#unemployedspy In 2020, Sir Alex Younger KCMG (SU 1976-81) retired after thirty years in the Secret Intelligence Service (aka MI6), the last seven of which he spent as its Chief. Quitting SIS HQ in Vauxhall, ‘the most famous secret building in the world’ as he points out, leaves him freer to look back on his school days, career, how things have changed in the Service, and the challenges it faces since he was recruited three decades ago. Susanna Spicer (SU 1979-81) tells us more.
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n 2014, when Alex Younger became the new ‘C’ at MI6, his contemporaries at Marlborough might have had reason to be surprised. A pleasant, urbane, but decidedly relaxed fellow at school, Alex was, by his own admission, one of life’s later developers. ‘I was certainly quite a languid character then. I grew up at university rather than school and was quite backward really,’ he recalls. The academic side of life at Marlborough held fewer attractions for him than the extra-curricular. ‘One of my interests was mountaineering; I thought it incredibly character forming. My other fascination was computers. Terrifyingly, I was left for days and days alone in the computer science lab just doing stuff. This was quasi anarchic before cyber was anarchic, and it was fantastic. There was a breadth to the school that definitely contributed to some of the qualities I subsequently relied on,’ even if his exam results weren’t the best. ‘Please spell out that there is hope for those who get s**t A Levels!’ he pleads, though given he went on to read Economics & Computer Science at St Andrew’s on an Army scholarship, they can’t have been all that bad. Sandhurst and a commission in the Scots Guards followed, where his relaxed demeanour continued. ‘While I was in the Guards, we all had a cartoon done of us. In mine, I’m lazing at the bottom of the picture.’ Appearances can be deceptive, and behind his languid image his superiors recognised a highly effective leader with a focussed mind and considerable intellectual curiosity. A year after leaving the army, Alex joined the Secret Intelligence Service. This was in 1991: the USSR was breaking up and the Cold War was ending. The recruitment of spies is the stuff of legend. Has it changed over the years? ‘When I was “tapped on the shoulder” it was a pretty self-selecting time,’ he admits. ‘Subsequently, we moved to open competition and anyone could apply, which is the situation now. But that, of course,
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The Marlburian Club Magazine
