The United Kingdom is facing a “staggering rise” in assassination attempts on its soil by Russia and Iran as the hostile states recruit criminals to “do their dirty work” for them, the head of the UK’s domestic intelligence agency has said.
In a rare public speech on Tuesday setting out the major threats to the UK from both hostile states and terror groups, MI5 director Ken McCallum said the number of state-threat investigations undertaken by MI5 has risen by 48 percent in the past year, with Iran, Russia and, China the main perpetrators.
“The first 20 years of my career here were crammed full of terrorist threats,” McCallum said. “We now face those alongside state-backed assassination and sabotage plots, against the backdrop of a major European land war.”
“It will be clear to you that MI5 has one hell of a job on its hands,” McCallum told journalists at the UK’s counterterrorism command centre in London.
Charting out threats from Iran, he said that his agents and police have tackled 20 Tehran-backed plots since 2022 and warned that Iran could expand its targets in the UK if Israel attacks in response to Iran’s missile barrage.
The spy chief also noted that the widening conflicts in the Middle East raise the risk “of an increase in – or broadening of – Iranian state aggression in the UK.”
With respect to threats from Russia, McCallum said that despite the expulsion of more than 750 Russian diplomats from Europe since Moscow invaded Ukraine and the ejection of the last Russian military intelligence officer from the UK earlier this year, it was “eye-catching” how Russian state actors were turning to proxies to do their work.
“The GRU in particular is on a sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets: we’ve seen arson, sabotage and more. Dangerous actions conducted with increasing recklessness,” he said, declining to give further details.
Both Russia and Iran often turn to criminals, “from international drug traffickers to low-level crooks,” to carry out attacks, he added.
The UK’s official “terror” threat level stands at “substantial,” the middle of a five-point scale, meaning an attack is likely, and since 2017 MI5 and the police have disrupted 43 late-stage “terror” plots.
McCallum also said there was worrying signs that the ISIL group is back, despite the collapse of its self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria.
He said the internet was the “biggest factor” driving the rise, describing how easily youngsters can access “inspirational and instructional material” from their bedrooms.
He said the intelligence service was seeing “far too many cases where very young people are being drawn into poisonous online extremism” and singled out “canny” internet memes.
“Extreme right-wing terrorism in particular skews heavily towards young people, driven by propaganda that shows a canny understanding of online culture,” he added.
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