This is getting to be a habit – and an embarrassing one for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6. Soon after it appoints its new chief, the media reveals something personal about the latest ‘C’ that hardly fits with the image we would wish the world to have of the person at the apex of our espionage operations.
When Sir John Sawers was appointed in 2009, The Mail on Sunday immediately found that his wife Shelley had put up various snaps of the nation’s new spy chief on a family Facebook page, including one of Sir John on holiday wearing Speedos – and also details of where the family lived.
The Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Ed Davey – then as now, a dedicated headline-grabber – declared this might have ‘breached the security of the incoming head of MI6 too seriously to allow him to take up the post’.
And when Sir Richard Moore was appointed as C in 2020, the Sun revealed that our new intelligence chief’s grandfather, Jack Buckley, had been a volunteer in the Irish Republican Army, later given a medal by the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein, for his service in the war against the British.
Through rapid research in archives held in Ukraine and Germany, the Mail produced proof that her paternal grandfather was Constantine Dobrowolski, a notorious Ukrainian collaborator with the invading Nazis in the 1940s.
He had defected from the Red Army to serve in an SS unit and later boasted, according to the records: ‘I oversaw captured Russian vehicles and personally took part in front-line action near Kyiv and in the extermination of Jews.’
I have spoken to former MI6 colleagues of Metreweli about this. Their take is it was most unlikely that its vetting processes would not have uncovered this fact about her family when she applied to join in 1999. They also thought someone of her intensely curious nature would have found out for herself, anyway.
MI6 have appointed their first ever female chief, the brilliant new boss Blaise Metreweli
But they added that not only would the heinous actions of a grandparent (who died long before she was born) be no reason for rejecting her, she was also far and away the best candidate for the top job.
Nevertheless, this is catnip for the Kremlin. Putin’s regime, since it launched its mass-murdering campaign to destroy Ukraine as an independent nation, has incessantly described President Zelensky’s government as ‘Nazi’, in an effort to depict the conflict as a replay of the ‘Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945’ in which the Soviet Union ultimately triumphed over the invading Wehrmacht of a genocidal Adolf Hitler.
So how convenient for Moscow’s propagandists that the new chief of a Western intelligence service committed to the defence of Ukraine can be graphically linked – through bloodline – to this legend; one which, alas, is widely believed by the Russian people. But for the same reason, it was much in our interests that the Mail broke the full story, and with as much factual detail as possible. Whiffs of it were already emerging on pro-Moscow social media accounts.
Indeed, a few days before the Mail story broke, a former MI6 man alerted me to an account on Telegram (much used by Russian bloggers) which alleged that the grandfather of the new head of MI6 ‘by late 1942 was already working at the Special Preliminary Camp in the city of Auschwitz, where Caucasian-origin Nazi collaborators were trained’.
This was garbled stuff, but it could only have been highly damaging to this country’s reputation if the whole story was, in a sense, owned by Russian propagandists. Or as another ex-MI6 officer, and no particular admirer of the British press, said when I made this point: ‘I agree that the Mail was right about denying the Russians the triumph of breaking the story.’
Still, the Russian foreign ministry’s long-standing spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, has clicked into gear. Tass, the state news agency, ran a story in its English language outlet under the headline ‘Nazi descendants promoted to leading posts in West purposefully’.
It quoted Zakharova: ‘The trend is obviously neo-Nazi. Friedrich Merz, Annalena Baerbock… Now the head of MI6, Blaise Metreweli, can be added to the list. Someone purposefully and consciously puts descendants of the Nazis in leadership positions in the countries of the collective West.’
It’s hardly surprising that leading German politicians, such as its current Chancellor (Merz) or the Foreign Affairs minister in the previous administration (Baerbock) would have grandfathers who not only fought against the Soviet Union in 1941-1945, but were actually Nazi party members.
Russian president Vladimir Putin, who has been denied a propaganda ‘triumph’ by the Mail’s gripping revelations
But Zakharova went on to assert, despite clear historical documentation to the contrary, that Blaise Metreweli’s grandfather must have been present at the massacre of an estimated 34,000 Jewish men, women and children by Nazis, aided and abetted by Ukrainian nationalists, at Babyn Yar. What she doesn’t say, of course, is that the Holocaust Memorial at Babyn Yar, a sacred site for Ukraine’s Jews, was attacked by missiles sent by her government in March 2022. Indeed, the Ukrainian president, whose government the Kremlin disgustingly describes as ‘a genocidal Ukrainian Nazi regime’, is himself Jewish, and Zelensky’s family – which had members exterminated in the Holocaust – fought for the Red Army against the Germans.
If one adopts the modern parlance of describing far-right ultra-nationalists as ‘neo-Nazis’, then it is Putin’s Russia, not Zelensky’s Ukraine, which gives them succour and support – and derives the same in return.
When Putin invaded Crimea in 2014, it organised a so-called ‘anti-fascist’ conference of Western politicians supportive of his action. The British delegate was the then leader of the BNP, Nick Griffin, and similar figures from the European nationalist far-right also showed up to support Putin – and were paid for by the Kremlin. This was Orwellian: fascists against fascism.
On the actual battlefield, the Wagner group, which was the leading supplier of mercenary troops to Putin’s war on Ukraine, had been founded and commanded by Dmitry Utkin, a man covered in Nazi tattoos (and do you wonder why he named his group after the anti-Semitic German composer most beloved by the late Fuhrer?).
Utkin had been awarded the honour of Hero of the Russian Federation and photographed with Putin when receiving it. (In 2023, Putin had him bumped off in a plane ‘accident’, along with other leaders of the Wagner group, just as Hitler had ordered the murder of leaders of the Sturmabteilung, when he believed they were planning a coup against his leadership).
And there is still the ultra-nationalist Rusich Brigade, fighting alongside the regular Russian army in Ukraine, led by the sadistic Aleksei Milchakov, a man who when asked about his political views, said: ‘I’ll tell you straight up, I’m a Nazi.’
Go back to Putin’s claims when he launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with the assertion that Kyiv was and always must be a Russian city and that the frontier between Russia and Ukraine should be dissolved; it is eerily similar to what Hitler said when he invaded Poland in 1939: ‘Danzig was and is a German city . . . I am resolved to remove from German frontiers the element of uncertainty.’
Also note, because Russian propaganda obliterates the fact, that this was part of a Nazi-Soviet carve-up of Poland, under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. There was even a joint Nazi/Soviet military parade in Brest-Litovsk to celebrate Poland’s evisceration.
So when the Kremlin tries to paint this country as connected with the depravities of the Nazis and their collaborators, remember all that.
I’m sure Blaise Metreweli knows it very well.
