The sultry spy Contessa Valentina Allegra de La Fontaine was born in northern Italy in 1928. Her father was a French nobleman, Le Comte de La Fontaine, who had married an Italian woman and settled in her homeland, where Val grew up. Although the nation was under the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, Val’s parents supported the pro-democracy movement, and being nobles, pledged their allegiance to King Vittorio Emanuele III rather than whomever happened to be running the government. However, they became embittered when Italy joined with Nazi Germany in declaring war on France in 1940.
In late 1943, Val’s parents were both murdered by the Nazis for having given aid and comfort to the Italian Resistance movement. Devastated by her loss, the teen-aged Val nevertheless joined the Resistance and waged a reckless guerilla war against both the Nazis and the fascist Italian troops who remained loyal to Mussolini after his ouster. All through 1944, she proved herself to be an effective fighter and gained a fearsome reputation. Finally, in April 1945, the war came to an end and Val returned home, claiming her title as a contessa.
Now 17 years old, Val decided to attend a university in the United States of America. While there, she was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency, based on her wartime exploits. When she graduated from college in 1950, Val returned to Italy, and at the behest of the CIA, she took an administrative position at SIFAR (Servizio Informazioni Forze Armate), the new Italian intelligence service which was formed under CIA direction and control.
After a few years, she resigned in frustration over the fact that she was not permitted to be a field agent or, indeed, much more than a secretary. Using her family fortune, Val became a member of the emerging “jet set,” attending glamorous parties and elegant social affairs across Europe and North America. Eventually, though, she grew bored and dissatisfied with this life of indolent luxury and conspicuous consumption, and she sought a way to once more serve the cause of international justice.
Then, in the early weeks of 1963, she was recruited into the newly formed international intelligence agency S.H.I.E.L.D. as part of its first class of agents. She jumped at the chance and enthusiastically underwent one year of specialized training. During this period, she befriended fellow recruit Clay Quartermain. Val finished her training and became a full-fledged S.H.I.E.L.D. agent in February 1964. Around this same time she met the agency’s Executive Director, Nick Fury. The two felt strongly attracted to each other, and before long they became lovers.
Val quickly rose through the ranks, and in 1965 she was assigned to a task force of female agents, which came to be dubbed Femme Force One. Val’s romantic relationship with Fury faltered when he started seeing an old flame, Laura Brown, on the side. In response, Val began flirting with Captain America, only to find herself becoming infatuated with the stalwart hero. After a contentious few months, Val realized how deeply she cared for Fury and reconciled with him, after which she became openly hostile toward Captain America. When the leader of Femme Force One, Sharon Carter, resigned from the agency, Val was tapped to take over. She then led her squad on numerous missions around the world, occasionally encountering other costumed heroes such as the Black Widow, Daredevil, and Spider-Man. Femme Force One operated primarily out of the agency’s huge airborne headquarters, the Helicarrier.
After six years, Femme Force One was disbanded and Val was promoted to Special Director in charge of the S.H.I.E.L.D. public relations department, becoming one of Fury’s top advisors. She struggled with what a sprawling bureaucracy the agency had gradually become, which led to serious problems of waste, fraud, and abuse among the thousands of agents scattered around the world. When the Helicarrier crashed in the southwestern United States during an unauthorized operation involving the She-Hulk, S.H.I.E.L.D. transferred its administrative headquarters to a nondescript office building in New York City, where Val then took up full-time residence. Val often sought respite from the pressures of her job behind the wheel of her black 1965 Jaguar XK-E sports car.
In 1974, Val was saddened when Clay Quartermain died during Fury’s botched attempt to retrieve the radioactive power core from the wreckage of the Helicarrier. Fury also failed to prevent the power core from being stolen by HYDRA. Immediately afterward, Fury was brought up on charges by his superiors. Val was shocked when, rather than answer the charges, Fury fled and became a fugitive. Though emotionally conflicted, Val believed it was her duty to help bring Fury in, believing he could then clear his name. Thus, when Fury arranged a secret rendezvous with her, Val informed S.H.I.E.L.D.’s new executive director, Jasper Sitwell, who set an ambush. To Val’s horror, Sitwell’s squad of agents tried to kill Fury rather than apprehend him, and she felt that Sitwell had betrayed her trust. Luckily, Fury escaped and went back into hiding. Val then joined with former Howling Commandos Timothy “Dum Dum” Dugan and Gabe Jones to launch their own unofficial investigation into Fury’s situation. Their efforts were stymied a few weeks later when Val was abruptly transferred to a mysterious Project Delta, which somehow involved nearly a third of all S.H.I.E.L.D. agents.
Val and numerous other Project Delta initiates were transported to a secret installation where she found her old romantic rival Laura Brown apparently in charge. Val was imprisoned with another agent, Kate Neville, who had discovered Delta’s true purpose was to gradually replace all S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel with synthetic doppelgängers. The initiates were then moved to S.H.I.E.L.D.’s orbital platform for final processing, but with unexpected help from sleeper agent Alexander Goodwin Pierce, CIA liaison officer Al MacKenzie, and the latest Madame Hydra, the initiates broke free and fought their way to the station’s command center. There, they found Fury a prisoner of the mastermind behind Delta, a highly evolved LMD android with delusions of grandeur. The android’s scheme was foiled when Quartermain’s doppelgänger went rogue and destroyed the orbital platform, though the humans aboard were permitted to escape back to Earth. As it turned out, the Deltite androids had been manipulating S.H.I.E.L.D., HYDRA, A.I.M., and the Roxxon corporation for many years. Val was distraught to learn that many of her friends and associates had been killed and replaced with androids, and in the aftermath of the scandal, S.H.I.E.L.D. was officially abolished.
Fury abruptly broke off his relationship with Val, feeling she had personally betrayed him, and took up with Kate Neville before they both went underground. It was an acrimonious split with bitterness and resentment on both sides. Heartbroken, Val had an affair with Al MacKenzie and followed him back to the CIA, where they grew closer over the next several months. In the spring of 1975, Pierce helped Val and MacKenzie track down Fury and Neville when a neo-Nazi terrorist organization calling itself the Death’s Head Squadron seemingly murdered Dugan and targeted Fury. The quintet recruited the unstable telepath known as Network Nina, a former head of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s ESP division, and brought down the terrorists, discovering their extraterrestrial origins in the process. It was the aliens’ technology, seized by HYDRA founder Baron Wolfgang von Strucker during World War II, that eventually led to the development of the Deltite androids. The aliens had also telepathically absorbed Strucker’s Nazi ideology, which drove them to finally destroy themselves. Following this successful mission, the United Nations agreed to allow Fury’s new task force to form the basis for a streamlined S.H.I.E.L.D. to deal with such international threats. Despite their misgivings, Val and MacKenzie both resigned from the CIA to continue working with Fury.
Over the summer, Val supervised the construction of a new Helicarrier, working closely with Stark Enterprises. Its maiden voyage took Fury’s task force to rescue Pierce from a resurgent HYDRA cell based on an island in the South China Sea. Their leader, Madame Hydra, had become obsessed with Pierce during the Deltite affair. Her forces were routed, and before committing suicide, she revealed that her group had been financed by the Yellow Claw. During the mopping-up operation, Dugan was found alive and well, though his presence there was a complete mystery. However, both MacKenzie and Neville had been badly injured during the battle and required hospitalization. As the two agents recovered, Val realized she’d fallen in love with MacKenzie and finally accepted that both she and Fury had moved on from their old love affair. This enabled all four of them to develop a less contentious working relationship going forward. With her many years of experience, Contessa Valentina Allegra de La Fontaine proved to be a valuable asset to the all-new S.H.I.E.L.D. as it faced the challenges of a changing world.
Val is pictured above in her official S.H.I.E.L.D. uniform from the agency’s heyday in the early 1970s.
First Appearance: Strange Tales #159
Final Appearance: Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. v.2 #14
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