BIOTERROR SPY ALERT
MI5 chief warns of foreign virus attack on UK
BRITAIN’S enemies could carry out a coronavirus-inspired bioterror attack, the new head of MI5 warned yesterday.
Ken McCallum said the UK’s adversaries will have taken note how the global pandemic has ‘turned the world upside down’ – and could try to make weapons from deadly viruses in future.
In his first speech since taking over as MI5’s director-general, he said Britain is facing a ‘nasty mix’ of threats which were ‘becoming ‘more diverse and in some ways difficult to spot’, and that state-backed hostile activity was on the rise.
The spy chief said Russia is ‘providing bursts of bad weather’ but China is more fundamentally ‘changing the climate’ – and claimed MI5 would step up its response to the Communist state.
Mr McCallum, 45, a Glaswegian who has spent 24 years at MI5, said the possibility of a bioterror attack had been a threat for a generation – but that the devastating effects of coronavirus could spark ideas in Britain’s enemies.
He said: ‘I wouldn’t want to be transmitthe ting a message today this threat is now immediately upon us, neither would I want to be transmitting a message of complacency that that couldn’t hap
‘Could be stolen from labs’
pen.’ He said MI5 had carried out ‘anticipatory research’ and built defences against possible ‘terrorist interest in biological agents’ and other materials.
A security source added: ‘Terrorists would love to replicate the mayhem caused by Covid’, but said MI5 has no intelligence that other countries are developing bio-weapons at this time.
Mr McCallum’s comments came amid warnings about the security of labs that develop and research deadly pathogens.
Hamish de Bretton- Gordon, former commander of the UK’s chemical and biological defence regiment, said containment laboratories handling deadly pathogens should be policed.
He added: ‘ Deadly viruses could be stolen, or escape, from a research laboratory. The ability to manipulate viruses is becoming more available to despots and terrorists and people who want to create terror.’
In his speech outlining a range of threats facing Britain, Mr McCallum revealed how MI5 plans to step up its response to Chinese spying in Britain and told of the worrying rise in Right-wing terrorism – with eight plots thwarted by the spy agency since 2017.
He warned that more youngsters were being attracted to t cause. Mr McCallum, who became MI5 chief in April, said his spies had been helping to combat coronavirus by refocusing research on toxic chemicals to see how the virus could be dispersed in droplet form.
Medically-qualified MI5 officers also stepped away from their duties to support the NHS.
He added his staff were helping to ‘protect the integrity’ of the UK’s vaccine research, warning of Russian disinformation to try to undermine the credibility of Western jabs. The spy chief said MI5 is defending against threats to Britain’s economy, research and infrastructure.
Mr McCallum, who studied mathematics before joining MI5, did not go into detail about what the Security Service could do more of when it came to tackling the threat from China.
Prior to becoming the chief of the spy agency, he was in charge of all counter-terror investigations in the run-up to and during the 2012 London Olympics.