MI5 has warned of a “major shift” in Iranian activity in Britain, with the security service now seeing attempts to target military installations as well as individuals and civilian sites.
Speaking during his annual threat assessment on Tuesday, MI5 Director General Sir Ken McCallum said Iranian-linked activity had moved towards increasingly ambitious targets.
“The other major shift this year has been Iranian ambitions to come at harder targets, like military sites.”
McCallum said more than 50 people had been arrested in the UK during the past 12 months in connection with Iran-related investigations, while MI5’s overall workload dealing with hostile-state threats has quadrupled over the past decade.
The comments come just one day after Prime Minister Andy Burnham said the Government believed the incident near RAF Fairford was “highly likely” to have been coordinated from Iran and was “almost certainly” directed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Fairford: MI5 remains guarded
Notably, McCallum did not provide any new evidence about the Fairford investigation itself.
Although the published threat assessment concentrated on the broader Iranian threat, McCallum was asked separately about Fairford by journalists. He declined to discuss the evidence while the police investigation remains active, but said:
“The RAF Fairford incident … is not unique.”
He added that similar attempts to target military installations had been seen elsewhere, including outside Britain.
The Government has now publicly attributed the suspected operation to Iran with a high degree of confidence, while Britain’s domestic intelligence chief is simultaneously refusing to disclose the evidence behind the specific Fairford case.
Seven men have been arrested during the investigation and subsequently released on bail. None has been charged. Police previously confirmed that petrol was recovered during the initial incident but no improvised explosive devices were found.
Iran threat extends beyond Fairford
McCallum said Iran was increasingly using proxy actors and criminal networks as part of its activities abroad; a method British security agencies have warned about previously.
Russia remains what McCallum described as Britain’s “aggressor number one”, while MI5 is also dealing with threats from China, terrorism and the growing potential for artificial intelligence to assist hostile actors.
For Fairford, however, the central unanswered question remains unchanged: the British Government says Iran was almost certainly behind the incident, but the evidence establishing precisely what happened, and what the seven arrested men allegedly knew, has still not been made public.
