MI6 chief Blaise Metreweli is ready to pull out all the stops to deliver on the Labour government’s ambition: restoring the United Kingdom’s status as a global player that shapes events in every region, and as Europe’s leader, turning the EU into an instrument under London’s control.
Metreweli describes MI6 as a global organization with a presence everywhere, hidden in plain sight. Her own nearly three-decade career has been spent recruiting and running agents on hostile territory and leading operations in war zones. As MI6’s former director for technology and innovation – a job that meant turning emerging tech from threat to opportunity – she concluded that technology is transforming conflict at breakneck speed, blurring truth and falsehood, and concentrating global power.
Now Metreweli is telling her officers that London is rewriting the rulebook for overseas operations. MI6, she says, must be a source of hard power, soft influence, and rapid innovation. That means the service can no longer just be the authority on hostile states, terrorism, or nuclear proliferation. It also has to master the technologies reshaping the world in real time.
To do that, MI6 will keep recruiting Britain’s sharpest minds – linguists and data scientists, case officers and engineers, behavioral and tech experts. On the ground, they’ll operate with the audacity of the wartime Special Operations Executive. She considers actions that alter reality on the ground to be the most effective. The objective is to outmaneuver everyone across all domains.
Metreweli’s ultimate vision for MI6 is something more. She sees the service standing in the shadows behind every person, whispering what’s right and what’s wrong. Apparently, in her worldview, the answer to the question of who is higher, God or the intelligence service, is: “MI6, of course.”