LONDON — The head of Britain’s domestic intelligence service said Tuesday that MI5 is now devoting more resources to countering hostile states than it did during the Cold War, naming Russia “aggressor number one” and warning that Iran has set its sights on “harder targets, like military sites,” BBC News and The Guardian reported.
In his annual threat update at MI5’s Thames House headquarters, Director General Sir Ken McCallum said threats from foreign states had quadrupled over the last decade, so that “our terrorism and state threats operational missions are pretty much of equal scale.” He said Russia was waging hybrid warfare while avoiding a joint NATO response, a line the Kremlin would be “foolish to cross.”
“With its traditional covert footprint eviscerated by almost 1,000 expulsions since the invasion, the Kremlin’s global toolkit is weak. So we see them scrambling to pay criminals to do their bidding,” McCallum said, according to the BBC. “These are not the actions of a great power with the strategic upper hand.” He also said Moscow had tried to interfere in the 2016 Brexit referendum through RT, Sputnik and troll accounts, but that there was a big difference between “what may have been attempted and what actually resulted,” The Guardian reported.
MI5’s counter-Iran work led to more than 50 arrests in the past year, McCallum said, with much of the activity aimed at British Jewish communities. He did not directly address the arrests at RAF Fairford, which Prime Minister Andy Burnham has said were linked to a plot “almost certainly directed” by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, but said that “those who seek to cause mayhem on British streets — whether hired thugs here or their paymasters overseas — will meet an unflinching response.”
On terrorism, McCallum said “the most marked trend has been an increase in cases where extremist versions of anti-immigration and anti-Muslim grievance are tipping into terrorist intent,” and that MI5 had recently investigated a radicalized 13-year-old. He said the service had “caught terrorists seeking to exploit AI to improve their reconnaissance and attack methodologies, with AI-enabled drones adding a new twist,” and that his greatest worry was AI helping extremists build bioweapons — a threat “not yet realised.” The Guardian said he announced a new AI threat assessment centre. Britain’s terrorism threat level was raised to severe in April.
Sources: BBC News, The Guardian
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