MI6
Blaise Metreweli, new director of MI6
“We now operate in a space between peace and war.” Blaise Metreweli spoke for the first time, and made his mark very clear. “Despite cyber attacks”, he praised a “transforming” China — in contrast to Russia, which he called “aggressive, expansionist and revisionist”.
In his first speech as leader of the UK’s external intelligence services, Blaise Metreweli covered a wide range of topics suggesting, implicitly, that China should be treated differently from an “aggressive, expansionist and revisionist” Russia.
At first glance, the first speech by the new director general of MI6 had many of the same same villains and heroes that marked the interventions of his predecessors, says .
But in her first public appearance on Monday, the geek anthropologist turned , left a strong signal that you want to print your own brand in the positionby highlighting a wave of interconnected threats to Western democracies.
Speaking at MI6 headquarters in London, Metreweli, who succeeded Richard Moore in October, highlighted a confluence of geopolitical and technological disruptionswarning that “the front line is everywhere” and adding: “we now operate in a space between peace and war”.
In a speech punctuated by references to a transatlantic order in transformation and the growth of misinformationMetreweli made notoriously scant allusion to historically close relationship with the USA in intelligence gathering — a pillar of the UK’s understanding of intelligence for decades.
Instead, he stated that “andnew blocks and identities are being formedand alliances are rebuilding.”
This passage will be widely interpreted as an official acknowledgment that Donald Trump’s second administration forced the security services to adjust their performanceinvesting more in building multilateral relations.
In contrast to a long excerpt on the severity of the Russian threat to the UK, China deserved only a slight mention to its tendencies towards cyber attacks against the country — and was described, in a more complimentary tone, as “a country where a central transformation is taking place in this century”.
Metreweli, who grew up in Hong Kong and therefore knows the Chinese system first hand, proceeded cautiously around the risk of conflict in the South China Sea and Beijing’s espionage activities targeting British politicians — and even the royal family. In a carefully placed phrase, he noted that he would “break with tradition and I’m not going to give you a global guided tour of the threats”.
The implicit suggestion from the new director of British spies is that China demands a treatment different from the policy of clear and frontal confrontation with an “aggressive, expansionist and revisionist” Russia.
Sources within the service suggest that the British China strategy seeks avoid confrontationin order to deepen the collection of information and allow for a more productive economic relationship with Beijing.
Hard-line observers of the Secret Intelligence Service may have raised their eyebrows at Metreweli’s idea that the service’s “calling power” would allow it to “reduce tensions.”
There was, however, no doubt about Metreweli’s deep concern for the effects of misinformation and distortion on social mediain a framework that seemed as attentive to North American technological titans as it was to conventional threats led by States:
“We are being challenged from the battlefield to the boardroomand even our brains, as misinformation manipulates how we understand each other.”
By declaring that “some algorithms become as powerful as states”, it seemed point to platforms like Elon Musk’s Xand Facebook, owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta.
Metreweli warned that “hyper-personalized tools can become a new conflict and control vector”, affecting societies and individuals in “minutes, not months — and MI6 must also operate in this new context”.
The new director used the possessive several times, talking about “my service” throughout the intervention — another sign that intends to leave a distinctive mark in office, now that, at just 48 years old, inherited the famous green ink penand with which the head of the service signs correspondence.
Metreweli, who studied anthropology at Cambridge Universityis an operator experienced in theaters of war and had a commission in MI5, the internal intelligence services.
He got the job largely thanks to accumulated experience in the direction of the scientific and technological branch of MI6, “Q”, which aims to keep the identities of agents secret and develop new ways to avoid threats.
The head of MI6, commonly referred to as ‘C’(although in the fictional James Bond universe he is given the code name “M”), is the only member of the British secret services whose identity is publicly known.
She is the first holder of the position to use a huge pin, in jewelryin the shape of a scarab, on his sober navy blue outfit. It is not unlikely that in Moscow and Beijing there will be whoever tries to decipher the meaning of this detail.
