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British Intelligence Chief Blathers about the ’Increasingly Aggressive’ Russian Threat

Nov. 1, 2016 (EIRNS)—Great Britain’s Director General of British Intelligence’s MI5, Andrew Parker, granted an interview to the Guardian in which he blabs that Russia poses an aggressive threat to Great Britain.

"It [Russia] is using its whole range of state organs and powers to push its foreign policy abroad in increasingly aggressive ways— involving propaganda, espionage, subversion and cyber-attacks,"

the daily quoted Parker as saying. "Russia is at work across Europe and in the U.K. today," he said.

"It is MI5’s job to get in the way of that. Russia increasingly seems to define itself by opposition to the West and seems to act accordingly. You can see that on the ground with Russia’s activities in Ukraine and Syria. But there is high-volume activity out of sight with the cyber-threat. Russia has been a covert threat for decades."

This is the first time an incumbent MI5 director general has given a newspaper interview in the agency’s 107-year old history.

The more immediate threat to Great Britain is of its own making: radical jihadist terrorists. In the interview, Parker referred to 12 jihadi terror plots that had been foiled by the security services in the past three years and said there are about 3,000 "violent Islamic extremists in the U.K., mostly British."

Spokesman for the Russian Presidency Dmitry Peskov dismissed Parker’s allegations as fiction. "Those words do not correspond to reality," said Peskov during a press briefing. "Until someone produces proof, we will consider those statements unfounded and groundless."

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova was just as derisive: "I would like to ask the head of MI5 if he also sees the hand of the Kremlin in the appointment of Boris Johnson as head of the Foreign Office."

The Russian Embassy to the Court of St. James in a missive on their Twitter account said it was "saddened to see a professional trapped to his own propaganda-created world." Alongside the message was a poster from the 1966 comedy movie "The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming."

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