Of the counter-terrorism work performed by Britain’s domestic intelligence agency MI5, three-quarters are “Islamic extremist”, the agency director said in a public threat briefing.
The UK Security Service, best known as MI5, has worked with police to foil 43 “late-stage attack plots” since 2017, agency director Ken McCallum said on Tuesday. Making a rare public address, the top spy headlined his comments with remarks about counterterrorism work, but this important facet of intelligence work was roundly ignored by UK news headlines overnight, which focussed heavily instead on his comments on the “fevered imagination of Putin’s regime” and its efforts to “generate mayhem” in Britain in revenge for its interventions on behalf of Ukraine.
Of the 43 advanced terror plots intercepted in the past seven years, McCallum said, some were “were trying to get hold of firearms and explosives, in the final days of planning mass murder”. MI5 and the police had “saved numerous lives” by beating these plotters, he said.
The “headline split” of counter-terror work by MI5 was “75-per-cent Islamist Extremist, 25-per-cent extreme right-wing terrorism”, he said, confirming it remains the case Islamism is the overwhelming majority of violent extremism cases known in the United Kingdom.
Despite emphasising the non-political nature of the work his agency does, McCallum nevertheless made a speech thoroughly grounded in the political zeitgeist and recent news cycles. He also articulated government talking points — assuming they weren’t the intelligence communities’ in the first place — making a special interest pleading the case for government-sanctioned access to encrypted private communication, threatening unfettered paedophiles and terrorism if the now years-long digital privacy debate doesn’t go his way.
On that zeitgeist of “disinformation”, the top spy was particularly disdainful, stating it has an “insidious effect” and “played into… the public disorder that has followed the sickening attack in Southport”.
McCallum also attempted to establish some cover for frequently-heard criticism of the police in the wake of suspected terror attacks, asserting that in what he said is a new era of terrorism distinct from what had gone before, it is now less clear when attackers are actually extremists, and not just mentally unwell. He said:
…compared to my years combatting Al-Qaeda, it is harder these days for my investigators and their police counterparts to quickly and definitively determine whether an act of violence is ideologically motivated, or driven by another factor like mental health. Today, an attacker may have no connection to other terrorists, and they might not be on our records.
MI5 and the police follow the evidence to the conclusion, or lack of conclusion, they support. To be explicit, politics plays no role in these decisions.
Curiously, despite the abundant evidence and experience from Europe where its influence is more widely discussed McCallum did not mention the issue of left-wing, or anarchist extremism at all. It is not as if MI5 isn’t aware of that risk, and such groups have been considerably more active lately in performing acts of industrial sabotage against the UK’s defence infrastructure, but judging by previous such speeches by McCallum, talking about it simply doesn’t seem to be his style.
In past years, these MI5 director’s speeches have generally seen the establishment media laser-focus on any mentions of right-wing extremism, even where McCallum made abundantly clear the actual lion’s share of plots faced were Islamist. His mention of Russia and Iran this year, however, gave the newspapers something else to panic about, and it was Russia’s efforts to target Britain that got the attention.
This part of his speech was relatively light on detail, but the top spy did make reference to cases of a Russian intimidation campaign in Britain already in the public domain, for instance, the arson of a Ukraine-connected business in London allegedly by a Russia-paid criminal. McCallum said:
…Putin’s henchmen seeking to strike elsewhere, in the misguided hope of weakening Western resolve… the more eye-catching shift this year has been Russian state actors turning to proxies for their dirty work including private intelligence operatives and criminals from both the UK and third countries…
…the UK’s leading role in supporting Ukraine means we loom large in the fevered imagination of Putin’s regime, and we should expect continued acts of aggression here at home. The GRU [Russian main directorate of military intelligence] in particular is on a sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets. We’ve seen arson, sabotage, and more. Dangerous actions conducted with increasing recklessness.”
Lurid as they are, McCallum’s warnings on this subject have already been expressed in greater detail by his intelligence community colleague, the director of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) spy agency Anne Keast-Butler, in May. Assuming British and continental intelligence agencies are satisfied to go public with their successes in foiling Russian plots, so far it seems to be the case this attention of Moscow has been more focussed on Europe so far, particularly in Germany and Poland, with several alleged plots have been prevented, from the very serious to the almost bizarrely petty.
Less discussed were his circumspect remarks on China, which the intelligence chief said — due to China’s massive influence on the well-being of Britain’s economy — has to be handled differently. While McCallum strayed away from specifics, he did at least tacitly acknowledge there is a major issue with industrial espionage, urging British businesses to avail themselves of government-produced advice on how to harden themselves against external threats.
