The head of MI5 has issued a dramatic nationwide “call to arms”, warning that Britain faces greater and more complex terror threats than it did in 2001.
Writing exclusively for The Independent on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, Sir Ken McCallum says there are multiple state threats on top of the continued dangers from Islamic extremism.
In a highly unusual and significant intervention, he says: “The MI5 I lead in 2026 contends with a threat landscape markedly different to 2001’s.
“Sadly, mass-casualty terrorist ambition endures… but the terrorist threat now sits alongside strategic national security threats posed by capable States.”
Citing former CIA director James Woolsey, who spoke of the West slaying “a large dragon” after the Cold War, Sir Ken adds: “We now face the worst of both worlds: dragons are back, but snakes persist.”
Those “dragons” are, principally, Russia and China. The “snakes” are ongoing radical Islamic extremists.
He writes: “This is my call to arms after 25 years: government, business, academia, and the public must treat national security not as the specialist concern of a handful of agencies, but as a shared national endeavour.”
The threat level in the UK is currently at severe, the second-highest category, meaning that an attack is highly likely. Commemorations for the 2,977 people who died in 9/11 will be marked around the world, remembering the day the world changed.
As head of the UK’s domestic intelligence service, Sir Ken argues that the campaigns to destroy al-Qaeda after the Twin Towers and Pentagon atrocities were necessary because the organisation continued to plot mass casualty attacks across the world.
“Al-Qaeda had to be not just taken on, but taken down. A gargantuan multinational effort, powerfully spearheaded by the US, devised new capabilities to dismantle the core of the organisation in Pakistan’s federally administered tribal areas, into which it had been pushed by the Afghan campaign.
“It worked. Al-Qaeda remains a threat today, but its capabilities are a fraction of 2001’s. That rolling back was not inevitable; it was forced.”
In his rare engagement with the public, Sir Ken uses The Independent to warn that the UK, and the wider West, needs to shun complacency following this success.
“We must resist the temptation to admire the defences we built yesterday and instead build the ones we will need tomorrow.”
The MI5 chief adds his voice to other experts, including former head of MI6, the late Sir Alex Younger, and Fiona Hill, a former adviser to the White House, to call for greater preparation and resilience to meet external threats. They overtly named Russia and China while Sir Ken’s warnings are more general.
Russia’s hybrid war against the West and China’s competition over minerals and trade routes have led to increasing calls for a “whole nation” response rather than a reliance on the security services and armed forces for protection and survival.
He writes: “Contending with rising State-backed aggression – whether sabotage subcontracted to criminals, or covert interference in our democracy, or destructive cyber attacks on power stations – demands new laws as well as new tradecraft.”
Russia has used the full spectrum of attacks that he refers to against the UK in the last 15 years as well as state-sponsored murder.
“We cannot wait for the next shock to discover who owns the vulnerability, who has the authority to act, or who was supposed to pick up the phone.”
For Sir Ken, there is no “if” in the planning, or language, or that there will be another “next shock”. It is the when, where, and how to cope that must be planned for. His “call to arms” is for help from across the country.
“In 2026, unlike 2001, many of the assets, systems and services under threat sit in private sector hands. This means many of the most critical decisions will be taken not in COBR but in boardrooms.
“We need a new team of teams, preserving an open economy but cooperating across government, industry and academia, to close vulnerabilities and enable swift coherent action when crises hit.”
Paying tribute to all those who died in New York 25 years ago, he concludes: “We owe the victims of 9/11 – and those who will otherwise become the victims of tomorrow’s attack – something more than remembrance.
“We owe them preparation, resilience and the courage to adapt before the next shock arrives.”
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