(BBC News) Russia’s intelligence agency has been on a mission to generate “sustained mayhem on British and European streets,” the head of MI5 has said.
Giving his annual update on security threats faced by the UK, Ken McCallum said GRU agents had carried out “arson, sabotage, and more dangerous actions conducted with increasing recklessness” in Britain after the UK backed Ukraine in its war with Russia.
MI5 had also responded to 20 plots backed by Iran since 2022, although he added the majority of its work still mostly involved Islamist extremism, followed by extreme right-wing terrorism.
The complex mix of terror-related threats and threats from nation states meant MI5 had “one hell of a job on its hands,” he said.
In a wide-ranging speech, he said:
- Young people are increasingly being drawn into online extremism, with 13% of those investigated for terrorism involvement aged under 18
- 43 late-stage plots involving firearms and explosives to commit “mass murder” in the UK have been foiled since 2017
- The number of state-threat investigations by MI5 had increased by 48%
- Counter-terrorism work remained split between “75% Islamist extremism, 25% extreme right-wing terrorism”
There is a “dizzying range of beliefs and ideologies” MI5 has to deal with, he told the briefing at MI5’s counter-terrorism operations centre in London.
“The first 20 years of my career here were crammed full of terrorist threats. We now face those alongside state-backed assassination and sabotage plots, against the backdrop of a major European land war,” he said.
The UK’s “leading role” in supporting Ukraine means “we loom large in the fevered imagination of Putin’s regime,” and further acts of aggression on UK soil should be expected, he said.
How do terrorism threat levels work?
More than 750 Russian diplomats had been expelled from Europe since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, saying “a great majority of them” were spies, McCallum said.
This affected the Russian intelligence services’ capability, he said, adding that diplomatic visas had been denied to those considered by Britain and allies to be Russian spies.
Russian state actors turned to proxies, such as private intelligence operatives and criminals, to do “their dirty work”, but this affected the professionalism of their operations and made them easier to disrupt.
While McCallum has spoken publicly before about the Russian and Iranian threats, he has not previously accused Moscow in such stark terms.
In a previous public address, he referred to 10 plots against Iranians in the UK. That number has doubled, implying that Iranian state activity is undeterred by the threat of being caught.
In both cases, Russia and Iran, the MI5 boss stressed that because it was difficult to almost impossible for their accredited diplomats to carry out such actions, they were turning increasingly to underworld criminal gangs.
On China, he said the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had a program to steal data and information from the UK and “we have seen 20,000 obfuscated approaches to individuals by China.”
