Russia pays criminals to sow ‘mayhem’ in Europe: MI5

MI5 Director General warns Russia and Iran are leaning on criminals to undertake sabotage and attacks on dissidents, while ISIS terror threats are also on the rise

MI5 boss Ken McCallum took up his role in April 2020

The Kremlin’s spy services are on a “sustained mission to generate mayhem” on Europe’s streets, the head of the UK domestic spy agency warned Tuesday, saying that the number of investigations into state-orchestrated threats his agency is handling has jumped by nearly half in the past year.

MI5 Director General Ken McCallum said that Russia and Iran were increasingly leaning on low-level criminals to undertake arson, sabotage and attacks on dissidents aimed at sowing chaos across Europe. Russia in particular is ramping up cyberattacks and reliance on criminal proxies after its spy network was largely dismantled by the expulsion of 750 Russian diplomats following the Kremlin’s decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, MI5 said.

“We should expect to see continued acts of aggression here at home,” he said.

McCallum also said Iran was becoming increasingly hostile with 20 known Iran-backed plots since 2022 targeting people based in the UK, mostly dissidents or critics of the regime. Many of those plots involved using “international drug traffickers to low-level crooks,” McCallum said.

In addition to the uptick in state-backed violence, MI5 said it also faced a renewed challenge from traditional Islamic terror threats. While the continuing conflict in the Middle East has yet to translate into large-scale terror violence in the U.K., McCallum warned that Islamic State and al Qaeda “have resumed efforts to export terrorism” and that in the past month, more than a third of MI5’s priority probes were linked to overseas terror organisations.

Much of the rise in activity from al-Qaeda and IS predates Hamas’s attack on Israel last year, he said. The terror threat is also structured in a different way than it was a decade ago, with a less centralised command and more online recruiting. Those involved also come from different regions, namely Central Asia. Al-Qaeda is trying to use the Middle Eastern conflict to recruit, he said, warning of “slower burn radicalisation.”

Trying to give priority to resources given this range of threats is a challenge for the agency. MI5 says that would-be terrorists are more ideologically volatile and are self-radicalised online, neither adhering to Islamic or far-right ideology, making them difficult to track.

Since 2022 Russia’s intelligence agencies have been linked to dozens of incidents across Europe, aimed at curbing arms production, pressuring politicians and sowing panic.

McCallum said that there has been a “staggering rise” in the number of such attacks recently, co-ordinated by Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency. MI5 is now working closely with European allies to crack down on criminal networks being funded by authoritarian states, he said.

This summer seven people were accused by U.K. authorities of setting fire to a London warehouse owned by Ukrainian businessmen, an arson attack allegedly paid for by Russian intelligence. Russian saboteurs are also suspected of being behind a fire at a Berlin factory that builds air-defence systems. In France, prosecutors are investigating a possible Russian connection after two people were found spray painting more than 200 Star of David symbols on buildings late last year. There has also been a spate of arson attacks in the Baltics and Eastern Europe.

Iran meanwhile has been linked to several attacks on dissidents in the U.K. over the last two years. In December 2023 a man was convicted of carrying out hostile reconnaissance of the West London headquarters of TV station Iran International, a media group Tehran has proscribed as a terror organisation. In March Iran International presenter Pouria Zeraati was stabbed outside his home in South London, an attack officials believe was linked to Iran.

In Spain, a politician who publicly supports the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran, an Iranian opposition group, was shot in the face in broad daylight late last year.

McCallum said the challenges of hunting down criminals paid by authoritarian states were similar to unearthing would-be terrorists. He added that these proxies were poorly trained and sometimes were themselves hired by criminals without knowing they were working for Iran or Russia. McCallum warned criminals that if they accept money from autocratic states they will face the full force of the security services rather than the police. “It’s a choice you will regret,” he said.

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