IN THE EARLY 1990s, with the cold war over and the Russian threat seemingly gone, Sir Robert Fellowes, the private secretary to Queen Elizabeth II, was lunching with Sir Gerry Warner, the deputy chief of MI6. “What shall I tell Her Majesty her Secret Intelligence Service [SIS] is for?” he asked. “Please tell her”, replied Sir Gerry, “it is the last penumbra of her Empire.” Later that decade another MI6 officer described Britain’s aspiration to global intelligence as “the itch
IN THE EARLY 1990s, with the cold war over and the Russian threat seemingly gone, Sir Robert Fellowes, the private secretary to Queen Elizabeth II, was lunching with Sir Gerry Warner, the deputy chief of MI6. “What shall I tell Her Majesty her Secret Intelligence Service [SIS] is for?” he asked. “Please tell her”, replied Sir Gerry, “it is the last penumbra of her Empire.” Later that decade another MI6 officer described Britain’s aspiration to global intelligence as “the itch after the amputation”.
When Blaise Metreweli takes over as the 18th chief of MI6 on October 1st, succeeding Sir Richard Moore, she is unlikely to face similar attitudes. Britain’s intelligence agencies are riding high, having provided early and unambiguous warning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There is no shortage of threats. This year the single intelligence account, which sets budgets for Britain’s three main spy agencies, was given its largest boost in almost a decade. Surveys show that, much like the armed forces, the agencies are highly trusted (though poorly understood) by the public.
Yet MI6 also stands at a historical juncture. Traditional espionage is becoming harder even as there is much more that needs spying on. The distinctions between human and technical intelligence are ever blurrier. And bringing human spies into the digital age is an expensive business.
Start with the basics. MI6 is a human-intelligence (HUMINT) service. Put simply: “We recruit agents to spy for us.” It steals secrets for three purposes: to protect national security (eg, how will Vladimir Putin approach peace talks?), for economic well-being (what is India’s position in trade negotiations?) and to tackle serious crime. Its main job is to inform policymakers. It has a lesser-known mandate for disruption of threats—say, feeding dud components into Iran’s nuclear supply chain.
At its heart are case officers: the people who recruit and run agents. Many work out of embassies, posing as diplomats; others travel abroad under an alias, with no diplomatic immunity should they be unmasked. Around them is a web of other officers and experts, who help identify potential targets, plan how they might be approached, build robust cover stories and study foreign intelligence services. The raw intelligence that they collect is fed into the Joint Intelligence Organisation, which combines it with other data, such as intercepted communications and press reports, to produce “all source” reports that go to the prime minister and others
For Ms Metreweli, a Cambridge-educated career intelligence officer who spent much of her working life in the Middle East, the first challenge is where to direct her agency’s efforts. Formally, priorities are set by the government, but MI6 has a lot of influence in shaping those. Its top priority is now China, whose spy agencies dwarf British ones and increasingly match them for skill. Russian intelligence services, rebuilding after mass expulsions from Europe, are more and more active in sabotage and subversion. Iran’s nuclear programme is a key concern, with inspectors kicked out of the country following American and Israeli strikes earlier this year.
Emerging technology is a growing challenge. Intelligence on China’s chips, ai models and data centres is becoming vital. Breakthroughs in quantum computing abroad could radically affect the security of encrypted data at home. There is not enough money, nor enough spies, to do it all. “Do you get out of Africa or the Americas?” asks one insider. “Is that wise?”
The second question is how to prioritise not just among targets, but also tasks. A rising one is counter-intelligence: catching spies working for foreign services, ideally by penetrating them. “The intelligence community is less prepared for the growing importance of counter-intelligence than it should be, after two decades of focusing on terrorism and insurgency,” says Philip Davies of Brunel University, the author of a book on MI6’s structure. “SIS is going to have to go back to a cold-war model of operating.” Ms Metreweli is well placed for this: as well as her recent history as head of Q branch, which deals with technology, she was director of MI5’s K branch, which counters subversion.
There is also, says Mr Davies, “a lot more thinking” under way about MI6’s role in disruptive action. MI6 has never had a large in-house paramilitary capacity like the CIA. But it has worked closely with the Special Air Service, a special-forces unit. MI6 is part of the National Cyber Force, which conducts offensive cyber operations. In recent months Sir Richard has repeatedly alluded to that aspect of the agency’s work. “We cherish our heritage of covert action,” he said in Paris in November, “which we keep alive today in helping Ukraine resist the Russian invasion.” One former intelligence officer points to Mossad’s involvement in Israel’s war against Iran as an example of how MI6 might need to integrate more deeply with the armed forces in wartime.
A third debate is how to build a HUMINT service for the digital age. “It’s never been more difficult to run agents because of what they look like in big data,” says one person familiar with these efforts. The cost of operating covertly—building aliases that are robust to digital scrutiny, for instance—has risen exponentially since Ms Metreweli joined the service in 1999. That is one reason why the ratio of HUMINT to signals-intelligence (SIGINT) material flowing to British intelligence analysts has tilted much further in the latter’s favour over the past decade.
That does not mean old-fashioned agent-running no longer matters. The profusion of data on individuals, companies and countries—and AI-enabled tools to sift through it—can turbocharge the process of scoping out agents or finding leads. Yet law and red tape have meant that it is often easier for outsiders to use publicly available data than for spooks. In 2023 GCHQ, Britain’s SIGINT agency, noted that it would have taken the agency weeks to acquire the same data to train a particular model that anyone else could have downloaded in hours. In April the Investigatory Powers Act of 2016 was updated to ease this problem.
Storing data, training AI models and running them requires huge amounts of computing power that is designed to handle highly secret material. The IT systems in Britain’s spy agencies are just as ropey as those in other government departments, with new systems built on top of ageing ones. “The risk is that secret cloud servers become the nuclear deterrent of the intelligence world,” says a source familiar with Whitehall budget debates, referring to the way nuclear spending has cannibalised the rest of the defence budget.
The technological turn in human espionage is also reshaping how MI6 relates to its sister agencies. Each agency has long supported the other—MI6 providing code-breaking material to GCHQ, for instance, and GCHQ drawing on decrypted cables to flag up potential Soviet spies—but the relationship is “more connected than ever before”, says a source. MI6 needs GCHQ to access a would-be target’s fitness tracker; GCHQ needs MI6 to slip implants into kit headed to an Iranian nuclear site.
“There are arguments to be made that if the intelligence services were being created from scratch now, we wouldn’t have a separate HUMINT versus SIGINT agency,” suggests Rory Cormac, an expert at the University of Nottingham. “The organisational divide is a relic of a bygone age.”
Even so, the ethos of the case officer remains paramount for SIS. Most of the CIA’s directors have been generals and admirals, lawyers and politicians. Only two operational officers have led it in the past 50 years. In contrast, MI6 has not been led by an outsider in that same period. “It’s a moment for the three agencies to also remember they each have unique DNA,” says another intelligence professional. “And for Vauxhall,” he says, referring to MI6’s location in south London, “it is that ability to build those networks and develop human agents. That’s their thing.”
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