priority list. This is likely to be related to the UK's close relationship with the US, and the fact that the UK is seen as central to the Western anti-Russian lobby.[1]
7. This perception will have been reinforced by the UK's firm stance recently in response to Russian aggression: following the UK-led international response to the Salisbury attack – which saw an unprecedented 153 Russian intelligence officers and diplomats expelled from 29 countries and NATO – it appears to the Committee that Putin considers the UK to be a key diplomatic adversary. The threat to the UK – and any changes to this following the actions taken in response to the Salisbury attack – is described in this Report, together with the action that the UK Intelligence Community is taking to counter those threats.[2]
8. This has been a major Inquiry, spanning a number of evidence sessions with a broad range of witnesses over the course of eight months, in addition to a substantial volume of written evidence. We are grateful to those outside the Intelligence Community – in particular Anne Applebaum, William Browder, Christopher Donnelly, Edward Lucas and Christopher Steele – for volunteering their very substantial expertise on Russia, which provided us with an invaluable foundation for the classified evidence sessions.
9. We also express our particular gratitude to the late Sir Charles Farr, who was Chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee for much of the duration of our Inquiry. The evidence he provided directly and his wider assistance in the progression of our Inquiry were both very helpful. We wish to take this opportunity to pay tribute more broadly to his lifetime of exceptional service to the Intelligence Community.
10. The matters covered by our Inquiry are highly sensitive. We have been told, repeatedly, that the Russian Intelligence Services will analyse whatever we put in the public domain and therefore, on this subject more than any other, the potential to damage the capabilities of the intelligence and security Agencies and Defence Intelligence was both real and significant. It was clear, therefore, that any Report would have to be subjected to extensive redaction, and risked becoming unreadable. In order to be able to publish a Report at all, we have accordingly decided to produce a shorter Report than usual, which takes the form of a summary of the most important points we have noted during the Inquiry, at a high level, without revealing underlying detail. We have supplemented this with a substantial Annex, which provides both greater detail on the points we have raised and further rationale for the judgements we have reached. This Annex is not published at this time, in view of the current Russian threat.
11. The Report covers aspects of the Russian threat to the UK (Cyber; Disinformation and Influence; and Russian Expatriates) followed by an examination of how the UK Government – in particular the Agencies and Defence Intelligence – has responded (Allocation of Effort; Strategy, Co-ordination and Tasking; A Hard Target; Legislation; International Partnerships; and Engagement with Russia).
- ↑ There is, of course, also a long history of hostile engagement between the Russian – and previously Soviet – intelligence services and their UK counterparts.
- ↑ Throughout this report the term 'Intelligence Community' is used to refer to the seven organisations that the Committee oversees: the intelligence and security Agencies (MI5, SIS and GCHQ); Defence Intelligence in the Ministry of Defence; the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism (OSCT) in the Home Office; and the National Security Secretariat (NSS) and Joint Intelligence Organisation (JIO) in the Cabinet Office.
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