Manhattan, New York City, headquarters of the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division.
Although it had been in operation for more than a year, S.H.I.E.L.D.'s laboratories and training facilities were still under constant construction and improvement.
This White House agency brought together key departments for cutting-edge strategic technology research and development, responses to unusual threats, intelligence, mutant research, and the application of mutant powers. It was gradually becoming the nation's most important defense and foreign-strike agency outside America's conventional military forces.
Over the past few months, S.H.I.E.L.D.'s personnel structure and operating methods had quietly undergone enormous changes.
Since taking on the additional role of S.H.I.E.L.D. director, Mr. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, had relentlessly reshuffled personnel, drawing on the Federal Bureau of Investigation, intelligence agencies, and other organizations and fields he had spent decades cultivating.
He had easily brought Roger Dooley, head of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s intelligence division, to heel. At the same time, he had pushed others aside while secretly arranging for Major William Stryker to join the Mutation Power Research Institute.
Meanwhile, Howard Stark, head of the Strategic Scientific Research and Development Division, had "coincidentally" become embroiled in a treason scandal over selling weapons to enemy nations.
For a time, S.H.I.E.L.D.—an organization with immense power and resources but no fully integrated system—became Edgar Hoover's personal stronghold, where he could call all the shots.
"S-sir. Every dose of the third-generation Super Soldier Serum requires authorization from the military and the White House. Have we taken too many this time?"
During World War II, the prototype Super Soldier Serum developed by the German-born scientist Dr. Abraham Erskine was considered the first-generation enhancement serum.
Erskine had barely succeeded in his experiment when he was shot by a Nazi spy and then mysteriously disappeared. After that, no complete formula for the prototype