“Christ, I miss the Cold War!” Judi Dench complained in the film. Casino Royalefrom the James Bond saga, in which the British actress played the role of head of MI6, the United Kingdom’s foreign intelligence service. In real life, the woman who heads that department for the first time in history, Blaise Metreweli, has inherited a world in which the main enemy remains an “aggressive, expansive and revisionist” Russia.
This Monday, in her first public speech since she was appointed to the position last June (although she began serving in October, marking the five-year tenure of her predecessor, Richard Moore), Metreweli described a world in which threats come from all fronts, “the rules of conflict have been rewritten,” “the battlefront is everywhere today,” and the West faces an “era of uncertainty” that an actor like Moscow exploits for its own benefit.
“The export of chaos is not an accident but the pattern with which Russia faces the international stage, and we must be prepared for something like this to continue until we force Putin to change his calculations,” Metreweli warned. The Russian president’s attempts to consolidate his territorial gains in Ukraine and declare himself the winner of that war are facing a Europe that is desperately trying to convince the United States not to reduce pressure on Moscow or allow the Kremlin to dictate the terms of an agreement to end that conflict.
Metreweli has decided to deliver his speech on the same day that the British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, traveled to Berlin to meet with his European counterparts and with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to form a common front against Russian aspirations and support the Ukrainian president in his dealings with Washington. The head of MI6 has added her voice: “Let Putin have no doubt. Our support will be maintained. The pressure we are applying on behalf of Ukraine will be sustained over time,” she stated.
The human factor
London and Moscow maintain a tough and open confrontation, which has been increasing since two agents of the GRU, the Russian military intelligence service, traveled to the town of Salisbury in 2018 to try to assassinate double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia on British territory. They did not achieve their goal, but the perfume bottle in which they had transported the military-made Novichok nerve agent, abandoned without the slightest care in a public park, ended up in the hands of Dawn Sturgess. The 44-year-old woman immediately lost consciousness and died a few days later in a hospital.
Judge Anthony Hughes, who led the independent investigation into what happened, attributed responsibility for that attack to Putin earlier this month and did not hesitate to point out that the order came directly from him.
London is convinced that the Russian Government is behind the disinformation campaigns, hoaxes and computer sabotage suffered by the United Kingdom during these years of growing tension. Downing Street has sanctioned a large group of Russian individuals and entities whom it identifies as responsible for carrying out this new hybrid war ordered by Putin.
The new head of MI6 wanted to point out what is, according to her, the key to a response to all these threats: absolute skill in the management of new technologies, but with the essential human factor. “The challenge that will define the 21st century will not simply be who wields the most powerful technologies, but who will be able to handle them with greater wisdom,” Metreweli’s speech stated.
“We all have decisions before us about how we confront the undercurrents that are shaping reality. In a faster, more dangerous and more technology-dominated world, whether we are able to rediscover our shared humanity, our ability to listen and our courage will determine how the future unfolds,” he said.
Metreweli, of Georgian family origins, studied Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and joined MI6 in 1999. In recent years he headed the organisation’s Technology department, a position also known in the institution’s jargon as Q, the one responsible for giving Bond, at the beginning of each film, the pens with explosives, the guns with touch sensors and, inevitably, the new and improved Aston Martin.
“Mastery of technology must be present in everything we do. Not only in the laboratories, but also in the field, in our profession, and much more importantly, in the mental framework of each agent. We must feel equally comfortable handling lines of code as human sources. We must be as fluent in using the Python program as we are in speaking different languages,” demanded the head of MI6.
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