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At the start of the Avengers: Age of Ultron movie, the Avengers are on a mission, attempting to retrieve Loki's staff from HYDRA. They're attacking a castle which is a HYDRA base run by Strucker and they've got a Chitauri Leviathan corpse at the base.

Presumably this came from the battle of New York from the first Avengers movie, but how did HYDRA get the corpse of a Leviathan out of New York without S.H.I.E.L.D doing anything about it?

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    It probably has something to with the fact that at the time, HYDRA was part of SHIELD. – KSmarts May 11 '15 at 19:28
  • FWIW they're called leviathans – user23604 Nov 29 '16 at 15:15
  • Oh ok thank you. I looked around on the Internet for the name before posting and the first article that I found had used "whales", so I used just that. – Achilles Nov 29 '16 at 15:16
  • I doubt he was trying to create his own leviathan, but I'm sure he was studying it for whatever benefits he might be able to uncover. – Steve-O Nov 29 '16 at 15:32
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+100

As noted in the comments, as seen during the events of Captain America, Winter Soldier, Hydra had infiltrated every level of SHIELD by the 2010s. We know that SHIELD was already doing alien weapon research (The Destroyer weapon that Coulson used) and Hydra Tesseract weapon research (Hydra guns Cap found on the helicarrier). They even "converted" Hydra scientists, like Arnim Zola, whom in turn decided to poison SHIELD from the inside.

By 2010s, Hydra agents were everywhere, from low level rank and file, special agents (Jasper Sitwell), elite soldiers (STRIKE team leader Brock Rumlow), the World Security Council (Alexander Pierce), and even senators (Senator Stern, the prick from Iron Man).

These two factors combined, would have meant SHIELD either intentionally set up to study the Leviathan for further benefit, or Hydra intercepted it, as they did the Scepter in the Winter Soldier stinger.

It's highly likely that the Hydra base was a black site bankrolled by SHIELD until it collapsed.

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By using SHIELD.

By this point, it has been revealed (in Captain America: The Winter Soldier) that SHIELD had long ago been compromised by Hydra, the organisation that Baron Von Strucker was an important part of.

As a high ranking member of Hydra, he would have been able to have his people within SHIELD deliver the Leviathan corpse to him when the clean up operations were taking place following Battle of New York (seen in Avengers Assemble). We know that SHIELD were an important part of the clean up operation thanks to the short film Marvel One-Shot "Item 47", which sees Agents Sitwell and Blake attempting to tie-up some lose ends from the Chitauri Invasion.

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  • Thank you. Makes sense but there are a couple of things that don't seem to add up - Fury was still in-charge of Shield then (unless the leviathan got misplaced after Shield was dismantled). And why bother to take the unnecessary risk of smuggling it when it was possible to study it from within Shield – Achilles Nov 29 '16 at 15:40
  • Continued (the iPhone app doesn't let me edit my comment) - study it from within the Shield assuming Shield was completely in control of Hydra. It's probably easier to smuggle the research data than the humongous alien leviathan skeleton. – Achilles Nov 29 '16 at 15:43
  • @Achilles Fury may have been in charge of SHIELD, but we know that at least two members of the World Security Council - who sit above SHIELD in the hierarchy - were Hydra members too. If Fury is given the order to allow this Leviathan corpse to be transported to Sokovia, why wouldn't he obey? Alternatively, who is saying that Fury even knew the exact details of the clean-up operation? It would be easy for Hydra to hide this information from him. – Dr R Dizzle Nov 29 '16 at 15:52
  • Fury is more of a "sort this s-- ituation out" kind of guy. – OrangeDog Nov 29 '16 at 17:29

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