Sir Alex Younger, the former head of MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, who has died from pancreatic cancer aged 62, was one of the most engaging and indeed open British spymasters in the service’s 116-year history.
As head of the service, which spies on and attempts to combat foreign subversion, from 2014 to 2020, he did not entirely keep to the omertà that characterised many of his predecessors, though he did not compromise security. His gift for colourful phrases was evident in his last BBC interview, at the start of the Iran war in February; speaking of the regime following the replacement of its leadership he said: “The threat of 88 mullahs on Zoom is one that is difficult to comprehend.”
Known by the codename “C”, inherited by all heads of the service from the first, Sir Mansfield Cumming, who served during the first world war, he also continued Cumming’s tradition of signing documents with the initial in green ink. Younger even gave his pen to the actor Daniel Craig when he toured the set of the latest Bond movie, No Time to Die, on his retirement in 2020. James Bond, he said, had made the service more famous than Pepsi. He declined the offer of a cameo appearance in the film.
However, in a letter to the Economist in 2017, he wrote: “I’ll take the quiet courage and integrity of George Smiley [the cerebral character in John le Carré’s spy novels] over the brash antics of 007 any day.” He doubted whether Bond would get recruited in the modern era, at least without changing his ways.
Younger, the son of Mary (nee Edge) and Nicholas, was born in Westminster, London, into the Scottish brewery family – George Younger, one of Margaret Thatcher’s defence secretaries, was a cousin. He was educated at Marlborough college and studied economics and computer science at St Andrews University before becoming a captain with the Scots Guards. He was first approached to join the secret service while a student but turned the invitation down, only taking it up after leaving the army in 1990, just after the first Gulf war.
The days of derring-do for spying were not over. Younger found himself negotiating with the Serbs during the Balkan civil war, travelling under a false identity: “It involved many nights drinking obscure homemade alcohol, piecing together the intentions of the parties to that conflict. I had the satisfaction of knowing that my work, along with that of many others, helped to pave the way for the eventual arrest and prosecution of war criminals,” he said.
There were times when he adopted four different identities, even an occasion when a false moustache came unstuck during a negotiation. He told the Financial Times in 2020: “I am a romantic. I believe in human agency. I love the fact that individuals can make a difference … I wanted to be one of those people.” There were, he said, times of “a Boy’s Own sense of excitement”.
Subsequent foreign postings were to Vienna (1995-98) and Dubai (2002-05). His official cover as a diplomat – “which my friends frankly regarded as improbable” – meant that even his three children were not told what he did for a living.
In a BBC Radio 4 Today programme interview last year, he said: “It is rather wonderful to be in this play that no one knows is even going on in the middle of everyone’s life. That does give you a kick, but at the same time it is incredibly isolating and that compounds and amplifies a lot of doubts and fears and the psychological swings therefore are things you learn to guard against quite quickly.”
Not that others did not know: called to a meeting with Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, on an island off the kingdom’s coast, he discovered him sitting under an umbrella watching a Bond movie.
There were moments of ingenuity too. As the station chief in Afghanistan during the war against the Taliban, Younger discovered that the country’s president Hamid Karzai enjoyed sweetening his tea with jam, so ensured he had a plentiful supply of his mother’s home-made blackberry variety to give him: one way of competing with the CIA’s lavish security assistance.
Back in London in 2009, Younger was made the service’s head of counter-terrorism, a high-pressure job confronting the new order of domestic lone wolf would-be perpetrators of explosions and suicide bombings influenced by Islamism, as well as hostile state actors such as those of Russia.
During this time there were successful operations including that against the “underwear bomber”, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian who had hoped to bring down a Northwest Airlines plane using explosives sewn into his clothes at Christmas 2009.
In 2012, Younger was put in charge of overseeing security against threats to the Olympic Games in London. A colleague told the Times: “For Alex the greatest success was not Mo Farah or Jessica Ennis [but] that nothing happened on the terrorism front – and that certainly wasn’t an accident.”
Two years later, he succeeded Sir John Sawers as head of the service during a time of international crisis, Russian expansionism and interference, and Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. In 2018 there would be the Russian attempted poisoning of the defector and former KGB officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury and the subsequent death of Dawn Sturgess, where the perpetrators were identified though not brought to justice.
Younger was a popular head of the service. He encouraged greater cooperation with the domestic security service, MI5 and opened MI6 to a wider selection process, to include applicants from the age of 18 (down from 21) and from a wider range of social backgrounds, with adverts placed in national newspapers and on social media. In 2018, Theresa May asked him to stay on for an extra year to maintain stability during Brexit; and he was knighted in 2019. In retirement he had an advisory role at Goldman Sachs.
He was not blind to the subversive threats posed by Russia or China. In December 2023 he told the Today programme: “We in the west should reflect on the hubris with which we have approached recent years: the kind of monopoly on the right way to run the world and think about our history and the way we have behaved and how that sounds when we talk about our values.”
Younger married Sarah Hopkins, who is now an arts administrator, in 1993. She and two of their three children, Tom and Amy, survive him. Another son, Sam, died in a car accident in Scotland in 2019.
• Alexander William Younger, security services chief, born 4 July 1963; died 2 June 2026
