Russia pays criminals to sow ‘mayhem’ in Europe, warns UK spy chief

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. LONDON—The Kremlin’s spy services are on a “sustained mission to generate mayhem" on Europe’s streets, the head of the U.K. domestic spy agency warned Tuesday, saying that the number of investigations into state-orchestrated threats his agency is handling has jumped by nearly half in the past year.

MI5 Director General Ken McCallum said that Russia and Iran were increasingly leaning on low-level criminals to undertake arson, sabotage and attacks on dissidents aimed at sowing chaos across Europe. Russia in particular is ramping up cyberattacks and reliance on criminal proxies after its spy network was largely dismantled by the expulsion of 750 Russian diplomats following the Kremlin’s decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, MI5 said. “We should expect to see continued acts of aggression here at home," he said.

McCallum also said Iran was becoming increasingly hostile with 20 known Iran-backed plots since 2022 targeting people based in the U.K., mostly dissidents or critics of the regime. Many of those plots involved using “international drug traffickers to low-level crooks," McCallum said. In addition to the uptick in state-backed violence, MI5 said it also faced a renewed challenge from traditional Islamic terror threats.

While the continuing conflict in the Middle East has yet to translate into large-scale terror violence in the U.K., McCallum warned that Islamic State and al Qaeda “have resumed efforts to export terrorism" and that in the past month, more than a third of MI5’s priority probes were linked to overseas terror organizations. Much of the rise in activity from al Qaeda and IS predates Hamas’s attack on Israel last year, he said. The terror threat is also