Britain’s MI6 spy company names first feminine chief : NPR

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Kin Cheung/AP LONDON — Q is changing into C.

The top of expertise and innovation at Britain's MI6 overseas intelligence company — the real-life equal of James Bond's gadget-master Q — has been promoted to the nation's high spy job.

And for the primary time within the company's 116-year historical past, the MI6 chief — codename C — might be a girl.

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, slightly than C.)

Now, actual life is catching up with fiction. In a press release 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, also called the Secret Intelligence Service. The company handles covert abroad intelligence-gathering, and is assumed to handle a worldwide community of spies. It is roughly the British equal of America's CIA.

"I look ahead to persevering with that work alongside the courageous officers and brokers of MI6 and our many worldwide companions," Metreweli stated, in accordance with a press release from Starmer's workplace.

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AP/United Kingdom International 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 beneath the pseudonym Director Okay wherein she warned British espionage legal guidelines have been old-fashioned, and likened Vladimir Putin's Russia to an "unpredictable storm."

As Q at MI6, Metreweli was in command of retaining secret the identities of British spies around the globe, and arising with new methods of evading adversaries, together with China's biometric surveillance.

She takes over at a time when MI6 and the U.Okay. 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 dealing with threats on an unprecedented scale — be it aggressors who ship their spy ships to our waters or hackers whose subtle cyber plots search to disrupt our public companies," Starmer stated within the assertion from his workplace.