Alex Younger

Every little detail in Sir Alex Younger’s office in the modern-day ziggurat building on the south bank of the Thames evokes intrigue. The 57-year-old spy chief has for the past six years run MI6, Britain’s secret intelligence service, from a designer office that belongs more in a museum of modern art than a government building; it is an aesthetic designed to defy expectations and, perhaps, to put visitors off guard. Meetings are held around a Scandinavian oak dining table; the desk is suspiciously free of paper or a computer and has only two landline phones. From his seat behind the desk, you can see the river, although it’s all but hidden by the vertical blinds that are almost fully drawn. The Swiss Mondaine clock on the wall is set five minutes fast, a tactic to get people out of meetings on time. Sometimes, says Younger, you want to play to spy chief central casting, but at other times, “it’s good to present in a different way”. That strikes me as a metaphor for his 30-year-long intelligence career, in which he studied patterns, peeled back layers, hid and uncovered secrets. His predecessor, John Sawers, who was given the reins of an agency tarnished by the intelligence disasters of the 2003 Iraq war, had spent much of his career in the diplomatic service. Younger, however, is a spy through and through. I ask if the staff address him as C. Absolutely, he says, and that goes for the prime minister too. Mugs for guests at MI6 say either “courage”, “creativity” or “respect”, apparently references to qualities of a successful spy (I get “creativity” for the occasion). But he had trouble competing with the CIA for the president’s time, which I suspect is every British station chief’s frustration. Younger, however, cracked the Karzai code when he heard that the president liked putting jam in his tea to ward off colds. “I employed my mother- in-law’s jam and afforded him a ready supply which I think, at a casual estimate, would have compensated for some billions of dollars of security assistance.” More radically changed over time has been the nature of the security threat. “There was a difference, call it prosaic, between peace and war; there was a difference between domestic and international; there was a difference between cyber and real, largely because cyber didn’t exist,” he explains. “That’s all blurred now and we’ve got hybrid and ambiguity and conflict across the spectrum.” Ambiguity is a fascinating concept for a chief spy, he admits with an edgy laugh, because it is both a threat and an opportunity: “We are charged with dispelling ambiguity, but we also use ambiguity.” Part of Younger’s mission has been to ensure that MI6 emerges a winner in the intelligence tech race. The Q character (in real life a whole department) who made magnet watches and pen grenades in the James Bond films no longer has a monopoly on tech expertise. Under Younger, in 2018 the service backed an £85m venture capital fund to encourage American-style collaboration between the intelligence community and the private sector. The status of Q officers, who were in the past support staff to “fighter pilots”, the human intelligence officers, also has been elevated, a levelling of staff that he welcomes. Yet, even if he likes to be described as a venture capitalist (his face lights up when I mention it), it’s hard to miss Younger’s enduring commitment to the slightly boy scout, ingenuity-in-adversity ethic of traditional spycraft. “I don’t want to lose the garage shed ethic. This really matters to me.” No amount of data or tech, however, prepared Britain or its allies for the onslaught of a coronavirus pandemic that has upended everything from geopolitics to business and intelligence gathering. Younger laments the disruption of his plans to visit SIS stations around the world before his October 1 departure. The pandemic-induced paralysis across countries makes for a safer world, in some ways, but it also dangerously disrupts sensitive, human-to-human