Former head of SRI gives message on death of British spy chief who caught the perpetrators of the Novichok neurotoxin attack in Salisbury
He died Sir Alex Younger62, the head of MI6 between 2014 and 2020. Eduard Hellvig, the most recent civilian director of the SRI, wrote a eulogy on X, in which some memories with the famous British spy chief are slipped in.
“Yesterday Alex Younger, ex-MI6 director, died in a Boston hospital, and this news will hardly make it into our news journals,” Eduard Hellvig began his message on X.
“However, his life and career will remain forever in my thoughts and emotional memory. Alex Younger spent almost his entire career in the British secret service with professionalism and discretion, as if despite the flamboyant role that cinema traditionally assigns,” says Hellvig, SRI director between 2015 and 2023.
The reason for the MI6 chief's visit to Romania: Regardless of Brexit, we continue
“I met Alex in Bucharest in 2015. He had been a director for a short time, just like me, and he had come to Romania in the midst of the Brexit campaign, to ensure that, whatever the outcome of the vote, our services would continue to cooperate.
We later saw each other on several occasions and heard from each other several times. Alex was the type of professional who quickly identified problems and defined them clearly and precisely. He had a way of being, cordial and direct, that analysts would call charisma. In fact, it was a permanent joy to dialogue, to serve one's country and profession, in ways and tones that were never rigid or conventional”, says the former head of the SRI.
Alex Younger on digital disinformation
Hellvig says the former MI6 chief has been talking about internet manipulation as a danger to free societies as early as 10 years ago.
“In 2016 he was warning, years before the world understood, that digital disinformation threatened democracies existentially. No one really listened then, his words probably being dismissed as spook exaggerations. In the meantime, things have been reassessed.”
The Novice case
On March 4, 2018, in Salisbury, Great Britain, there was an assassination attempt on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, both refugees in the West.
The attackers placed the neurotoxin Novichok, a lethal military compound, on the doorknob. Four months later, two British citizens were affected in the same area after coming into contact with a container of Novichok. A woman died.
A major diplomatic scandal erupted between Great Britain and Russia. In December 2018, in a public speech, Sir Alex Younger explicitly warned Russia “not to underestimate Britain's resolve and capabilities” after the use of a chemical weapon on British soil. Under his command, MI6 identified the GRU agents who participated in the Novicioc attacks.
MI6 and the SRI
Hellvig says the way the MI6 chief helped Romania is secret and will remain secret.
“Romania will never know for sure if and to what extent it benefited from the friendship of such a man. But I know enough to say that the East was not indifferent to him and that his friendship was effective, cordial and discreetly loyal. He personally supported the entire process of institutional transformation of the SRI and we worked together on some of the sensitive files of Central and Eastern Europe, with indirect echoes both in Romania and in the UK”.
“Sir Alex Young understood Romania and our part of the world more completely and more nuanced than many Europeans”, Eduard Hellvig also wrote.
The former head of the SRI ends with a message for Alex Young's wife: “My thoughts also go to Sarah, the one who knew best what it means to love a man who belongs to tens of millions at the same time. The one who knew very well, for years, what it's like to understand without being able to ask.”
