Melissa Cole was an operative for the Central Intelligence Agency working with Agent Robbie Hewitt of ASIS, who was responsible for the detaining of Sayid Jarrah at Heathrow Airport in London, England. When she informs Sayid that the reason he was detained was not because he was a terrorist, but because he knew one. She told him that his friend Essam Tazir was a member of the terrorist cell in Sydney and that an associate of his had stolen 300 pounds of C-4 from an Australian base outside of Melbourne, and that if he cooperated in helping the Australian government retrieve this C-4 that he would be given the location of Noor Abed Jazeem with whom he’d been estranged with for years.