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Officials were conducting about 160 investigations into security threats linked to enemy states, the vast majority of which concerned suspected proxies in the UK, said [Commander Dominic Murphy, head of the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism squad and in charge nationally]. In some cases Britons had been unknowingly recruited to feed information to foreign governments.
“We’ve seen a significant increase,” said Murphy. “Every single week we’re working on proxy-based investigations. It does form the majority of what we’re doing.
“The breadth of activity is so significant. It goes from very low-level information acquisitions, and that can be cyberattacks, or it can be trying to turn somebody inside an organisation … right through to an assassination plot in the United Kingdom.
“There are disruptions happening on an extraordinarily regular basis. Almost every month we’re disrupting something — and often much more regularly than that even.”
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In recent years several Britons have been charged with espionage. They include Dylan Earl, 21, from Leicestershire, who was recruited by the Wagner Group, a mercenary organisation with ties to the Kremlin, and instructed to carry out arson on a London warehouse storing aid for Ukraine.
This act has empowered security officials but the risk posed by foreign states and their proxies is only going to increase in the years ahead, Murphy predicts, as a result of political instability in the Middle East, the war in Ukraine and the mass expulsion of foreign intelligence officers from Britain following the Salisbury nerve agent poisoning — a failed assassination attempt on Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military officer and double agent for British intelligence and his daughter, Yulia.
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His intervention also comes amid heightened anxieties in Westminster over the extent and reach of Chinese spy operations in Britain. In November, MI5 warned that various parliamentarians had been targeted on LinkedIn by Chinese agents posing as headhunters.
Before that, two British men were charged with passing sensitive political information to a Chinese intelligence agent. The case was later dropped by prosecutors. They denied the charges.
Critics have meanwhile warned that Beijing’s efforts to construct a new super-embassy in London will, if approved, embolden Chinese espionage and interference in the UK.
Murphy said China was one of “the big three” for conducting proxy operations in the UK, alongside Russia and Iran.
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He also expressed concern that the algorithms used by social media were fuelling the ease with which Britons and foreign intelligence agents were connecting with one another.
“If someone is trying to understand how they can earn some money and do stuff on behalf of other countries, I’d hate for there to be a situation where the internet service providers or social media companies were pushing content towards those people,” he said.
Not all of those recruited as proxies are aware of their involvement in espionage. Murphy said they had uncovered cases in which private detectives had entered into business with companies linked to foreign states and were tasked with collecting information.
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