Exclusive: Meet ‘Director K’, the MI5 spy responsible for keeping Britain safe from China and Russia

MI5’s head of hostile states counterintelligence has called for an overhaul of the Official Secrets Act, complaining it is a “staggering” 100 years out of date.

In an exclusive interview, the senior intelligence officer said current laws were suitable “if we catch somebody with a hand-drawn map intending to send it to an enemy”, but not to combat the most diverse series of threats ever faced by the UK.

The officer - who can be identified in public only by her title, Director K - said new laws were needed to “disrupt what is increasingly damaging activity” waged against the UK by hostile states, including Russia and China.

She said that just two people had been successfully prosecuted under the Act in the past decade, proof that it needed urgent changes.

Director K told The Telegraph that Britain was under threat from “malign interference” that ranged from the theft of valuable intellectual property, such as the Oxford Covid vaccine, to “crass assassination plots” - a reference to Vladimir Putin’s attempt to kill a Russian double agent using Novichok nerve agent in Salisbury.

In the interview - the first ever given by an MI5 officer at her level of seniority - Director K urged the British public to play its part in combating the threat, by making sure computer systems were secure from cyber attack and that vital UK companies do not sell stakes to foreign powers.

She added: “We need academia and industry to understand what the threats are and not to be naive about them.”

Official Secrets Act: ‘We need new legislation’

The Official Secrets Act, which dates back to 1911, was introduced in response to the threat from international espionage. It was replaced in 1989, although parts of the original act remain in force.

Following consultation, the Home Office is considering updating the law, although campaigners have warned it will punish whistleblowers and investigative journalists.

But Director K said: “We need new legislation. We are in a position now where we are relying on powers that are over 100 years old.”

She said MI5 had “been laying out the threat”, but it was now for Parliament to “decide what the right balance is” to ensure Britain retained its “openness” while giving the intelligence services “the tools we need to stop our adversaries from exploiting our openness against us”.

Director K went on: “There will be some specific measures in there that will allow us to create modern legislation that we need to deal with the range of threats we have been describing.

“Some of them are really basic, so that at the moment it is not illegal to be a foreign spy in the UK. Which is staggering.

“If we catch somebody with a hand-drawn map intending to send it to an enemy, which we don’t really define, then we have the legislation. We have only used it twice [successfully] in the last 10 years because of that.”

New laws, she said, would mean MI5 “not having to find really creative ways every time to disrupt what is increasingly damaging activity”.

Don’t sell out to Chinese firms, warns Director K

In the interview, Director K said that espionage was no longer the “stuff as being spy on spy, old school movies and novels territory”, but “impacts every area of society, potentially every individual in the UK”.

Russia posed an “acute” threat to the UK but China’s was “chronic”, she said, likening Putin’s Russia to an “unpredictable storm” while China’s threat was long term, akin to the risk of climate change.

She issued a warning to strategic companies not to sell out to Chinese firms, adding: “It could look very attractive to a small, pioneering start-up to be attractive to Chinese investment but we are seeing all too often that IP [intellectual property] being stolen and the benefits do not accrue to the company, and ultimately to our society, our economy.”

Director K also admitted her children had discovered her real job after espionage work of their own.

“Normally you would not tell children early because it is quite a big secret to hold, but they are sensible and clearly quite capable,” she said.

Interview: Director K on China, Russia and how children rumbled her as one of Britain's top spies

Director K has an admission to make. Her children discovered she was an MI5 agent by deploying the kind of espionage skills that would make their mother proud.

So secretive is the work of security services that only spouses and the closest relatives can know what Director K does for a living. The children deduced that mum worked for MI5 and confronted her with it. Having been rumbled, she confessed. The Telegraph has agreed not to disclose how they did it.

Director K’s children now know what she does for a living but will be keeping mum, so to speak - trusted with the true identity of one of the country’s most senior domestic spies.

Director K’s real name cannot be disclosed in public. The Telegraph does not know who she really is. Only her boss, Ken McCallum, MI5’s director-general, is in the public domain.

Director K’s responsibilities are huge. “It is everything that is not counter-terrorism,” she said.

Her job entails presiding over what is officially called “hostile states counterintelligence”. Put simply, that is trying to keep Britain safe from Putin’s assassins, China’s spies - including theft of our precious intellectual property - and Iran’s agents of chaos.

Within MI5, Director K, who is in her 40s, also oversees the UK’s response to the threat of cyber attacks and a critical role in charge of something officially known as Protective Security - overseeing the safety of national infrastructure, from the internet to nuclear power stations.

Nobody as senior as Director K - other than the director-general - has ever given a media interview before. But MI5 is taking a step out of the shadows. And it is doing so because the threats against the UK now are so all-encompassing, so diverse in a shifting world order of rogue nations, state-backed cyber hackers, electoral interference and the like that Director K needs you - the British citizen - to play your part.

‘We need to defend society, defend our democracy against malign interference’

“In the current world, threats really are diverse,” she said. “We are basically looking at it as a set of harms to UK national security and we focus on areas where we can have the greatest impact against the hardest threats.”

We sat in a sealed room inside Thames House, MI5’s headquarters on the bank of the river. “The threats we are looking at primarily exist around protecting government, protecting secrets, protecting our people - so counter-assassination - protecting our economy and our sensitive technology and critical knowledge.

“We need to defend society, defend our democracy against malign interference. Those are the broad buckets. What we do at MI5 is detect, deter and disrupt.”

She has an enthusiasm for her role. The challenge, she said, was “huge but brilliant”.

She added: “It is really easy to think of this stuff as being spy on spy, old school movies and novels territory, Cold War stuff but it really isn’t. It impacts every area of society, potentially every individual in the UK.”

She did not specifically refer to the Salibsury poisoning and the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal, a double agent, using weapons-grade nerve agent. However, Director K pointed out that “the collateral damage in crass assassination plots” was an example of how blameless British subjects can be caught up in state-sanctioned hostile actions.

The Wiltshire city faced huge disruption in the face of a massive clear-up operation. Months later, an innocent British person was killed by a discarded vial of Novichok.

“Thankfully, assassinations are incredibly rare,” she said, partly because of the huge efforts the Security Service puts in the thwart them. “MI5 is interested in state-sponsored, state-backed activity and we look at that in terms of the intelligence we receive.”

Britain expelled dozens of Russian diplomats as a consequence, but Director K said: “Russian state activity - not Russia itself - remains a threat.

“We would prefer that was not how Russia chose to engage with the world. It is also in Russia’s interests to have positive relations with the world.”

‘I look at where can do our utmost to prevent harm’

Similarly, Director K called out the ransomware attacks that threatened to bring parts of the NHS to its knees in 2017, and which was blamed on North Korea as another example of rogue states threatening the very fabric of society.

The shift away from an international rules-based order alarms her. However, she dismissed the idea that Russia will only step back into line once Vladimir Putin is either forced from office, resigns or dies.

“They are really precious, these norms,” she said. “And the shift of the last five to 10 years where we have seen some of those eroding is really worrying.

“It does not require anybody to be dead. Whether that is Putin or former dissidents or anybody else. It requires us to get on with each other and respect each other.

“It is also in Russia’s interests to have positive relationships with the wider international community.”

Director K added that the beauty of her job was that “from morning to night, I look at where we can do our utmost to prevent harm”.

Russia posed an “acute” threat to the West, she said, while she described the Chinese threat as “chronic”.

She used an analogy popular in intelligence circles - that Russia is the storm, and China is climate change. “China is absolutely changing the way the world is and that presents amazing opportunities and threats for the UK,” she added.

On the other hand, “Russia is not as influential and has not permeated through every sector of society,” she said.

“Russia blows hot and cold. It has lightning strikes. It can be a bit unpredictable.”

‘Everybody who walks through these doors holds responsibility every day’

Asked how she sleeps at night, given the weight of responsibility on her shoulders, she said: “This is the question we talk about internally and also when I’m with friends - some of whom know what I do and some who don’t.

“There is a sense that everybody who walks through these doors holds responsibility every day. You don’t know if every single decision you take is world-changing or massively impactful for the UK national security. Every single plot or activity we detect or disrupt can go wrong. We might not intervene at the right moment. There are so many risks that go with this.

“But if you worried about it as you went to bed or think about it as you wake up, it would be unsustainable. It’s not a heroic culture, it’s a very supportive one and that makes a difference.

“So I do wake up worrying about my kids. It is more stuff like that. It’s about how do we actually make a difference? The stuff I genuinely worry about or wake up in the middle of the night is - this is really huge. The state threats, the way the world is changing, exacerbated by Covid. How do we do this properly? This is not within our gift, if it ever was for MI5. It has to be a whole of society effort.

“How do you do that most effectively? That is the stuff at 2am when I come up with another idea of how we might do this.”

She added that there was a “high premium on mental health and access to counselling” in MI5.

“One of the reasons nobody in the media has ever previously interviewed a Director K is we do our work in secret. Necessarily - it’s really sensitive work. But one of the reasons I am talking to you now is we need a whole of society effort.

“It is not a spy film thing. This affects everybody. In order to help people understand that we [MI5] need to break open a bit more about what we can see and encourage people to think individually about what they can do.”

It is a rallying cry for the 21st century.

Do not be naive about the threat, says Director K

The “ubiquity of the threat”, Director K said, means all of us need to be on our guard.

She cited the threat of “economic espionage”. There are campaigns already in place, such as “Think Before You Link”, warning academics and business leaders not to let any foreigner link to them on social networking sites.

“We need academia and industry to understand what the threats are and not to be naïve about them,” she implored. “We need them to understand there is a threat from hostile predatory foreign direct economic investment and help them work out what to do about it.

“I look at my kids and they are doing their best at school and have some great opportunities ahead. I am hoping they go into science and a tech-confident UK economy in however many years time. Then I look at how some hostile states are…stealing our IP [intellectual property] for their own advantage and I hope that collectively we can protect that. We need to protect our innovation and our future.”

Britain is leading the world in such new developments as artificial intelligence, quantum physics and machine learning. However, that “also means all of those are open to exploitation and part of that open science relies on trust”, she said. “But we regularly see some states taking advantage of it. We are seeing early stage IP being acquired and then stolen.”

She warned startups against selling stakes to unscrupulous companies based in hostile foreign states. “It could look very attractive to a small, pioneering startup to be attractive to Chinese investment,” Director K said. “But we are seeing all too often that IP being stolen and the benefits do not accrue to the company, and ultimately to our society, our economy.”

Behind the scenes, she admitted, MI5 advises against certain deals being done. The intelligence agency works with the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure, a government body accountable to MI5, to advise companies on any ongoing threats.

“It is often not about stopping it but managing it, because ultimately the UK needs investment. Stopping all of this doesn’t help us, it cuts us off. This is about finding the balance… But where we see individual companies or sectors being targeted we will focus our efforts there.”

Pressed on what industries and sectors need to be protected, she said: “Where there is a national security threat from foreign investment, that is where we focus our interest. MI5 is able to focus on the harder end of the threat. MI5 should not be - and isn’t - the economic policeman of the UK.”

The National Security and Investment Act, which comes into force in January, will give the Government the power to unwind or block any acquisition deemed to be a threat to national security. The new legislation will underpin much of MI5’s ongoing work.

The attempts to steal the Covid vaccine developed at Oxford University and MI5’s role in investigating that and trying to thwart has added to Director K’s workload.

“The Covid vaccine is arguably the most valuable discovery probably in our lifetimes and, of course, states are going to compete to either retain or gain an advantage in that competition,” she said.

“I think the vaccine also showed some of the misinformation campaigns other states were prepared to launch in the UK. We know the really malign states directed aspects of that.

“Any country with the ability to launch state-backed acquisition campaigns with an interest in the vaccine and large population to protect would have been interested and I don’t think it is exclusively Russia.”

Another burning issue has been allegations of “malign interference” in elections and in the referendum by Russia. Director K has faith in the British electorate. “Luckily, the UK public is more discerning and more thoughtful about their sources of information than looking for alternatives,” she said.

Director K makes an impassioned plea for a modernised Official Secrets Act, which is currently being revamped amid complaints from the espionage community that it is 100 years old and out of date.

“At the moment it is not illegal to be a foreign spy in the UK. That is staggering,” she said. “If we catch somebody with a hand-drawn map intending to send it to an enemy, then we have the legislation. We have only used it twice [successfully] in the last 10 years because of that.”

A Russian spy caught working in the British Embassy in Berlin may well be the third.

‘We collectively need to be much more resilient’

Director K has been at MI5 for two years, having transferred to the domestic agency after two decades with MI6. She spent at least some of that time in hostile, dangerous territory.

“I started life as an MI6 agent runner and spent most of my career overseas and joined MI5 to do this job,” she said.

Before that, she had studied anthropology because she was “really fascinated by human behaviour and how and why people act”.

Anthropology, she explained, “is really useful for this job because it isn’t really about states doing this to each other. It is individuals who do this”.

She added: “Our adversaries are people and the victims are people and it is really important to see it on that level.

“I have lived in countries throughout my career where democratic principles and freedoms sometimes disappear overnight, or a free press squashed, and it makes you realise quite how special the UK is. It is really rare and really worth protecting.

“So what I worry about for my kids is not the day to day threat, the theft of IP or even frankly an individual assassination plot. But it is the change you can feel in the way global geopolitics is playing out in our society right now. It is quite hard to convey that to the public without being alarmist. But this is different. That is why we collectively need to be much more resilient.”

Talk of the children turns to their cunning discovery that mum’s workplace was not among civil servants in some anodyne government department - as Director K must tell her friends - but in the bowels of Thames House, the headquarters of MI5, not far from the Palace of Westminster.

We got onto the subject of female spies and how they are played on screen. Director K does not name-check them but think Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love with a murderous steel spike hidden in a matronly shoe, or else any number of over-sexed seductresses tricking James Bond into bed.

“Women in particular in this world are portrayed as psychologically damaged in some way,” she said. “That's more interesting and I get that. And in the movies the evil guys are really obvious and the stereotypes of the small teams who solve incredible problems in one episode. But looking across my teams, the sheer diversity is staggering.”

She has an ex-theatre director, a one-time nuclear physicist, a former midwife and even a professional musician working for her.

But Director K added with a twinkle: “Stereotypes can be helpful because my kids think what I do is really cool. My kids now know what I do. They worked it out and confronted me. I was totally rumbled.

“Normally you would not tell children early, because it is quite a big secret to hold but they are sensible and clearly quite capable.”

The discovery might be embarrassing to most MI5 operatives who would never dare reveal such a tale. But in truth, Director K is impressed by her own children and the early promise they are showing as spies of the future.

Not least because despite being the intelligence supremo in charge of keeping Britain safe from China’s cyber spies and Russia’s hit squads, she is at heart just like many of the rest of us - a proud parent, worried for her children’s future.