Russia Report: Intelligence Expert Explains How U.K. Ignored Growing Threat

MI5 gave the ISC just six lines of text on the Brexit referendum, instead referring MPs to open source material. The report reveals confusion in Whitehall over responsibility, with the U.K.’s agencies prioritising “secret intelligence” for departments, suggesting the Electoral Commission and Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport were responsible for electoral security – a claim they rejected.

Those wanting definitive proof that Russia meddled in the Brexit campaign will be disappointed by the startling lack of information from the security agencies. What’s clear is that the agencies never asked the right questions. Former ISC chair Dominic Grieve told the BBC: “When the committee came to ask the question – can you tell us there wasn’t interference – we really weren’t able to get an answer.”

Eye Off the Ball
According to the report, successive U.K. governments welcomed Russian oligarchs and their money “with open arms” and Russia’s influence on the British establishment is extensive. What is clear is that cold war-style subversion is back, despite MI5’s website still maintaining the threat has “diminished” since the collapse of the Berlin wall.

And yet MPs said the U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA) lacks financial investigators, technical experts and legal expertise to deal with the threat.

The U.K.’s security agencies – and the government itself – also took their eyes off Russia for too long, despite an assertive Kremlin and the killing of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.

One Threat amid Many
Still, this criticism needs to be put into the wider security context. During the cold war, the Soviet Union was the main concern and target for the U.K.’s security agencies. Today, the U.K. intelligence community, especially MI5, is heavily focused on terrorism.

The U.K. agencies are faced with a growing list of threats, non-state and state-level, pulling priorities in different directions. In 2008-9, just 3 percent of MI5’s resources, the report shows, focused on hostile states, a figure rising to just over 14 percent in 2013-14.

GCHQ devoted around 10 percent of its resources to Russia as late as 2016, when a “significant further increase” began. To place this in context, during the cold war 70 percent of GCHQ’s went on the Soviet Bloc. Resources and staff numbers are increasing, especially after the attempted assassination in Salisbury of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in 2018, but the U.K.’s agencies are still playing catch-up. And they have a long way to go.

Resources may well increase further following a forthcoming integrated defense, security and foreign policy review. Russia is one of the hardest intelligence challenges that there is, though intelligence resources will also be stretched by China, North Korea and Iran.

The ISC itself was in the process of investigating security issues relating to China, receiving written evidence in April 2019, and questioning intelligence officials in July, although the inquiry was shelved due to the 2019 election.

A key message from the report is that the U.K.’s agencies will have to push for even more resources if they’re to balance managing the existing terrorist threat while refocusing on traditional state-based ones. The problem now – as the former CIA director James Woolsey once remarked – is that we live in a “jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes”.

Russia is just one of several hostile foreign states inimical to U.K. national interests. Lessons need to be learnt quickly to ensure the mistakes here aren’t repeated.

Dan Lomas is Program Leader, MA Intelligence and Security Studies, University of Salford. This article is published courtesy of The Conversation.