It’s frustrating that British law currently doesn’t criminalise being a covert foreign agent, the UK’s spymaster said on Friday.
Ken McCallum, director-general of the Security Service, also known as MI5, said the agency is effectively “operating with one hand behind our back on state threats.”
“We don’t have—in my view—sufficient legal powers to deal with some of what we are now seeing,” he said.
“With state threats, we seek to do everything we can to make the UK resilient. But in many cases, we don’t have the ability to bring prosecutions in the criminal courts. For example, it is not presently a criminal offence to be a covert agent of a foreign power.”
“It is frustrating,” McCallum said. “At the moment, we are in effect operating with one hand behind our back on state threats. We think we could do a better job for our nation if some of those gaps were closed.”
Last month, MI5 took the unusual step of sending an alert to Parliament, warning that an individual named Christine Ching Kui Lee has been “knowingly engaged in political interference activities on behalf of the United Front Work Department [UFWD] of the Chinese Communist Party [CCP].”
The alert states that Lee had been facilitating financial donations to UK political parties and politicians and that anyone contacted by her should be “mindful of her affiliation with the Chinese state and remit to advance the CCP’s agenda in UK politics.”
While not wanting to frame the West’s relationship with Russia and the Chinese communist regime as a “Cold War II,” McCallum said it’s important that the UK is “clear-eyed” that it’s “in a struggle.”
“We need to stand up for our values, for the benefits of the democratic way of life that we and our allies hold dear,” he said.
McCallum said he doesn’t “see much sign” of change in Russia’s and China’s political systems, and said the two regimes pose very different threats to the UK.
While Russia brings “bursts of bad weather,” the Chinese regime is “changing the climate,” he said—an analogy previously used by Director K, MI5’s head of hostile states counterintelligence.
Alexander Litvinenko, a defected ex-KGB officer, was fatally poisoned in London in 2006 with a rare radioactive substance, while former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia survived a Novichok poison attack in the English city of Salisbury in 2018. Both attacks were carried out by Russians.
“We don’t see the Chinese Communist Party or the Chinese intelligence services crossing a ‘line of outrage,’ if you will. Instead, they have been and remain on an organised, conscious campaign to mould the rest of the world in ways that the Chinese Communist Party believes is in its interests.”
Asked if Russian agents are also working in Parliament as Lee did, McCallum said he “would be surprised if they weren’t making these attempts.”
“We have seen covert Russian activity on British soil” since the Salisbury attack, he said. “And as you might imagine, MI5 seeks to disrupt them, often at the earliest opportunity. There has not been a last-minute ’swoop.'”
