Former MI6 chief Sir Alex Younger, the widely respected former head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, has died aged 62.
The news was confirmed by his family. Sir Alex died in Boston in the early hours of the morning on Tuesday after being diagnosed with prostate cancer last year.
Sir Keir Starmer has led tributes, saying Sir Alex “led an exemplary life and career” and that he will be remembered “for his utmost dedication to British public life and protecting our nation”.
He was the longest-serving MI6 chief in 50 years and served in the Balkans in the 1990s, was stationed in the Middle East and served as head of the MI6 station in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Sir Alex was a significant figure in secret intelligence throughout Britain’s “war on terror” and was appointed head of counterterrorism in 2009, during heightened threat alerts following the 7 July 2005 London bombings and in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics.
He joined the National Security Council, advising the prime minister on intelligence and security matters. He went on to become deputy director and was nominated as chief of MI6 in October 2014, a position known as “C”, after Sir John Sawers retired.
An expert on international security, cybersecurity and global conflicts, he publicly and repeatedly warned of threats from hostile states, passionately urging intelligence services to use evolving technology to their advantage.
A close friend told The Independent that he took the role incredibly seriously and would share no details of his ongoing operations.
“He was very modest and took his job to protect the nation very seriously,” the friend told The Independent. “During the war on terror, he took the moral challenges and dangers of his role very seriously, where the risk of becoming detached from ethics was high. He was very careful to ensure that didn’t happen and to keep all of his decisions and operations within strict moral bounds in an age when the gloves were off.
“He was part of a very close family and extended family and friends. He was loved by many.”
Sir Alex was educated at Marlborough College before studying economics and computer science at the University of St Andrews.
The computer science graduate began his career in MI6 in 1991 while working for the Halo Trust in Afghanistan as a Scots Guard officer, after being recruited via “a tap on the shoulder”, as he later described the approach. He nursed a lifelong ankle injury incurred during his role as an officer, becoming an admired operational spy.
He led the response to the 2018 poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury, when UK security services quickly realised Russia was behind the attack.
Sir Alex surprised the world by championing openness and accountability in intelligence. In December 2018, he delivered his first public speech while still in office, at his former university.
After he left the position in 2020, he would recall personal anecdotes from his experience, including the time his false moustache fell off during a secret agent meeting, which meant he had to rush to the toilet to glue it back on. He almost passed out from the fumes while trying to reattach it.
Sir Alex spent a considerable period of his final years warning against the threat of Russia and urged the United Kingdom to take the importance of military preparedness for a direct conflict seriously.
During an interview on The Independent’s The World of Trouble podcast, he warned Britain must rearm and rebuild its reserves – potentially through national service – to face the growing threat from Russia and the destabilising influence of leaders like Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.
He said in April 2025: “We have, for many years, been completely free of any form of existential threat. We’ve unforgivably… launched a set of wars of choice, which have imposed sacrifice needlessly on young people, and there’s great cynicism about this idea of collective effort to defend your country.
“I think we’re more comfortable thinking about the army as like the England football team; they go and do their thing over there and we watch it on telly – and that can’t happen anymore.”
One of the darkest and most significant periods of his life included the death of his son, Sam, in March 2019, in a car accident on a private estate in Scotland.
The 22-year-old was a student at the University of Edinburgh.
Sir Alex continued his work and extended his role with the intelligence agency following the UK’s decision to leave the European Union because he was determined the service would help maintain the country’s stability.
In the shadowy world of MI6, where secrets can lead to distrust and paranoia, his colleagues in the spy agency openly admired a straightforward leadership style that reassured an agency shifting from coping with Islamic terror to the traditional threats from Moscow, the fallout from Brexit (which he considered an act of strategic idiocy), and a world of hybrid warfare.
During his retirement, he entered the public arena, debating matters of foreign policy and international affairs. He had reportedly been frustrated by the extent to which the war on terror had drawn dedicated British resources away from old rival, Russia.
He warned about President Trump’s seemingly close ties to Russia, and when asked if he thought the US leader was a Russian agent, said: “I mean, who knows? I personally don’t think he’s a Russian agent. I went out of my way not to find out because why would you want to know? So I don’t know.
“In a sense, that’s not the point. The point is, he agrees with Vladimir Putin. He agrees that big countries get additional rights over small countries, particularly in their own backyard.”
Sam Kiley, world affairs editor at The Independent, said: “Alex was discreet and guarded. He tried to obfuscate his brilliance as one might expect of any British spy chief. But he was open and generous with his love for his family and friends.”
In addition to his professional achievements, Sir Alex was an enthusiastic and talented sailor. He is survived by his wife, Sarah Hopkins, and two children.
