James "Jim" Phelps was the Director of the Impossible Missions Force and the "captain" of its most reliable "mission team" for several years. As the IMF Director and mission-team captain, it was his job to plan out the missions that his team would accomplish, considering all known, suspected, or possible angles. If anything failed to go according to plan during the mission, Phelps was quick enough to improvise so that the objective could still be obtained. ("The Controllers") Though this was never actually revealed in any of the Missions, Phelps could be assumed to have served in the Intelligence Unit of whichever branch of the United States armed forces could claim him as a veteran, as he was as familiar as Daniel Briggs was with grand-scale confidence games which his mission teams usuall