The X-Files

Character arc

Within the series, the birth date of the Smoking Man is never revealed. Much of his background is revealed in the fourth season episode "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man," where one of the conspiracy theorists known as The Lone Gunmen claims Smoking Man was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on August 20, 1940. This, however, is directly contradicted by the third season episode "Apocrypha," in which a young adult Smoking Man is one of three government agents who interrogate a severely burned submariner in the U.S. Navy Hospital at Pearl Harbor, on August 19, 1953. In that scene, Smoking Man was played by 24-year-old actor Craig Warkentin. Yet according to The Lone Gunmen's chronology, Smoking Man would then have been only 12 years old.

Also in "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man," he is said to have grown up an orphan, his father having been executed by electric chair in Louisiana for treason for working as a Soviet spy, and his mother having died of lung cancer from smoking. In 1962, he was stationed along with Bill Mulder at the US Army Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He was known for having a long history in black ops and American intelligence. He was potentially involved in the training of Cuban rebels in the Bay of Pigs. It is also revealed that he personally carried out the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King as revealed in "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man", though the veracity of that episode is somewhat unclear.[2] In his first appearance in the series, he oversees FBI agent Dana Scully's briefing and debriefing, and later disposes of evidence Mulder and Scully had brought back from their investigation of an alien abduction.[3] With the Smoking Man hiding truth from the public, Mulder seeks to reveal it to the public and the truth about the disappearance of his sister, Samantha. This leads to a rivalry that lasts until the end of the series.[4]