How New British Spy Chief Blaise Metreweli Is Revamping MI6

For a supposedly secret organization, Britain’s foreign intelligence service spends a lot of time honing its public profile. Key messages emphasize the relevance, effectiveness, and modern management style of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), colloquially known as MI6. Forget the James Bond films, with their flamboyant stunts and louche sexual antics, or the starchy, tweedy, more realistic world of John le Carré’s George Smiley novels, where espionage was the British establishment’s shadowy outstation, never publicly mentioned by name. Today’s SIS advertises itself as a mirror of modern Britain: diverse, inclusive, and classless. If you want to join, you do not wait for a tap on the shoulder from an Oxbridge don; you go to the website. The service’s former boss (known as “C”), Sir Richard Moore, even coined the tag “#ForgetJamesBond” on a post on X about family-friendly careers at MI6.

Some might wonder, therefore, if the appointment of Blaise Metreweli, the first woman to lead SIS, is part of this image campaign. She was showcased (under a pseudonym of “Ada”) in a flattering Financial Times profile in 2022 of the up-and-coming women who, at the time, occupied three out of the four top deputy roles in the service. Moore had repeatedly made it clear that he wanted a woman to succeed him—a case of life following art, given that 007’s boss has been played by Judi Dench in eight Bond films since 1995.

Some might wonder, therefore, if the appointment of Blaise Metreweli, the first woman to lead SIS, is part of this image campaign. She was showcased (under a pseudonym of “Ada”) in a flattering Financial Times profile in 2022 of the up-and-coming women who, at the time, occupied three out of the four top deputy roles in the service. Moore had repeatedly made it clear that he wanted a woman to succeed him—a case of life following art, given that 007’s boss has been played by Judi Dench in eight Bond films since 1995.

But attributing her elevation largely to her gender would be a mistake. For a start, Metreweli had a distinguished operational career, ending up as head of “Q” branch, which deals with science and technology. A monicker originating from the Bond films, Q is now established parlance for the British spy agency’s inventors of nifty gadgets. Remember 007’s Aston Martin in Goldfinger, which came with built-in machine guns, an oil slick dispenser, and an ejector seat? In contrast to the fictional car, the real-life counterparts are miracles of miniaturization and concealment. Some have wondered if Metreweli’s only distinctive fashion trait, a penchant for large brooches, could be a nod to the long history of jewelry as spy gear.

Other biographical details are sparse. Married with a family, she is the granddaughter of post-war immigrants from Eastern Europe. As a child, she lived in Hong Kong while her father, an eminent doctor, was working there. She went to one of Britain’s most storied private high schools, Westminster, and then to Cambridge University, where she was a champion rower. She continues to row with a fiercely discreet group of friends. Her only job outside MI6 was a cross-posting to the domestic sister agency, MI5.

Now, Metreweli is signaling a change in MI6, one that harks back to an earlier and more swashbuckling era. In her first public speech, she made only scant mention of terrorism, a top priority for more than two decades, or of China, which the government regards as the biggest impending threat to national security. She also all but ignored the United States, once Britain’s most important intelligence ally, and now regarded by many in London as leaky, unpredictable, and, on some fronts, outright hostile.

Instead, she focused on Russia’s campaign to export chaos, citing arson, sabotage, cyberattacks on critical infrastructure, drones buzzing airports and military bases, “aggressive” undersea activity, and influence operations that create and exploit “fractures within societies.” In this space “between peace and war,” she said, MI6 would no longer restrict itself to understanding its foes, she said. It would actively counter them: “We will sharpen our edge and impact with audacity, tapping into—if you like—our historical SOE instincts,” she continued, referring to Britain’s wartime Special Operations Executive.

Short of invoking D-Day, she could scarcely have found a more evocative historical reference. Winston Churchill set up SOE in 1940, when Britain was fighting all but alone against Nazi Germany, and gave it the mandate to “set Europe ablaze.” Its mission was to conduct sabotage and aid resistance groups across German-occupied Europe.

Visitors listen to a briefing by an actor playing the role of a Special Operations Executive spy at the Churchill War Rooms in central London on Oct. 4, 2013. Carl Court/AFP via Getty Images

It was also a mission that has become highly unfashionable in MI6 in recent years, when the service focused its budget (secret, but in the low billions) on collecting the best possible high-level intelligence. When Moore took over in 2020, he closed down an expensively constructed directorate called Strategic Advantage, which focused the agency’s efforts on hostile state activity by Russia, China, and Iran, several sources with knowledge of the matter told me. Insiders decried the idea that MI6 should be the government’s all-purpose gadget for each and every secret mission. Instead, the service focused on providing Britain’s decision-makers with actionable secrets. The results could be spectacular: Going into a negotiation when you know the other side’s bargaining position makes a speedy and favorable outcome more likely.

But some customers of the intelligence service questioned the value of this approach. “Underwhelming,” a minister who used to see SIS’s output told me. In 2024, former SIS deputy head Nigel Inkster publicly castigated his old service for its diminished expertise on China, saying: “MI6 clearly does have difficulties, in terms of language expertise and collective general historical and cultural awareness” of China. In my conversations with them, other intelligence insiders asked similar questions. Where is the deep knowledge of the adversary that makes sense of the stolen secret? What about the long-term value of deeply penetrating the other side’s decision-making? There are also worries that pervasive surveillance makes old-style spying all but impossible. China assiduously collects biometric data to spot anomalies and patterns of behavior suggestive of spying; Russia has made huge efforts to crack the SIS recruitment website, a potentially devastating breach.

Others question MI6’s emphasis on a polished public image. Moore, who had also served as a diplomat, was comfortable with journalists and gave public speeches. His immediate predecessors also weigh in on issues of the day, usually in close alignment with government thinking. Declassification of politically useful intelligence stepped up too, particularly in highlighting Russian aggression in Ukraine. The success of that tactic has largely assuaged the mistrust created by then-Prime Minister Tony Blair’s cavalier politicization of SIS intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq War.

If Metreweli has her way, MI6 will be returning to what in U.S. spy jargon is called “covert action”—secretly planned operations that deliver results, using a mixture of overt and covert means, combining military, cyber, psychological, and other tactics. When Russia engages in these tactics, Western countries call them “active measures” or gray-zone attacks.

Western responses to these attacks have been mostly feeble and belated. The one exception that stands out is Ukraine, which—while often the victim of such operations—has mounted spectacularly successful counter-operations across Russia, using unwitting Russian truck drivers to launch drone attacks on military airfields and launching destructive cyberattacks. It is an open secret that SIS has worked closely with the Ukrainian services, coaching and training them, as well as supplying the high technology and intelligence information needed to make these operations successful.

But SIS could do more. It is not only that the emphasis on public image has, in some eyes, made the service too risk-averse. Over-focusing on the most vital top-level intelligence consumes resources that could be deployed on less secret targets for more practical purposes. Russian corruption means that most databases can simply be bought without the need to steal them. Rather than find out what Vladimir Putin had for breakfast, why not just embarrass him by leaking his associates’ private emails? Or leave some breadcrumbs that will stoke a frenzy of spy paranoia?

A man walks over Vauxhall Bridge toward the MI6 headquarters in London on Aug, 17, 2018. Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Options for covert action include leaking the personal financial details of Putin’s cronies or disrupting everyday life in Russia with ruses, stunts, and pranks. Placing phony advertisements on online platforms to dent morale is one option, echoing the dark arts used by Britain against Nazi Germany. Such ads could, for example, spread the notion that young Russian women are finding easy employment in Chinese massage parlors, says a former intelligence officer; that would play on deep-seated Russian racism and subtly stoke Russians’ growing resentment at their country’s growing dependence on Xi Jinping’s regime. Another option would be causing a bank run in some hard-pressed provincial Russian town. Such operations do not require exquisite intelligence access, just imagination and ingenuity.

And they require nerves. The big question around the more swashbuckling style suggested by Metreweli’s remarks is not MI6’s capabilities; its ambitious officers are straining at the leash. The real problem is political leadership. Who carries the can if an operation goes wrong? Or what if it works really well, prompting furious retaliation from Russia?

So far, Metreweli’s political bosses have her back. She easily rode out a storm at the time of her appointment, when the Daily Mail tabloid revealed that her Ukrainian grandfather, Constantine Dobrowolski, had been a Nazi spy chief and probable war criminal. (His wife remarried; her young son then took his new stepfather’s name, Metreweli.) And she has plenty of scope. SIS is notoriously lightly supervised. Parliament’s cross-party Intelligence and Security Committee is toothless and under-staffed, a pale shadow of its powerful counterpart in the U.S. Senate. Nominally accountable to the British foreign secretary, spymasters habitually plead secrecy when awkward questions arise. Only the prime minister and the country’s top civil servant, the cabinet secretary, have full authority to inquire what the service is up to; they spend “perhaps an hour a month” doing so, a former minister told me. SIS’s successes are secret, but so too—mostly—are its blunders.

A glittering image coupled with secrecy works wonders. Set against Britain’s hollowed-out military, shriveling soft power, and stuttering economy, SIS is one of the country’s few remaining institutions with a world-class reputation. Consistency of leadership helps too. During Moore’s five-year tenure, he had to deal with a succession of six foreign secretaries. Amid the chaos, Moore led quasi-diplomatic efforts with the Saudis, Americans, and other allies. Though “C” has the formal rank of a cabinet minister, never before had an SIS chief had such an independent, agenda-setting role. Moore’s prominence highlighted how Britain’s powerful institutions have taken up the slack amid the dysfunction of the country’s political system.

The SOE invoked by Metreweli, at least in popular memory, exemplifies the opposite of Britain’s current woes: wartime defiance and ultimate triumph. In the service’s hulking green-glass ziggurat at Vauxhall Cross on the south bank of the Thames, Metrewili and her 3,500-odd staff are not just the custodians of Britain’s secret intelligence capabilities. They may prove key to its self-respect as well.