The Scots boss of MI5 has revealed that the security services stopped six “late stage” terror plots in the last two years during the coronavirus pandemic.
MI5’s director general Ken McCallum said in the last four years the organisation has disrupted 31 attack plots in Britain as he warned that threats from terrorism were “part of our lives at this time in history” and would remain so for some time.
Speaking on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on New York, the Glasgow-born head of the security services said the covid crisis had not diminished the threat.
He said: “Even during the pandemic period, which we have all been enduring for the past two years, we have had to disrupt six late-stage attack plots.
“That number includes mainly Islamist attack plots but also a growing number of attack plots from right wing terrorists,” he told the BBC’s Today programme.
McCallum said: “We have stopped dozens of attacks…(but) this is part of our lives at this time in history and I suspect some form of this terrorism will remain with us for quite some time to come.”
He added: “I wish we didn’t have to teach children about terrorism, I wish I didn’t have to teach my children about terrorism, and I don’t think we should be alarming children.”
“The purpose of organisations like mine is to ensure the public can live their lives freely and with confidence, but the reality, I’m afraid, is that terrorism is one strand within our complex society.
McCallum said one of the hardest things about his role as director general of MI5 was the “prioritisation” of tackling specific threats.
He added: “While we have, I can confidently say, saved thousands of lives across the last 20 years, we cannot always succeed.”
“I think there is plenty of scope for debate about how we go after terrorism, but we should all be clear that we must go after it.
“Sometimes there is a false illusion 20 years on that 9/11 was inevitably the high watermark of al Qaida and they would have run out of ideas and run out of steam. That was not the reality we faced.
“(Further) threats have been reduced, not eliminated, but reduced by patient work by my organisation, by police, through the courts, in order to bring this threat down to size as much as we possibly can.”
McCallum added that a consequence of the success of reducing large-scale terror events had been the growth of “inspired terrorism".
He said the so-called Islamic State had “managed to do something that al Qaida did not” in inspiring lots of people to attempt smaller scale acts of terrorism through online grooming.
“The number of plots that we disrupt nowadays are actually higher than the number of plots that were coming at us after 9/11, but on average they are smaller plots of lower sophistication," McCallum added.
