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Russian spies are on a “mission to generate mayhem” on Britain’s streets as Iran foments lethal plots at “an unprecedented pace and scale”, the head of the UK’s domestic intelligence service has warned.
Instances of spying against the UK by other states “shot up” 48 per cent in the past year, MI5 director-general Ken McCallum said on Tuesday, with the range of threats “the most complex and interconnected . . . we’ve ever seen”.
“The GRU in particular is on a sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets . . . arson, sabotage and . . . dangerous actions conducted with increasing recklessness,” he said, referring to Russia’s military intelligence unit.
Iran is also making extensive use of criminals — from international drug traffickers to low-level crooks — to serve as proxies for Tehran’s espionage operations in the UK, mostly against dissidents, McCallum said.
Over the past two years, MI5 has seen Iran launch “plot after plot . . . at an unprecedented scale”, and since January 2022 it had responded to 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed threats.
“MI5 has one hell of a job on its hands,” McCallum said in his annual threat assessment, adding that the agency was having to confront “state-backed assassination and sabotage plots, against the backdrop of a major European war”.
The rise in threats facing the UK, which includes confronting technological theft and high-level espionage by China, means that “things are absolutely stretched”, said McCallum. MI5’s budget is classified but it had 5,527 staff in 2022, the latest year for which figures are available.
The decisions MI5 now had to take on how to prioritise its finite resources “are harder than I can recall in my career”, he said. It had also meant that “our lower-level bar has had to rise” — a tacit warning that some potential threats might go uninvestigated.
McCallum said MI5 had so far not seen the rising conflict in the Middle East lead directly to increased terrorism incidents in the UK.
But he cautioned that radicalisation stemming from recent events in the Middle East was a “slow burn” process.
Established groups such as Islamic State and al-Qaeda had meanwhile “resumed efforts to export terrorism”, according to McCallum, who said their return was the “terrorist trend that concerns me most”.
Over the past month, more than a third of MI5’s highest-priority investigations were linked to organised overseas terrorist groups, he said.
Another development the MI5 chief cited was that one in eight terrorists now being investigated in the UK are minors who are often recruited online.
MI5 had seen a “threefold increase” in investigations of under-18s in the past three years, driven by far-right terrorism that skews “heavily towards young people, driven by propaganda that shows a canny understanding of online culture”.
However, it is state threats that have undergone the biggest rise, not least by Russia. The UK and other European countries’ expulsion of 750 Russian diplomats since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine had “put a big dent” in the Kremlin’s ability to cause damage in the west, as “the great majority of them” were “spies”.
Denying diplomatic visas to new Russian agents by the UK and its western allies was “not flashy, but it works”, he added.
The expulsions forced Russian spies, especially its GRU military intelligence unit to use proxies, including private intelligence operatives and criminals.
McCallum said this had reduced the usual professionalism of Russia’s spy services and increased MI5’s “disruptive options”, as the proxies were not covered by diplomatic immunity.
Nevertheless, the UK’s “leading role in supporting Ukraine means we loom large in the fevered imagination of Putin’s regime”, McCallum said, adding that “we should expect to see continued acts of aggression here at home”.
He described the counter-intelligence work of detecting criminals who are recruited online by hostile states, such as Russia or Iran, as being similar to spotting would-be terrorists recruited online by overseas radicalisers.
“It’s a familiar challenge,” he said, and “we’ll keep finding them.”
This story has been amended to clarify that the UK and other European states together expelled 750 Russian diplomats since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
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