After cutting his teeth on white-collar crime, he was rotated into the New York office, home of one of the F.B.I.'s largest foreign counterintelligence operations.
In 1993, Mr. Noesner helped secure the release of 35 people from the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Tex., before he was rotated off the case after a disagreement over negotiating strategy.
After his "Lawrence of Macedonia" experience, he was rotated back to Washington, where he was assigned to work as special assistant to former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who had been asked by President Lyndon B. Johnson to provide advice on how to respond to France's threat to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
But on Saturday, he was rotated in on the offensive line.
In November 1963, he was rotated back to shore duty, serving nine months on the staff of the Naval Air Basic Training Command at Pensacola.
Shortly after this final mission, his tour of duty ended and he was rotated back to the United States for an extended rest and vacation, which he spent with his family.
At the same time he's rotating through a selection of missiles and bombs.
(The Marines got a new commandant, Gen. James F. Amos, last month, and the Air Force chief, Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, retires in 2012 unless he is rotated into another senior position, which is possible).
With the idea of seeing whether the universe was rotating, he developed an instrument called a differential microwave radiometer to detect differences between the temperature of the background in two different parts of the sky and mounted it on a U-2 spy plane to make measurements.
