‘The Times’: New MI6 boss will be a woman

Dame Barbara Woodward and her team at UN Security Council

Dame Barbara Woodward, a former ambassador to China who has never been a spy, is one of three women in line for the top job at the Secret Intelligence Service, ‘The Times’ informs.

A woman is to take charge of MI6 for the first time in the history of the Secret Intelligence Service, many years after Dame Judi Dench became James Bond’s boss on film.

Interviews for the post took place last week and the final three candidates were all women — two of them MI6 officers. The MI6 chief, Sir Richard Moore, is due to stand down in the autumn after five years in charge.

However, the appointment is controversial because critics say the runaway favourite for the job is too sympathetic to China and is understood to have no previous intelligence experience at a time when Beijing has launched aggressive spying operations in the UK.

Dame Barbara Woodward, who is Britain’s ambassador to the United Nations, is the most senior woman in the Foreign Office. Critics of her expected appointment say she was reluctant to voice any criticisms of the Chinese regime when she was ambassador in Beijing between 2015 and 2020.

Those who support Woodward say she is the most senior woman in the foreign service and her experience in Beijing gives her a unique perspective.

“Beijing Barbara”, as she is known in Whitehall, clashed with successive foreign secretaries over her approach to the oppression of the Uighur people in Xinjiang, which has been widely described as genocide.

Woodward, 63, was also in the post when the Chinese government sanctioned five MPs and two peers for criticising the regime’s treatment of the Uighurs. One of those sanctioned said Woodward “did absolutely nothing to help”.

When she left Beijing, Woodward gave an interview to the English-language Chinese newspaper, Global Times, saying that independence for Taiwan was not an option.

The other two finalists for the job cannot be named because they are intelligence officers whose identities have not been made public — something which would change if they got the top job.

Insiders said Woodward had been asked to apply because there was not a standout internal candidate to replace Moore, who had served MI6 undercover in Vietnam, Turkey, Pakistan and Malaysia before becoming the British ambassador to Turkey, based in Ankara.

Woodward does not have an intelligence background. After growing up in Suffolk, she read history at St Andrews University followed by an international relations master’s degree at Yale. She taught English in China and joined the Foreign Office in 1994. Between 2009 and 2011, she was international director of the UK Border Agency.

The secret service, which focuses on gathering intelligence overseas, has had 17 male chiefs since 1909, each of whom has been referred to as “C” after the first, Sir Mansfield Smith-Cumming. Ian Fleming renamed the spy chief “M” for his Bond books, Cumming’s other initial. C’s memos are always signed with a green pen.

But there are concerns that MI6 — once lauded, alongside Israel’s Mossad, as the best small intelligence-gathering organisation in the world — is losing its cutting edge in a world where the vast bulk of actionable intelligence is gathered by the GCHQ listening station in Cheltenham.

“They have lost their way,” a former intelligence officer said. “They’ve become a more discreet version of the Foreign Office. They seem to have forgotten that their job is agent handling and running and recruiting. Human intelligence is vital but when you get out of the habit it gets really difficult.”

Security sources claimed that a former senior MI6 officer who made the long list for the director-general’s job called for a return to classic recruitment of penetration agents. “He basically said: ‘Your organisation needs a complete reset,’” a source said. This candidate did not make the shortlist.

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