Blaise Metreweli, the first woman to head Britain\u2019s MI6 spy service, is a self-confessed \u201cgeek\u201d whose appointment comes as the intelligence world faces growing challenges from cyber plots and AI.<\/p>\n
While actress Judi Dench has played the head of the MI6 Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in the James Bond film franchise for years, in reality the 17 chiefs so far have all been men.<\/p>\n
Metreweli will be the 18th head of Britain\u2019s foreign intelligence outfit when she takes up the role in the autumn, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Like her predecessors she will be referred to as \u201cC\u201d \u2014 not \u201cM\u201d as Dench is called in the movies based on Ian Fleming\u2019s daring fictional agent.<\/p>\n
The head of MI6 is the only publicly named member of the organisation and reports directly to the foreign minister.<\/p>\n
Little is known about the 47-year-old Metreweli, who will take over from outgoing MI6 head Richard Moore.<\/p>\n
Currently, she is MI6\u2019s director general \u2014 known as \u201cQ\u201d \u2014 with responsibility for technology and innovation at the service, Downing Street said in a statement.<\/p>\n
Metreweli is described as a career intelligence officer who joined the service in 1999 having studied anthropology at Cambridge University.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe is an incredibly experienced, credible, successful operational officer. She is widely respected,\u201d former MI6 chief Alex Younger told the BBC.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe has been thinking deeply for a long time about how we prosper in the nexus between man and machine.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019s got a plan. And I think that she knows how to enact it. That is the way MI6 remains at the cutting edge,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Born into a family with roots in Eastern Europe \u2014 Metreweli derives from the Georgian name Metreveli \u2014 the future spy boss was part of the Cambridge rowing team that defeated Oxford in 1997.<\/p>\n
She joined MI6 in 1999 as a field officer and \u201chas spent most of her career in operational roles in the Middle East and Europe\u201d, according to the UK government.<\/p>\n
\u2018Historic\u2019 <\/p>\n
Metreweli also spent time at MI5, the domestic intelligence service, as a director, the government said, without providing further details.<\/p>\n
She speaks Arabic, according to UK media.<\/p>\n
The Financial Times interviewed her in 2022 for an article on female spies, where she was initially quoted under a pseudonym to encourage other women to join the intelligence service.<\/p>\n
She described herself as a \u201cgeek\u201d and said she had always wanted to be a spy.<\/p>\n
It was revealed that she grew up abroad, enjoyed learning encryption techniques at a young age, and had at least one child while stationed outside the UK.<\/p>\n
Metreweli asserted that in the male-dominated world of intelligence, women had certain useful skills.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the moments where you\u2019re deciding to become an agent, you\u2019re having to make thousands of risk-based calculations, but you\u2019re not quite sure how to respond emotionally,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s no etiquette. Ironically, it becomes a bit of a no man\u2019s land. In that space, women are really good at finding common ground. We are the\u00a0liminal\u00a0ones.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her appointment comes over three decades after MI5 appointed its first female chief.<\/p>\n
Stella Rimington held the position from 1992-1996, followed by Eliza Manningham-Buller from 2002-2007.<\/p>\n
The UK intelligence and security organisation GCHQ appointed its first woman chief, Anne Keast-Butler, in 2023.<\/p>\n
Starmer called Metreweli\u2019s appointment \u201chistoric\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe United Kingdom is facing threats on an unprecedented scale \u2014 be it aggressors who send their spy ships to our waters or hackers whose sophisticated cyber plots seek to disrupt our public services,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Blaise Metreweli, the first woman to head Britain\u2019s MI6 spy service, is a self-confessed \u201cgeek\u201d whose appointment comes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":191564,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5018,3,4],"tags":[1942,748,7499,393,4884,2817,27002,1144,712,34880,15689,16,15,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-191563","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-britain","8":"category-uk","9":"category-united-kingdom","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-britain","12":"tag-editors-picks","13":"tag-england","14":"tag-great-britain","15":"tag-intelligence","16":"tag-londonwires","17":"tag-northern-ireland","18":"tag-scotland","19":"tag-spy","20":"tag-u-k","21":"tag-uk","22":"tag-united-kingdom","23":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191563"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191563\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/191564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}