Britain’s MI6 spymaster warns Russia not to mess with the West
The head of UK’s secret service Alex Younger talks of Russian chemical weapons, Islamic State plots and the need for fourth-generation espionage
St Andrews — The chief of Britain’s foreign intelligence service warned the Kremlin on Monday not to underestimate the West after a brazen nerve agent attack on a retired double agent in England stoked fears about Russian covert activity abroad. In his second major speech since being named in 2014 to head the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, Alex Younger said Russia had a stance of “perpetual confrontation” with the West. After the attack on Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military intelligence officer who betrayed dozens of agents to MI6, Britain’s allies in Europe and the US took its side and ordered the biggest expulsion of Russian diplomats since the height of the Cold War. Britain identified the nerve agent deployed in the English town of Salisbury as Novichok, a highly potent group of nerve agents developed by the Soviet military in the 1970s and 1980s. “The Russian state used a military-grade chemical weapon on UK soil,” Younger told students at the University of St Andr...
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