MI5 head Ken McCallum warned that foreign state threats have quadrupled, with Iran now targeting military locations and Russia turning to paid criminals.
Foreign state threats against the United Kingdom have quadrupled, forcing domestic intelligence to commit more resources to countering hostile nations than it did during the Cold War, the head of MI5 said Tuesday. Giving his annual threat update at Thames House headquarters in London, MI5 Director General Ken McCallum warned that Britain has entered a new era of national security comparable to the period after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, NBC News reported.
McCallum explained that hostile activity by foreign adversaries has grown so fast that “our terrorism and state threats operational missions are pretty much of equal scale,” according to BBC News. While Russia continues to be the primary state antagonist, Iran has intensified its own operations in the UK, moving past earlier targets to focus on British military installations.
British intelligence operations have led to more than 50 Iran-linked arrests over the past year. McCallum noted that Tehran’s hybrid campaign historically relied on criminal proxies to intimidate dissidents abroad, Iranian media outlets and Israeli or British Jewish sites. That focus has expanded toward harder targets, including defense infrastructure.
Targeting military sites and the Fairford incident
The intelligence chief pointed to a recent incident at RAF Fairford, a military base in rural England that the United States used to launch bombers. In the early hours of Sept. 27, a member of the public notified police after seeing three vans parked on a country lane near the base. Officers found gasoline in the vehicles and arrested seven men in their 20s, including one dual British-Iranian national. All seven individuals were subsequently released on bail.
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham told Parliament on Monday that the Fairford incident was highly likely to have been coordinated in Iran and almost certainly directed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. A week after the incident, Washington pulled its bombers from the airfield following reports of a possible drone strike against the site.
McCallum played down concerns that Iran can currently carry out such sophisticated strikes on British soil. He explained that Tehran has so far hired low-level criminals for domestic operations, though he cautioned that the situation could change.
Russian hybrid tactics and proxy networks
Russia remains the leading state adversary facing Britain, McCallum said. With almost 1,000 Russian intelligence officers expelled globally since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin’s covert network has been heavily degraded. Because of those expulsions, Russian intelligence services have turned toward hiring third-party criminals to carry out sabotage, arson and other disruptive tasks.
The MI5 director general said Russian operations seek to destabilize European nations while intentionally remaining below the threshold of NATO’s Article 5 mutual defense pact. By relying on recruited proxies, Moscow aims to cause disruption without provoking a united military response from the alliance.
Beyond Russia and Iran, MI5 continues to track Chinese operations under the 2023 National Security Act. McCallum noted that Beijing is a major trading partner for Britain, but the security service remains focused on Chinese state efforts involving espionage, coercion and interference with democratic institutions.
Emerging tech risks and domestic terrorism
Alongside hostile states, intelligence agencies are confronting new hazards created by artificial intelligence. McCallum stated that investigators have already caught terrorists attempting to use AI to improve attack planning and reconnaissance, including the integration of software into aerial drones. He cautioned that violent groups could eventually exploit AI to engineer novel biological weapons, an issue MI5, MI6 and GCHQ are addressing in coordination with the UK AI Security Institute.
Conventional domestic terror risks have also kept investigators busy since the UK raised its terrorism threat level to severe in April, indicating an attack is highly likely. Both the Islamic State and Al Qaeda continue trying to inspire mass casualty attacks, but McCallum noted that a significant portion of the increased risk comes from extreme right-wing terrorism.
Online activity is pushing extreme right-wing ideology toward younger age groups, driven by grievances over immigration and anti-Muslim rhetoric. McCallum revealed that MI5 recently investigated a radicalized 13-year-old in the UK, generating intelligence that allowed an overseas partner agency to disrupt an imminent deadly attack in another country.
