How Blaise Metrewell is redefining secret intelligence as the first female chief of MI6
Trading 007 tropes for anthropology and AI, Blaise Metreweli is the first woman to lead MI6. Her "hidden service" prioritises human wisdom and deep restraint to steady a world reshaped by tech and geopolitics.
Blaise Metreweli has described her role as the UK’s most senior spy as a kind of “hidden service”. That’s less a show of modesty than a statement of intent. Her path to becoming the first female chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (commonly known as MI6) wasn’t what you might expect from reading spy novels. After training as an anthropologist, she studied psychology and then artificial intelligence. What was closer to James Bond was her time at Q, MI6’s technology arm. There, she rose to director general after years in the field, recruiting and running sources in hostile environments and leading operations in warzones.
MI6 is fundamentally a humanintelligence collection service. Its job is to find, recruit and run sources. It doesn’t assess. Signals intelligence, geospatial imagery and opensource material come from other agencies. Those streams are fused at the Joint Intelligence Committee, which produces assessments for UK ministers. The model’s value lies in complementary perspectives; premature consensus is a danger.
Metreweli’s strategic brief is exacting. Rapid advances in AI, biotechnology and quantum computing are changing risks, while global power realignment is reshaping alliances and broadening fault lines. Yet she warns that technological superiority alone won’t decide outcomes. “The defining challenge of the 21st century is not simply who wields the most powerful technologies but who guides them with the greatest wisdom,” she told an audience in London recently.
Metreweli’s predecessor, Richard Moore, described her as a “powerful recruiting sergeant” and a corrective to the “damage” done by 007 – who is not a helpful model for anyone contemplating an intelligence career. Metreweli, on the other hand, is. She believes that intelligence, grounded in human judgement and institutional restraint, can help to steady a destabilising world. In that belief lies a contemporary vision of the quiet service.
This article is from Monocle’s March issue, The Monocle 100, which features our editors’ favourite 100 figures, destinations, objects and ideas.
Read the rest of the issue here.
