The head of MI5 says he will “never back off” from confronting threats from China as he revealed his officers disrupted a case linked to Beijing in just the past week.
More broadly, Sir Ken McCallum said the number of people in the UK under investigation for “state threat activity” – also including from Russia and Iran – has jumped by 35% in the past year compared with the previous 12 months.
He admitted he felt frustration at the collapse last month of a trial against two British men accused of spying for China, but he stressed that the Security Service had still successfully derailed the alleged espionage operation.
With pressure mounting on Sir Keir Starmer over why the high-profile trial foundered, the director general of MI5 – choosing his words carefully given the controversy – confirmed that “Chinese state actors” pose a threat to UK national security “every day”.
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More broadly, he warned that the threat from states – also including Russia and Iran – are escalating and becoming as ugly as terrorism.
He used an annual speech at MI5’s headquarters in London to say:
• The wider threat from nation states is escalating and becoming as ugly as terrorism
• Attempts by states – principally China, Russia and Iran – to carry out operations involving violence, sabotage, arson or surveillance are “routinely” being uncovered
• MI5 has tracked more than 20 “potentially lethal” plots backed by Iran in the past year
• Russia is hatching a “steady stream” of surveillance plots with “hostile intent”, while MI5 officers take it as a working assumption that Russian trolls will attempt to exploit any particular “fissures” in UK society using online posts, though these efforts are largely unsuccessful
• On terrorism, MI5 and the police have disrupted 19 late-stage attack plots since 2020 and have intervened in many hundreds of developing threats
• There is growing…
