A normal view of the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, in London.
Kin Cheung/AP
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Kin Cheung/AP
LONDON — Q is changing into C.
The top 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 — can 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, reasonably 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 position within the autumn, succeeding Richard Moore, who’s retiring.
Metreweli, 47, stated she was “proud and honored.”
C is the one publicly-named place at MI6, often known 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 sit up for persevering with that work alongside the courageous officers and brokers of MI6 and our many worldwide companions,” Metreweli stated, based on a press release from Starmer’s workplace.
This undated picture launched by the UK Overseas Workplace exhibits new MI6 chief Blaise Metreweli.
AP/United Kingdom Overseas Workplace
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AP/United Kingdom Overseas 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nameless interview below the pseudonym Director Ok through which she warned British espionage legal guidelines had been outdated, and likened Vladimir Putin’s Russia to an “unpredictable storm.”
As Q at MI6, Metreweli was accountable for holding secret the identities of British spies world wide, and developing with new methods of evading adversaries, together with China’s biometric surveillance.
She takes over at a time when MI6 and the U.Ok. total 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 UK is going through threats on an unprecedented scale — be it aggressors who ship their spy ships to our waters or hackers whose refined cyber plots search to disrupt our public providers,” Starmer stated within the assertion from his workplace.
