‘Power, money and politics is going east’: MI6 chief warns of twin threats of Russia and China

Security chief stresses need to ‘innovate faster’ than any other power willing to harm UK’s interests

The head of MI6 has warned that while Russia poses a clear and present threat to Britain and the west, China’s dominance of emerging technologies presents a greater risks to security in the future.

Issues such as 5G technology being reliant on Chinese know-how needed to be examined for future wellbeing of the country, he said.

“Basically, power, money and politics is going east, that’s the political reality we need to adjust to,” said Alex Younger. “This is something we really need to talk about, the future of knowledge is in play.”

In a rare public speech as head of the Secret Intelligence Service, Mr Younger stated that he had taken particular interest in the recent declaration by president Xi Jinping’s “made in China” ambition to dominate smart communications, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and genetics.

“We have some decisions to take here”, said Mr Younger. “We need to look at it and we need to have a conversation. It is not going to be straightforward.”

Russia has been accused of interfering in western politics, including the US presidential race which put Donald Trump in the White House, the elections in France and Germany and referendums on Brexit and Catalan independence.

But while there have been accusations of Beijing’s industrial espionage in the west, direct action has so far come from neighbouring countries. Australia and New Zealand have both blocked the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei from providing 5G on grounds of national security.

In only his second public address in four years as “C”, in charge of MI6, Mr Younger warned of the threat of technological espionage and “malign activity” by foreign powers.

He said: “Our approach to attaching a cost to malign activity also applies to cyber attacks, as in March this year when the UK attributed responsibility for the NotPetya attack against Ukraine, which also affected the United Kingdom, to the Russian government.

“Much of the evolving state threat is about our opponents’ increasingly innovative exploitation of modern technology. So simply put, we’ve got to innovate faster than they can. Indeed, future generations would not forgive us if it were otherwise.”

We’ve got to innovate faster than they can. Indeed, future generations would not forgive us if it were otherwise

Alex Younger, MI6 chief 

“The need is to ensure that technology is on our side, not that of our opponents,” Mr Younger continued, describing how it had helped expose the Russian spies who allegedly poisoned former MI6 agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the Noivichok attack in Salisbury.

“The digital era has profoundly changed our operating environment. Bulk data combined with modern analytics make the modern world transparent, a fact which contributed to GRU embarrassment after the Salisbury attack. But it is also a serious challenge if used against us,” he said, speaking at St Andrews University, where he studied economics and computer science before joining the British army and then MI6.

“Cyber is now our fastest-growing directorate. We are shifting our focus to the nexus between humans and technology.

“And for the first time, through the National Security Strategic Investment Fund, we are pursuing a completely different type of partnership with the tech-innovation community, giving the private and academic community the role we need and they deserve.”

“Ironically, the most profound consequence of the technological challenge is a human one. We are determined to attract people with even higher levels of technical skill to join our ranks. But my organisation will need to adapt even faster if it is to thrive in the future. And that will require people with new perspectives, capable of harnessing their creativity in ways that we can’t yet even imagine.”

Mr Younger also spoke about controversies surrounding two of Britain’s closes allies in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and UAE, over the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the imprisonment of the British academic Matthew Hedges.

The MI6 chief called the killing of Khashoggi, in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in early October as “horrible” and “absolutely barbaric” and wanted to stress that there should be a “full and transparent investigation into what happened”.

On the jailing of Mr Hedges, Mr Younger said he was “perplexed” by claims of the UAE authorities that he was a British spy. “I genuinely can’t understand how our Emirati partners came to the conclusions they came to,” he said.