Sam Fisher (Splinter Cell) - Background

Background

Lieutenant Commander Samuel Fisher, USN (Ret.), is a former member of Third Echelon, a top-secret sub-branch within the National Security Agency. He is 177 cm (5 feet 10 inches) tall, weighs 78 kg (170 pounds), has greying dark brown hair and green eyes. He was the first person to be recruited as a field agent of the "Splinter Cell" program, Third Echelon's highly clandestine black ops project. Fisher is a master in the art of stealth, trained in various espionage techniques and infiltration tactics, and an expert in urban warfare tactics as well as extensive knowledge about various other skills such as combat tactics, surveillance, computer hacking, explosives and the use of nearly any conventional weapon ambidextrously and is extremely proficient in fieldcraft. He is a highly-trained expert in the Israeli martial art of Krav Maga and specializes in Night Ops. In Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction, he utilized the Center Axis Relock, a modern shooting stance used in close quarters combat. He prefers to work alone in the field. When not on assignment or at Fort Meade, Fisher resided in a townhouse in Towson, Maryland.

Fisher was born on August 8, 1957 in Towson, Maryland. While not much is known about his early life, it is known that Fisher attended a military boarding school shortly after his parents died when he was a child. He later graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy with a Bachelor of Science degree in Political Science. While Fisher was stationed at a U.S. Air Force base in Frankfurt, Germany during the 1980s, he met Regan Burns and they married in 1984. They had one daughter together whom they named Sarah (born May 31, 1985). Fisher and Regan later divorced and she had Sarah's surname changed. Regan died from ovarian cancer sometime in 2000 and Sarah was killed by a "drunk driver" in 2008. However, three years later he hears a rumor that the death of his daughter was no accident and goes to Malta to investigate. After being captured by Third Echelon in Malta, Grim reveals that Sarah is alive but if Sam wants to see his daughter again he has to help her investigate Reed. At Third Echelon HQ, Grim plays a recording that Lambert made before his death in New York explaining that Sarah's death was faked to prevent her from being used as leverage by a mole inside Third Echelon to compromise Sam and Third Echelon.

Sam's direct supervisor and handler was Colonel Irving Lambert, USA (Ret.) (deceased), who coordinated intelligence and objective updates with Fisher during his missions. In addition to being supported by Lambert, Sam was also accompanied and supported on operations by NSA employees Vernon 'Junior' Wilkes (deceased), Anna Grímsdóttir, Frances Coen and William Redding (introduced in Chaos Theory). One of his aides, Dermot Paul ("D.P.") Brunton (introduced in Pandora Tomorrow), became the head of SHADOWNET Operations, a black-ops group within Third Echelon which uses teams of operatives.

Fisher has conducted operations in Canada, the Democratic Republic of Congo, China, Iceland, Israel, East Timor, Indonesia, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iraq, North and South Korea, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Myanmar, Serbia, the Republic of Georgia, and France in order to complete his missions. He has also conducted operations inside the United States, places such as Los Angeles International Airport, New York City, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., Ellsworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas and the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

Ubisoft's lead character artist Martin Caya established in early interviews about the first game of the series that during his career Fisher had served in Afghanistan, where he had an experience in which he was forced to hide under dead bodies in order to avoid being killed in the middle of an operation. Caya also established that Fisher had served in East Germany and in "other Soviet satellite countries leading up to the collapse of the USSR."

The novel version of Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell establishes that Sam hated his time in the CIA, and that he mostly had official cover (i.e. he was a "diplomatic aide"). The "Bank" mission in Chaos Theory established that Fisher served in Panama during Operation Just Cause when Redding reveals in the level's pre-mission briefing that Fisher was part of a CIA team that raided the same bank during the conflict searching for some of Noriega's drug money. The "Bank" mission also established that he served in Kuwait, where he said he spent the months leading up to the Gulf War "sleeping in a ditch on the road between Baghdad and Kuwait" shortly after the invasion in 1990. The end of the training mission in Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell established that he saw action during the Gulf War in 1991 and was active in Kuwait when Lambert tells Sam "I hope you don't mind I told him some of your stories from Kuwait". Wilkes makes a comment stating "I've heard crazy things about your work".

It was revealed during the flashback level in the series' fifth installment, Splinter Cell: Conviction, that Sam served in southern Iraq during the Liberation of Kuwait campaign when he led a four-man U.S. Navy SEAL squad on a search-and-destroy operation in al-Diwaniyah, where he and his team was ambushed by Iraqi military forces while on a routine patrol on a highway leading out of Kuwait back toward Baghdad during Operation Desert Storm. Although Sam survived, two of his teammates were killed, and he was subsequently captured. However, his teammate and second-in-command, Victor Coste (callsign "Husky"), who survived the ambush and was left for dead, rescued him after he fought his way through several Iraqi soldiers in order to reach Fisher, who was being tortured for information regarding their mission in the region.

The novel Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Checkmate revealed that Sam served in Senegal where his team was deployed to hunt down and assassinate a French black market arms dealer who had been arming both sides of a brush war between Senegal and Mauritania. Fisher’s team eventually tracked down the arms dealer in Dakar where they eliminated him after weeks of searching through the jungles along the Senegal-Mali border.

Shortly after Fisher rescues Douglas Shetland from a hostage situation during the "East Timor" mission in the second game, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, Shetland established that Fisher had served with the Navy SEALs when he asks Sam "Where are the rest of the SEALs?" to which Sam replies and establishing that he left the Navy in 1996 by saying "I came alone. Haven't been Navy for a decade." It's also been established in the original Splinter Cell in the interview with Sam found in the extra features that he was indeed with the Navy SEALs, when he says "I've had the good fortune in my life to work with some really talented and professional people. U.S. Navy SEALs, the folks at Third Echelon. All real pros." The "Sam Fisher Interview" was an exclusive behind-the-scenes video with Sam going undercover as Ubisoft's "technical advisor" after the "Presidential Palace" level. According to his DD214 from the website for Double Agent, Sam rose to the rank of Lieutenant Commander (O-4) in the Navy, where at some point he spent nearly three years (2 years, 11 months) as an intelligence analyst.