The director of the UK surveillance agency GCHQ, Jeremy Fleming, has abandoned the organisation’s usual caution to publicly accuse the Kremlin of reckless and unacceptable behaviour over the Salisbury nerve agent attack.



He was speaking before the release of the results of an investigation by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons into the attack.



Fleming devoted much of his 30-minute speech to the subject of Russia, ranging from Salisbury to cyber-attacks on the UK. He also made a fleeting reference to chemical attacks in Syria, without adding the “alleged” caveat used by the government.

“And whilst we face an emboldened Russia, we also see the tectonic plates in the Middle East moving. We see Iran and its proxies meddling throughout the region. The use of chemical weapons in Syria,” he said in Manchester.

In what was his first public appearance after more than two decades as an intelligence officer, Fleming said the attack in Salisbury on the Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia was “sobering”, and the first time that a nerve agent had been deployed in Europe since the second world war.

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“It demonstrates how reckless Russia is prepared to be, how little the Kremlin cares for the international rules-based order, how comfortable they are at putting ordinary lives at risk,” he said.

Fleming, a former deputy director of MI5 who became director of GCHQ last year, indicated that he anticipated a long-running confrontation with Russia, saying GCHQ’s expertise would be in increasing demand.

Hinting at possible retaliatory action, he said GCHQ was developing its toolkit, including cyber-offensive capabilities, and boasted of how GCHQ had used cyber-offensive tools to defeat Islamic State online.

He was more emphatic in attributing blame for the Salisbury attack than Theresa May, who has tended to speak of Russia rather than the Kremlin and who has restricted her assessment to saying only that Russia is “highly likely” to have been behind the attack.



The UK case against Russia is based partly on the use of the nerve agent novichok, but also on undisclosed intelligence. GCHQ, along with its US counterpart the NSA, closely monitors Russian government communications.



Fleming said the UK had lots of adversaries who were exploiting the fast pace of technological developments. “Alongside these new dangers, we must not and have not forgotten the old foes. For decades, we have collected intelligence on Russian state capabilities, on their intent and posture. And for over 20 years, we’ve monitored and countered the growing cyber threat they pose to the UK and our allies. This has never gone away. But nevertheless, recent events are particularly stark and shocking.”



He said the robust response from the UK and the international community to the Skripal case “shows the Kremlin that illegal acts have consequences”.

The intelligence agencies have until recently been coy about their own ability to mount cyber-attacks on other countries. Fleming said: “We’ll continue to expose Russia’s unacceptable cyber behaviour, so they’re held accountable for what they do, and to help government and industry protect themselves.”



But he added: “To stay ahead, to match the pace of technological change, we are investing in deploying our own cyber toolkit. It’s one that combines offensive and defensive cyber capabilities, to make the UK harder to attack, better organised to respond when we are, and able to push back if we must.”



Speaking of the GCHQ cyber-offensive operation against Islamic State, Fleming said it had shown how effective such measures could be. “We may look to deny service, disrupt a specific online activity, deter an individual or a group or perhaps destroy equipment and networks.”

He was speaking on the final day of a three-day conference organised by the National Cyber Security Centre, the shop window of GCHQ.

At MI5, which he joined in 1993 from the private sector, Fleming focused on Northern Ireland, counter-terrorism and cybersecurity, and he was involved in organising security for the 2012 London Olympics.