MI6 chief says UK faces threat from Russia’s desire to export chaos
LONDON (AP) — The new head of the MI6 spy agency is expected to warn Monday that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s determination to export chaos around the world is rewriting the rules of conflict and creating new security challenges.
Blaise Metreweli will use his first public speech as head of the UK’s foreign intelligence service to say Britain faces increasingly unpredictable and interconnected threats, with a focus on “aggressive and expansionist” Russia.
“Exporting chaos is a feature, not a bug, of Russia’s approach to international engagement, and we should be prepared for this to continue until Putin is forced to change his calculus,” she will say, according to extracts released by the Foreign Office, which oversees MI6.
The head of MI6, known as C, is the only employee of the secret agency whose name is made public. Metreweli, who took over from Richard Moore at the end of September, was previously MI6’s director of technology and innovation – the real-world equivalent of James Bond’s fictional gadget master Q.
She plans to say that technological know-how and human intelligence are both essential to combating hybrid threats, and that MI6 officers “must be as comfortable with lines of code as they are with human sources, both in Python and in multiple languages.”
The speech is the latest in a series of warnings from Western defense and security authorities about the growing hybrid threat from states including Russia, Iran and China, whose use of cyber tools, espionage and influence operations they say threaten global stability.
Last week, the UK imposed sanctions on several Russian media outlets for alleged information warfare and two Chinese technology companies for “broad and indiscriminate cyber activities”.
Metreweli is the first woman to hold this position since the creation of MI6 in 1909.
Britain’s other two main intelligence agencies have already shattered the spy world’s glass ceiling. MI5, the internal security service, was headed by Stella Rimington from 1992 to 1996 and Eliza Manningham-Buller between 2002 and 2007. Anne Keast-Butler took over as head of the electronic and cyber intelligence agency GCHQ in 2023.
