The UK government is close to choosing the first female head of the secret intelligence service MI-6, after two women remained in the final race for the top post in the agency, tasked with the dangerous job of recruiting agents to spy for Britain abroad, BNR reported.
In the past few weeks, of the four candidates who were on the shortlist to lead the British foreign intelligence service, two remained and they are women, people familiar with the selection process told the “Financial Times“ newspaper. The competition for the post, codenamed “C”, will now be between Barbara Woodward, the current UK permanent representative to the UN and former ambassador to China, and a female candidate from MI6, whose name cannot be released at this stage for security reasons and because she is not a public figure. The successful candidate will be the first female head of the agency in more than a century since the Foreign Intelligence Service was founded. She will take up the post this autumn when current head Richard Moore steps down after a five-year term. The final decision will be made by Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy after a round of private talks with the candidates, Whitehall officials said. Jonathan Powell, Starmer's national security adviser, is also expected to have a say in the selection.
The announcement of the successful candidate is expected in the next few weeks.
“Russia is at war with the UK, the US is no longer a reliable ally and the UK must respond by becoming more cohesive and more resilient”, said Fiona Hill - one of the three authors of the strategic defence review - in an interview with the “Guardian” newspaper, quoted by BNR.
Fiona Hill became the White House's top adviser on Russia during Donald Trump's first term and has now contributed to the British government's strategy, the newspaper said.
In the interview, she said "the country is in big trouble", describing the UK's geopolitical position as being squeezed between the "hammer" of Vladimir Putin's Russia and the "anvil" of Donald Trump's increasingly unpredictable US.
"Russia has established itself as an adversary in ways that we probably didn't fully anticipate", Hill said, claiming that Putin saw the war in Ukraine as a starting point for Moscow to become "the dominant military power across Europe". As part of this long-term effort, Russia has already been “threatening the UK in various ways”, she says, citing “poisonings, assassinations, sabotage operations, all sorts of cyberattacks and influence operations”, adding also “the sensors being placed around critical pipelines and efforts to destroy undersea cables”.
Fiona Hill concludes that “Russia is already at war with the UK”. She also believes that Vladimir Putin sees the war in Ukraine as “part of a proxy war with the United States and has thus persuaded China, North Korea and Iran to get involved”.