For her eyes only: a new boss at MI6

0:00This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. This intelligence podcast is sponsored by Backmarket, the leading global marketplace for refurbished tech.

0:37When the kids need phones, laptops, or tablets for school, buying refurbished tech makes sense for families trying to save money without sacrificing quality. At Backmarket, tech costs up to 50 % less compared to new. All devices have been professionally refurbished and come with a one-year warranty and 30-day return policy. Start saving money. Visit Backmarket.com or the Backmarket app to shop now.

1:04The Economist

1:11Anne McElvoy:Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Bloor. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

1:25Anne McElvoy:For decades, nuclear power has been championed as a potential answer to many of our problems. Yet it remains pricey and time-consuming to build, not to mention the toxic byproducts. But our correspondent reckons things could just be different this time. And Stephanie Shirley got sick of standing against a wall so that male colleagues couldn't pinch her bottom. So she started her own firm. With just£6 in capital, it ended up being valued at£3 billion, much of which she gave away. Our obituaries editor celebrates her life.

2:06But first...

2:13Anne McElvoy:MI6, Britain's spy service, is generally portrayed as a glamorous but mysterious organisation, thanks in no small part to the James Bond effect. Mr Bond. James Bond. Most Brits, however, know very little about what it does to try and keep them safe. That's something that's only getting harder. In a world where wars compete for attention, new foes are making new allies, and technology has changed the tasks and risks of any intelligence work. You could say it's been shaken and stirred. So as a new chief takes over MI6 on October 1st, how will the agency approach its increasingly complex mandate?

2:56Anne McElvoy:And will it ever come out of the shadows? There's so much more to spy on with a growing number of threats. Shashank Joshi is The Economist's defence editor. And indeed growing connections between those threats, as we saw recently with the meeting between Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. But technology is completely changing the business of spycraft in some really profound ways. And so for the incoming MI6 chief, I think there are going to be some really difficult choices ahead about how she steers her organisation into this new period of intense geopolitical competition. So tell us about the new chief.

3:41Blaise Metroeli is a career intelligence officer. She's been in MI6 since 1999. I think she's the youngest ever chief. And there's quite an interesting generational shift, I think, Rosie, right? If you think about all the other chiefs, most of them have either cut their teeth in the Cold War or they've joined just after it in the case of Sir Alex Younger. She is the first one to have joined MI6 that was well beyond the Cold War days. And she's a real operational officer by trade. She's been based all over the Middle East, but she's also done a number of interesting jobs. Perhaps most famously, she was head of Q branch until recently, which heads up MI6's approach to technology.

4:24But she also served in MI5, countering subversion by other states. And that experience is going to be very useful indeed. The CIA has been run by outsiders for the last 50 years on the whole, mostly lawyers, politicians and the like. MI6 is different. It's been run by people like Blaise Metroelli, insiders, intelligence officers, people who have done the hard work of running and recruiting agents on the ground in foreign countries. And I think that tells us something interesting about the ethos of the organisation relative to other human intelligence agencies.

5:00Anne McElvoy:So how will she address the challenges that she's facing? I mean, I think that there is so much to spy on. You obviously have a war in Europe, You have Russia resurgent, conducting sabotage, Aston across Europe, as we've discussed many times on the intelligence. But we heard from Richard Moore, who's the outgoing MI6 chief, about how China, for the last several years, so this is not a new development, has been the number one priority of the service, not just because of China's possible military activity in Asia, but perhaps more importantly, because of the global impact it has on security. So just to give you some examples of that, China is, as we've discussed, Rosie, before, the single biggest enabler of Russia's defence industry.

5:43China is selling advanced telecommunications equipment across Europe. In fact, the Spanish government recently signed and then reversed a contract to use Huawei, the Chinese company that you know very well, for its wiretapping domestically. So for a start, you have to juggle these enormous challenges, these two hostile spy services from China and Russia that are much, much bigger individually than you. And then on top of that, you have a range of other things to tackle. That could be counter-proliferation. So how do you stop Iran's nuclear program? But it could also be stuff like emerging technology.

6:18You know, how do you monitor breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and quantum computing that occur abroad? These are all within the remit of MI6. So the single biggest challenge for a mid-sized country like Britain, which has a very ambitious spy service, but not one on the scale of the Chinese, is how do you juggle all of these plates at the same time with a budget that's growing, but that isn't growing enough to be able to let you do all of this at the same comfortable pace you might have done 50 years ago?

6:47Anne McElvoy:Shashank, you've just talked about the geographical juggle, but what about the tasks that MI6 faces? Well, most people will think of MI6 correctly as an espionage service. It steals secrets from other countries and other groups to benefit the UK. And that is right. That is the core of what it does. But less well known is that it also has another mission, which it calls disruption. It has to make things happen abroad. And that can be information. It can be propaganda. But it can also be actual disruption. So to give you one example, let's say Iran, after the bombing of its nuclear sites, is trying to revive its nuclear program by buying new components abroad.

7:29Intelligence agencies like MI6 also have a mandate to do things like feed perhaps damaged components into that program to try to cause it to go awry, to try to delay it in various ways. Or that could be sowing division inside the upper ranks of the Russian army to try and complicate their military planning in Ukraine. So that isn't classical espionage. It's not paying someone to give you a secret, but it requires the same kind of covert work abroad, often perhaps in very difficult situations against governments that have a strong degree of surveillance over what's happening. And I think balancing those two things, collection of secrets, collection of intelligence with operations to make things happen, I think that's going to be an increasingly significant challenge, not just for MI6, for many intelligence agencies.

8:20We have all these different areas that Blaise Metroelli is going to have to juggle. And technically, it isn't her job to decide what she spies on. Those are priorities set by the government. But I think, you know, she will have to have difficult conversations with those in the Foreign Office, those in the Cabinet Office, those in other parts of the British government, saying, look, we have a set budget. I just can't juggle all of these things in the same way that British military chiefs have had to say, we can't do all of the things you've asked us to do with this amount of money.

8:48Anne McElvoy:Shashank, you mentioned tech. How does that change what MI6 is now doing? Well, it's been really obvious to intelligence agencies for more than a decade that the age of big data, the fact that your smartphone leaks everything about you, your location, your activity, that it is hard to operate covertly. So if you're an intelligence officer trying to meet an agent secretly to keep them safe from their own country's hostile counterintelligence service, it is increasingly difficult to keep that relationship covert. And Rosie, from your time as a journalist in China, you'll understand just how suffocating the surveillance state there is.

9:27But this isn't just a China problem, but it's true all around the world, even for less capable countries. So the huge challenge that MI6 and its sister services face is how to use technology to their own advantage. So for instance, how do you use technology to identify potential agents that you can recruit? How do you use technology to identify their patterns of life, their movements, their habits, their state of mind in ways that turn the tables and help you recruit them? I think it's also about working increasingly closely with technical signals intelligence services, organizations like GCHQ, Britain's Technical Signals Intelligence Service, who do things like hack communications, collect data, hack into devices abroad, that there is more of a symbiosis between these two.

10:17There always has been, but more than there ever was. And I think in the UK context, you see that in a very interesting way in an organisation that's called the National Cyber Force. It's Britain's offensive cyber organisation, and it includes not just the military, not just GCHQ, but also MI6. And I think that one of the big changes that technology will drive is this greater and greater integration of what traditionally used to be much more separate and distinctive types of intelligence agencies, even within a country. But there's no doubting the fact that Britain is not a globe-straddling imperial power.

10:54And like the British armed forces, like the British Foreign Office and diplomats, there are difficult choices that simply have to be made.

11:01Anne McElvoy:Shashank, thank you so much for talking to me. Thanks very much for having me.

11:15Anne McElvoy:Tomorrow on The Weekend Intelligence, a story you really need to hear. When the Taliban swept back into power in Afghanistan in 2021, some said they wouldn't repeat their earlier oppression. Yet they have, and they are. The freedoms of women in Afghanistan are being crushed day by day. Their futures snatched. Tomorrow, you have the chance to hear from three young women desperate to do things most of us take for granted. Get an education. Meet our friends. Plan a future. The Taliban wants to silence them. That's all the more reason to listen. To do so, you'll need to be a subscriber.

12:02This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. Hey, I've got the campaign brief ready. Built from last quarter's data and the competitive landscape.

12:37Approved? Oh, agents, where would we be without you? Somewhere with a lot more tabs open. Create your first Monday agent in minutes at monday.com.

12:53Nuclear energy was once billed as the energy source of the future. Today, science marshals its atomic resources to fight disease, drive industry, propel ships and aircraft. The atom may yet be the answer to man's age-long quest for cheap and abundant power. The last two decades, though, have been gloomy ones for the industry.

13:14Anne McElvoy:Vijay Vaiteswaran is The Economist's energy editor. While China has successfully built many nuclear plants, their true costs under communist economics are questioned by critics. Meanwhile, in Finland, Britain and the United States, Overruns on new installations have stretched first into months, then years. Exploding costs and lengthy delays on projects have hampered the spread of atomic energy. But that, perhaps, is set to change. So Vijay, lay it out for us. What's changing? Surprisingly to those who might be following nuclear industry the last 20 years, when not a single power plant has been built in the West on time and on budget, There is investor enthusiasm.

14:01There is government excitement. There's even popular support in the countries on both sides of the Atlantic for nuclear power. This is probably the most optimistic moment in 20 years. Today, the 50th annual symposium of the World Nuclear Association, the industry's most important body, is wrapping up in London, where top nuclear regulators and industry bosses gathered. And unlike in some of the previous years, the mood was one of celebration, a seeming renaissance of their once more abundant industry.

14:31Anne McElvoy:As you say, we've been talking about the potential of nuclear for so long, and you think we finally arrived at a really hopeful moment. What's driving that? Well, whether it's hopeful or delusional remains to be seen, but there's no doubt there's much more enthusiasm, optimism, investment, and prospects for this industry than in a long, long time. The first reason is that governments have become pro-nuclear in many Western countries, and sharply so in some places. And particularly European listeners will remember, sentiments were extremely anti-nuclear in many countries after the Chernobyl accident and more recently the Fukushima accident.

15:08The second big reason is that we now have a rich green uncle that's turned up to the party in the form of big tech. The AI giants have a seemingly insatiable thirst for power. And curiously, they seem to be willing to pay more for clean power. And that has led to interest in nuclear because, of course, it can produce lots of power and it's carbon free and is free of local emissions as well. The third, and in some ways less glamorous, less seemingly sexy area, but one that might be more important, is operational. There's new kinds of business, financial and operational innovations that are emerging that might actually produce a lot more nuclear power at an economical way.

15:47at least that's the hope of the boosters. They think that these three forces combined together will help overcome the challenge of this industry, which is the risky, first-of-a-kind plant, which is the one where the costs tend to get out of control and explode.

16:02Anne McElvoy:You say that government sentiment is changing. Are they actually putting money behind this? Interestingly, yes. In several countries, that's already true. The most notable and strong support comes in America. And it must be said it is bipartisan. Joe Biden was in favor of nuclear power and increased America's goals and commitments, in part because he was very concerned about climate change. And so his big climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, had tax credits supporting nuclear power. Donald Trump has doubled down on Joe Biden's support. And the new one big beautiful bill law, as it's called in America, that was recently passed with strong Republican support, extends very generous tax credits for the industry.

16:45President Trump has also issued some executive orders, as is his way, strongly supporting the industry and trying to clear regulation, fast-tracking approvals for new plants. So that's a big force. But we see this in Canada, for example, which has long had a nuclear tradition but is now leading the world in building smaller reactors, so-called small modular reactors. And in Europe, of course, we see Britain has recently given the green light for a massive project its size will see. Sweden is planning some of those small modular reactors. Germany has ended its opposition to the European classification of nuclear as green energy, which is a great bone of contention between Germany and France.

17:26And in Eastern Europe, closest to the Russian bear and wary of addiction to Russian gas, by far the strongest support from governments for nuclear power in Eastern Europe.

17:36Anne McElvoy:As you say, the thing that always costs so much which is the first-of-a-kind plants, which every nuclear plant has been. You mentioned nuclear innovations. What's changing? So part of the hope that's arising now is there's at last a country that is not Russia or China, that is not an autocratic system with very opaque economics, that has been able to build lots of nuclear plants successfully, and that is South Korea. We now have evidence of multiple nuclear plants that have been built in South Korea on time, on budget. and part of the enthusiasm is studying what works. And among other things, it's to build lots of plants that are exactly the same.

18:15It's not that complicated, right? Get a fleet so that you can have learning by doing or economies of scale, as we sometimes call them. And that's what in South Korea they've been able to do. And that suggests there is a model if we can get the parameters right. But also we're seeing innovation on the technology side. We're seeing a new generation of smaller reactors, so-called small modular reactors, 120 plus different companies with different designs all over the world coming up with new ways to make smaller reactors where the initial capital outlays much, much smaller. That makes it more digestible, makes it more easy to attract investors.

18:51And also, if you make smaller reactors, the theory goes, you can quickly get to building four or five or 10 as opposed to building one enormous reactor, which will probably be over budget and delayed. And so these are a couple of the reasons. And of course, that rich green uncle in the form of big tech turning up, being willing to take on long-term contracts or to fund some of these innovative companies that are often startups that require capital. And we've seen OpenAI, Amazon, Google, Meta investing very heavily and quite creatively into nuclear power plants.

19:25Anne McElvoy:These are still very ambitious plans, a lot of novelty, a lot of new plants. what's to stop these projects also being over budget and delayed like their predecessors? I think almost certainly most of them will be, especially with novel, first of a kind technologies unproven. You're probably going to see significant rates of failure. And that's as it should be. One of the CEOs, one of the leading SMR companies that's backed by a Silicon Valley funder says, look, we need to take a lot of shots on goal, he tells me. But the new thing he says is in the past, we were in the comfortable hammock of government support.

20:01But now, because of the massive amounts of private sector funding that have come, we're talking on the order of billions of dollars have flowed just to this industry of small modular reactors. We haven't even talked about fusion energy, which is even more unlikely and more radical. That is the energy of the sun. The fusion startup companies have attracted billions of dollars themselves, including the leading one, Commonwealth, has just gotten over$800 million in fresh funding in a new round. So you're finding lots of private capital willing to try. And that suggests that one of those pathways might well be the one that works.

20:35Anne McElvoy:You've done some hedging, Vijay, as well as some excitement about innovations. Where do you stand on whether the future is nuclear? Well, Rosie, as ever, you detect the journalist in me. Yes, I have seen this movie before. And I think even on our pages as a young energy correspondent, I may well have written, this is the most hopeful moment for nuclear power in 20 years. back during the days of George W. Bush's time. And I will say that once again, this is the most hopeful moment in 20 years for the nuclear industry. And there is real reason to think that something might be different. But unless these pioneers can show us that they can transform the difficult economics of nuclear plants, the industry that was once claimed to be too cheap to meter when it started seven decades ago will still be remembered as too costly to matter.

21:24Anne McElvoy:Vijay, thank you so much for talking to me. It's my pleasure, Rosie.