The Foreign Office has defended Blaise Metreweli, the new head of MI6, after reports that her paternal grandfather was a Nazi spy in Ukraine.
On 15 June, the government announced that Blaise Metreweli would become Chief of MI6 in autumn 2025, replacing Sir Richard Moore.
She is the first woman to head the secretive organisation, responsible for the UK’s foreign intelligence.
Metreweli has served as an intelligence officer since 1999 and is currently Director General ‘Q’, responsible for technology and innovation in MI6.
However, on 27 June the Daily Mail published a report into Metreweli’s paternal grandfather, Constantine Dobrowolski.
Journalists Andy Jehring, Vazha Tavheridze and Rebecca Camber said that letters by Dobrowolski to his Nazi superiors, found in military archives in Germany, showed his role in Nazi atrocities.
Dobrowolski was born in 1906 in the Chernihiv region of Ukraine.
When he was 11, Russian Bolshevik forces invaded Ukraine, killed his family and destroyed their 1,300-acre estate.
In 1926, Dobrowolski was sentenced to ten years in prison in Siberia for anti-Soviet agitation, anti-Semitism and concealing his ancestry.
In 1941, when the Germans invaded Ukraine, Dobrowolski defected to the German army and served in an SS tank unit.
In one letter, Dobrowolski says that he “personally took part in front-line action near Kyiv and in the extermination of the Jews”.
The Daily Mail said that Dobrowolski “become a local intelligence chief, first serving as an inspector for the Hiwi – Eastern European Nazi collaborators – before joining the Nazis' notorious secret military police, the Geheime Feldpolizei (GFP), in July 1942”.
He took part in the ‘cleansing’ of local political leaders, partisans and Jews in Ukraine. One witness said that Dobrowolski kept valuables stolen from murdered Ukrainian Jews and laughed at reports that his men were sexually assaulting female prisoners.
Dobrowolski was so feared that the Soviet army offered a 50,000 rouble bounty for his death or capture.
At some point Dobrowolski married a woman called Varvara Andreevna. Their son, also called Constantine, was born in 1943 in the town of Snovsk.
Dobrowolski’s files show that he managed to obtain a pass to bring his wife and child from Snovsk to Uman in south-west Ukraine, ahead of the advancing Russian army.
What happened next isn’t known, but by 1947 Varvara, who had anglicised her name to Barbara, and Constantine Jnr were living in Britain as refugees. There, Barbara married a man called David Metreweli.
Constantine Jnr – Blaise Metreweli’s father – took his stepfather’s surname, served in the British Army and became a radiologist.
The Daily Mail said that, while Blaise Metreweli is “impeccably qualified” to lead MI6 and “cannot be judged for the sins of her grandfather”, it was necessary to report her family origins to prevent them being used as a propaganda coup by the Russian government.
“Malign actors – including Vladimir Putin’s supporters – have already been digging into her family background,” the Mail said.
“It was only a matter of time before they discovered the same facts and twisted them into a propaganda weapon against Ms Metreweli and Britain.
“The Kremlin already tries to justify its blood-soaked illegal invasion of Ukraine as being about ‘denazification’, while smearing Kyiv’s Western backers as fascist sympathisers. So it’s easy to see how they’d try to exploit Ms Metreweli’s family history.”
A spokesperson for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said: “Blaise Metreweli neither knew nor met her paternal grandfather. Blaise's ancestry is characterised by conflict and division and as is the case for many with eastern European heritage, only partially understood.
“It is precisely this complex heritage which has contributed to her commitment to prevent conflict and protect the British public from modern threats from today's hostile states, as the next chief of MI6.”
