Impossible Missions Force - The Original Mission: Impossible TV Series

The Original Mission: Impossible TV Series

As depicted in the original TV series, the IMF agents were mostly parttime operatives, who held regular jobs elsewhere, and many of them were independently wealthy, hence they could not be bribed. The regular characters included:

• "Rollin Hand" (Martin Landau), a performer billed as "The Man Of A Million Faces", a brilliant infiltrator and a master of disguise.
• "Cinnamon Carter" (Barbara Bain), a high-class infiltrator and con artist with the looks of fashion model — hence a connsumate manipulator of foreign dictators, corrupt governments, their henchmen, etc.
• "Barney Collier" (Greg Morris), an engineering genius who owned his own electronics company, one that often worked with the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Department of Defense.
• "Willy Armitage" (Peter Lupus), a champion weightlifter called "The World's Strongest Man", and also a smart technician who works often with Barney Collier.

Later regulars included Leonard Nimoy as the stage magician "The Great Paris", Lesley Ann Warren as "Dana Lambert", and Lynda Day George as "Lisa Casey". Other occasional members included specialized experts such as doctors, lawyers, circus acrobats, and even entire repertory companies. The only "full-time" member identified was the team leader. In the first season of the original series, this was "Dan Briggs", played by Steven Hill, and beginning in the second season and continuing into the revival series, the team leader was "Jim Phelps", played by Peter Graves.

All team members displayed skill in social engineering and misdirection, improvisational acting, hand-to-hand combat, sleight of hand, and fluency in multiple languages. Where some operatives who specialized in these skills had reason to believe they would not be available, they often crosstrained the others in between missions.

The IMF agents were anonymously sent on covert missions to tackle the dangerous world of counterterrorism, espionage, political subversion, international crime, and American organized crime. Their international missions tended to undermine communist govenments, dictatorships, and other opponents of democracy. The TV series never directly specified exactlty whom oversaw the IMF, though it was some agency of the Federal Government of the United States. All of the team members were Americans, of course. They acted under nonofficial cover status, and if they were ever caught or killed, the U.S. Secretary of State would deny any knowledge of their actions.

In secret tape messages issued to the team leaders, references were made to "the Secretary", and whenever these were foreign operations, this Secretary is understood to be the Secretary of State. The IMF team leader was also given the option to reject a mission which he did not find to be suitable, or if he believed that it was truly impossible to accomplish. This has not yet been shown to happen in either television series or any of the movies.

However, in the film Mission: Impossible II there is a scene in which leader of the IMF, Ethan Hunt, met with the owner of the taped voice face-to-face, and the latter explicitly stated that Hunt does not have the option of not accepting a mission, even though the recorded briefings contain the famous phrase, "Your mission, should you decide to accept it...."

Other "missions" were undertaken by the team as personal favors to the team leader, or to a fellow member, but those were far less common.