Russia trying to create 'mayhem' on UK streets, MI5 boss warns

Russia is trying to create “mayhem” on the UK’s streets, the head of the MI5 has warned – as he revealed a growing number of children are being investigated for terrorism.

In a wide-ranging speech, the organisation’s director general Ken McCallum said the UK faces an increased threat from “Putin’s henchmen” as “plot after plot” from Iran.

It comes as Islamic terrorism is also re-emerging, with Mr McCallum saying “the trend that concerns me most [is] the worsening threat from Al Qaeda and in particular from Islamic State“.

“After a few years of being pinned well back, they’ve resumed efforts to export terrorism,” he added.

Over the last month, more than a third of MI5‘s top priority investigations have had links to organised overseas terrorist groups.

Mr McCallum revealed that, overall, MI5 and the police have disrupted 43 “late-stage” terrorist plots since March 2017.

He said some plotters planned mass murder through the use of firearms and explosives.

The split of MI5’s counter-terrorism work is roughly 75% Islamist and 25% extreme right-wing, although Mr McCallum described a “dizzying range of beliefs and ideologies” as people access a range of online hatred, conspiracy theories and disinformation.

In his first speech of its kind in two years, Mr McCallum said his team had “a hell of a job on its hands” and painted a picture of a multifaceted threat facing the UK, with resurgent terrorist organisations such as Al Qaeda and IS, in addition to state terrorism from countries such as Iran and Russia.

He said state threat work has risen 48% in a year, revealing that since January 2022, MI5 and the police have responded to 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots.

Protecting Britain has changed dramatically in recent years

Today’s speech from MI5’s boss doesn’t just lay out the range of threats to the UK, it makes clear how dramatically the job of protecting Britain has changed in recent years.

Ken McCallum talks of an early career “crammed full of terrorist threats” but says while that hasn’t gone away, they now sit alongside “state-backed assassination and sabotage plots” and on top of this there is a major European land war that is pulling on resources.

It all adds up to “the most complex and interconnected threat environment we’ve ever seen,” and without saying it, one could take from this speech that the director general wants all the resources he can get from this new government’s spending review.

That said, the current terror level threat remains at “substantial” – two points below its highest level. Events in the Middle East have spilled over into hate crimes, but not yet a major act of terrorism – no significant plots are detected on this front.

But another element, not to be underestimated, is the far-right, which filled the gaps in MI5’s work when Islamic terrorism was receding. It remains a big factor, 25% of the threat, particularly when it comes to young people being radicalised.

I asked Mr McCallum about this in an off-camera briefing. Whereas Islamic terrorism takes its inspiration from extremist preachers or propaganda from terrorist groups such as Islamic State, where are these far-right extremists drawing their inspiration from?

The MI5 boss answered: “We don’t tend to see prominent radicalisers [among this group]”. He described a “pick-n-mix ideology” and a “crowd-sourced model” where people pull on hatred and misinformation from a multitude of mostly online sources.

That one in eight of the people his organisation investigates are under 18 years was, he said, “not something I expected to see”.

What’s clear is that it is hard to overstate how significant the online world is in enabling and inspiring today’s terrorists, and it seems to be getting to them at a younger age.

Mr McCallum says that in all forms of extremism “lone individuals indoctrinated online continue to make up most of the threats”.

But he added: “Sorting the real plotters from the armchair extremists is an exacting task.”

He said the threat from Iran has increased “at an unprecedented scale”, warning that it – along with Russia – were “using proxies” such as organised criminals to “do their dirty work”.

More than 750 Russian diplomats, many of them spies, have been expelled from Europe since Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.

While this has dented Russian intelligence services, Mr McCallum said they are on a “sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets” with “arson, sabotage and more”.

He had a message to criminals considering taking on work for hostile states, saying: “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.”

He also offered counter-sabotage support to businesses through MI5’s protective security arm, the National Protective Security Authority (NPSA).

But the statistic that 13% of people under investigation were children was one of the most unexpected developments – it is a three-fold increase in three years.

Mr McCallum said MI5 is seeing “far too many cases where very young people are being drawn into poisonous online extremism”.

He added: “Extreme right-wing terrorism in particular skews heavily towards young people, driven by propaganda that shows a canny understanding of online culture.”

Speaking later in an off-camera briefing, Mr McCallum said the fact that one in eight of the people his organisation investigates are under-18 was “not something I expected to see”.

As yet, the conflict in the Middle East has had little impact on UK terrorism.

Mr McCallum referenced last October’s knife attack in Hartlepool but said: “We are powerfully alive to the risk that events in the Middle East trigger terrorist action in the UK… [but] thus far, while our police colleagues have responded to rising public order, hate crime and community safety challenges, we haven’t – yet – seen this translate at scale into terrorist violence.”