MI5 is devoting more resource to countering state threats than during the Cold War, the head of the intelligence service has said, as he labelled Russia “aggressor number one”.
Sir Ken McCallum warned MI5 was now facing a situation in which “our terrorism and state threats operational missions are pretty much of equal scale” as threats from foreign adversaries have quadrupled over the last decade.
He used an annual speech at the domestic intelligence service’s headquarters in London to also warn of rising threats from Iran and “extreme right-wing terrorism”.
Sir Ken added that MI5 had “caught terrorists seeking to exploit AI”, including by integrating the technology with drones – and warned the UK must stay ahead of the emerging threats like new bioweapons.
The MI5 chief said Russia was waging hybrid warfare while carefully avoiding triggering a joint response from Nato, a line which he said the Kremlin would be “foolish to cross”.
Sir Ken said Russia had stopped short of “conventional conflict” against the military alliance, and is instead trying to unsettle European countries while its progress in its full-scale invasion of Ukraine is “minimal and horrifically costly”.
He said MI5’s successes in identifying and expelling Russian spies from the UK had left the Kremlin dependent on paying proxies for attempted attacks.
He continued: “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.”
He added: “These are not the actions of a great power with the strategic upper hand.”
Meanwhile, Sir Ken warned that Iran is also expanding a hybrid campaign in the UK.
The intelligence chief said there had been 50 arrests in the last year over Iran-linked activities.
Credit: bbc.com
