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” in Britain as the UK continues to support 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.
Mr McCallum warned of young people being drawn into online extremism, with the number of under-18s investigated for terrorism involvement growing.
The MI5 director general warned the UK was facing the most “complex and interconnected” threat it has ever seen.
He said a total of 43 late-stage plots involving firearms and explosives to commit “mass murder” in the UK have been foiled since 2017.
Mr McCallum added there were a “dizzying range of beliefs and ideologies” MI5 had to deal with.
“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 complex mix of terror-related threats and threats from nation states meant MI5 had “one hell of a job on its hands”.
In a briefing at MI5’s counter-terrorism operations centre in London, Mr McCallum said that, in the past year, the number of state-threat investigations by MI5 had increased by 48%.
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.
More than 750 Russian diplomats had been expelled from Europe since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, saying “a great majority of them” were spies, Mr McCallum said.
This affected the Russian intelligence services’ capability, he explained, and added that diplomatic visas had been denied to those Britain and allies considered 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.
He also told the briefing that MI5 and police had responded to 20 Iran-backed plots since 2022, which presented “potentially lethal threats to British citizens and UK residents”.
He said targeted counter-terrorism work remained split between “75% Islamist extremism, 25% extreme right-wing terrorism”.
Mr McCallum expressed concern over the number of young people being drawn into online extremism.
About 13% of those investigated for involvement in terrorism were under 18 – a threefold increase in the last three years, he added.
He said other issues MI5 encountered were exacerbated by the internet, and a high proportion of the threat was made up by “lone individuals indoctrinated online”.
“In dark corners of the internet, talk is cheap. Sorting the real plotters from armchair extremists is an exacting task,” he said.
“Anonymous online connections are often inconsequential, but a minority lead to deadly, real world actions.”
He spoke of the difficulty the security service faces while dealing with “volatile, would-be terrorists with only a tenuous grip of ideologies”.
This article was originally published at www.bbc.com
