Iran has ‘ambitions’ to kidnap or kill Britons it sees as ‘enemies of the regime’

Iran has plotted to kill or kidnap at least 10 British residents it accuses of being ‘enemies of the regime’ on UK soil this year alone, the boss of MI5 dramatically revealed today.

Director general Ken McCallum said while Tehran had long used violence to silence critics at home, its ‘aggressive intelligence services’ have now crossed the line to threatening Britain directly. 

‘At its sharpest, this includes ambitions to kidnap or even kill British or UK-based individuals perceived as enemies of the regime,’ he said. 

‘We have seen at least 10 such potential threats since January alone.’

In a speech from the security agency’s Thames House headquarters in London this morning, Mr McCallum also set out in stark language the dangers faced from Russia and China, describing how the UK is in a contest with ‘adversaries who have massive scale and are not squeamish about the tactics they deploy.’

He warned the UK would have to deal with Russian aggression ‘for years to come’, adding that his agency had blocked more than 100 attempts by the Kremlin to insert suspected spies into Britain since the Salisbury poisonings.  

Drawing on a football analogy to hammer home his concerns, Mr McCallum said Russia ‘thinks nothing of throwing an elbow in the face, and routinely cheats to get its way.’

‘They will keep attacking us’, he said, but stressed president Vladimir Putin was ‘not winning’ the war in Ukraine.

Chinese authorities are ‘trying to re-write the rulebook, to buy the league, to recruit our coaching staff to work for them’, while Iran ‘will only let people support one team and is prepared to use violence against those who don’t toe the line.’

‘We’re alive to the risk of these teams loaning players to each other, amplifying their strengths’, he added as he highlighted Iran providing support to Russia by supplying drones ‘inflicting misery in Ukraine’.

Last week, the Foreign Office summoned the Iranian deputy ambassador over claims two London-based journalists had faced death threats from Tehran-backed agents over their reporting of protests. .

Iran International, a news channel, was told by the Metropolitan police earlier this week that it believes there were credible threats to the journalists’ lives. 

In a wide-ranging speech, Mr McCallum said while rising state threats are a ‘huge challenge’, getting ahead of terror plots was ‘still the first thing the British public expect of us’, as he told how so-called lone wolf terrorists were ‘fiendishly hard to detect and disrupt’. 

MI5 and the police have disrupted 37 late-stage terror attack plots since the start of 2017, including a further eight since Mr McCallum gave his last update on threats in July last year.

Security services are seeing growing attempts by right-wing extremists to ‘acquire weapons’, particularly firearms, ‘well in advance of any specific targeting intent developing’, Mr McCallum said.

There are also growing numbers of right-wing extremist ‘influencers’ which ‘fuel grievances and amplify conspiracy theories.’

Terrorism inspired by Islamist ideology still accounts for about three-quarters of MI5’s terrorist caseload, Mr McCallum added. 

He also spoke about the expulsion of more than 400 suspected Russian spies from across Europe this year, which he said had struck the ‘most significant strategic blow’ against Moscow in recent history and taken Vladimir Putin by surprise. 

Mr McCallum said a massive number of Russian officials had been expelled from across the world including over 600 from Europe of which more than 400 were judged to be spies.

‘This has struck the most significant strategic blow against the Russian Intelligence Services in recent European history,’ he said. 

‘And together with coordinated waves of sanctions, the scale has taken Putin by surprise.’ 

He also described suggestions from Moscow that Britain was involved in blowing up Nord Stream gas pipelines as ‘silly claims’.

He said the expulsion action followed a template set by Britain in the wake of the nerve agent poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, southern England, in 2018 which prompted a wave of diplomatic expulsions.

Mr McCallum said this year Britain had refused more than 100 Russian diplomatic visa applications on national security grounds.

On China, the spy chief said the Chinese authorities were using all the means at their disposal to monitor and intimidate the Chinese diaspora.

He referenced an incident last month in Manchester when a man who was protesting outside a Chinese consulate said he was dragged inside the grounds by masked men, and then kicked and punched.

‘To intimidate and harass UK nationals or those who have made the UK their home cannot be tolerated,’ McCallum said.