MI5 Chief: State Threats Quadruple, Russia 'Aggressor Number One' — SkimNews
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- MI5 is devoting more resource to countering state threats than during the Cold War, with threats from foreign adversaries having quadrupled over the past decade, director-general Sir Ken McCallum said in his annual speech.
- Russia is "aggressor number one," waging non-military hybrid warfare to unsettle European countries while avoiding conventional conflict with NATO, with its Ukraine progress "minimal and horrifically costly," McCallum told Thames House.
- Nearly 1,000 Russian spies have been expelled from the UK since the Ukraine invasion, leaving the Kremlin dependent on paid criminal proxies — "not the actions of a great power with the strategic upper hand," McCallum said.
- Iran-linked activity prompted 50 arrests in the last year, with aggression aimed at Jewish communities and "harder targets, like military sites," including beyond RAF Fairford where three suspicious vans led to seven arrests.
- MI5 has caught terrorists exploiting AI through improved reconnaissance and AI-enabled drones, and launched a new AI Threat Assessment Centre to evaluate emerging bioweapons risks, which McCallum called "not yet realised" but capable of changing "the stakes."
- The UK's terrorism threat level was raised to "severe" in April for the first time in five years, driven "in significant part" by extreme right-wing terrorism, including a radicalised 13-year-old whose investigation helped an international partner prevent a lethal attack.
- On Brexit interference, McCallum acknowledged Russian media and troll-farm attempts but stressed the 2016 referendum result was "not in dispute" and warned against "making these trolls look 10ft tall."
Why it matters: McCallum framed the equal scale of counter-terrorism and counter-state work as a "huge shift," meaning UK intelligence resources are being redirected at the same moment that 50 Iran-linked arrests and Russia's reliance on criminal proxies show sabotage has replaced traditional espionage as the dominant threat mode on British soil.
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