The welcome appointment of Blaise Metreweli as ‘C’, the chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service, is a timely reminder of the challenges facing intelligence agencies in the digital age. Most of the media comment on the appointment has understandably centred on her gender as the first female C (notwithstanding that Judi Dench made the role of Chief seem so natural for her in the later James Bond movies). Understandable, since senior female intelligence officers such as Neta Ramsay and the late Daphne Park may have been subject to prevailing male prejudice in being passed over in previous eras. The more important story is that the 47-year old Blaise Metreweli, as well as having extensive experience as a case officer, has senior experience in the domestic Security Service, MI5, and is being promoted from her present position of Director General of MI6 for technology and innovation.

In the early films, before starting his missions, James Bond visits the Secret Service’s quartermaster ‘Q’ to be equipped, perhaps with the Aston Martin fitted with machine guns and an ejector seat, plus some other improbable gadgets (fiction does not have to obey the laws of physics). I always imagined Q as a rather eccentric former Royal Engineers officer. But in the film Skyfall Bond meets the new Q, aptly in front of the Turner painting in the National Gallery showing the old 98-gun sailing ship of the line, The Fighting Temeraire, being towed to the breakers yard by a new-fangled steam-powered tug. The significance of the image is not lost on the middle-aged Bond when the spotty youth beside him introduces himself as the new Q, played by Ben Wishaw, as a wizard of the new digital age. In the film Bond still gets a radio beacon and a handmade weapon for his mission. ‘Is that all?’, says Bond, ‘not exactly Christmas, is it”. To which Q replies, ‘what were you expecting, an exploding pen? We don’t go in for that sort of thing these days’. But Bond’s new Walther PPK does have a grip digitally encoded with Bond’s palmprint so that only Bond can fire it, as a villain later finds out when he seizes and fires it at Bond and a bullet comes out of the back of the gun straight into him. Auch is the penalty for coming up against the technology of His Majesty’s Secret Service.

That scene marked an important cultural inflection point on the journey from the analogue world to the digital. What scholars would describe as part of ‘a mind-tech nexus’, the interplay between the mind of the intelligence officers seeking to uncover and neutralise threats to the nation while avoiding the attentions of the adversary, and achieving their goals through harnessing the latest technology. Today, for example, AI is already superior to humans in recognising faces, identifying speakers, and finding patterns in very large sets of data.

Intelligence officers have been consistently innovative in exploiting the latest scientific or technological advances. A good pub quiz question would be: when and where was the first ever use of electricity for communication? In 1837 a copper cable was used to send electric signals between Camden Town and Euston stations in London. The demonstration was attended by no less a notable than Robert Stephenson, whose Rocket was one of the very first steam locomotives. It only took seven years from that first example of almost instantaneous communication to Samuel Morse in 1844 sending the first message using his eponymous code over the new electric telegraph from Washington to Baltimore. ‘What hath God wrought’ was the Biblical message sent via the new technology (Numbers 23:23). The intelligence value to be derived from those cable communications became obvious to both Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War, as they sought to track the movements of their opponents. President Lincoln spent more of his presidency in the War Department’s telegraph office (where he had a bed) than anywhere else outside the White House. By the time of the Franco-Prussian war undersea copper cables spanned the Atlantic and connected the far-flung British Empire (to India in 1870 and Australia in 1872 – today’s fibre optic cables in large part follow the same routes).

The same story followed with the use of radio. Less than ten years after Hertz’s 1886 experimental vindication of Clerk Maxwell’s equations, Marconi was demonstrating practical radio transmission to the Royal Navy. Only a few years after that, British secret agents were equipped with covert radio sets built into suitcases. Bletchley Park during the Second World War invented the first computer Colossus to aid the intelligence attack on advanced German cyphers. Colossus had 1,600 valves; when OpenAI launched the large language model GPT-1, in 2018, it had 117 million equivalents; the latest generative AI models may have over a trillion. It is difficult to see how, without such advanced AI, it will be possible for intelligence officers to make sense of the ever-expanding volume of material available from a vast array of different global sources and thereby spot emerging risks or trends. At the same time, the job of the intelligence officer in recruiting and running agents becomes so much harder. Digital technology severely reduces the anonymity provided by the false passports and carefully curated pocket litter – let alone the wigs, false beards and moustaches – beloved of traditional intelligence tradecraft. For an intelligence officer and her agents operating in hostile territory, every step risks generating data that the opposing security apparatus can detect, classify as anomalous, and therefore flag up to be investigated. It can be thought of as a parallel to the transparent battlefield that has emerged on the frontlines of Ukraine, where every movement of soldier or vehicle can be observed by a multitude of digital sensors linked to effectors such as first-person-view drones and precision munitions. New ways of conducting intelligence operations are needed, as are new ways of warfare.

When I joined the intelligence agency GCHQ in the autumn of 1969, intelligence was an entirely analogue affair. Unknown to me, at that same time over in California, the first direct computer-to-computer communication took place. The log of that momentous event – the germination of the seed of what was to grow into the internet – shows that at 21:00 on 29 October 1969 one computer at the University of California at Los Angeles was used to log in to another at the Stanford Research Institute. Actually, the link crashed on that first try, but they persevered. A few years later, what had started as a Department of Defense Advanced Research Project had become a nationwide network and was going international, with the UK as a first overseas node.

By 1993, the Five-Eyes nations of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand were firmly digitally connected along with part of Western Europe, and in 1995 the network was being handed over from the Pentagon to the US Department of Commerce, thereby creating the modern internet. When I became the Director of GCHQ in the mid-1990s these advances in digital communication were just becoming exploitable for intelligence purposes. It should come as no surprise that 1995 saw the start of the first major Russian cyber espionage attack, codenamed Moonlight Maze, hacking into US defence establishments. The direction of travel of the intelligence world into the digital age was clear.

Today, every form of information that as humans we can access through our senses to inform us about the world in which we live can be turned into numbers, 0s and 1s: text, music and sound, still and moving pictures and today of course our online activity, our travel, our purchases and financial transactions, our biometrics, our DNA. Even our emotions can be digitised through sentiment analysis. When the iPhone arrived in 2007 mobile devices started to provide all of us with constant interconnection, abolishing barriers of time and space. By 2030 the Internet of Things is expected to comprise over 29 billion individual devices each with an addressable Internet address. Once the information is in the form of numbers it can be encrypted and easily transmitted, stored, accessed, searched, manipulated and, of course, stolen and corrupted and denied to us, as the British retailer Marks and Spencer has very recently found to its cost following a serious ransomware attack.

Enabling the exploitation of these innovations has been a whole series of other scientific breakthroughs. The first quantum revolution arrived in the 1950s, associated especially with the Nobel laureate Richard Feynman (he was the guy portrayed playing bongo drums in the film Oppenheimer) and his quantum electrodynamic theory governing the interaction of light with matter. That led to the tuneable laser, making possible the rapid writing, storing and retrieval of data – a vital capability for intelligence and security agencies – later commercialised for the general public as the CD then the DVD. The laser also made possible the precision manufacture of printed circuits, packing more and more components together into integrated microchips. The result was a transformation of espionage for the major powers through constellations of satellites ­– in geostationary and elliptical orbits – launched to collect and transmit every kind of electromagnetic emission, multi-spectrum communications, radar, visual and infrared. The latest manifestation, Elon Musk’s private sector Starlink satellite constellation, has played a vital, if at times controversial, part in enabling Ukraine to resist the Russian invasion. But amid all this technology, as the new chief of SIS will know from her own experience, there is no substitute for the well-placed human source able to provide insights into even the most closed of societies and into the motivations of their autocratic leaders.

It has to be admitted that not all imaginative innovation applied to intelligence activity works in practice. The CIA spent $20 million in the 1960s on ‘acoustic kitty’, implanting aerials and listening devices into cats that would be trained to walk into Soviet embassies and stroll around, like 10 Downing Street’s Larry the cat. The US programme was eventually cancelled by CIA auditors on the grounds that although all the technology worked fine, their cats – like all cats – were obstinately untrainable. A recent Director of the CIA, Bill Burns, has said that his favourite piece of CIA wizardry was the Dragonfly bugging device. The CIA technologists crafted a beautiful life-size rendering of a dragonfly to be a covert listening device with its microphone powered by having a laser shone on it. Sadly, the device was never usable operationally. It weighed only a gram, and the slightest puff of wind would blow it too far from the target to overhear the wanted conversation. The Cold War KGB also had their R&D labs and made their own effective bugging devices including the cavity resonator based on the physics of an unusual musical instrument invented by a Soviet scientist, the theremin. Intelligence history has its dark side, too. The Washington Spy Museum displays a 1960s KGB one-shot gun built in to a bright red lipstick for a female assassin – no doubt the instruction was to get up close and personal with the target. The Scotland Yard black museum contains the umbrella gun that fired a ricin pellet that fatally poisoned the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov on Waterloo Bridge on 18 September 1978.

Looking back, we can see the way that every scientific and technological advance over the centuries has been exploited by intelligence officers. There has also been remarkable open mindedness displayed in otherwise traditionally minded intelligence agencies to use the advanced technologies of their day to support the practical craft of espionage. That will be true of future scientific revolutions, too. We are just at the beginnings of the search for workable quantum computing but quantum-sensing devices already show practical promise and advanced neuroscience is reshaping the relationship between the human and the machine. Today, however, most of the potentially relevant research and development capable for intelligence exploitation is no longer confined to highly classified projects in government laboratories, although those do exist. The agencies now have to look externally for inspiration to the commercial world and to academia, as well as exploiting the networks of contacts that the agencies and their scientific advisers have been steadily building over recent years.

I wish I could be as confident that civil government will be as innovative over the years to come as the intelligence community is having to be with new technology. Let me share with you a delightful quote from a book by J.P.W. Mallalieu published in 1942 as a polemic against the sluggish ways of the civil service even when facing the demands of a nation at war:

One afternoon in the summer of 1860 a sheet of paper was handed across the table to a Treasury official giving evidence to a Parliamentary committee. The committee had discovered that every one of the 20,000 letters prepared each year by the Treasury was written with pen and ink, and copied in pen and ink twice. The committee was shocked. It suggested that as letter presses had been in use in business for a century they might be safely introduced into the Treasury. The Treasury was not impressed. The change would be unfair to the copyists, it would be undignified and anyway it would not work. So the Treasury stuck to its pens and encouraged other government departments to stick to theirs. It did not give in to letter presses until 1885; and by that time Remington’s had been selling typewriters for at least 12 years. The same was true for shorthand, introduced into government just as the first Dictaphones were coming onto the market.