Iran is stepping up efforts to strike more heavily defended targets in Britain, including military sites, while Russia is intensifying hybrid operations aimed at Ukraine’s allies, MI5 has warned.
Setting out what he described as a fast-changing threat landscape in his annual address, MI5 Director General Ken McCallum also singled out the dangers posed by the misuse of artificial intelligence. He said his biggest concern was that terrorists could exploit AI to help develop bioweapons or even create novel pathogens.
Mr McCallum said the pressure from hostile states had surged over the past decade, with state threats quadrupling in that period. The scale of the challenge, he added, now requires MI5 to commit more resources to countering state activity than it did during the Cold War.
On Monday, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham said Tehran was “highly likely” to be behind a suspected plot against RAF Fairford, a base that has been used by US bombers to conduct strikes on Iran. The incident triggered a major security alert and led to US President Trump pulling aircraft from the site.
Mr McCallum said he was unable to comment directly on the Fairford case because an investigation is continuing, but he pointed to what he called a clear change this year in “Iranian ambitions to come at harder targets, like military sites”.
“The RAF Fairfield incident … is not unique. There have been other examples, not just in the UK but around the world,” he said.
Turning to Russia — which, like Iran, denies involvement in hostile acts in Britain — the MI5 chief described Moscow as the country’s “aggressor number one”.
He aligned MI5’s assessment with warnings from other European intelligence agencies that Russia has increasingly leaned on methods that fall just short of conventional warfare. As examples, he cited an attempted drone attack on a cargo plane at a German airport and a cyber attack targeting Polish energy infrastructure.
“It’s no accident that Russian aggressors are trying to unsettle other European homelands at a time when their military progress in Ukraine is minimal and horrifically costly,” he said.
