MI5 is devoting more resources to countering state threats than it did during the Cold War, the head of the UK intelligence service has said. Sir Ken McCallum made the remarks in an annual speech in London, where he said threats from foreign adversaries had quadrupled over the last decade.
He named Russia as “aggressor number one” and said Iran-linked aggression had increased, including against Jewish sites and military bases. He also warned of rising extreme right-wing terrorism and of the misuse of artificial intelligence, which he said was “supercharging the cyber-security contest between attackers and defenders”.
Russia’s hybrid campaign and covert operations
Sir Ken said Russia was waging hybrid warfare. The term generally refers to non-military methods such as cyber-attacks, sabotage or misinformation, designed to put pressure on and destabilise an adversary. These are often carried out through proxies, and Moscow denies involvement despite growing evidence to the contrary.
According to the MI5 chief, Russia had stopped short of “conventional conflict” with Nato and was instead trying to unsettle European countries. He described its progress in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine as “minimal and horrifically costly”. He credited MI5’s success in identifying and expelling Russian spies with leaving the Kremlin reliant on paying proxies for attempted attacks.
“With its traditional covert footprint eviscerated by almost 1,000 expulsions since the invasion, the Kremlin’s global toolkit is weak,” he said. “So we see them scrambling to pay criminals to do their bidding.” He added that these were “not the actions of a great power with the strategic upper hand”. His comments came as a growing number of European leaders warned that Russia may be preparing attacks to test their commitment to Ukraine.
Asked about Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s recent comments that Russia interfered with the Brexit referendum, Sir Ken said it was “not new news” that Moscow had attempted interference. He distinguished between “interference attempted” and “outcome achieved”, stressing that the result of the 2016 referendum was “not in dispute”. He said it was a matter of public record that Russian media pieces and “so-called internet trolls and bot farms” had sought to influence the Brexit debate.
He said he was “worried” about the ongoing debate on Russian interference. “I am a little bit anxious that we don’t play into our adversaries’ hands by making these trolls look 10ft tall,” he told reporters.
Iran-linked activity and the RAF Fairford incident
Sir Ken warned that Iran was also expanding a hybrid campaign in the UK. He said there had been 50 arrests over Iran-linked activities in the last year, and that much of the aggression had targeted Jewish communities and, in his words, “harder targets, like military sites”.
He did not mention the arrests at RAF Fairford directly in his speech, but told reporters afterwards that the incident was “not unique”. “We have seen Iranian interest beyond RAF Fairford in the UK,” he added. The incident at the Gloucestershire airbase, where three suspicious vans were seen parked nearby, has led to seven people being arrested and bailed by counter-terrorism police.
Burnham has said the incident was “almost certainly directed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard”. Sir Ken told the audience that those seeking to cause mayhem on British streets, “whether hired thugs here or their paymasters overseas”, would meet “an unflinching response”. He also said the National Security Act, a 2023 law aimed at people working against UK interests for foreign powers, was in heavy use, including against threats from China as well as Iran and Russia.
AI misuse, bioweapons and extremist terrorism
On artificial intelligence, Sir Ken said the technology could produce propaganda and radicalising material tailored to individuals. MI5 had caught terrorists seeking to use AI to improve their reconnaissance and attack methods, with AI-enabled drones adding a new dimension. He said the bioweapons threat posed by AI was “not yet realised”, but that the technology had the “potential to change the stakes”.
He said the UK intelligence community, including MI5, GCHQ and MI6, was working closely with the AI Security Institute. Speaking at Thames House, he said MI5 had launched an AI Threat Assessment Centre to assess sources and “separate the bluster from the realities”. He also said human history offered no experience of facing an actor “which is smarter than we are”.
In April, the UK’s terrorism threat level was raised to severe for the first time in five years, meaning an attack is highly likely. Sir Ken said Islamist groups including Al Qaeda and so-called Islamic State continued to direct and inspire attacks. He said extreme right-wing terrorism was also driving the increased risk “in significant part”, with the most marked trend over the last year being an increase in cases where extremist anti-immigration and anti-Muslim grievances were tipping into terrorist intent.
He said extreme right-wing terrorism tended to “skew young” and was fuelled by the internet. MI5 had recently investigated a “radicalised extreme right-wing 13-year-old” in the UK, and that investigation had enabled an international partner to prevent a lethal attack on its soil.
