MI6 Chief: UK Faces Threat From Russia 12/15 06:09

   

   LONDON (AP) -- The new head of the MI6 spy agency is set to warn on Monday 
of how Russian President Vladimir Putin's determination to export chaos around 
the world is rewriting the rules of conflict and creating new security 
challenges.

   Blaise Metreweli will use her first public speech as chief of the United 
Kingdom's foreign intelligence service to say that Britain faces increasingly 
unpredictable and interconnected threats, with emphasis on "aggressive, 
expansionist" Russia.

   "The export of chaos is a feature not a bug in the Russian approach to 
international engagement, and we should be ready for this to continue until 
Putin is forced to change his calculus," she will say, according to extracts 
released by the Foreign Office, which oversees MI6.

   The MI6 chief, known as C, is the only employee of the secretive agency 
whose name is made public. Metreweli, who took over from Richard Moore at the 
end of September, was previously the MI6 director of technology and innovation 
-- the real-world equivalent of the fictional James Bond gadget-master Q.

   She plans to say that technological savvy and human intelligence are both 
key to combating hybrid threats, and MI6 officers "must be as comfortable with 
lines of code as we are with human sources, as fluent in Python as we are in 
multiple languages."

   The speech is the latest in a series of warnings by Western defense and 
security authorities about the growing hybrid threat from states such as 
Russia, Iran and China, whose use of cyber tools, espionage and influence 
operations they say threatens global stability.

   Last week, the U.K. imposed sanctions on several Russian media outlets for 
alleged information warfare and two Chinese tech firms for "vast and 
indiscriminate cyber-activities."

   Metreweli is the first woman to hold the post since MI6 was founded in 1909.

   Britain's two other main intelligence agencies have already shattered the 
spy world's glass ceiling. MI5, the domestic security service, was led by 
Stella Rimington from 1992 to 1996 and Eliza Manningham-Buller between 2002 and 
2007. Anne Keast-Butler became head of the electronic and cyberintelligence 
agency GCHQ in 2023.

   The spy chief's warning came amid a flurry of diplomatic meetings aimed at 
ending the almost four-year war sparked by Russia's invasion of its neighbor.

   Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met U.S. envoys on Sunday in Berlin, 
and will meet later with the leaders of Germany, France and Britain. Kyiv's 
allies are trying to bolster support for Ukraine amid Washington's pressure to 
swiftly accept a U.S.-brokered peace deal.

   In a separate speech, the head of the British military, Air Chief Marshal 
Richard Knighton, will say Monday that Putin's aim is "to challenge, limit, 
divide and ultimately destroy NATO."

   "The war in Ukraine shows Putin's willingness to target neighboring states, 
including their civilian populations ... threatens the whole of NATO, including 
the U.K.," Knighton plans to say, arguing that Britain needs both a stronger 
military and more resilient infrastructure to meet the evolving threat.