Russian spies targeting UK with Cold War-style sabotage, warns MI5 boss

Ken McCallum says Vladimir Putin’s intelligence agencies targeting businesses to undermine security and economy

Russian spies are targeting Britain with Cold War-style sabotage, the director general of MI5 has warned.
Writing exclusively for The Telegraph, Ken McCallum said Vladimir Putin’s intelligence agencies are targeting businesses to undermine the UK’s security and economy.
His comments came as he gave his annual threat briefing, in which he warned that Russian operatives are “on a sustained mission to generate mayhem in British streets”.
In a joint article with Rain Newton-Smith, the CBI chief executive, business leaders were urged to “think hard about the sabotage risk you might be facing”.
“States are not just going after government and military secrets, British businesses have become a target too”, they wrote. “State actors have made aggressive and well-documented attempts to steal UK advantage, including through cyber attacks and penetration of supply chains.
“It might sound like a Cold War-era manoeuvre, but while the war in Ukraine grinds on, we have seen Russian state-sponsored sabotage attempts targeting European – including UK – businesses, with arson a prevalent, but not the only, tactic.”
The Cold War was characterised by repeated attempts by East and West to steal the others’ industrial and military secrets. Mr McCallum said logistics firms, and those with international footprints, are most at risk.
In recent months, the Kremlin has re-energised such covert activity through the use of criminal gangs and is thought to be behind a number of planned or actual attacks across Europe.
In May, the Polish authorities arrested an alleged Russian spy ring planning attacks on commercial premises in the country.
Donald Tusk, the prime minister, said at the time: “We currently have nine suspects detained and indicted, who have been directly implicated in the name of Russian [intelligence] services in acts of sabotage in Poland.”
Earlier this year, Thomas Haldenwang, the head of German domestic intelligence, warned that “we assess the risk of state-controlled acts of sabotage [by Russia] to be significantly increased”.
In the UK, seven people were charged over a Russia-linked arson attack on a Ukrainian business at an industrial unit in Leyton, east London, on March 20. 
Two were charged under the National Security Act 2023 – the first case to involve alleged offences under the new legislation.
Giving his annual speech from the Government’s Counter-Terrorism Operations Centre, in west London, Mr McCallum gave a stark warning to anyone considering working for states hostile to British interests.
He said: “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.”
The MI5 chief added that as the war in Ukraine continues, the security services were seeing “Putin’s henchmen seeking to strike elsewhere in the misguided hope of weakening Western resolve”.
The expulsion of more than 750 Russian diplomats from Europe since Russia invaded Ukraine has put a “big dent in the Russian intelligence services’ ability to cause damage in the West”, he added.
As a result, malign states such as Russia and Iran have increasingly turned to criminal elements to carry out their “dirty work”.
The MI5 director general said Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU – deemed responsible for the 2018 chemical attack in Salisbury against double agent Sergei Skripal, which resulted in the death of local woman Dawn Sturgess – had been active in the recruitment of criminals.
“The GRU in particular is on a sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets,” he said. “We’ve seen arson, sabotage and more – dangerous actions conducted with increasing recklessness.”
Elsewhere in his speech, Mr McCallum said the law enforcement and security services were “powerfully alive” to the risk that events in the Middle East could trigger a terror attack in the UK.
He said al-Qaeda had sought to capitalise on the conflict in the Middle East by calling for violent action, and that his staff would give their fullest attention to the risk of an increase in Iranian state aggression in the UK.
Since the start of 2022, MI5 has helped to disrupt 20 Iran-backed plots presenting lethal threats to British citizens and UK residents.
Speaking a day after the first anniversary of the Hamas attacks on Israel, the spy chief said “the ripples from conflict in that region will not necessarily arrive at our shores in a straightforward fashion”, adding: “They will be filtered through the lens of online media and mixed with existing views and grievances in unpredictable ways.”
Russia and Iran continue to be the focus for external threats to the UK, with the number of state threat investigations run by MI5 up 48 per cent in the last year alone.
The head of MI5 said his agency also has “one hell of a job on its hands” given the changes in the terrorist threat in recent years. Since 2017, MI5 and the police have together disrupted 43 late-stage attack plots. In some cases, terrorists were trying to get hold of firearms and explosives in the final days of planning mass murder.
Although Islamist extremism continues to make up about three-quarters of MI5’s counter-terrorist work – the remainder being extreme Right-wing terrorism – Mr McCallum said that “much has shifted”.
“Straightforward labels like ‘Islamist terrorism’ or ‘extreme Right-wing’ don’t fully reflect the dizzying range of beliefs and ideologies we see,” he said. “We’re encountering more volatile would-be terrorists with only a tenuous grasp of the ideologies they profess to follow.”
Referring to advances in communications technology, Mr McCallum said security services must keep access to online communications in the face of calls for greater encryption and privacy, otherwise “terrorists will be able to operate at scale without fear of consequence”.
He said: “Privacy and exceptional lawful access can coexist if absolutist positions are avoided. World-class encryption experts are confident of this.”
Mr McCallum also revealed there has been a threefold increase in the number of under-18s investigated by his agency for involvement in terrorism over the last three years.
Extreme Right-wing terrorism “skews heavily towards young people”, he said, “driven by propaganda that shows a canny understanding of online culture”. This has resulted in 13 per cent of MI5’s terrorist investigations being against children.