Symbolic imageMI5 chief says Iran now targets UK military sites, confirms Russian Brexit meddling
MI5 director-general Ken McCallum said on Tuesday that Iran has shifted to targeting UK military sites. He also confirmed Russia tried to interfere in the 2016 Brexit referendum, with little effect.
In his annual threat update on Tuesday, 13 October, McCallum said MI5's Iran-linked operations led to more than 50 arrests in the past year, and called the RAF Fairford incident "not unique". MI5's caseload on state threats has quadrupled in a decade and is now similar in scale to its counterterrorism work. A day earlier, Prime Minister Andy Burnham said the Revolutionary Guard almost certainly directed the Fairford plot. Seven men were detained after the incident on 27 September and released on bail; according to the Guardian, nobody has been charged.
Russia and the Brexit vote
McCallum said RT, Sputnik and fake accounts on X tried to sway the 2016 referendum, but he saw a big gap between what was attempted and what resulted. He warned that prolonging the debate would hand the Kremlin a propaganda win.
Far right and AI
McCallum called the shift from anti-immigration views to terrorist intent the most marked trend in MI5's caseload over the past year. MI5 is also creating an AI Threat Assessment Centre to assess the risks of the technology.
Other opinions
Iran's foreign ministry rejected the UK attribution as a "clumsy false flag operation" and said London had provided insufficient evidence, Al Jazeera reports.