MI6 chief warns 'front line is everywhere' and signals intent to pressure Putin

In her first public speech on Monday, the new chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) will warn about the acute threat posed by an “aggressive, expansionist, and revisionist” Russia according to a pre-released speech excerpt.

Focusing on the landscape of hybrid threats facing the United Kingdom — which have included cyberattacks, espionage and sabotage — Blaise Metreweli will warn the “front line is everywhere” and signal Britain’s intent to increase pressure on the Kremlin.

“The export of chaos is a feature not a bug in the Russian approach to international engagement; and we should be ready for this to continue until Putin is forced to change his calculus,” she will say.

Speaking from the agency’s headquarters in Vauxhall, London, Metreweli is the latest figure from Britain’s spy services to warn about the links between Russian cyberattacks and kinetic harms facing the country.

Earlier this month, the British government imposed sanctions on the entirety of Russia’s military intelligence agency and a number of its cyber officers after a public inquiry concluded it was responsible for a deadly nerve agent attack on British soil in 2018.

Last week, several more Russian and Chinese organizations were sanctioned and accused of attempting to undermine the West through both cyberattacks and influence operations, with Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper warning Europe was “witnessing an escalation in hybrid threats.”

Metreweli is the first woman to head MI6 since it was formally founded in 1909. She joined as a case officer in 1999 and had most recently led the agency’s real-life “Q branch” responsible for technology and innovation.

Her comments and appointment highlight a perceived tension between the classical kind of human intelligence ascribed to MI6 — developing agents and placing officers undercover in target organisations — and intelligence gathering methods driven by modern technologies, from bulk data analysis through to biometrics.

Metreweli’s predecessor, Sir Richard Moore, previously argued that advances in technology only served to emphasise the value of “human agents in the right places” noting: “They are never just passive collectors of information: our agents can be tasked and directed; they can identify new questions we didn't know to ask; and sometimes they can influence decisions inside a government or terrorist group.”

This was not to discount the value of technology. Speaking at a conference in London earlier this year, the head of GCHQ — Britain’s cyber and signals intelligence agency — said all of the country’s spies had access to AI tools at their workstations.

The MI6 chief will describe on Monday how her agency is using these kinds of tools to accomplish its mission: “Mastery of technology must infuse everything we do. Not just in our labs, but in the field, in our tradecraft, and even more importantly, in the mindset of every officer. We must be as comfortable with lines of code as we are with human sources, as fluent in Python as we are in multiple languages.”

However she stressed that the “defining challenge of the twenty-first century is not simply who wields the most powerful technologies, but who guides them with the greatest wisdom,” arguing that Britain’s “security, our prosperity, and our humanity depend on it.”

 “We all have choices to make ahead about how we deal with the undercurrents shaping the world. About how, in our new, faster, more dangerous and tech-mediated world, it will be our rediscovery of our shared humanity, our ability to listen, and our courage that will determine how our future unfolds,” she will say.

“It is not what we can do that defines us, but what we choose to do. That choice — the exercise of human agency — has shaped our world before, and it will shape it again.”