Britain faces ‘extraordinary' threat from Russian and Iranian plots, official warns

Straits Times

a day ago

A police officer stands guard outside the Old Bailey criminal court in London on May 30. PHOTO: AFP
LONDON – In a room at the Old Bailey courthouse in London, six men went on trial this week over an arson attack on a business that was shipping satellite equipment to Ukraine. Down the hall, a separate hearing involved an alleged plot to inflict 'serious violence' on Iranian journalists working in Britain. And in May, six Bulgarians were sentenced to prison for being part of a Russian spy ring operating from a guesthouse on England's east coast.
These disparate cases underscore how Britain has become the locale for a web of foreign espionage operations. For Britain's top adviser on state threats and terrorism, they offer a stark backdrop to his warning that Russia and Iran are 'exploiting divisions in the West' to recruit agents via social media.
The adviser, Jonathan Hall, cannot discuss active criminal cases because of England's strict reporting laws. But in an interview with The New York Times, he said attempts by Russia and Iran to carry out hostile acts on British soil were creating an 'extraordinary' level of threat, albeit one that may be harder for the public to grasp than that from terrorism.
'Terrorism is something that gets public attention,' Hall said, partly because of the 'death and destruction and mayhem' caused by attacks. State threats, he said, were 'much harder to conceptualise' for the public.
Mr Hall's warnings, and those of other senior British officials, stand in sharp contrast to the United States, where President Donald Trump has said little about the efforts of Russia and Iran to destabilise American society, preferring instead to focus on diplomatic overtures to the two countries on issues like the war in Ukraine and Tehran's nuclear programme.
Mr Trump's approach comes even as US authorities have tracked what they believe to be Iranian plots to assassinate the president – allegations that Iran denies – and former intelligence officials have spoken of Russian agents in Mexico who have tried to encourage illegal migration into the United States.
In Britain, as in the United States, some of these cases may reach into high places. On June 6, a judge said that three defendants will stand trial in April over the fires at two properties and a vehicle linked to Prime Minister Keir Starmer. British news media has reported that the security services are investigating whether Russia may have been involved in the fires – an allegation the Russian government denies.
Mr Hall acknowledged that some details from recent cases, including that of the six Bulgarians involved in the Russian spy ring operating out of the guesthouse in Great Yarmouth, could appear 'intrinsically funny.'
'But without being a killjoy, I think it risks missing the point about the risk posed by these individuals,' Mr Hall said. 'They were contemplating assassinating people and they clearly were able to get very close to their targets, so there's nothing comic about that.'
The Bulgarians had been conducting surveillance on targets that included journalists, Russian dissidents and political figures. The ringleader discussed the possibility of kidnapping and killing an investigative reporter. The group was acting under the orders of Jan Marsalek, an Austrian fugitive and former businessperson whom the prosecution said was working on behalf of Russian intelligence.
In another recent case, Daniel Khalife, a young British army soldier who had been spying for Iran, blew his cover by telephoning MI5 and fruitlessly offering his services as a double agent. After escaping from jail by strapping himself to the bottom of a van delivering food, Khalife was apprehended, tried and sentenced to 14 years in prison in February.
For hostile states looking to recruit agents, Mr Hall said, 'It doesn't really matter if they have someone who bungles, because volume is enough, and I suppose it's inevitable, if you have a volume approach, that you'll pick up some bunglers and some people who go out to be very capable.'
A lawyer and former prosecutor specialising in international crime and security, Mr Hall was appointed by the government in 2019 to review the effectiveness of Britain's terrorism laws, and in 2024, to additionally advise on state threats.
In an official review published last month, Mr Hall called for the British government to create new legal powers allowing it to seize passports from suspected foreign agents, issue alerts over activity by foreign intelligence services and prosecute people for targeting victims overseas.
He is not the only official sounding the alarm. In its most recent annual threat assessment, Britain's domestic intelligence agency, MI5, warned that Russia, Iran and China represented the biggest state threats to national security and were outsourcing espionage and sabotage operations designed to disrupt and destabilise Britain.
Mr Ken McCallum, the director-general of MI5, said in October that Russian intelligence agents were on a mission 'to generate mayhem on British and European streets,' while Mr Richard Moore, the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, said that Russian intelligence services had 'gone a bit feral.'
The embassies of Russia and Iran in London did not respond to a request for comment on these recent cases.
One of the most brazen recent foreign acts on British soil was a nerve-agent attack on a former Russian double agent, Sergei Skripal, in Salisbury, south-west of London, in 2018. The fallout prompted the British government to introduce new national security laws in 2023, which made foreign espionage, sabotage and influence criminal offenses.
In February, Mr Hall met with officials from the Justice Department in Washington, to examine their handling of the threat from hostile states. He praised 'the US approach of just whatever works,' which uses a broad spectrum of federal and state legislation to disrupt plots.
The most striking trend in recent years has been the use of organised crime groups by foreign powers, Mr Hall said. That is the result of waves of diplomatic expulsions that ejected intelligence officers from Britain, he said, which meant that states 'couldn't use intelligence officers under diplomatic cover to recruit and to coordinate plots.'
Mr Hall said both Russia and Iran were paying local criminals to carry out acts of violence, espionage and intimidation on British soil. Such efforts have had mixed success, with the prosecution of the Bulgarian spies and others resulting in rare disclosures of spy tradecraft because of lapses in operational security.
Russia and Iran, he warned, were also using the internet to find, influence and hire politically disaffected people in Britain and the United States, both of which suffer from degrees of polarisation. He noted that this was 'increasingly hard to combat' because of deeply targeted and personalised social media feeds: 'Every individual person gets a different feed, and we don't know what other people are seeing.'
'If you're an intelligence officer,' Mr Hall added, 'why would you not exploit divisions in the West and try to find some sort of cultural synergy between you and your target?' NYTIMES
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