Licence to Lead

Blaise Metreweli takes charge of Britain’s foreign intelligence service, completing a century-long arc of invisibility, persistence and espionage by women in MI6.

When Blaise Metreweli signs her name “C” in green ink this autumn - continuing a tradition begun by Captain Mansfield Cumming, the first chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) - she will mark a revolution in British espionage. For the first time in its 116-year history, MI6 will be headed by a woman. The moment is symbolic, but long overdue. Women have operated in the shadows of British intelligence since its inception. Metreweli’s rise, though historic, is less surprising than the delay in her appointment.

Aged 47, Metreweli is a career intelligence officer with a pedigree that runs through both MI5 and MI6. She joined the foreign intelligence service in 1999 and rose through its ranks, with operational experience in Europe and the Middle East. She later headed the “Q” branch - MI6’s fabled hub for technology and innovation, immortalised in fiction but grounded in the grim reality of cyber-warfare. There, she helped counter the biometric surveillance ambitions of China and the digital sabotage of Russia. Her ascension to the top job is not the triumph of tokenism, but the logical next step for an intelligence professional shaped by the digital age and hardened by two decades of geopolitical disruption.

Yet to see Metreweli’s appointment as unprecedented is to forget a buried history. From the trenches of the First World War to the paranoia of the Cold War, British women have always spied with skill, tenacity and distinction. The surprise is not that MI6 has a female chief at last; it is how successfully women’s contributions have been hidden for so long.

The secrecy was often deliberate. In an institution that thrives on anonymity, women were routinely labelled as clerks or secretaries even when they were code-breakers, interrogators, agents and handlers. During the Second World War, women working in MI6 operated under diplomatic cover in Lisbon, Tangier and Istanbul, turning enemy agents and collecting vital intelligence in espionage hotspots.

The Cold War, too, had its female legends. Daphne Park, once described (to her chagrin) as “the greatest woman intelligence officer in the world,” served across Africa, Moscow and Hanoi before becoming Controller Western Hemisphere in 1975 - the highest post then occupied by a woman in MI6. Her 40-year career was not unusual for women in intelligence, but it was rarely acknowledged.

It was partly due to official secrecy and partly cultural bias that these careers vanished into footnotes. Fiction has not helped: the seductive ‘femme fatale’ and the gun-slinging Bond girl continue to obscure the reality of patient, painstaking spycraft. Hollywood eventually gave MI6 a female chief in form of Dame Judi Dench’s steely “M” but left “Q” as a male figure. Metreweli, in real life, has already been both.

As chief, she inherits a service under strain. The intelligence landscape has never been more diffuse, or more dangerous. The long arc of jihadist terror, a revanchist Russia, and the creeping authoritarianism of China have reshaped the global order. The work of MI6, once confined to the murky politics of the Cold War, now spans quantum cryptography, disinformation networks and biometric espionage. Metreweli’s time in Q branch suggests she understands both the traditional art of human intelligence and the newer domain of technological warfare.

Her appointment reflects not only institutional evolution but also a reluctant modernisation. A generation ago, MI6 was so secretive that its very existence was officially denied. Today, it has a website, a Twitter account, and even a commissioned official history. Naming its chief, something once unthinkable, signals a calculated transparency, perhaps to cultivate public legitimacy in an age of mistrust.