Former spy chief says Britain may already be at war with Russia

By Sean Rayment

A former head of MI5 has said it may be right to say that the UK is at war with Russia, citing cyberattacks, sabotage and covert operations on British soil.

Baroness Manningham-Buller, who led the Security Service between 2002 and 2007, told the Lord Speaker’s Corner podcast that she agreed with foreign policy expert Fiona Hill’s warning that Moscow is waging a new kind of conflict against Britain and the West.

“Fiona Hill may be right in saying we’re already at war with Russia,” Manningham-Buller said. “It’s a different sort of war, but the hostility, the cyberattacks, the physical attacks, [and] intelligence work are extensive.”

There is growing concern in Westminster about so-called “hybrid warfare” tactics, which combine cyber operations, disinformation and targeted violence.

Manningham-Buller, 77, who spent more than 30 years in MI5, recalled meeting President Putin in 2005, when Britain was still trying to bring Russia into the fold of international cooperation.

“We all hoped that at the end of the Soviet Union we would have a potential partner,” she said. “That was one of the reasons why Putin was with us for the G8 summit in 2005. I met him when he came back to London.

“But actually we were wrong, because Russia is extremely hostile to the West. I didn’t anticipate that within a year he’d be ordering the murder on London streets of Alexander Litvinenko.”

Litvinenko, a former Russian intelligence officer, died after drinking tea laced with radioactive polonium-210 at a London hotel in 2006. An inquiry later concluded he was murdered by Russian agents, probably with Putin’s approval.

Manningham-Buller said Russia’s behaviour since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has reinforced the view that the Kremlin has already moved into a state of sustained hostility with the West. She pointed to examples of “sabotage, intelligence collection, [and] attacking people” in the UK.

Reflecting on her own face-to-face encounter with Putin 20 years ago, Manningham-Buller said she had not anticipated that within a year of meeting him he would be plotting to kill a Russian dissident in London.

“We all hoped that the past history of Russia wouldn’t prevail and that, at the end of the Soviet Union, we would have a potential partner. That was one of the reasons why Putin was with us for the G8 [Gleneagles summit] in 2005,” she said.

The former MI5 chief underlined the authority of Hill, a biographer of Putin and co-author of Sir Keir Starmer’s 2025 strategic defence review, describing her as “probably the person who knows more about Putin than anybody else”.

Hill, an adviser to President Trump during his first term, said that Russia was at war with Britain in an interview with The Guardian in June. She also warned that America was no longer a reliable ally.

“We’re in pretty big trouble,” Hill said, describing the UK’s geopolitical situation as caught between “the rock” of Putin’s Russia and “the hard place” of Trump’s increasingly unpredictable US.

Manningham-Buller, in a wide-ranging conversation with Lord McFall of Alcluith, the Lord Speaker, also lifted the lid on her time at the helm of MI5.

She dismissed the “John le Carré view” of constant rivalry with MI6 as “entirely fictional”, describing close cooperation not only with Britain’s overseas intelligence agency but also with GCHQ and counterterrorism police.

She said that MI5 and MI6 “both help each other, as we do with GCHQ. It’s a close-knit community”.

She added: “The other very important partner for MI5 is the police … the counter-terrorist part of the Metropolitan Police is in the same building, integrated with the counter-terrorist part of MI5, with representatives of the Five Eyes [intelligence-sharing alliance comprising the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada].”

Recalling the aftermath of the 7 July bombings in London in 2005, which killed 52 people, she said she deliberately sent a third of MI5’s staff home to preserve their “battle rhythm” and prevent exhaustion during what she expected to be a long investigation.

She also voiced concerns about children’s access to violent and disturbing material on smartphones, warning of the dangers to “impressionable minds which are not yet fully developed”.

On the loss of ‘soft power’, she said: “One of the things I remember very strongly was the HIV work funded by the Americans in Africa. You’d go to a pretty primitive hospital with people on pallets on the ground, but the George W. Bush-funded AIDS wing was on a different scale.

“For Americans to stop all of that, and for us cutting back on aid, means that we leave space for your friendly Chinese diplomat. I think … if we withdraw from the world, they can move in because they have a strong economic base. So I think soft power — whether it’s the BBC World Service, whether it’s aid, whether it’s de-mining — all contribute importantly to our influence in the world, as well as being of humanitarian importance.”

When asked about her ability to read upside down, she added: “It’s a professional talent! Well, I try to avoid people thinking that I’m reading their letters upside down. But when I joined MI5 and discovered that we read people’s correspondence, I was rather shocked.

“I was brought up: you don’t read other people’s letters. You don’t listen to other people’s telephone calls. If somebody was on the landline when you picked it up, you put it down. I had to counter that upbringing in MI5, because it was necessary to do that to counter the people who threatened us — but to do it on a proper legal basis, with proper authority and scrutiny.”

Commander Dominic Murphy, the Metropolitan Police’s head of counterterrorism, has warned parents that “foreign states need to find a different way of operating and unfortunately targeting young people online is one of those ways”.

He told the BBC programme Politics London: “The online environment is the one that we’re most concerned about. In several of our cases we’ve seen young people, sometimes teenagers, being contacted online or proactively reaching out online to organisations.”