Under pressure from U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government, the director of the United Kingdom’s GCHQ signals intelligence service (responsible for hacking phones, computers, satellites, and electronic communications) has given China a pass on its hyper-aggressive espionage.
In a major speech on Wednesday, Anne Keast-Butler was rightly robust in her criticism of Russian offenses against the U.K. and its allies. China, however, was spared a similar condemnation. It reflects Starmer’s desire to avoid aggravating the willfully sensitive Chinese Communist Party for fear of losing possible economic investments. There is a trend here. Shortly after Starmer entered office in 2024, the director general of the U.K.’s MI5 security service adopted a notably more dovish message toward China than he had in previous speeches. Starmer’s government has also let a Chinese intelligence agent escape justice by refusing to identify Beijing as an adversary. Starmer is now allowing Beijing to establish a spying hub alongside London’s financial district.
Keast-Butler’s speech was good to a point. She rightly identified how the U.K. was in “a space between peace and war. I’ve spent three decades working in National Security. And the risk of miscalculation is as high as I’ve ever seen it.”
This is an accurate assessment. The problem is that the risk of miscalculation is enabled when an adversary is allowed to believe it has space to advance its aggression. Keast-Butler knows this well, which is why she so directly identified Russia’s aggression against the U.K. Yet, by sparing China the same due treatment, she suggests to Beijing that the U.K. will tolerate its continuing aggression in the desperate pursuit of a few more scraps from Xi Jinping’s economic trough.
The contrast in how the GCHQ director treated Russia and China was truly striking.
While Keast-Butler stated that the U.K. intelligence community was “shoring up international resilience to China’s widespread cyber operations,” for example, she did not describe those operations for what she knows they are. Which is to say, operations scaled far beyond those of any other nation. Operations that are voracious in targeting and appetite, designed to relentlessly steal British trade and technology secrets, and bleed British security. The director mentioned Russian aggression three times in her speech, but Chinese aggression not once.
She explained how “stretching from the seabed to cyberspace,” Russia is “relentlessly targeting critical infrastructure, democratic processes, supply chains and public trust.” Keast-Butler added, “We’re also disrupting Russia’s attempts to smuggle Western tech; fending off its cyber-attacks and countering reckless sabotage and assassination attempts.”
In contrast, we were told only that “China is now a tech superpower with sophisticated cyber, intelligence, and military capabilities.” Again, note the absence of condemnatory language. Keast-Butler added that we “live in a fast-changing world of big tech dominance and pervasive Chinese technology.” Note here the refusal to do what her own agency has previously done and identify Chinese technology as one big backdoor for the Chinese intelligence services. Indeed, the director appeared to actually offer an olive branch to Chinese technology when she observed that, “Sovereignty doesn’t have to mean ‘made in the U.K.,’ so long as we carefully manage our supply chains, dependencies, and data.” This might be music to Beijing’s ears, but it will ring alarm bells at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade.
The only area where equal treatment was given was when Keast-Butler referred to how “Both China and Russia are investing heavily in space to support both peace and war ambitions.” But even here, the understatement wasn’t removed. It was simply spread across both countries. After all, China is building thousands of heavy payload satellites that, while veiled as innocuous civilian systems, can be redeployed to destroy Western military satellites and civilian satellite constellations such as Starlink. Russia is building Space-based nuclear weapons systems designed to irradiate satellite constellations and render them inoperable.
To be clear, this equivocation isn’t really Keast-Butler’s fault. She is a civil servant required to serve the directives of the government of the day. But that fact won’t reduce the concern that this China appeasement proffers for the U.S. intelligence community.
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Ending her speech, Keast-Butler rightly saluted this year’s 80th anniversary of the U.S.-U.K. intelligence sharing alliance, noting that it is the world’s strongest. That is accurate. The NSA and GCHQ are symbiotic in many areas. During the first Trump administration, for example, the NSA was instrumental to the success of a joint intelligence operation of critical strategic value to the U.K. (the Washington Examiner is withholding details of that operation for national security reasons).
This is what we should want more of. But if the head of the U.K.’s most important intelligence agency is instructed to placate America’s primary adversary, the omens for the special relationship aren’t good.