British intelligence is facing a “hell of a job” over rising threats from Iran and Russia, as well as the resurgence of Isis and Al-Qaeda, the head of MI5 has warned.
A day after Sir Keir Starmer called on the international community to focus on the “malign” regime in Iran, which supports proxies across the Middle East including Hamas and Hezbollah, Ken McCallum said British intelligence has thwarted 20 Tehran-backed plots that “presented potentially lethal threats to British citizens” since the start of 2022.
“We’ve seen plot after plot here in the UK, at an unprecedented pace and scale,” the MI5 director general said.
As fears grow of an all-out war across the Middle East, with Israel expanding a ground invasion in Lebanon against Hezbollah, a year-long war in Gaza against Hamas, after the 7 October terror attack, and Iran firing almost 200 ballistic missiles at Israel last week, the director general of MI5 said British intelligence were “powerfully alive to the risk that events in the Middle East directly trigger terrorist action in the UK”.
“As events unfold in the Middle East, we will give our fullest attention to the risk of an increase in – or broadening of – Iranian state aggression in the UK.” He gave an example from December when a man was jailed for reconnaissance he had carried out against the then-headquarters of the Iran international media organisation, a body that is outside the control of Tehran’s autocratic regime.
Mr McCallum said the UK was facing terrorist threats “alongside state-backed assassination and sabotage plots, against the backdrop of a major European land war” – Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Since March 2017, he said, MI5 and the police have disrupted 43 terror plots in “the final days of planning mass murder”.
“Some of those plotters were trying to get hold of firearms and explosives,” he said, adding that 75 per cent of their counter-terrorism operations involve investigating Islamist extremism. The remaining 25 per cent is focused on “extreme right-wing terrorism”.
The intelligence services have also seen a 48 per cent rise in the number of investigations into threats directly from hostile states, including cyber attacks, acts of espionage and attempted assassinations.
When it comes to Russia, Mr McCallum said Moscow has stepped up its attacks on the UK despite the majority of diplomatic staff being expelled, with the Russian intelligence service, the GRU, being primarily responsible.
He said the GRU is on “sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets” with “arson, sabotage and more” and revealed that the GRU’s actions are driving increased coordination between European partners.
“The UK’s leading role in supporting Ukraine means we loom large in the fevered imagination of Vladimir Putin’s regime, and we should expect to see continued acts of aggression here at home,” he said.
Mr McCallum said that while they were yet to see Russia and Iran collaborating to attack the UK, there were clear similarities in the manner of their attempted assaults.
Their “repression at home increasingly extends to aggression overseas”, he said, adding that they had “invested heavily in human intelligence operations and in advanced cyber capabilities”.
He added that both regimes have turned to proxies “from international drug traffickers to low-level crooks” to perpetrate violence against the UK.
He issued a stark warning that acting on behalf of Russia, Iran or other hostile state actors will result in the suspect feeling the “full weight of the national security apparatus”.
He said: “To those tempted to carry out such tasks, I say this: If you take money from Iran, Russia or any other state to carry out illegal acts in the UK, you will bring the full weight of the national security apparatus down on you. It’s a choice you’ll regret.”
Beyond Iran and Russia, he said there was a “worsening threat” coming from Al-Qaeda and Isis.
Over the last month, he said more than a third of their top priority investigations had some connection to organised overseas terrorist groups.
“After a few years of being pinned well back, [Isis] has resumed efforts to export terrorism,” he said.
He pointed to an Isis attack on Moscow in March, which killed around 133 people, as a “brutal demonstration of its capability” and spoke about the threat from the Isis branch who claimed the Moscow attack, Isis Khorasan Province (Isis-K), which is based primarily in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
He revealed that towards the end of last year, two brothers from Birmingham were jailed for an attempt to join that group in Afghanistan, which neighbours Iran.
Another man from Coventry around the same time was also jailed for designing a 3D-printed armed drone for Isis forces in west Africa.
“We and many European partners are detecting Isis-connected activity in our homelands, which we are moving early to disrupt,” he said.
“And Al-Qaeda has sought to capitalise on conflict in the Middle East, calling for violent action.”