MI6 to appoint first woman chief
The next boss of MI6 will be a woman for the first time in its history.
The shortlist to select the new Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), also known as MI6, has been whittled down to three female candidates.
It means that Britain's top spy, known internally by the moniker 'C', for chief, will be a woman.
At least two of the candidates are serving intelligence officers, and therefore cannot be named.
The current head of MI6's engineering arm is a woman and is likely to be a strong contender, and those with knowledge of the service have touted her as a candidate
The department was fictionalised as Q Branch in Ian Fleming's James Bond novels and films.
Dame Barbara Woodward, an outsider candidate, is also a favourite, The Sunday Times reported.
The former head of the UK Border Agency currently serves as Britain's Permanent Representative at the United Nations and has not worked at MI6 before.
Sir Richard Moore, the current MI6 chief, was a former spy who left and became the British ambassador to Turkey. In 2020, he returned to MI6 to take the top job.
His five-year term is coming to an end later this year, with the search for a replacement proceeding at pace.
Final interviews for his successor are understood to have taken place last week.
In 2023, Sir Richard revealed that he had been recruited from an all-male shortlist, writing on X: 'I will help forge women's equality by working to ensure I'm the last 'C' selected from an all-male shortlist.'
Dame Barbara, currently the most senior woman in Britain's diplomatic service, has attracted comments for being insufficiently vocal with her criticism of China while serving as Britain's ambassador to China from 2015 to 2020.
After she left Beijing, Dame Barbara described the situation in Xinjiang as 'one of the worst human rights crises of our time'.
The final decision on the appointment will be made by the Prime Minister, advised by a board of senior government figures including David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, and Jonathan Powell, the National Security Adviser.
MI5, the domestic security service, has had two female directors-general, Dame Stella Rimington and Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller. MI6, which was established in 1909, has had 17 chiefs, all of them men.
In the James Bond series the figure of 'C' was fictionalised as 'M'. Fleming chose the moniker after the first initial of the first MI6 Chief, Sir Mansfield Smith-Cumming.
In John Le Carre's George Smiley novels the head of the intelligence service was known as Control.
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