Blaise Metreweli
Who is Blaise Metreweli?
What is Blaise Metreweli’s educational background?
What was Blaise Metreweli’s role in MI6 before becoming its head?
What are some key aspects of Blaise Metreweli’s early life?
What did Blaise Metreweli identify as a priority in her role as head of MI6?
As a girl Blaise Metreweli learned to write in code, often leaving secret messages for her friends. She knew she wanted to be a spy. That was a goal she achieved right out of college. In 2025 she became the first woman to lead MI6, Britain’s foreign spy service.
Early life
- Birth date: July 30, 1977
- Education: University of Cambridge, bachelor’s degree in anthropology, 1998
- Best known for: Being the first woman to head MI6, the British foreign spy agency
- Family: She is married with children, but kept her career secret from them—until they figured it out.
- Code names: Q—used when she headed MI6’s technology division; she is now known as C, for chief, as the agency head. (M is the fictional code name Judi Dench used in James Bond films.)
- Quotation: “We get to do extraordinary things in the service of the country, but it’s really important that it looks ordinary.”—Metreweli on the role of spies.
Metreweli was born in 1977. Her father, Constantine Metreweli, was a radiologist who served in the British Army Medical Unit. Blaise Metreweli and her siblings grew up mostly overseas, with their father completing a medical residency in Saudi Arabia in the early 1980s and then working at the Chinese University of Hong Kong from 1986. Metreweli has said that as a child, she took her brother’s book on spycraft, crossed out his name, and wrote in her own. She learned pigpen code and left coded messages for friends under flowerpots.
Metreweli attended Westminster School in London and then studied social anthropology at Pembroke College, one of the constituent colleges of the University of Cambridge. “She was clearly both subtle and sophisticated,” her mentor, Barbara Bodenhorn, later told the BBC. At Cambridge, Metreweli was head of the boat club and a member of the rowing team that defeated Oxford’s team in the 1997 Women’s Boat Race. The Times reported in 2025 that she still rows with some of her old college friends.
The making of a spy
Cambridge is known as a feeder school for MI6, and Metreweli joined the spy agency in 1999. In the years since then, she has kept an extremely low profile, with her name almost never appearing in the news media. However, the agency has said she spent most of her career working in Europe and Iraq, and other Middle Eastern countries—sometimes in war zones. In those postings she learned Arabic and ran agents. Former MI6 head Alex Younger in 2025 described Metreweli as “an incredibly experienced, credible, successful operational officer.” She moved to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s MI6 branch in March 2003.
She also raised a family while working as a spy chief. In one posting, Metreweli was given an armored car, and she became the first officer to ask for help installing her baby’s car seat. “There was a lot of scratching of heads and people saying, ‘we haven’t had a request for one of those things before,’” she later recalled.
In 2021 while Metreweli was working for MI5 (Britain’s domestic spy operation), she gave an interview to the Telegraph. Her name was not disclosed to the reporter—she was identified only as Director K—and she explained that only her husband and closest relatives were told what she did for a living. She revealed it to her children only after they figured it out on their own.
As of 2022 Metreweli held the MI6 role known as Q, where she oversaw the development of spy technology. That year she gave another anonymous interview, this one to the Financial Times. “The extreme secrecy around Q’s operations is such that I am not allowed to describe any of it,” the reporter wrote, “even in the sparest terms. I can only observe that, given the scale of the tech threat posed by hostile countries, computers are very much in evidence.”
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Nazi family history
The Daily Mail reported in 2025 that Metreweli’s paternal grandfather was Constantine Dobrowolski, a Ukrainian-born man who worked as an informant for the Nazis during World War II. Dobrowolski’s parents were killed by the Bolsheviks when he was 11, and their home and estate in Ukraine were plundered. As a young man, Dobrowolski spent 10 years in exile in Siberia and was then drafted into the Red Army. But in 1941 he defected to the German military and became an informant in Ukraine. Among the Nazis he came to be known as “the Butcher” and had a bounty put on his head. It is unclear when he died.
Dobrowolski’s wife, Varvara, and his infant son, Constantine, were allowed to leave Ukraine for Germany. Varvara ended up in Britain, where she married David Metreweli, who was Georgian. The younger Constantine—Blaise Metreweli’s father—took his stepfather’s surname.
A spokesman for Blaise Metreweli told the Daily Mail that she had never met her Nazi grandfather. The spokesman said Metreweli’s “complex heritage” had contributed to her “commitment to prevent conflict and protect the British public from modern threats from today’s hostile states.”
View of her role
Despite having a very limited public profile because of the nature of her work, in 2024 Metreweli was made Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of Saint Michael and Saint George, a British order of chivalry, for her “services to British foreign policy.” In June 2025 British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that Metreweli would be the new head of MI6, following the retirement of Richard Moore, who had overseen the agency since 2020.
In a December 2025 speech Metreweli identified Russia as a top threat to the U.K. and promised to continue supporting Ukraine in its war against the Kremlin. She also said MI6 would “continue to inform the government’s understanding of China’s rise and the implications for U.K. national security.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given her former role as Q, she also suggested that technological development would be a key priority for her. “Mastery of technology will infuse everything we do,” she said. “Not just in our labs, but in the field, in our tradecraft, and even more importantly, in the mindset of every officer. We will become as comfortable with lines of code as we are with human sources, as fluent in Python as we are in multiple other languages.”