Cinnamon CARTER

Cinnamon Carter's role as an IMF agent was that of "femme fatale" and "woman in distress." In her IMF dossier, she was noted as being a successful model and the dossier scenes during her three seasons on the show showed at least three different magazine covers that she was featured on. Carter was often used to play on the vanities of powerful men to get them to lower their defenses. Frequently, she would play the role of a beautiful American woman on the make to draw the subject in. On occasion, she would play a woman in distress to distract someone. Carter never adopted elaborate disguises, as did practically everyone else on the program, because Barbara Bain, the actress playing her, suffered from claustrophobia, and could not abide being hemmed in by heavy makeup. In a nod to Bain's condition, Carter, too, was shown to be claustrophobic. However, in "The Heir Apparent" she is made up as an aging Princess, heir to a nation, while in "The Bunker" she is masked as the objective scientist's wife. In episodes where someone was needed to get into tight spaces, another female agent would be brought in, but in "The Slave" Cinnamon, in spite of her claustrophobia, is seen being placed into and later coming out of the false bottom of a food carriage as part of the IMF plan. Cinnamon's claustrophobia would be used against her in a devastating way in the third-season mission, "The Exchange," when an enemy intelligence service discovers her phobia after capturing her and uses it in an attempt to break her. While Cinnamon was being interrogated, she demonstrated that she had been trained in counter-interrogation techniques, resisting all attempts to get her to give up the team.

While Carter was rarely called upon to defend herself in hand-to-hand combat, she was shown to have at least the basic skills to disable a single adversary as evidenced in missions such as "Odds On Evil" and "The Town," and she was confident handling a gun. Like Rollin Hand, on rare occasions her assignments did lead to her falling for her target.

Barbara Bain was Martin Landau's wife at the time, and a contract dispute Landau had with the program's producers as the third season wound down resulted in both leaving the cast together.