Lieutenant Commander (SEAL) Samuel Fisher, USN (Ret.), is a former member of Third Echelon, a top-secret sub-branch within the National Security Agency (NSA) and currently the commander of Fourth Echelon, a newly created covert special operations & counter-terrorism unit answerable only to the President of the United States. Fisher was born in 1957 in the affluent Baltimore suburbs of Towson, Maryland. While not much is known of his childhood, it is known that Sam attended a military boarding school after the death of his parents when he was a child until being accepted into the United States Naval Academy, where he graduated from in 1977 with a bachelor's degree in Political Science and commissioned as an Ensign in the U.S. Navy. Soon after, his personnel file was flagged for recruitment by the Navy SEALs, which he joined after passing their grueling selection process and training program. In the mid-1980s, while Fisher was attached to the CIA (though still on active duty with the Navy) and working under an official diplomatic cover in Georgia (at the time part of the USSR), he met an NSA cryptanalyst named Regan Burns and they married in 1984/85 at a small ceremony at Rhein-Main Air Base in Frankfurt, Germany, after learning that Regan was pregnant. On 31 May 1985, Regan gave birth to their only child whom was named Sarah.Fisher and Regan divorced after three years of marriage, and after gaining custody of Sarah, Regan reverted to her maiden name and changed Sarah's as well. When Regan died from ovarian cancer sometime in 2000, Fisher gained guardianship of Sarah, moved back to the U.S. and took a bureaucratc job with the CIA, where he worked in weapons development as well as studied experimental weaponry and information warfare, in order to spend more time with her and focus on her upbringing.