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UK: New head for MI5

01 January 2007

The Home Office has announced that it has appointed a new head of MI5, Jonathan Evans (49), to replace Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller on 8 April 2007. Evans is a career spook who joined the security service in 1980. According to The Observer (11.3.07) newspaper Evans' worked in Northern Ireland where he liaised with the British Army's Force Reconnaissance Unit (FRU) which was "at the heart of a counter terrorist strategy in which intelligence, police and military operatives actively supported loyalist paramilitary groups and dramatically increased their killing capacity."

He is currently deputy head of the organisation and in charge of counter-terrorism monitoring al-Qaeda and its sympathisers in the UK. His predecessor, Manningham-Buller, announced that she would be retiring last December shortly after claiming that Britain had been targeted by 30 separate serious al-Qaeda terrorist plots and was targeting more than 1,600 individuals engaged in supporting and promoting jihadism.

Richard Norton-Taylor, in The Guardian newspaper, has speculated that Manningham-Buller actually left her job "in order to avoid the fallout from the July 7 2005 London suicide bombings."

The change-over at the top of MI5 occurs at a time when the agency is expanding its regional operations. The first changes happened a couple of years ago when regional offices were set up and regional Special Branches placed even more firmly under MI5’s control. Now four new “Counter Terrorism Units” (CTUs) are to be set up in Manchester, West Yorkshire, West Midlands and London.

The CTUs will have 350 staff (drawn from police experts and Special Branches) and will “work alongside MI5 and other security services”.

Smaller Regional Intelligence Cells are being established in Wales, East Midlands and the South West.

"New Director General of the Security Service”, Home Office press release, 7.3.07; The Guardian 8.3.07; BBC News, 2.4.07; see also Statewatch News Online, March 2007 “What did “Bob” do in the FRU?”