Highlights
- MI6's first female chief warns of aggressive Russian hybrid warfare including cyber attacks and drone incidents.
- Defence chief Richard Knighton calls for 'whole of society approach' to build national resilience against growing threats.
- New spy chief emphasises technology mastery, urging intelligence officers to be 'as comfortable with computer code as with human sources'.
The new chief of MI6, Blaise Metreweli, will warn of "the acute threat posed by Russia" when she makes her first public speech later today, highlighting hybrid warfare tactics including cyber attacks and drone incidents near critical infrastructure.
Metreweli will describe this as "an acute threat posed by an aggressive, expansionist and revisionist Russia" and warn that "the front line is everywhere".
The speech will point to recent sanctioning of Russian entities accused of conducting information warfare, as well as two China-based companies sanctioned for their "indiscriminate cyber activities against the UK and its allies".
Metreweli, who took over as head of the Secret Intelligence Service on October (1), is the first woman to head Britain's overseas spy agency. She succeeded Richard Moore in the autumn.
Referring to the war in Ukraine, she will insist that Britain will keep up pressure on president Vladimir Putin on Ukraine's behalf.
Technology will be a special area of focus for the new spy chief.
Having joined MI6 in 1999, she has arrived at the top job via Q Branch, the real-life, top-secret division that designs gadgets enabling agents to communicate with handlers without being detected.
In her speech, she is expected to call on all intelligence officers to master technology, "not just in our labs, but in the field, in our tradecraft. We must be as comfortable with lines of [computer] code as we are with human sources, as fluent in Python as we are in multiple languages".
National defence urgency
In an age where biometric scanning can unmask spies in seconds at borders and checkpoints, MI6 needs to prove it can still be relevant.
Separately, chief of the Defence Staff Richard Knighton will on Monday call for a "whole of society approach" to building national resilience in the face of growing threats.
In a speech to the Royal United Services Institute in London, Richard is expected to say the situation is more dangerous than he has known during his entire career.
Russia has made it clear it wishes to "challenge, limit, divide and ultimately destroy Nato", he will say.
"A new era for defence doesn't just mean our military and government stepping up as we are, it means our whole nation stepping up," he will say.
Richard will announce £50 m for new defence technical excellence colleges to address skills gaps highlighted in a recent report by the Royal Academy of Engineering.
