Police probe greater than 100 Britons amid fears they might be spying for Russia, Iran and China

More than 100 Britons are under investigation amid growing fears they may be spying for hostile foreign states including Russia, Iran and China, a senior counter-terrorism chief has revealed.

Security services are currently handling around 160 investigations linked to state threats, with the vast majority focused on suspected proxies operating inside the UK. 

In some cases, individuals are believed to have been recruited without realising they were feeding information to foreign governments.

Commander Dominic Murphy, head of Counter Terrorism Policing London and the national lead for counter-state threats, told the Times that there has been a sharp rise in foreign powers recruiting people from across society including criminals, professionals and even those working in legal and financial sectors.

He said the activity ranged from cyber operations and intelligence gathering to far more serious plots. 

‘The breadth of activity is so significant,’ he said, adding that it could extend ‘right through to an assassination plot in the United Kingdom’.

Security officials are now disrupting hostile-state activity with increasing frequency. ‘There are disruptions happening on an extraordinarily regular basis,’ Murphy said. ‘Almost every month we’re disrupting something and often much more regularly than that even.’

The warning comes as concerns grow in Westminster over espionage operations linked to China, Russia and Iran – described by Murphy as ‘the big three’ conducting proxy operations in Britain.

In November, MI5 warned that UK parliamentarians had been targeted on LinkedIn by Chinese agents posing as headhunters. 

More recently, two British men were charged with passing political information to a Chinese intelligence officer, though the case was later dropped and the men denied any wrongdoing.

Russia-linked activity has also led to criminal convictions. Dylan Earl, 21, from Leicestershire, was convicted under the National Security Act 2023 after being recruited by the Wagner Group and instructed to carry out arson on a London warehouse storing aid for Ukraine.

Earl and his five stooges were lured in by an automated Russian chatbot trawling for recruits on the encrypted Telegram app before their communication was taken over by Russian intelligence operatives, according to security sources.

Counter-terrorism police said the men were part of a Europe-wide campaign of sabotage by ‘grey-zone proxy actors’ on behalf of the Russian Federation.

Meanwhile, former British soldier Daniel Khalife was sentenced to 14 years in prison earlier this year after being found guilty of spying for Iran and passing sensitive information, including the names of elite special forces personnel, to Tehran.

The 23-year-old, who claimed to be on a one-man ‘double agent’ mission but was labelled an ‘attention seeker’ by a judge this afternoon, was sentenced at Woolwich Crown Court in London and ordered to pay £10,000 towards prosecution costs.

Judge Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb said Khalife – who was ignored when he contacted MI6 and MI5 in his attempts to become a double agent – had been motivated by ‘a selfish desire to show off’ and described him as ‘a dangerous fool’.

Khalife was in the British Army when he ‘exposed military personnel to serious harm’ by collecting sensitive information and passing it to agents of Iran. He was paid in cash and told handlers he would stay in the military for 25-plus years for them.

Murphy said Iran was particularly active in using proxies to target dissidents living in the UK, warning: ‘The Iranian threat in that respect is quite substantial.’

Many of those recruited are not ideologically motivated, he said, but driven by money and recruitment is largely happening online, particularly via encrypted platforms such as Telegram. 

‘Most of the time, this is very much an online environment,’ Murphy said, warning that social media algorithms could be making it easier for vulnerable individuals to be targeted.

Some people caught up in investigations may not even realise they are participating in espionage. 

Murphy said private investigators and legitimate businesses have sometimes been used unwittingly under the guise of debt recovery, corporate disputes or due diligence work.

‘People do need to wake up to the way in which Russia particularly, but other countries too, are operating differently now and how vulnerable they could be to committing serious offences without really realising,’ he said.

The warning follows a rare public intervention by the new head of MI6, Blaise Metreweli, who recently cautioned that Britain was entering an ‘age of uncertainty’ as hostile states rewrite the rules of conflict.

Security officials believe the threat from foreign proxies will only intensify amid global instability, the war in Ukraine and the mass expulsion of foreign intelligence officers from the UK following the Salisbury Novichok poisoning.

This comes as plans for China’s proposed new ‘mega-embassy’ by the Tower of London were blocked by the last Tory government on security grounds, but they have been put back on the table by Sir Keir Starmer who is hoping to fly to China at the end of the month for trade talks.

The Mail on Sunday has led the way in revealing the concerns of British security experts about the planned development over the past year, including the presence of a ‘spy dungeon’ in the basement close to sensitive City data cables.

Security sources denied reports that they had dropped their concerns over the embassy, saying that EU countries had raised fears that it may not just become a hub for China intelligence operations in the UK, but for their spying throughout Europe.

A source said: ‘At the moment, their people are spread out across different sites in the capital. That makes it easier for us to track them. They’re moving around.

‘They’re using electronic comms to communicate. We can have eyes on them. But if their operations become centralised in this giant hub it would become much harder to penetrate them.’

The source added: ‘They are obsessed with infiltrating Parliament. It’s a major focus of their activity here in the UK.

‘We’re not sure if it’s because they’ve misinterpreted how influential your average MP is. But they are still deploying major time and assets to getting inside the Commons and the Lords. And that will intensify if the super embassy gets the green light’.