LONDON • Russia is pushing its foreign policy in increasingly aggressive ways including cyber attacks and espionage, posing a growing threat to Britain and the rest of Europe, the head of British internal intelligence agency MI5 has said.
The Kremlin has dismissed the allegations as untrue and challenged its critics to produce evidence.
MI5 director-general Andrew Parker told the Guardian newspaper in an interview published yesterday that Russia had been a covert threat for decades, but what differed now from the Cold War era was that there were more and more methods available for it to pursue its anti-Western agenda.
"Russia increasingly seems to define itself by opposition to the West and seems to act accordingly," he said.
"It is using its whole range of state organs and powers to push its foreign policy abroad in increasingly aggressive ways, involving propaganda, espionage, subversion and cyber attacks. Russia is at work across Europe and in the UK today."
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Mr Parker's words "do not correspond to reality".
"Until someone produces proof, we will consider those statements unfounded and groundless," he said.
Mr Parker's interview coincided with a British government announcement of plans to invest an extra £1.9 billion (S$3.2 billion) in cyber security defences.
Already strained by the case of Mr Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent murdered in London in 2006, relations between Britain and Russia have further deteriorated over Moscow's actions in Ukraine and Syria.
Mr Parker said the targets of Russia's covert activities in Britain included military secrets, industrial projects, economic information and government and foreign policy.
On Islamic extremism, Mr Parker said British security services had foiled 12 attack plots in the past three years, but that the threat would endure for at least a generation.
"That sort of tempo of terrorist plots and attempts is concerning and it's enduring.
"Attacks in this country are higher than I have experienced in the rest of my career, and I've been working at MI5 for 33 years," he said.
"The reality is that because of the investment in services like mine, the UK has got good defences. My expectation is that we will find and stop most attempts at terrorism in this country."
Mr Parker broke down the threat into three components: home-grown extremists numbering about 3,000, Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in Syria and Iraq trying to incite plots against Britain, plus online propaganda by ISIS and others.
The United Kingdom's threat level is officially set at "severe", meaning an attack is considered highly likely.
REUTERS
