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new head of MI6 The spy agency is going to warn on Monday how Russian President Vladimir Putin’s determination to spread chaos around the world is rewriting the rules of conflict and creating new security challenges.
Blaise Metreveli will use his first public speech as head of the United Kingdom’s Foreign Intelligence Service to say Britain faces unprecedented and interconnected threats, with an emphasis on an “aggressive, expansionist” Russia.
She would say, “The export of chaos is not a bug but a feature in the Russian approach to international engagement, and we should be prepared to see it continue until Putin is forced to change his calculations.” foreign OfficeWhich oversees MI6.
The MI6 chief, known as C, is the only employee of the secret agency whose name has been made public. Metreveli, who took over from Richard Moore at the end of September, was previously MI6 director of technology and innovation – the real-world equivalent of the fictional James Bond gadget-master Q.
She plans to say that both technical understanding and human intelligence are vital to dealing with hybrid threats, and that MI6 officers must be “as comfortable with lines of code as we are with human sources, as adept in Python as we are with multiple languages.”
The speech is the latest in a series of warnings from Western defense and security officials about the growing hybrid threat from states such as Russia, Iran and China, whose use of cyber tools, espionage and influence operations threatens global stability.
Last week, the UK imposed sanctions on several Russian media outlets for alleged information warfare and two Chinese tech firms for “vast and indiscriminate cyber activities”.
Metreveli is the first woman to hold the position since MI6 was established in 1909.
Britain’s two other main intelligence agencies have already broken the glass ceiling in the spying world. MI5, the domestic security service, was led by Stella Rimington from 1992 to 1996, and by Eliza Manningham-Buller between 2002 and 2007. Anne Kest-Butler becomes head of Electronic and Cyber Intelligence Agency GCHQ In 2023.