LONDON — MI5 is putting more resources into countering state threats than at any point during the Cold War, its Director General Sir Ken McCallum has said, naming Russia as “aggressor number one”.
Sir Ken delivered the assessment in his annual address at the domestic intelligence service’s headquarters in central London, according to BBC News.
He said the service was operating in circumstances where “our terrorism and state threats operational missions are pretty much of equal scale”, a shift he attributed to threats from foreign adversaries having quadrupled.
Alongside the Russian threat, he flagged growing dangers linked to Iran and to “extreme right-wing terrorism”.
Sir Ken also disclosed that MI5 had “caught terrorists seeking to exploit AI”, including by pairing the technology with drones, and said the UK must remain ahead of the risk that violent groups develop new bioweapons.
Russia pursuing hybrid warfare
According to Sir Ken, Russia is conducting hybrid warfare while taking care not to provoke a joint response from Nato — a line he said the Kremlin would be “foolish to cross”.
Moscow has avoided “conventional conflict” with the military alliance, he said, and is instead working to destabilise European countries while its full-scale invasion of Ukraine delivers progress he characterised as “minimal and horrifically costly”.
MI5’s record of finding and removing Russian spies from the UK, he added, has pushed the Kremlin towards paying proxies to carry out attempted attacks.
“With its traditional covert footprint eviscerated by almost 1,000 expulsions since the invasion, the Kremlin’s global toolkit is weak. So we see them scrambling to pay criminals to do their bidding,” Sir Ken said.
He added: “These are not the actions of a great power with the strategic upper hand.”
Iran and the National Security Act
Sir Ken warned that Iran is widening a hybrid campaign on UK soil, saying MI5 had carried out more than 50 arrests over Iran-linked activity in the past year.
A large share of that activity was directed at Jewish communities, he said, with “harder targets, like military sites” also in Iran’s sights.
He said the National Security Act — the 2023 legislation aimed at people acting against UK interests on behalf of foreign powers — is being used extensively, including against threats originating from China, Iran and Russia.
AI and bioweapons risk
On artificial intelligence, Sir Ken said: “We’ve caught terrorists seeking to exploit AI to improve their reconnaissance and attack methodologies, with AI-enabled drones adding a new twist.”
The scenario he described as his greatest concern was extremist groups using AI to produce bioweapons.
That threat, he said, is “not yet realised”, but he cautioned that the technology has the “potential to change the stakes on existing or even new bioweapons”.
“These risks are real. The UK Intelligence Community — MI5, GCHQ and MI6 — is working closely with the UK’s globally respected AI Security Institute to take them on,” he said.
Threat level at severe
The UK’s terrorism threat level was raised to severe in April — the first such move in five years — meaning an attack is highly likely.
Sir Ken said Islamist groups including Al Qaeda and so-called Islamic State continue both to direct and to inspire attacks, while the higher risk was also driven “in significant part” by extreme right-wing terrorism.
“Over the last year the most marked trend has been an increase in cases where extremist versions of anti-immigration and anti-Muslim grievance are tipping into terrorist intent,” he said.
Extreme right-wing terrorism, Sir Ken said, tends to “skew young” and is fuelled by the internet. MI5 had investigated a “radicalised extreme right-wing 13-year-old here in the UK” in recent months, he said.
“That investigation generated insight that enabled one of our international partners to prevent a lethal attack on their soil,” he added.
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