Britain’s MI6 spy agency promotes ‘Q’ to be first female head 

Blaise Metreweli has been appointed the new chief of MI6, the UK Secret Intelligence Service, becoming the first woman to lead the agency that recruits spies overseas since its foundation more than a century ago.

Metreweli is currently SIS head of technology — a role known as “Q” after James Bond’s mastermind gadgeteer — and has previously held operational posts across the Middle East and Europe.

She will take up her new job in October when current head Sir Richard Moore steps down after a five-year term.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who held interviews with the two final candidates, praised Metreweli’s promotion as a “historic appointment” at a time when the UK was facing threats on an “unprecedented scale”.

Metreweli said she was “proud and honoured” to be asked to lead SIS, and that she looked forward to continuing her work “alongside the brave officers and agents of MI6 and our many international partners”.

In an interview with the Financial Times three years ago — in which she was quoted under the pseudonym Ada to protect her identity — Metreweli revealed that even in childhood, being a spy was the only job she had ever wanted.

A self-confessed “geek”, she said her first job in counter-proliferation had been an opportunity to engage with the “really deep science” of nuclear technology, as well as the task of building relationships with agents overseas “who were risking their lives to be able to share secrets with us”.

Metreweli, who studied anthropology at Cambridge, initially applied to work as a diplomat before being diverted to the SIS recruitment track.

Her surname is Georgian, reflecting her eastern European heritage. She is said by colleagues to be an excellent Arabic speaker and has extensive experience working across the Middle East, including in war zones.

During her 26-year intelligence career, Metreweli also spent some time at MI5, the UK’s domestic intelligence agency, as head of directorate ‘K’ — which oversees the threats to Britain from hostile states such as Russia, China and Iran.

Her background as an Arabist will be particularly relevant given the current conflict between Israel and Iran. However, Britain’s spies are grappling with a number of other competing threats.

In a speech last November, Moore said that in nearly four decades of working in intelligence, he had “never seen the world in a more dangerous state”. He cited the resurgence of Isis, a more assertive China and the instability wrought by Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Metreweli, 47, had been due to take up an overseas posting this summer, but will now remain in the UK to become chief, a role known by the moniker “C”.

One of her main challenges will be managing SIS’s changing relations with the CIA — traditionally its closest allied agency — during a period of diverging security interests under US President Donald Trump.

Since MI6 is a secret organisation, the chief is the only member of staff who is “avowed”, or publicly named, and the agency will not reveal how many employees it has in the UK and its stations around the world.

Metreweli, the first female “C” in SIS’s 116-year history, acknowledged in her 2022 FT interview that being a woman had sometimes been an advantage when recruiting sources in the field.

“In the moments where you’re deciding to become an agent, you’re having to make thousands of risk-based calculations, but you’re not quite sure how to respond emotionally,” she said. “There’s no etiquette. Ironically, it becomes a bit of a no man’s land.” In this “liminal” space, she argued, women were good at finding common ground.

Still, reality has lagged Hollywood fiction — it is 30 years since Dame Judi Dench first played the head of MI6 in the James Bond film GoldenEye.

MI5 has been led by two female directors-general: Dame Stella Rimington was appointed in 1992 and Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller became head 10 years later. Gina Haspel, the first female CIA director, took up her post in 2018.

Moore, who promised he would be the last “C” to be selected from an all-male shortlist, has championed the appointment of a female chief. In this contest, three women and one man were put forward for interview.

Moore said he was “delighted” by Metreweli’s appointment, describing her as “a highly accomplished intelligence officer and leader, and one of our foremost thinkers on technology”.

The historical paucity of female representation in senior SIS roles has improved in recent years. Three of the four current director-generals below Moore are women: Metreweli, another who is head of operations and a third who is head of strategy.

Women at the agency are still paid a mean average of 7.9 per cent less than men in equivalent positions, according to SIS’s most recent gender pay gap data.

Baroness Meta Ramsay, who worked as a career SIS intelligence office until her retirement in the early 1990s, said she “could not be more delighted” that SIS would have a female chief.

Ramsay, who was one of the most senior women of her cohort, told the FT that MI6 was “beginning to be an odd exception among national intelligence agencies” for never having had a woman at the helm.

She added that there had been a number of well-qualified female spies in the senior ranks of the agency over the years, though none succeeded in reaching the top job. “At last the glass ceiling has been smashed,” she said.

Metreweli’s name has been kept largely out of the public eye, though she was awarded a CMG last year for “services to British foreign policy”.

A Companies House record also lists her as a part-owner of a property business that appears to control a single property in Pimlico, London, across the river from MI6 headquarters. This is not her current address, according to people familiar with the matter.

The FT reported last week that the process for selecting the new MI6 head had been narrowed to two candidates, one from inside the agency and one from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

They were Metreweli — though the FT chose not to name her — and Dame Barbara Woodward, the UK’s permanent representative to the UN and a former ambassador to China.