When Blaise Metreweli was announced as the next head of
MI6 it was immediately apparent she had long been groomed for the top.
The woman set to become the first female spy chief in the agency's 116-year history had all the right attributes.
Fiercely intelligent, Ms Metreweli had grown up abroad in a multilingual home and excelled at Cambridge – where she read anthropology at Pembroke College and was in the winning crew in the 1997 women's Boat Race – before she graduated, and then... disappeared.
From the age of 22, her name was only mentioned in public when receiving honours 'for services to British foreign policy' and in a civil service notice documenting a bland economics posting to
Dubai. Despite entering her 20s in the Wild West early days of social media, there is no trace of her online.
There are no loose-lipped acquaintances, either. Indeed, when the news broke of her appointment earlier this month, the most interesting thing contemporaries could say of her is that she still enjoyed rowing.
It seemed, then, that MI6 had done its job. Its legendary vetting services had succeeded in keeping a lid on everything about Ms Metreweli's no doubt remarkable double life.
But there is one thing neither she nor the world's most famous intelligence agency could control, the one thing that none of us get to choose – her family.
Archives in Germany reveal that the woman who from September will take charge of the nation's secrets is the granddaughter of a notorious Nazi collaborator who spied and killed for Adolf Hitler's Germany.
We can disclose that Ms Metreweli's grandfather was Constantine Dobrowolski, a Ukrainian dubbed 'The Butcher' who defected from the Red Army to become the Fatherland's chief informant in the region of Chernihiv in Ukraine.
While Ms Metreweli never met her paternal grandfather – who remained in Nazi-occupied Ukraine while the rest of his family fled the Soviet 'liberation' of the region in 1943 – his story does cast an awkward shadow over her impeccable career in MI5, MI6 and the Foreign Office.
The Mail has unearthed hundreds of pages of documents held in archives in Freiburg, Germany, detailing the extraordinary – and blood-soaked – life and times of Dobrowolski which are themselves worthy of a spy thriller.
Known as 'Agent No 30' by Wehrmacht commanders, he had vowed revenge against the Russians ever since they slaughtered his noble land-owning family, plundered their estate and seized Ukraine after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
The archives detail how the Soviets put a 50,000-rouble bounty – £200,000 in today's money – on the head of the local spy chief they labelled 'the worst enemy of the Ukrainian people'.
Within the files are handwritten letters from Ms Metreweli's grandfather to Nazi superiors signed off 'Heil Hitler'. Shockingly, Dobrowolski boasted to German commanders of 'personally' taking part 'in the extermination of the Jews' and killing hundreds of Ukrainian resistance fighters. There are even accounts of him looting the bodies of Holocaust victims and laughing at the sexual assault of female prisoners.
Of course, Ms Metreweli cannot be judged for the sins of her grandfather. One of our nation's most formidable intelligence operatives, she has served her country with distinction on dangerous operations for MI6 across Europe and the Middle East for two decades in the wake of 9/11.
She then moved to a senior role at MI5 – the UK's domestic counterintelligence and security agency – again winning praise from insiders for her handling of hostile states' counterintelligence. It was long predicted by those in the know that she would, one day, take the top job at MI6.Yet for Ms Metreweli – now coming out of the shadows as MI6's incoming chief, a role that allows her name to be known for the first time – there can be no doubt her grandfather's wartime crimes pose a challenge.
They will be seized upon by the Kremlin, which has sought to portray Ukrainians as 'Nazis' and similarly smear Kyiv's Western backers since its illegal full-scale invasion in 2022.
Indeed, Vladimir Putin's supporters have already discovered that her paternal heritage is Ukrainian, not Georgian as her surname suggests, and tried to use that fact to imply she is descended from a Nazi.
Beka Kobakhidze, a professor of modern history at Ilia State University in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, who helped the Mail uncover the Metreweli family tree, said it was only a matter of time until the Kremlin found and exploited the truth – if they don't already know it.
'As a historian and researcher from a country that grapples daily with Russian propaganda, I can say with confidence that this will become a favourite talking point for Kremlin propagandists for years to come,' he said.
'Of course, children should not be held responsible for the sins of their fathers – or grandparents, for that matter. But I do find it puzzling why the UK would willingly hand such 'ammunition' to the Russians.'
The Russians will, no doubt, twist every word to their own sinister agenda.
Yet if there is anyone equipped to handle such cheap shots from a hostile foreign power, it is the trailblazing Ms Metreweli. What is indisputable is that the story of how a Nazi spy chief's own granddaughter rose to lead MI6 is nothing short of astounding.
When Ms Metreweli was appointed as the next head of the Secret Intelligence Service two weeks ago it was greeted with fanfare in the UK.
Some 30 years after Dame Judi Dench became the first woman to take up the fictional 'M' character in the James Bond movies, life had finally imitated art and the real MI6 had its first female spy chief, aka 'C'.
But it was also met with jubilation some 3,000 miles away in the tiny Black Sea nation of Georgia – for this is where the Metreweli name hails from (though traditionally spelt with a v). 'Our name originates from the mountainous region of Racha, from a village called Utsera,' local historian Roin Metreveli said. 'The thing about Georgian villages, much like in Scotland, is that everyone is related, everyone is either a cousin or thrice removed.'
Mr Metreveli then added, jokingly: 'So, I can confidently claim that my cousin will be James Bond's boss!'
Back in the UK, the new spy chief's surname had also piqued our interest at the Daily Mail. Georgia is a colourful part of the world and, if Ms Metreweli's forbears were as capable as her, then their life under the Soviet Union, and their subsequent journey to the UK, was surely an interesting tale.
Yet almost immediately, the Georgian connection unravelled.
Ms Metreweli's father, Constantine Metreweli, is a British military veteran and renowned radiologist who raised his daughter and her siblings in Hong Kong.
Because he was born abroad, there was little trace of him in Britain. That is, aside from an intriguing entry in the London Gazette, an official UK government journal of record, from 1966 which reads: 'Dobrowolski, Constantine (known as Constantine Metreweli); Of uncertain nationality.'
It did not take long for Putin's agents, who have a far more pernicious interest in the Metreweli back story, to find this.
For them, this was proof enough that the incoming MI6 spy chief was a Ukrainian, despite the Dobrowolski surname also being common in Poland. Not just that, but for one Russian propagandist this was somehow evidence that it was likely her grandfather was a Nazi.
'Post-war Ukrainian emigration to Britain largely consisted of members of the SS Galicia division who surrendered to the British in Italy,' he wrote to his supporters on numerous social media channels days after Ms Metreweli's appointment.
These unfounded claims were soon being widely repeated in the Russian Press.
It set in motion a race between historians in Russia, Georgia and Ukraine to get to the truth. Why did Ms Metreweli's father go by what appeared to be an alias?
Was it a mark of respect to a selfless family who saved the Dobrowolskis from Nazi prison camps, as one suggested?
Could there be a more innocent explanation? Or, in fact, was this a cover for a darker family secret as those in Moscow claimed?
As academics across the former Soviet states posted competing theories online and dug through respective records, the Mail requested the public file to which the London Gazette notice referred in the National Archives – a Home Office naturalisation certificate for Mr Metreweli.
It showed he was born on January 1, 1943, in Snovsk, Ukraine, to parents 'Constantin Dobrowolski and Barbara Metreweli, formerly Barbara Dobrowolska (of uncertain nationality)'. Further searches found that Metreweli was not an alias but instead the surname of Constantine Jr's stepfather, David Metreweli, who married his mother, Barbara Dobrowolska, in Yorkshire in 1947. We had to determine why the name had passed on to his stepson, and in turn to his step-granddaughter who is now set to become MI6 spy chief. And, crucially, who was Constantine Dobrowolski Sr?
We contacted a Ukrainian expert in the field who had been sharing his musings on the subject and gave him our findings on Ms Metreweli's grandparents.
The reply was succinct. 'F***. The Russians are right.' Therein ended the collaboration.
But it did not take long for us – and others – to circle in on the Dobrowolskis' life in Snovsk, and what we found astonished us.
Dr Giorgi Astamadze, of the University of Karlsruhe in Germany, was another Georgian historian who started the search hoping to unearth Ms Metreweli's roots. And as he uncovered her past he soon realised the political implications if this information was not handled with care and sensitivity, and so agreed to come on board with our investigation.
'As we dug deeper, the initial excitement gave way to a growing sense of horror,' he said. 'More and more disturbing details began to emerge from Constantine Dobrowolski's ominous past.
'There's an entire archive in Germany – three volumes, over 500 pages – and together, they tell a truly harrowing story.'
After a little digging, we came across an identity that matched in the Federal Military Archives located in Freiburg, Germany.
Indeed, we found several tomes on a Ukrainian Nazi collaborator who was known to his enemies as 'The Butcher'. As we scoured them, the Russians were closing in. They too had discovered her step-grandfather was David Metreweli and posted unfounded claims falsely stating he was a Nazi.
Separately, pro-Russia historians trying to paint Ukrainians as collaborators had for years been writing long blog posts on Constantine Dobrowolski Sr, whose crimes are well documented in Soviet histories. They had not yet made the link to the new MI6 chief, but it was only a matter of time. We had to be certain of the genealogy and pored over hundreds of pages of primary- source correspondence between Constantine Sr and his Nazi superiors.
Just as in the naturalisation certificate for Constantine Jr, they showed Constantine Sr had a wife called Varvara, the Russian spelling of Barbara, and at some point in early 1943 they had a child together in Snovsk – a town then home to around just 6,000 people.
While Constantine Sr stayed to fight the Soviets, who were 'liberating' Ukraine from the East, such was his standing he got safe passage from the Nazis for his wife and new child – then just two months old – to flee West towards Germany that February.
Somehow, from there, it appears Varvara and her child ended up in Britain where she anglicised her name to Barbara and married a new partner, Georgian-born David Metreweli, in Yorkshire after the war. On her wedding certificate, she marked her status as 'widowed'. So her son, Constantine Jr, grew up a Metreweli – perhaps because he never knew his real father, whom he parted with when barely a few months old, or possibly because Barbara was wanting to suppress their dark family history.
In time, the Metreweli name passed down the family line to his own children, including to his daughter, who from September will head up the very same intelligence service that was fighting against her grandfather in the Second World War.
So, who exactly was Constantine Dobrowolski Sr, and what were his crimes? Extensive letters to his Nazi commanders between 1941 and 1943 give a detailed biography of the man in his own words – which make for uncomfortable reading.
Born in the Chernihiv region of Ukraine to a German-Polish father and a Ukrainian mother in 1906, his family had a small estate of 1,300 acres. When he was just 11, the Bolsheviks invaded, destroyed his house, and 'exterminated' nearly all of his relatives. He survived on the run for years, obtaining a fake ID and travelling to Moscow – but was caught in 1926 and sentenced to ten years in Siberia for anti-Soviet agitation, anti-Semitism and concealing his ancestry.
Returning from exile in 1937, he studied economic engineering in Vladivostok before being assigned to Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, to purchase machinery tools in April 1941 when the Germans invaded.
Dobrowolski immediately reported to the War Commissariat and requested to be sent to the front, where he defected to the Nazis at the first opportunity on August 4, 1941.
Explaining himself to his new German commanders, he wrote: 'If drafted into the Red Army, my political unreliability would have meant I would only have been used in the rear. I had long hoped that Germany would enter the war with Russia.'
He immediately reported to his local military branch and requested that he be sent to the front. 'I wanted to use the panic to get over to the German side in this way, and all the more quickly,' Dobrowolski wrote.
Paid just 81 Reichsmark per month by the Nazis – around £250 today, an amount that put him on the lowest rung of the German workforce – Dobrowolski was clearly not motivated by money.
Initially, he served with an SS tank unit, and later told Nazi officers: 'There, I oversaw captured Russian vehicles and personally took part in front-line action near Kyiv and in the extermination of Jews.'
Some historians claim he may even have taken part in the Babyn Yar massacre, in which more than 30,000 Jews were slaughtered over two days in Kyiv, but our research suggests that is false.
In letters, he says he left Kyiv for his home district of Sosyntsia on September 22, 1941 – seven days before the massacre.
But the history here is just as grim, with the local Jewish community destroyed and more than 300 Jews shot under Nazi occupation. Constantine Sr told his commanders that he had organised a Ukrainian police unit of 300 men who 'cleared' 12 sub-districts there between October and December 1941. During this time, Ukrainian police assisted German murder squads and Hungarian soldiers shooting the Jewish population. One harrowing account claimed that Dobrowolski was part of a police force that is said to have raped, shot, and robbed the bodies of Jewish women in Ponornytsia, Chernihiv – though he is not believed to have taken part in the massacre and sexual assault.
Over a year later a witness, interrogated by the Germans, claimed Constantine Sr's subordinate gave him 'a gold watch' from one of the victims.
'I had access to [Constantine Sr's] residence in Sosnytsia and saw many valuable possessions there, such as carpets, tablecloths, silk shawls, and a luxurious fur coat, which originated from the Jewish executions in Ponornytsia,' the witness said.
The same witness claimed that he 'overheard' a conversation in which Constantine Sr simply 'laughed' on being told 'that female prisoners in the jail were being sexually abused through violence'. He allegedly said that he 'tolerated these acts without objection'. By his own account, Constantine Sr said he 'cleansed' various districts 'of undesirable elements'. He was commended by a Hungarian colonel for his 'excellent reconnaissance' in this task in December 1941. After this, the Soviets put the 50,000-rouble bounty on his head.
A Red Army lieutenant colonel told his men: 'The fascist man-eater who has returned with the Germans, Dobrowolski, whom you all know, is taking revenge for his lost property and houses by killing and shooting the best of our people helping the Red Army...
'In order to eliminate him as quickly as possible, as the worst enemy of the Ukrainian people, I am offering a reward of 50,000 roubles to anyone who delivers this fascist Dobrowolski to us, dead or alive, and he will be proposed for an award from the government.'
Constantine Sr rose to become a local intelligence chief, first serving as an inspector for the Hiwi – Eastern European Nazi collaborators – before joining the Nazis' notorious secret military police, the Geheime Feldpolizei (GFP), in July 1942.
The GFP operated under the Commissar Order which instructed them to summarily execute captured local political leaders, partisans and Jewish people in 'cleansing operations'.
Soviet propaganda claimed Constantine Sr would assure Ukrainians that he was fighting with partisans against the Nazis. Then, once he had identified the local resistance, he had them executed.
A German assessment said of him: 'Captain Dobrowolski is a convinced opponent of Bolshevism and, accordingly, the most hated man among the Bolsheviks. His political convictions bind him firmly to the side of the German Wehrmacht, to which he has become an absolutely reliable and valuable assistant.'
It concludes: 'In summary, it can be said that Captain Dobrowolski is a reliable comrade and talented gang fighter.'
Though it is not detailed how Constantine Sr met Varvara, she is mentioned increasingly in correspondence between him and commanding Nazis from 1942 before a request is made to get her and his son out of Snovsk in 1943 as the Soviets are moving in.
He is granted a pass for a 'confidential mission' to bring his 'wife and child' from Snovsk to Uman, south-west Ukraine, from which they are to be 'provided with the necessary railway travel documents'. The Soviets succeeded in taking Chernihiv by September 1943, and the last record of Constantine Sr in the archives is from the previous month.
There, the trail runs cold. Barbara claimed she was a widow when marrying in 1947, and it is to be presumed that her previous partner was killed as Nazi Germany fell.
A Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office spokesman said last night: 'Blaise Metreweli neither knew nor met her paternal grandfather. Blaise's ancestry is characterised by conflict and division and, as is the case for many with eastern European heritage, only partially understood.
'It is precisely this complex heritage which has contributed to her commitment to prevent conflict and protect the British public from modern threats from today's hostile states, as the next chief of MI6.'
The Mail agrees – we could not be in safer hands. And yet the intrigue does not quite end there. For Constantine Sr is listed in a Soviet book documenting the enemies of the USSR – published in 1969.
'He is tall, thin, has black hair, brown eyes, a straight nose, a large forehead, a dimple on his chin, and a tattoo of a horseshoe and a horse's head on his arm below the elbow,' it reads.
It adds that the 'wanted case' is a man who 'limps after a leg fracture' and that there is 'a photograph from 1943 and a handwriting sample available'.
Though, surely, it is highly unlikely that he survived, this does raise the tantalising possibility that, unknown to authorities – and to his own family – Constantine Dobrowolski Sr, the man his enemies dubbed 'The Butcher', somehow managed to disappear into the shadows and live out the rest of his days.
