Former MI6 chief, the late Sir Alex Younger, on life as a spy | The Economist

I was head of intelligence my job was to have the courage and I hope I lived up to it but it's harder than you think to tell leaders what they don't want to hear. I hope I had the courage to do that. Well, I'm spies as I'm sure you would know at least spies like us human operators are basically optimists. We do a nearly impossible job. I get out of bed every morning expecting to be able to you know persuade some hard bitten intelligence officer to to change sides, you know, we have to have an optimistic mindset. At the same time it must be said as you know some really fundamental threats. If we don't take it seriously and we don't evolve and the most obvious of those is that our sort of basic business model has been disrupted by the internet and everything is visible. We are in a ubiquitously censored world and if you haven't got the memo on that then you are in big trouble. That's certainly true. So there's a premium on learning and adapting which is undoubtedly there and I think you'll see a sort of spreading out of services that got the memo and services that didn't and I'm quite sure that my successors and certainly I was determined you know that we would be in the right part of that movement.