The tweeting diplomat who is now UK’s top secret agent

DIPLOMAT and ‘properly good spy’ Richard moore is the new chief of mI6, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service.

His appointment as ‘C’, as the top agent is known, was announced by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office yesterday.

In the past officials were reluctant to admit even the existence of mI6, which gathers intelligence overseas and combats the activity of foreign states and terrorists.

For four years from 2014 mr moore was UK ambassador to turkey. He was praised for his cool-headed work there dealing with authoritarian Islamist president Recep tayyip Erdogan.

He used twitter and his fluency in turkish to give Britain a human face in the country. Fatherof-two mr moore, 57, pictured, was born in Libya and his family home is in Leatherhead, Surrey.

A security source said last night: ‘He is hugely experienced and he has all the right skills. He is a properly good spy and also a good diplomat. He was a trailblazer in turkey because of his online interactions on twitter and the way he conducted himself. He’s well liked, he is a very nice chap.’

the Foreign Office confirmed yesterday that Oxford graduate mr moore had been named as the new Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service.

mr moore is currently political director in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and has held director roles in the SIS and been Deputy national Security Adviser in the Cabinet Office.

He is understood to have taken a ‘very hands-on role’ in the aftermath of the poisonings in Salisbury.

After Oxford, mr moore won a Kennedy Scholarship for post-graduate study at Harvard University in America, before joining SIS aged 24 – when the Soviet Union and its KgB spies were the principal intelligence threat.

postings included communist Vietnam, terror-plagued pakistan, malaysia, and an earlier stint in turkey, in the 1990s.