Hi, listeners, it's Lila.

This week we are re-releasing an episode we love from a few months ago.

The first story is about women's spies and why there aren't enough of them in the UK.

And I wanted to come on to give you an update, which is that since we first dropped this episode,

Britain has appointed a woman to the highest ranking role in its intelligence cyber and security agency.

Her name is Anne Keast Butler, and she's now the first woman director ever of GCHQ.

Okay, have a wonderful weekend and enjoy the show.

When the FTs Helen Worrell was growing up, she was really into spy novels.

My dad introduced me to the John LaCarray novels when I was a teenager.

And I really love his kind of Cold War thriller-style depiction of what spying was like in those days.

And that kind of very, very incremental, slow, subtle kind

of tradecraft that he just, that John the Carrey describes. But as Helen got older and kept reading,

she realized something. She couldn't find any women in John LeCarray's books. Or in most spy thriller books or movies, women were kind of

missing from the whole genre.

Especially with a lot of the coverage of John La Carray's death last year, I started thinking

actually, you know, there aren't really any female intelligence operatives in his stories.

It just kind of set me on this sort of discussion, I suppose, with friends and, you know, people I would talk about books with, you know, why is it that, for instance, there's a huge history of female detectives, you know, working on crime, but not so much female spies in the intelligence world.

Helen went into a relevant career. She spent years covering UK defense and security.

And over her time as a journalist, she's gotten to know a few very senior real-life women spies.

She recently wrote an exclusive profile of the three highest-ranked women in the British spy agency, MI6, for FT Weekend magazine.

She calls them Rebecca, Ada, and Kathy.

And they agreed to talk because they're also worried that pop culture mostly ignores them.

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