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.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Euronews
26 minutes ago
- Euronews
Israel strikes Iran's 'propaganda' TV station during live broadcast
An Iranian state television reporter had to stop a live broadcast on Monday when an explosion occurred an hour after Israel issued a warning to evacuate the area of Tehran where the TV studios are located. Smoke was seen rising from at least three sites in the Iranian capital. The reporter for the Islamic Republic of Iran News Network said the studio was filling with dust after "the sound of aggression against the homeland, the sound of aggression against truth and righteousness." Anchor Sahar Emami rushed off-camera as the screen behind her cut out and people were heard saying "Allahu akbar," Arabic for God is great. The broadcast quickly switched to pre-recorded programmes. Later, state TV aired live video of the building on fire. Soon, Emami came back live from another studio and was seen speaking with another anchor. She said that "bodies of reporters" were at the site of the initial broadcast, and images showed smoke and flames in the sky. Israel's defence minister Israel Katz took credit for the attack as he called it a strike on the "propaganda broadcast authority." "The Iranian regime's propaganda and incitement broadcasting authority was attacked by the IDF after a widespread evacuation of the area's residents. We will strike the Iranian dictator everywhere," he said in a statement. An hour earlier, the Israeli military had issued an evacuation warning affecting up to 330,000 people in a part of central Tehran that includes the country's state TV and police headquarters, as well as three major hospitals. In response to the attack, Iran also issued evacuation warnings for Israeli news channels, Iranian state TV reported. The attack came on the fourth day of the escalating conflict, as the IDF claimed it had achieved air superiority above the Iranian capital and could fly over the city without facing major threats. Israel and Iran exchanged a barrage of airstrikes on Monday, the fourth day of fighting in an escalating conflict that began after an unprecedented Israeli attack on Tehran last week. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the aerial attack targeting Iran's nuclear, missile, and military complex that his forces carried out early Friday was an operation to "roll back" the Iranian threat to Israel's survival. According to a former Israeli spokesperson, Eylon Levy, the current Israeli campaign may go on longer than expected. Speaking in an interview with Euronews, Levy said, "We are likely to be looking at several weeks at least of Israeli military action because the Iranian regime's nuclear program is massive." "Let's remember the Iranian Regime hasn't built one or two reactors to develop uranium for medical isotopes or civilian energy. It built its nuclear facilities often underground; Fordow is under a mountain because it's part of a nuclear weapons programme." Levy added that Iran began the war with 360 ballistic missile launchers. Israel has destroyed one-third of them, he said. "It started with 2,000 ballistic missiles. Most of them are still intact. So this is going to take Israel time to neutralise the regional threat of the Iranian regime, but so far, Israel has been working very quickly," Levy explained. As of Monday afternoon, at least 220 people have been killed across Iran by Israeli strikes, while the death toll from Iran's missile strikes in Israel was at least 24. As concerns about the conflict widening into a regional war grow, Iran has said it won't negotiate a ceasefire while under Israeli attack. But Levy believes Tehran is not in any position right now to dictate the terms of a negotiation. "Israel has killed the head of its military, the head of its air force, and the intelligence; it's taken out a third of its ballistic missile launchers, and it controls the skies of Iran, and it is bombing Iran's illegal nuclear weapons facilities at will," he said. "If the Iranian regime wants to peacefully dismantle the enrichment program it built in order to build nuclear weapons in order to destroy Israel, it is welcome to do so. But it's not going to get an unconditional ceasefire so that it can go back to dragging out time and holding fake negotiations while racing towards a nuclear bomb". Tehran accuses the United States of being complicit in Israel's attacks on the Islamic Republic, something Washington denies, despite conflicting statements from US President Donald Trump. During late Friday's emergency session at the United Nations Security Council, the US urged Tehran that it would "be wise" to negotiate over its nuclear programme.
France 24
6 hours ago
- France 24
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.
Euronews
7 hours ago
- Euronews
Verifying videos claiming to show Israeli and Iranian strikes
As Israel and Iran exchange fire for the fourth consecutive day, unverified footage of missile and drone attacks targeted at both countries is spreading virally online. Euronews' fact-checking and verification team, Euroverify, has been taking a closer look at some of those videos in order to verify their authenticity and corroborate the location of strikes. Verifying such footage is crucial in this conflict. It allows us to debunk false reports and ensure the footage used in our reporting is authentic. Videos generated using artificial intelligence and falsely claiming to show Israeli and Iranian strikes are spreading virally online. This video, which has garnered hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok, claims to show destruction caused by Israeli airstrikes on Iran. But our analysis shows that the video has been clearly generated using AI. A closer look reveals that artificial-looking rays are emanating from one of the cooling towers. A fire truck can also be seen on the precipice of a crater while some of the emergency workers seem to disappear into thin air. Other AI-generated videos spreading virally claim to show damage caused to Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport by an Iranian strike. Euroverify detected several versions of the videos circulating on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X. But the video is clearly the work of AI, and is being shared widely by known disinformation accounts. While Iran's semi-official state media Mehr has reported that Iranian strikes struck Ben Gurion airport in Israel's largest city on Sunday, those reports have not been verified. We also detected online users falsely linking old videos of unrelated events to the current strikes. A video showing what appears to be a residential building engulfed in flames was shared by Al Jazeera's Arabic profile on X, with the caption: 'Massive fires in Tel Aviv sites as a result of the Iranian missile attack.' But a reverse image search shows that the same video was first circulating online in early May, meaning it cannot show damage caused by the current exchange of fire. A Facebook user shared the video on 10 May, claiming it shows the impact of an airstrike of fire between India and Pakistan. A brief but intense exchange of fire between those two countries took place from 7 to 10 May, but we were unable to verify whether the video in question shows damage resulting from those attacks. Another widely shared image claims to show an explosion at an Iranian oil refinery caused by an Israeli strike. We used a reverse image search to find that the picture in fact comes from a video showing a November 2020 explosion at a petrochemical plant in Ilam, Iran. The explosion was widely covered by Iranian media, and has no link to the ongoing conflict between Tehran and Tel Aviv. Israeli strikes have nonetheless struck key energy infrastructure including the South Pars gas field in southern Iran and the Shahran oil depot in Tehran. A football pass between a prisoner and a magistrate. A volleyball match between penitentiary wardens and regular citizens. It may sound like an unlikely sporting event but this unprecedented initiative at Rome's Rebibbia prison saw inmates break the monotony of the daily routine and take part in a mini-Olympiad known as the "Games of Hope" Within the walls of one of Italy's most crowded prisons - Rebibbia is home to 1,550 inmates, an unexpected space opened up. Not an escape or a celebration, but a gesture of trust. Four teams, made up of inmates, agents, magistrates and regular citizens, shared the field, crossing the lines that separate them every day. It may have been a small event, only 28 of the prison's inmates took part, but it was full of meaning. The games were a collaboration between the John Paul II Foundation for Sport, the Department of Prison Administration (DAP) and the magistrates' network, Sport and Legality. And even after its debut instalment, the games are being hailed as one of the most significant initiatives to take place in Italy's prison system in years. And it is no coincidence that the event debuted in Rebibbia, where on 26 December Pope Francis opened a Holy Door at the prison, part of the 2025 Jubilee Year of Hope and a sign of hope and inclusion for all, including those who are incarcerated. The Games of Hope featured four sports teams competing in various events, including football, volleyball, athletics, table tennis, table football and chess. "Like all crazy ideas, that of the Games of Hope was born during the Paris Olympics, where we presented the book Father Henri Didon - A Dominican at the Origins of Olympism. It is to him that we owe the Olympic motto, 'Citius Altius Fortius.' We thought of bringing Olympic values to where it is hardest to enter, to prison," said Daniele Pasquini, the president of the John Paul II Foundation for Sport. In the north-eastern quadrant of Rome, between the suburbs of Pietralata and Casal de' Pazzi, Rebibbia stands as an island in itself. It is not just a prison, but an entire citadel of detention. Its modern form was created in 1971 as a response to the overcrowding of the Regina Coeli prison. Today, it houses around 2,700 people, making it one of the largest and most complex detention centres in Italy. The facility is divided into four main sections: the New Complex Raffaele Cinotti, the Third House, the Reclusion House and the Women's Institute. In total, about 1,927 men and 352 women are housed there, with the percentage of foreign inmates close to 13% among men and over 40% among women. Those numbers speak of a fragmented prison population, often marked by people from the margins of society and feeling a sense of personal fragility. More than half of the inmates are in the prison for crimes such as theft, robbery and fraud. Around 40% are in prison for more serious crimes, like assault and murders. But one of the most significant data concerns drug addiction: 30-35% are imprisoned for drug-related crimes or have a history of addiction that has influenced their life choices. Behind every statistic lies a story. Small-time drug dealers convicted as big-time traffickers, women entering a guilty plea to protect a violent or guilty partner, and young people with no real alternative other than the street. For many, prison is not an exception, but a passage already foreseen in the script of their lives. Rebibbia too suffers from the overcrowding that afflicts the entire Italian prison system. On a national level, with a regulatory capacity of approximately 51,000 places, the prison population exceeds 62,000. In mixed cells, there is a lack of living space, activities are reduced and access to care is often minimal. In this context, the Games of Hope were much more than a sporting event. The president of the Italian National Olympic Committee (CONI), Giovanni Malagò, who took part in a game of table tennis, said: "It was an amazing initiative and it was important to be there, to touch, to see with one's own eyes, beyond all expectations. I really liked the idea of this multidisciplinary tournament." Today in Italy, more than 60% of people who leave prison end up back behind bars. However, for those who manage to secure a stable job, recidivism rates drop to 1%. That is why moments like the Games of Hope have a value that extends far beyond the day itself: they offer genuine opportunities for responsibility, meaningful relationships and dignity. "The Games of Hope represent a moment of encounter between institutions, the prison world and civil society, and the beginning of a path to be taken together," said the judge for preliminary investigations at the Court of Velletri, Fabrizio Basei, founder of the magistrates' network Sport and Legality. Rebibbia is a place that concentrates the contrasts of our time: justice and revenge, punishment and possibility, despair and humanity. It was the prison of Cosa Nostra boss Totò Riina, but also the prison-workshop of writer Goliarda Sapienza. Inside, the shadows are many, but there is no lack of light. And sometimes that light starts with a half-day of sport.
