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Eliza Manningham-Buller reveals the scale of cyberattacks and other hostile activities orchestrated by Moscow
Britain may already be at war with Russia due to the intensity of deep cyber attacks, sabotage and other hostile activities orchestrated by Moscow against the United Kingdom.
The warning comes from a former head of MI5.
Eliza Manningham-Buller, who headed the spy agency two decades ago, said she agreed with comments made by Russia expert Fiona Hill, who argued in an interview with the Guardian earlier this year that Moscow was at war with the West.
Manningham-Buller argued that the situation had changed "since the invasion of Ukraine and the various things I read about the Russians doing sabotage, intelligence gathering, attacks on people and so on."
Speaking on a podcast in which she was interviewed by the Speaker of Parliament, John McFall, she then referred to Hill, who advised Donald Trump during his first term as US president and co-authored the UK's strategic defence review.
"I think she may be right when she says we are already at war with Russia. It's a different kind of war, but the hostility, the cyberattacks, the physical attacks, the intelligence work is extensive," she said.
Six Bulgarians living in the United Kingdom were jailed this year for their role in a spy ring that carried out hostile surveillance across Europe, and five men were convicted for their involvement in a Moscow-ordered arson attack on a warehouse containing supplies destined for Ukraine.
Pat McFadden, a former Cabinet Office minister, said last year that Russia had stepped up cyberattacks against the UK. Hackers have targeted a number of British businesses. While the source of the attacks may take time to be discovered, many are suspected of originating in Russia.
Some of the UK's NATO allies in Eastern Europe have been affected by recent drone incidents, particularly Poland where 19 unarmed Russian drones crossed into its airspace this month.
During the early part of Manningham-Buller's tenure as head of MI5 between 2002 and 2007, there were hopes that Russia under Vladimir Putin would not return to its Soviet ways, but instead become a viable partner for the West.
Manningham-Buller met Putin in 2005, when he came to London after a G8 summit in Scotland, a time when Lord McFall suggested the Russian president was trying to put on a “nice face” to impress major Western nations.
"I wouldn't exactly describe him as such," Manningham-Buller replied, adding, "I didn't foresee that within a year he would be ordering the murder on the streets of London of [Alexander] Litvinenko, but I thought he was a rather unpleasant man."
Litvinenko, a former Russian FSB spy living in London, fell ill and slowly died in 2006 after being poisoned with radioactive polonium. A public inquiry held a decade later concluded that two Russian agents killed him and that they were probably acting on Putin's orders.
Manningham-Buller criticized the decisions of the US and UK governments to significantly cut aid spending, arguing that this would create a diplomatic opportunity for China to exploit poorer countries.
She said she was amazed by the quality of US-funded HIV treatment work in Africa, which she saw while she was director and then chair of the Wellcome Trust, the medical research charity, after leaving MI5.
“You would go to a fairly primitive hospital with people lying on pallets on the floor, but the AIDS arm funded by George W. Bush was on another level. For the Americans to stop all this and for us to cut aid means we are giving space to your friendly Chinese diplomat,” she said. The former head of MI5 then said “if we withdraw from the world, they can come in because they have a strong economic base, so I think soft power, whether it is aid or demining, all contribute significantly to our influence in the world, as well as having humanitarian importance.” /Adapted from The Guardian/
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