San Francisco Frontiers - The name's Metreweli... Who is UK MI6's first woman chief?

While actress Judi Dench has played the head of the MI6 Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in the James Bond film franchise for years, in reality the 17 chiefs so far have all been men.

Metreweli will be the 18th head of Britain's foreign intelligence outfit when she takes up the role in the autumn, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced on Sunday.

Like her predecessors she will be referred to as "C" -- not "M" as Dench is called in the movies based on Ian Fleming's daring fictional agent.

The head of MI6 is the only publicly named member of the organisation and reports directly to the foreign minister.

Little is known about the 47-year-old Metreweli, who will take over from outgoing MI6 head Richard Moore.

Currently, she is MI6's director general -- known as "Q" -- with responsiblity for technology and innovation at the service, Downing Street said in a statement.

Metreweli is described as a career intelligence officer who joined the service in 1999 having studied anthropology at Cambridge University.

"She is an incredibly experienced, credible, successful operational officer. She is widely respected," former MI6 chief Alex Younger told the BBC.

"She has been thinking deeply for a long time about how we prosper in the nexus between man and machine.

"She's got a plan. And I think that she knows how to enact it. That is the way MI6 remains at the cutting edge," he added.

Born into a family with roots in Eastern Europe -- Metreweli derives from the Georgian name Metreveli -- the future spy boss was part of the Cambridge rowing team that defeated Oxford in 1997.

She joined MI6 in 1999 as a field officer and "has spent most of her career in operational roles in the Middle East and Europe", according to the UK government.

- 'Historic' -

Metreweli also spent time at MI5, the domestic intelligence service, as a director, the government said, without providing further details.

She speaks Arabic, according to UK media.

The Financial Times interviewed her in 2022 for an article on female spies, where she was initially quoted under a pseudonym to encourage other women to join the intelligence service.

She described herself as a "geek" and said she had always wanted to be a spy.

It was revealed that she grew up abroad, enjoyed learning encryption techniques at a young age, and had at least one child while stationed outside the UK.

Metreweli asserted that in the male-dominated world of intelligence, women had certain useful skills.

"In the moments where you're deciding to become an agent, you're having to make thousands of risk-based calculations, but you're not quite sure how to respond emotionally," she said.

"There's no etiquette. Ironically, it becomes a bit of a no man's land. In that space, women are really good at finding common ground. We are the liminal ones."

Her appointment comes over three decades after MI5 appointed its first female chief.

Stella Rimington held the position from 1992-1996, followed by Eliza Manningham-Buller from 2002-2007.

The UK intelligence and security organisation GCHQ appointed its first woman chief, Anne Keast-Butler, in 2023.

Starmer called Metreweli's appointment "historic".

"The United Kingdom is facing threats on an unprecedented scale -- be it aggressors who send their spy ships to our waters or hackers whose sophisticated cyber plots seek to disrupt our public services," he said.

P.Thomas--SFF