Russian intelligence is on a mission to "sow continued chaos on the streets of Britain and Europe", the MI5 chief said. In his annual update on security threats to Britain, Ken McCallum said GRU operatives had committed "arson, sabotage and increasingly ruthless dangerous acts" in Britain after Britain supported Ukraine in its war with Russia. He said MI5 was also responding to 20 Iranian-backed attacks since 2022, but added that the bulk of its work still primarily concerns Islamist extremism, followed by far-right terrorism. The complex mix of terrorist and state threats means MI5 has "a monumental task ahead", he warned. In a wide-ranging speech, he said: Young people are increasingly being drawn into online extremism, with 13% of young people being investigated for terrorism links being under 18. A total of 43 late-stage plots for "mass murder" using firearms or explosives have been thwarted in the UK since 2017. The number of MI5 investigations into state threats has increased by 48%. Counter-terrorism activity remains divided between "75% Islamic extremism and 25% right-wing extremist terrorism". At a press conference at the MI5 Counter Terrorism Operations Centre in London, he said MI5 has to deal with a "dizzying range of beliefs and ideologies". "The first 20 years of my career here were riddled with terror threats. "We now face these threats against the backdrop of a major ground war in Europe, alongside state-sponsored assassination and sabotage plots," he said. Britain's "leading role" in supporting Ukraine means "we loom large in the fevered imagination of the Putin regime," he warned, and further invasions of British soil are to be expected. The current terror threat level to the UK is significant, meaning attacks are highly likely. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, more than 750 Russian diplomats have been expelled from Europe, "the vast majority of them" spies, McCallum said. This is affecting the effectiveness of Russian intelligence, he said, adding that anyone the UK and its allies consider to be a Russian spy is being denied a diplomatic visa. Russian state agents turned to proxies, including private intelligence and criminals, to do their "dirty work," which undermined the professionalism of their operations and made them easier to disrupt. McCallum has spoken publicly about Russian and Iranian threats before, but never before has he condemned Moscow in such graphic terms. In a previous speech, he cited 10 plots against Iranians in the UK. That number has now doubled, suggesting that Iranian state activity is not hampered by the risk of being found out. He said that since the 2022 assassination of Mahsa Amini (a 22-year-old who died in Iranian police custody after being arrested for allegedly violating rules requiring women to wear headscarves), we have seen one plot after another here in the UK at an unprecedented pace and scale. "
He added that MI5 would "pay close attention to the risk of increased or escalating Iranian state aggression in the UK" given the ongoing war in the Middle East. In both the Russian and Iranian cases, the MI5 chief stressed that accredited diplomats from both countries are increasingly turning to underworld criminal gangs because it is difficult, almost impossible, for them to make such moves. Regarding China, he said economic ties with the UK would help strengthen security. But later he told reporters that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has a program to steal data and information, and "we have seen 20,000 veiled overtures from China to individuals."
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