Britain’s MI6 spy company names first feminine chief

LONDON — Q is changing into C.

The pinnacle of know-how and innovation at Britain’s MI6 international intelligence company — the real-life equal of James Bond’s gadget-master Q — has been promoted to the nation’s prime spy job.

And for the primary time within the company’s 116-year historical past, the MI6 chief — codename C — shall be a lady.

It is a milestone that is already occurred on the silver display, when Judi Dench performed the MI6 chief in a number of Bond movies. (Although her character was often called M, quite than C.)

Now, actual life is catching up with fiction. In a assertion late Sunday, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer introduced that Blaise Metreweli — the first-ever feminine MI6 chief — will assume her new function within the autumn, succeeding Richard Moore, who’s retiring.

Metreweli, 47, mentioned she was “proud and honored.”

C is the one publicly-named place at MI6, also referred to as the Secret Intelligence Service. The company handles covert abroad intelligence-gathering, and is believed to handle a world community of spies. It is roughly the British equal of America’s CIA.

“I look forward to continuing that work alongside the brave officers and agents of MI6 and our many international partners,” Metreweli mentioned, based on a press release from Starmer’s workplace.

This undated picture launched by the UK International Workplace reveals new MI6 chief Blaise Metreweli.

AP/United Kingdom International Workplace

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AP/United Kingdom International Workplace

She’s a profession intelligence officer. Metreweli joined authorities service in 1999, and beforehand held director-level roles in MI6’s home sister company, MI5. She has spent most of her profession within the Center East and Europe.

Whereas at MI5 in 2021, she gave an nameless interview beneath the pseudonym Director Okay through which she warned British espionage legal guidelines have been old-fashioned, and likened Vladimir Putin’s Russia to an “unpredictable storm.”

As Q at MI6, Metreweli was in command of preserving secret the identities of British spies world wide, and arising with new methods of evading adversaries, together with China’s biometric surveillance.

She takes over at a time when MI6 and the U.Okay. general face unprecedented challenges from Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, and from non-state entities just like the Houthis in Yemen, and al-Qaeda.

“The United Kingdom is facing threats on an unprecedented scale — be it aggressors who send their spy ships to our waters or hackers whose sophisticated cyber plots seek to disrupt our public services,” Starmer mentioned within the assertion from his workplace.