British intelligence chief incoming as MSM salivate

A new British intelligence agency chief was just announced. Major General Matthew Jones will be Chief of Defence Intelligence (CDI). Jones will start the role when he is promoted to Lieutenant General in summer 2026. He will run the revamped Military Intelligence Services (MIS). MIS was announced in December 2015.

The BBC reported in December 2025:

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) will unify all of its intelligence services under a single organisation, as part of its strategy to combat “escalating threats” from adversaries of the UK.

That command now belongs to Jones. Jones is an officer in the British Army’s Intelligence Corps. His bio describes a long career in imperialism:

His operational service has included deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the wider Middle East. He currently serves as Director Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, overseeing intelligence collection, capabilities, training, and counter-intelligence.

MIS will work with other agencies:

including GCHQ, MI5 and SIS. Most notably to provide intelligence products for policy makers in the Ministry of Defence and UK Government.

At least one sycophantic right-wing newspaper got a little excited about the appointment…

Tories giddy over cool new spy man

Military intelligence is distinct in some ways from civilian-run intelligence agencies. Military intelligence personnel are not ‘spies’ or ‘spooks’ in the commonly held ‘James Bond’ sense. Their role is to gather, analyse, and collate information relevant to military operations.

If you want to know the nature of a military intelligence soldier look no further than Labour MP and Intelligence Corps veteran Mike Tapp of dog cutlery fame. Grim.

This seems to have been lost on some journalists. The Telegraph giddily described Jones as a “spymaster” known for being “ferociously intelligent”.

The slightly more measured Labour defence secretary John Healey said:

Matt has the right skills and experience to lead our Military Intelligence Services as the organisation transforms to raise our war-fighting readiness to help keep the nation safe in this era of rising threats.

At the Canary we don’t usually crush on intelligences organisations – we report on them instead. The organisation MIS is effectively replacing was Defence Intelligence (DI). Back in December we asked the Ministry of Defence (MOD) a question about MIS and its new counter-intelligence component:

Will MIS and the new defence counter-intelligence unit be subject to FOI?

We got a typically nebulous response:

They’ll be subject to the usual FOI rules around intelligence and matters of national security.

For the record, intelligence and national security issues are notoriously hard to get information on. As we reminded readers recently, state secrecy is the real so-called ‘English disease’. As legendary security and intelligence reporter Richard Norton-Taylor said:

“National security” is often used to cover up embarrassment rather than genuine, serious threats to the country.

We’ll be keeping an eye on MIS, needless to say.

Counter-intelligence role

The MOD announcement in December said MIS would cover areas like biometrics, chemical weapons, critical national infrastructure, counter proliferation, UK export controls, medical and biosecurity and more.

Pretty broad then…

MIS will also work with open source, human and geospatial intelligence and counter-intelligence around both state and non-state groups. This focuses:

on the understanding of terrorism, espionage, sabotage, subversion and organised crime threats and vectors, and contests the operating space through proactive and reactive counter-intelligence activities. It entails collection of information, analysis and investigation of both state and non-state actors’ intelligence methods, capabilities and activities.

Whether the UK needs a new ‘spy’ chief or not, it is getting one as the military tries to reorganise its intelligence gathering capabilities. There is no sense of the cost of the new reforms and few hints at how accountable it will be to the public. Business as usual then.

Featured image via the Canary