LONDON (AP) — Iran is trying to hit military sites in Britain and the suspected plot to attack a U.S.-run military air base in September is “not unique," the head of the MI5 spy agency said Tuesday, as he warned that both Tehran and Moscow are expanding their attacks against the U.K.
Ken McCallum, who leads the U.K.’s domestic security service, said Tehran is seeking to intensify its attacks in Britain beyond the traditional targets of Iranians opposed to the country's Islamic authorities.
That has included arson and sabotage attacks on Jewish sites that Britain says were carried out by Iranian proxies.
McCallum said another “major shift this year has been Iranian ambitions to come at harder targets, like military sites.”
The incident at RAF Fairford “is not unique. There have been other examples, not just in the U.K. but around the world,” McCallum said.
McCallum delivered his annual speech outlining major threats to the U.K. as counterterror detectives investigate a suspected terror plot against the U.S.-run base in western England, which has been used to bomb Iran during this year’s war.
Scores of residents were evacuated from their homes near the base on Sept. 27 as armed police officers and army bomb-disposal experts swarmed the rural area. Police later said they had found a quantity of an accelerant — gasoline — in three vans at the site, but no explosives.
Seven men in their 20s have been arrested and released on bail under investigation. In all, more than 50 people have been arrested over Iran-linked plots in the past year, McCallum said.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham said Monday that the apparent plot was “almost certainly” directed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, or IRGC. Iran has denied involvement, although it has previously said that it considers any base used to attack its territory a legitimate target.
The U.S. pulled its bombers from RAF Fairford after the incident, and the Trump administration said it believed the base faced Iranian threats intended to kill as many American troops and destroy as many U.S. planes as possible.
British officials have not confirmed that, and McCallum said that, in the U.K., Iran has so far used low-level criminal proxies who lack the capacity to mount a sophisticated large-scale attack. But he said Iran’s IRGC has shown stronger capabilities in countries closer to Iran, “so it would be foolish for a person in a role like mine to discount the possibility.”
MI5 says AI could bring bioweapon risk
In a stark speech, McCallum argued that the U.K. faces a “new era of national security,” with a generational shift equivalent to the 9/11 attacks a quarter century ago. He said the myriad threats to national security now range from “arson, sabotage cyberattacks, coercion, violence” to “what online algorithms are feeding your teenagers in their bedrooms.”
McCallum said his agency’s work countering state threats – chiefly from Russia, Iran and China – has quadrupled in the past decade, and claimed that both Russia and Iran are escalating hybrid warfare campaigns against the U.K. and other European countries.
He said Russia has been linked to attacks including an attempt to use an explosives-laden drone at Germany's Leipzig airport, and is “using tactics that stop short — though sometimes not much short — of conventional conflict.”
Meanwhile, technology is racing ahead, with artificial intelligence “supercharging” the cybersecurity battle between attackers and defenders, he said.
McCallum said terror plotters have used artificial intelligence for reconnaissance and attacks, including AI-enabled drones. Even more concerning, he said, is “AI’s potential to change the stakes on existing or even new bioweapons.”
After the speech he told journalists at MI5's London headquarters that terror groups “would dearly love” to have chemical, biological or radiological weapons, but these are hard to obtain.
“One risk is that AI could enable dangerous knowledge to get into the hands of people we would all rather didn’t have that knowledge,” he said. “A second and different risk … is the possibility that AI could generate novel pathogens not previously seen.”
McCallum said MI5 has set up a new AI Threat Assessment Center to try to keep ahead of the risks.
“Human history has given us no experience of facing an actor which is smarter than we are. It is capable of outthinking us. This is genuinely novel, and deserves the serious attention it is getting, including in MI5,” he said.
