BRITAIN’S INTELLIGENCE SERVICE
Head of MI5: Andrew Parker
Intro: Andrew Parker speaks out for the first time since the Salisbury nerve agent attack
THE head of MI5, Britain’s intelligence service, has launched an excoriating attack on Russia, accusing Vladimir Putin’s regime of flagrant breaches of international law.
Andrew Parker used his first public speech outside of the UK by taking aim at the Russian president and his “aggressive and pernicious” agenda.
He told European security chiefs the Salisbury poisonings were a deliberate and malign act that could turn Russia into a “more isolated pariah”. He also launched a strident attack on the “fog of lies, half-truths and obfuscation” that pours out of Mr Putin’s propaganda machine.
Mr Parker’s speech in Berlin was the first time he has spoken publicly since the attempted assassination in Salisbury of former Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, in March.
The attack, with the Novichok toxin, marked the first use of a nerve agent in Europe since the Second World War.
The MI5 director-general said that with an unrelenting international terrorist threat and rising state aggression, the UK and Europe need to work together more than ever.
His words are likely to have been interpreted as a warning to Brussels to agree a post-Brexit deal on security cooperation. That has been in growing doubt amid a row over whether Britain will still be allowed to participate in the EU’s multi-billion-pound Galileo global navigation satellite project. But Mr Parker reserved his toughest language for Russia, saying that Mr Putin’s government is pursuing an agenda through aggressive actions by its intelligence services.
He accused the Kremlin of flagrant breaches of international rules, warning that the Salisbury attack was a “deliberate and targeted malign activity”.
Britain’s security agencies are still trying to identify those individuals behind the attack. It is understood there are several persons of interest who are back in Moscow and may have been in the UK at the time of the poisoning.
Mr Parker, who has been head of the security service since 2013, also condemned the unprecedented level of Russian disinformation following the attack, saying it highlights the need “to shine a light through the fog of lies, half-truths and obfuscation that pours out of their propaganda machine”.
In the wake of the attack, Theresa May said “Kremlin-inspired” accounts were posting lies as “part of a wider effort to undermine the international system”.
Mr Parker did, however, praise the international response to the incident in his speech which was hosted by Germany’s BfV domestic intelligence service.
He noted that 28 European countries agreed to support the UK in expelling scores of Russian diplomats.
In 2017, Mrs May’s national security adviser, Mark Sedwill, said the threat from Moscow was worse than ever imagined. He warned that it was intensifying and diversifying.
MR Parker also told EU security leaders in Berlin that Internet giants have an “ethical responsibility” to prevent hostile states spreading a “torrent of lies” online. He said that “bare-faced lying” had become the “default mode” of the Russian state.
He added that there was a “great deal more” that could be done with internet providers to stop the exploitation of the web.
MI5’s director-general said Europe faced sustained hostile activity from states including Russia who he described as the “chief protagonist”.
In his speech, he said: “Age-old attempts at covert influence and propaganda have been supercharged in online disinformation, which can be churned out on a massive scale and at little cost. The aim is to sow doubt by flat denials of the truth, to dilute truth with falsehood, divert attention to fake stories, and do all they can to divide alliances.
“Bare-faced lying seems to be the default mode, coupled with ridicule of critics.”
The Russian state’s now well-practiced doctrine of blending media manipulation, social media disinformation and distortion with new and old forms of espionage, high levels of cyber-attacks, military force and criminal thuggery is what is meant these days by the term “hybrid threats”. Russia’s state media and representatives instigated at least 30 different so-called explanations of the Salisbury poisonings in their efforts to “mislead the world and their own people,” Mr Parker said.
One recent media survey found that two-thirds of social media output at the peak of the Salisbury attack came from Russian government-controlled accounts.
Last October, MI5’s chief said he wanted internet companies to do more to stop extremists using the “safe spaces” on the web to learn illicit techniques such as bomb-making.
This week’s keynote speech was the first time he has called on web giants to do far more. “We are committed to working with them as they look to fulfil their ethical responsibility to prevent terrorist, hostile state and criminal exploitation of internet carried services: shining a light on terrorists; taking down bomb-making instructions; warning the authorities about attempts to acquire explosives precursors.
“This matters and there is much more to do,” the director-general of MI5 said.
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