stark's files to find any clue as to the meaning of "Leviathan."

Recovering the Zodiac

While Carter longed to pursue field work, she was repeatedly assigned to codebreaking and data-analysis assignments, which she accomplished with ease. One night, after the rest of the department had gone out for a drink, Carter received a transmission detailing the latest known location of the Zodiac bioweapon. A group of SSR agents had recently tried and failed to recover the Zodiac on a previous attempt—desperate to prove herself, Carter now sought to recover it on her own. Prepared with a stock of potent gadgets, Carter went to the specified location, cleared out a warehouse of half a dozen small-time criminals, and recovered the Zodiac, a light blue liquid in a small vial. The next morning, Captain John Flynn scolded her for taking a mission without observing the proper protocol. At that moment, Flynn received a call from Howard Stark, who told him to inform Carter that she would be running the new organization S.H.I.E.L.D. with Stark and Chester Phillips effective immediately. Flynn did so with considerable humiliation in his face, and Carter proudly departed to her brighter future.

See also

• Peggy Carter of Earth-616