(C) BoingBoing
This story was originally published by BoingBoing and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Britain's Secret Intelligence Service distances new chief from her Nazi grandfather [1]

['Rob Beschizza']

Date: 2025-06-27

Blaise Metreweli is the first woman to lead Britain's MI6, officially the Secret Intelligence Service. She's also the first MI6 leader to have a Nazi grandfather known as "the butcher." Metreweli, 47, is currently "Q," the service's technical chief. But her appointment as "C"—real-life positions made famous through the fictional exploits of James Bond—exposed her background to deeper media scrutiny.

With little known about her wider backstory, several newspapers reported on Friday that her grandfather was Constantine Dobrowolski, who defected from Soviet Russia's Red Army to become the Nazis' chief informant in Chernihiv, Ukraine. However, the Foreign Office, which speaks on behalf of MI6, said Ms Metreweli "neither knew nor met her paternal grandfather". A spokesperson added: "Blaise's ancestry is characterised by conflict and division and, as is the case for many with eastern European heritage, only partially understood.

What a perfect character for a spy thriller.

The Daily Mail, which first revealed the family link, reports that it found hundreds of pages of documents in an archive in Freiburg, Germany, which showed Mr Dobrowolski was known as "The Butcher" or "Agent No 30" by Wehrmacht commanders. He reportedly signed off letters to his Nazi superiors with "Heil Hitler" and said he "personally" took part in "the extermination of the Jews".

File under "things that shouldn't be a problem for his descendents and wouldn't have been if it hadn't been kept quiet." Metreweli will be the agency's 18th leader when she takes over from Sir Richard Moore (no relation to Roger.)

Previously:

• MI6 hackers replace al Qaeda bomb recipes with pirated cake recipes

• MI6 compensates LSD human lab rats

• Top UK spies revealed as wankers

• UK spy agencies store sensitive data on millions of innocent people, with no safeguards from abuse

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2025/06/27/britains-secret-intelligence-service-distances-new-chief-from-her-nazi-granddad.html

Published and (C) by BoingBoing
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/boingboing/

You are viewing proxied material from magical.fish. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.