Dissident IRA threat on the rise

Editor’s Note: The following report is excerpted from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin, the premium online newsletter published by the founder of WND. Subscriptions are $99 a year or, for monthly trials, just $9.95 per month for credit card users, and provide instant access for the complete reports.

Jonathan Evans

LONDON – Jonathan Evans, the head of Britain’s MI5 Security Service, is warning the threat from dissident Irish Republican groups – the Continuity IRA and the Real IRA – is on the rise, according to a report from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.

Evans said the threat has “significantly increased in recent months despite the power-sharing deal agreed by the Provisional IRA, which has led to the restoration of devolved government in Ulster.”

In an analysis of the threats facing Britain in 2009, Evans also warned that the global economic crisis presents as great a threat to national security as did the Cold War.

The spy chief singled out economic espionage by China and Russia as “being a problem which is on the increase and this could lead to a watershed moment.”

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Among nations that face economic espionage like Britain, he singled out the U.S., Germany, France and Japan.

MI5 agents have created a “horizon scanning unit of experts to work with government officials at the Treasury and other Whitehall departments to study how foreign spies are exploiting the recession.”

While Britain remains at the upper end of “severe risk” from extremists linked to al-Qaida, with several thousand British Muslims forming “a seed pool for potential terrorists,” it is the threat posed by Republican dissidents which has now placed them at the same level as al-Qaida.

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