The head of Britain’s domestic intelligence service said on Tuesday that Russia’s intelligence service was bent on causing “mayhem” in Britain because of London’s support for Ukraine. Ken McCallum also said that MI5 has responded to 20 Iran-backed plots since January 2022 that present potentially lethal threats to British citizens and UK residents.
He said Russia and Iran had begun employing criminals and private intelligence officers to do their work on British soil.
McCallum said that from Russia, Britain should expect to see “continued acts of aggression at home” with its military intelligence agency, the GRU, “on a sustained mission to create havoc” on the country’s streets.
“We have seen arson, vandalism and more,” he said.
On Iran, he said there has been an “unprecedented pace and scale” of conspiracies over the past two years.
As events unfold in the Middle East, MI5 is paying its “full attention” to the risk of an increase in Iranian-state-backed aggression in the UK, he said.
In total, MI5 and police have foiled 43 late-stage attack plots since March 2017, saving “many lives”, he said: “Some of those plotters were involved in the final days of planning. The mass murder was carried out while trying to take possession of firearms and explosives.”
In a wide-ranging speech, McCallum also blamed extreme right-wing ideology for the “shocking” increase in the number of children being investigated for terrorism.
He said 13 per cent of the people being investigated by the spy agency for possible involvement in terrorist activities are under-18.
He told reporters at MI5’s Counter Terrorism Operations Center in London that the number was a “three-fold increase over the last three years”.
McCallum said the Internet was the “biggest factor” in the rise, citing how easily young people could access “inspirational and educational content” from their bedrooms.
He said the secret service was seeing “a number of cases where very young people are being drawn into toxic online extremism”, highlighting “clever” internet memes.
“Extreme right-wing terrorism in particular is skewed towards young people, fueled by propaganda that shows a deep understanding of online culture,” he said.
“It’s not really a coherent single ideology on the extreme right wing and that’s what has messed up the numbers the most.”
The terrorist threat level in the UK remains “substantial” – the third highest out of five – meaning an attack is likely.
McCallum said the Islamic State group has “resumed efforts to export terrorism” and that investigations into plots by hostile states have increased by 48 percent in the past year.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
