Sydney Bristow - Biographical Information

Biographical Information

Sydney Bristow was born April 17, 1975. For the first six years of her life she lived with both of her parents, Jack and Laura Bristow (real name Irina Derevko). Although her father's work with the CIA kept him away from home much of the time. Sydney and her family were living in rural Maryland until, at the age of two, Jack was transferred to Los Angeles. In 1981 her mother, who was also an undercover agent for the KGB, faked her own death to prevent being apprehended by the FBI. Afterwards Jack was taken into custody for some time, because it was believed that he also was part of a larger conspiracy. Jack named Arvin Sloane as Sydney's temporary guardian. Sydney went to live with Sloane and his wife Emily, for a time (Note that this is a retcon as it was previously established that Sydney did not meet Arvin or Emily until Sydney had already started working for SD-6. Though Sydney had stated that she had large memory gaps from around the time of her mother's death indicating that perhaps something else had happened to remove her memory of that time).

When Jack was finally cleared, he began drinking heavily and became more of an absentee father, leaving Sydney to be raised by nannies. In her later childhood, Sydney began exhibiting unusually high intelligence and problem solving abilities.

When Sydney was 19 years old and a freshman in college, a man approached her and told her that he worked with US intelligence and that they wanted to interview her because she fitted a profile. She declined at first but then decided to join them. After meeting with an organization she believed was the Central Intelligence Agency, she signed "dozens of non-disclosure agreements" and was offered a job.

They had Sydney take a job as an office assistant on the twentieth floor of Credit Dauphine, a corporate bank in downtown Los Angeles. She assumed that the bank was somehow affiliated with the CIA. When she told her father about her job after about a month, he ordered her to quit because as a double agent within SD-6, he knew the bank was a front. Sydney angrily refused to quit and this led to the beginning of a several year estrangement in their relationship.

Eventually she was told that she was ready for the transition, which involved eight months of training. It was during the training that Sydney first heard the term SD-6. At this time, she believed that SD-6 was affiliated with the CIA, that it was a black ops division of the CIA, funded by the CIA's black budget. They led her to believe that SD-6 was one of these divisions and that that was why they didn't operate through Langley, Virginia.

The transition ended when they made reference to SD-6 headquarters. They told her they'd take her there. What she didn't realize was that the headquarters was in the same building. Her role within SD-6 was desk work, at first, but she advanced quickly. Within the first year, she was assigned to reconnaissance missions.

Sydney was told that the objective of SD-6 was "the retrieval and study of intelligence, both military and industrial, throughout the world that is critical to the superiority and survival of the United States of America."

Seven years after joining SD-6, Sydney discovered that SD-6 was actually a branch of the Alliance of Twelve, an international organized crime group involved in the trade of intelligence and weapons that was an enemy of the United States.