Director General of MI5 Sir Ken McCallum warned of the threats facing the UK (Image: Jonathan Brady/PA Wire)
Britain is facing more danger than it was before 9/11, the head of MI5 has warned. Sir Ken McCallum admitted intelligence officers are detecting more conspiracies orchestrated by states such as Russia, China and Iran.
And terrorists – noticeably Islamist fanatics – are still plotting mass casualty attacks in the UK, Britain’s top intelligence officer admitted. Sir Ken said on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks: “The MI5 I lead in 2026 contends with a threat landscape markedly different to 2001’s.
“Sadly, mass-casualty terrorist ambition endures, as in the recent conviction of an Islamist extremist who sought automatic weaponry for an assault on Manchester’s Jewish community.
“But the terrorist threat now sits alongside strategic national security threats posed by capable states.”
Referencing James Woolsey, the former CIA director who spoke in 1993 of the West slaying “a large dragon” after the Cold War, Sir Ken added: “We now face the worst of both worlds: dragons are back, but snakes persist.”
The “dragons” are believed to be references to Russia, Iran and China, while the “snakes” are the dangers posed by Islamist terrorist groups such as Islamic State and Al-Qaeda.
Sir Ken wrote: “This is my call to arms after 25 years: government, business, academia, and the public must treat national security not as the specialist concern of a handful of agencies, but as a shared national endeavour.”
Some 19 al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial passenger planes, flying two into the Twin Towers in New York and another into the Pentagon.
A fourth plane crashed into a Pennsylvanian field after a passenger revolt, preventing it from hitting another target, thought to be the Capitol. The attacks killed 2,977 people from 90 nations.
The head of MI5 said British, American and coalition military campaigns targeting Al Qaeda dismantled the terror group.
Airliners crashed into the Twin Towers (Image: Getty Images)
He wrote in the Independent: “Al Qaeda had to be not just taken on, but taken down. A gargantuan multinational effort, powerfully spearheaded by the US, devised new capabilities to dismantle the core of the organisation in Pakistan’s federally administered tribal areas, into which it had been pushed by the Afghan campaign.
“It worked. Al Qaeda remains a threat today, but its capabilities are a fraction of 2001’s. That rolling back was not inevitable; it was forced.
“We must resist the temptation to admire the defences we built yesterday and instead build the ones we will need tomorrow.
“Contending with rising State-backed aggression – whether sabotage subcontracted to criminals, or covert interference in our democracy, or destructive cyber attacks on power stations – demands new laws as well as new tradecraft.
“We cannot wait for the next shock to discover who owns the vulnerability, who has the authority to act, or who was supposed to pick up the phone.”
He continued: “In 2026, unlike 2001, many of the assets, systems and services under threat sit in private sector hands. This means many of the most critical decisions will be taken not in COBR but in boardrooms.
“We need a new team of teams, preserving an open economy but cooperating across government, industry and academia, to close vulnerabilities and enable swift coherent action when crises hit.”