MI5 Says Iran Is Now Aiming at British Military Sites
“The other major shift this year has been Iranian ambitions to come at harder targets, like military sites,” the director general Sir Ken McCallum said in his annual threat update, disclosing more than fifty Iran-linked arrests in a year. State threats have quadrupled in a decade and now occupy MI5 on roughly the same scale as terrorism.
He was careful about capability in a way the headlines were not: what has actually been seen in Britain “has not been anywhere near” the level of sophistication the Revolutionary Guard deploys closer to home, because much of the work here is contracted to criminals. Much of the aggression, he said, has been aimed at British Jewish communities, “with whom I want to express solidarity”. On Russia he was blunter: with its covert network “eviscerated by almost 1,000 expulsions since the invasion”, the Kremlin is “scrambling to pay criminals to do their bidding” — “not the actions of a great power with the strategic upper hand”. The sharpest domestic trend is elsewhere: “extremist versions of anti-immigration and anti-Muslim grievance are tipping into terrorist intent”, with asylum hotels and immigration centres among the targets contemplated, and the caseload skewing young — MI5 investigated a radicalised thirteen-year-old whose case helped a foreign partner stop a lethal attack. A new AI Threat Assessment Centre is to “separate the bluster from the realities”.