The role and activities of the SIS and the M-15 in Britain can broadly be compared to the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) and the Intelligence Bureau (IB), respectively

When Britain appointed Blaise Metreweli as the first woman chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) on June 15, it cast a spotlight on how a posting to India six decades ago shaped the intelligence career of a British diplomat’s wife, who went on to become the first woman to head the Security Service — the SIS’s sister agency tasked with internal security.

While Blaise Metreweli will take over as the SIS Chief, the first woman Director General (DG) of the Security Service, also known as M-15, was Stella Rimington, who served from 1992 to 1996.

In 1965, Stella’s husband, John Rimington, was posted as the First Secretary (Economic) at the British High Commission in India. She had married him in 1963 and moved to London, where she worked at the India Office Library — a substantial collection of documents relating to the administration of India from 1600 to 1947.

According to excerpts from her autobiography, in 1967, after two years in India, she was asked to assist one of the First Secretaries at the High Commission with his office work. When she began work, she discovered that he was the M-15 representative in India.

After obtaining her security clearance, Stella worked with the M-I5 for nearly two years, until she and her husband returned to London in 1969, when she decided to apply for a permanent position at M-I5. During her career from 1969-1996, Stella worked in all the main fields of the Service’s responsibilities — counter-subversion, counter-espionage and counter-terrorism — and became successively the Director of all three.

Metreweli is the fourth woman to head a major British intelligence agency. The 47-year old career intelligence officer, known within the intelligence community as “Q”, had joined the SIS in 1999 and spent most of her professional time in operational roles in the Middle East and Europe.

She is currently the head of technology at the 116-year-old SIS, popularly referred to as M-16, a name that originated during World War II. The head of the agency is officially designated as ‘Chief of the SIS’.

Metreweli, though, is not the first female head of a major British intelligence agency. After Stella, the M-I5 had another woman head, Eliza Manningham-Buller, who served as Director General from 2002 to 2007.

In May 2023, Anne Louise Keast-Butler took over as the first female Director of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), a 105-year-old agency that deals with signals intelligence. She was earlier working with the M-15.

The role and activities of the SIS and the M-15 in Britain can broadly be compared to the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) and the Intelligence Bureau (IB), respectively — India’s agencies dealing with overseas and domestic operations. The National Technical Research Organisation is India’s equivalent of GCHQ.

While women operatives have been part of the intelligence community since times immemorial, very few have risen to the top echelons and it is only in the recent past that a few career officers have headed spy agencies. This apart, there are instances of women experts being appointed to critical positions dealing with intelligence matters in their country’s national security apparatus.

At America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Gina Cheri Walker Haspel became the first female to occupy the Director’s chair, a position she held from May 2018 to January 2021. A career intelligence officer, with numerous foreign assignments, she had earlier served as deputy director of the National Clandestine Service for Foreign Intelligence and Covert Action, and chief of staff for the director of the National Clandestine Service.

Prior to this, Meroë Park who served as Executive Director of the CIA from 2013 to 2017, held the position of Acting Director of the CIA for three days in January 2017, pending Senate confirmation of Mike Pompeo.

During the 1990s, women officers began reaching the number three rung at CIA and in 2002, Jami Miscik was appointed as the deputy director of intelligence, and in-charge of then President George W Bush’s daily briefing. Several key directorates and departments at CIA are now headed by women.

In Mossad, as Israel’s Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations is known by its acronym in Hebrew, women form an important element of its hierarchy and operations, even though the agency has never had a woman director.

It was in August 2022 that for the first time that a woman was appointed to the senior position of director of intelligence in Mossad, roughly equivalent to the rank of Major General. Another woman was also serving in a key spot as the head of Mossad’s Iran desk at that time. Then identified only by their first initials in Hebrew, “Aleph” and “Kuf,” they were the first women in Mossad history to take up these positions.

Aleph’s deputy, referred to by the Hebrew initial “Hay,” was also a female leading to Mossad’s intelligence branch being managed by two women, something described by the agency as “unprecedented”. The branch is the formation of the strategic intelligence picture at the national level and manages hundreds of employees in the domain of intelligence collection analysis and research.

In France, the Directorate General of Internal Security (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Intérieure), a special intelligence service under the Ministry of Interior, is presently headed by a woman career police officer, Céline Berthon, since December 2023. She has served as Head of the National Police Active Services, Central Director of Public Security and Deputy Director General of the National Police.

Both Russia and China are known to deploy a large number of female field operatives for information collection through various means, both domestically as well as overseas. While there would be a large number of women personnel in lower and middle rungs in the intelligence agencies in these countries, little is known about women serving in the upper echelons. The same also holds true for Pakistan.

In addition to senior executives in intelligence agencies, there are top positions in the government like the National Security Advisor or the Director of National Intelligence, which supervise and coordinate the functioning of all intelligence and security agencies. These may or may not be tenanted by career intelligence officers and such appointments can also be political.

The current US Director of National Intelligence (DNI), overseeing the plethora of US agencies, is Tulsi Gabbard, a middle rung army officer turned politician. She is the third woman to occupy this chair, the first being acting DNI Lora Shiao from January 20-21, 2021 and then from January 25-February 12. The first full time woman DNI was Avril Danica Haines from January 2021-January, 2025. A lawyer, she had earlier served as Deputy National Security Advisor and Deputy Director of the CIA.

Earlier, Condoleezza Rice had become the first female US National Security Advisor from 2001-2005. There have been women NSA’s in other countries such as Monica Juma of Kenya.