The head of Britain’s MI5 spy agency made a rare public statement Friday to warn that the next 9/11-scale terror plot “may already be taking shape somewhere we are not yet looking.”
General Ken McCallum, the director of the usually secretive agency, chose the 25th anniversary of the September 11th terror attacks to issue a “call to arms” for governments, businesses and the public to come together to prevent another atrocity.
“We know that the next strategic shock will, by definition, not resemble the last one. That is perhaps the most important lesson of all,” McCallum wrote in an editorial for the Independent newspaper.
“We must of course always learn from the last attack – but must beware of preparing brilliantly to fight yesterday’s enemy, using yesterday’s methods, against yesterday’s target … The uncomfortable truth is that the next strategic shock may already be taking shape somewhere we are not yet looking.”
Unlike in 2001, McCallum said, many security systems and services are operated by the private sector — and preventing the next attack will require cooperation.
“This is my call to arms after 25 years: government, business, academia, and the public must treat national security not as the specialist concern of a handful of agencies, but as a shared national endeavor.”
While Al Qaeda has been largely diminished over the last 25 years, it still remains a threat — as do other terror groups with aspirations to carry out mass casualty attacks, McCallum warned.
More coverage on the 25th Anniversary of 9/11:
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The MI5 director cited a recently foiled Islamist plot to murder hundreds in the Jewish community in the northern English city of Manchester.
He also pointed to rising state-backed aggression, ranging from sabotage carried out by criminal proxies to cyberattacks on power stations.
“Sadly, mass-casualty terrorist ambition endures… but the terrorist threat now sits alongside strategic national security threats posed by capable states,” he wrote.
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