Putin blasted by MI5 for ‘fog of lies’ over Salisbury

BRITAIN’S INTELLIGENCE SERVICE

Head of MI5: Andrew Parker

Intro: Andrew Parker speaks out for the first time since the Salisbury nerve agent attack

THE head of MI5, Britain’s intelligence service, has launched an excoriating attack on Russia, accusing Vladimir Putin’s regime of flagrant breaches of international law.

Andrew Parker used his first public speech outside of the UK by taking aim at the Russian president and his “aggressive and pernicious” agenda.

He told European security chiefs the Salisbury poisonings were a deliberate and malign act that could turn Russia into a “more isolated pariah”. He also launched a strident attack on the “fog of lies, half-truths and obfuscation” that pours out of Mr Putin’s propaganda machine.

Mr Parker’s speech in Berlin was the first time he has spoken publicly since the attempted assassination in Salisbury of former Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, in March.

The attack, with the Novichok toxin, marked the first use of a nerve agent in Europe since the Second World War.

The MI5 director-general said that with an unrelenting international terrorist threat and rising state aggression, the UK and Europe need to work together more than ever.

His words are likely to have been interpreted as a warning to Brussels to agree a post-Brexit deal on security cooperation. That has been in growing doubt amid a row over whether Britain will still be allowed to participate in the EU’s multi-billion-pound Galileo global navigation satellite project. But Mr Parker reserved his toughest language for Russia, saying that Mr Putin’s government is pursuing an agenda through aggressive actions by its intelligence services.

He accused the Kremlin of flagrant breaches of international rules, warning that the Salisbury attack was a “deliberate and targeted malign activity”.

Britain’s security agencies are still trying to identify those individuals behind the attack. It is understood there are several persons of interest who are back in Moscow and may have been in the UK at the time of the poisoning.

Mr Parker, who has been head of the security service since 2013, also condemned the unprecedented level of Russian disinformation following the attack, saying it highlights the need “to shine a light through the fog of lies, half-truths and obfuscation that pours out of their propaganda machine”.

In the wake of the attack, Theresa May said “Kremlin-inspired” accounts were posting lies as “part of a wider effort to undermine the international system”.

Mr Parker did, however, praise the international response to the incident in his speech which was hosted by Germany’s BfV domestic intelligence service.

He noted that 28 European countries agreed to support the UK in expelling scores of Russian diplomats.

In 2017, Mrs May’s national security adviser, Mark Sedwill, said the threat from Moscow was worse than ever imagined. He warned that it was intensifying and diversifying.

 

MR Parker also told EU security leaders in Berlin that Internet giants have an “ethical responsibility” to prevent hostile states spreading a “torrent of lies” online. He said that “bare-faced lying” had become the “default mode” of the Russian state.

He added that there was a “great deal more” that could be done with internet providers to stop the exploitation of the web.

MI5’s director-general said Europe faced sustained hostile activity from states including Russia who he described as the “chief protagonist”.

In his speech, he said: “Age-old attempts at covert influence and propaganda have been supercharged in online disinformation, which can be churned out on a massive scale and at little cost. The aim is to sow doubt by flat denials of the truth, to dilute truth with falsehood, divert attention to fake stories, and do all they can to divide alliances.

“Bare-faced lying seems to be the default mode, coupled with ridicule of critics.”

The Russian state’s now well-practiced doctrine of blending media manipulation, social media disinformation and distortion with new and old forms of espionage, high levels of cyber-attacks, military force and criminal thuggery is what is meant these days by the term “hybrid threats”. Russia’s state media and representatives instigated at least 30 different so-called explanations of the Salisbury poisonings in their efforts to “mislead the world and their own people,” Mr Parker said.

One recent media survey found that two-thirds of social media output at the peak of the Salisbury attack came from Russian government-controlled accounts.

Last October, MI5’s chief said he wanted internet companies to do more to stop extremists using the “safe spaces” on the web to learn illicit techniques such as bomb-making.

This week’s keynote speech was the first time he has called on web giants to do far more. “We are committed to working with them as they look to fulfil their ethical responsibility to prevent terrorist, hostile state and criminal exploitation of internet carried services: shining a light on terrorists; taking down bomb-making instructions; warning the authorities about attempts to acquire explosives precursors.

“This matters and there is much more to do,” the director-general of MI5 said.

The appearance of the heads of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Services before Parliament…

A WELCOME STEP

Yesterday, the heads of the three intelligence services in Britain – MI5, MI6 and GCHQ – gave evidence in public for the first time before Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC).

Underlying the examination was one of the oldest questions about the nature of state-sponsored surveillance: who monitors and regulates the watchers? An analysis of what was said should glean that we did not learn a great deal that we did not already know. The transparency element, for example, went only so far. They appeared suitably nondescript, too, with faces you would quickly forget in a crowd, a prerequisite for any spymaster.

MI6 chief Sir John Sawers, GCHQ chief Sir Iain Lobban and Andrew Parker, who handles intelligence agents in the UK, deserve some credit for showing up, given their keen professional aversion to public exposure in a political theatre. This should be seen as a welcome step in the right direction if the work of the agencies is to be more open and less susceptible to caricature by conspiracy theorists.

Three developments compelled yesterday’s momentous public appearance. The first is the leaks by the former US national security contractor Edward Snowden which revealed extensive spying by GCHQ and the US National Security Agency. The scope and extent of this surveillance, its modus operandi and authorisation frameworks are matters of high public interest and concern given our historic traditions of personal privacy and public angst over the monitoring activities of government into citizens’ lives.

The second is the revolution wrought by communications technology with subsequent and resultant concerns over data protection. And the third is the sizeable increase to the budget of the security services to combat ‘terrorist’ threats. Balancing the duty to protect the public from dangerous and highly-organised would-be killers with how that objective is achieved by SIS (Security & Intelligence Services) is bound to create conflicts.

For spymasters, whose stock in trade is secrecy, it is perhaps too much for others to expect answers to be given in public about what they do. Such shortcomings soon became apparent during exchanges about the impact of the leaks perpetrated by Mr Snowden. Sir Iain Lobban denounced the way the disclosure of thousands of covert documents had hampered his agency’s efforts to thwart the nation’s enemies. Sir Iain claimed it had put the security effort back many years. In a similar vein, Sir John Sawers insisted our adversaries were ‘rubbing their hands with glee’ as a result. When asked, though, for specific details they retreated behind a cloak of secrecy, saying that to divulge such information would compound the damage.

Because of the synthetic nature of the exercise, the imperfections exposed matters that could not be revealed and which the public would not expect to be told. It is from this point, then, where we have to rely on systems of parliamentary oversight and surveillance protocols to work effectively.

It is indicative that the parliamentary committee for security and intelligence hold the chiefs accountable in private for the allegations they have made and to establish whether their concerns are substantively genuine. The ISC should then report its findings to the public.

The issue of mass surveillance was also raised at a time when it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep an appropriate balance between intrusion and security because communications technology is developing so rapidly. On being asked how legislation setting out their powers can possibly be relevant today when it was last updated 13 years ago, Mr Parker of MI5 said the law was a matter for parliament, not the intelligence chiefs. They also punctured the notion that simply because something is secret does not mean it is also sinister.