MYSTIQUE

The most successful disguise Raven Darkhölme ever wore had no shapeshifting in it at all — it had a security clearance. As plain human civil servant Raven Darkhölme, Mystique rose rapidly through the United States Civil Service to become Deputy Director of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency inside the Department of Defense. The desk gave a mutant terrorist legitimate, daily access to America’s military secrets and its most advanced experimental weaponry — which she duly diverted to her own criminal and subversive purposes.

The double life collided with the X-Men in Uncanny X-Men Vol. 1 #158 (1982), by Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum. Wolverine and Storm infiltrate the Pentagon with Carol Danvers to plant a Starjammers-built virus that will erase the X-Men from federal databases — and run straight into Rogue, then still Mystique’s protégé in the Brotherhood. Carol slips away to run the virus and is followed by Mystique, on the premises in her Darkhölme identity, who shoots her; the bullet only grazes, Carol overpowers her, and military police arrest one of the Pentagon’s own senior officials while the virus quietly deletes the X-Men — and Carol’s files — from government memory.

The DARPA years were load-bearing for everything around them. In that chair she attempted to steal Centurion weaponry from S.H.I.E.L.D., spied on Carol Danvers, and — on Destiny’s warning that Ms. Marvel endangered Rogue — beat Carol’s lover Michael Barnett to death. The woman the X-Men fought as a blue-skinned saboteur spent her weekdays being briefed by the very establishment she robbed: the Brotherhood’s founder, drawing a federal salary, with a parking space at the Pentagon.