The UK’s new top spy emerges from the shadows

Every now and then, the public gets a glimpse beyond the veil. Take this week, with news the UK’s new foreign intelligence agency (MI6) spymaster will be Blaise Metreweli.

In his big reveal, PM Starmer endorsed her “excellent leadership” and noted she’s being promoted to ‘C’ (chief, though the ‘C’ derives from the surname of the original MI6 boss).

She takes the top job after several years serving as ‘Q’ (quartermaster — head of MI6’s famous high-tech division). But what else can we glean?

First, her limited public bio is no surprise — C is traditionally the only MI6 staff member publicly named, and it turns out the 47-year-old Metreweli has spent her entire 26-year career deep on the inside. But like any good spy, maybe she’s been hiding in plain sight:

• Turns out she’s a good rower and was on Cambridge’s winning 1997 team
• She’s appeared in some public records as a ‘civil servant’ over the years
• Some of the old public references to her are vague on dates (likely to allow a plausible explanation for her time off the grid doing MI6’s wild training), and
• Last year, the king himself honoured Metreweli, though he referred to her blandly as a foreign ministry “director general”, leaving her old college to then proudly (if conspicuously vaguely) highlight such a big win.

Second, it turns out Metreweli has spoken with the media before, including:

• A 2022 interview under the name ‘Ada’, to encourage more women to join, and
• A 2021 interview while on secondment to the domestic sister agency MI5 — referred to simply by her then ‘Director K’ job title (focused on thwarting threats from hostile states), she urged parliament to update the UK’s old espionage laws.

Third, from the clues above (plus her uncommon surname), a family story emerges:

• She likely grew up in Hong Kong due to her dad’s work as a top radiologist, and
• Her Georgian surname might’ve come via her great-grandfather, who escaped the Bolshevik invasion and then married a German woman, who in turn went on to appear in German media as one of her state’s oldest locals!

Then fourth, a vague professional picture starts to emerge, too:

• Metreweli studied anthropology at Cambridge and applied to become a British diplomat, but something about her application (like her intrepid upbringing) meant she got diverted into the MI6 recruitment process, and joined in 1999
• She’s served abroad in Europe and the Middle East — that’s typically posing as an embassy diplomat (official cover) or as someone out in the broader community (non-official cover), and
• She apparently speaks excellent Arabic.

On that last one, allow us to conclude with the ol’ diplomat language training joke, that only the first 20 years of Arabic are the hardest.

Intrigue’s Take

So after linking together all these breadcrumbs, here are three broader observations about what Metreweli’s appointment might mean:

• First, her stint as ‘Q’ is a reminder of tech’s role in today’s intelligence world: you need it not only so your teams and their sources can evade hostile surveillance, or thwart tech-enabled threats, but also to better fuse tech with MI6’s old-school human intelligence to stay ahead in an increasingly fragmenting world.
• Second, as a spook who’s already been in the media,she’s an example of how Western spies seem increasingly focused on preserving and strengthening their social license: democracies either demystify and humanise their security services, or sceptics will fill the void (all gleefully fanned by hostile states), and
• Third, the two points above hint at the tough gig awaiting Metreweli once she starts in October: Intriguers will already know our world is getting more hostile — her predecessor just warned the world is now at its most dangerous in 40 years. And that not only raises the stakes, but also (together with tech advancements) shrinks the space available for intelligence agencies to recruit new sources.