Former CIA director warns that MI5 and MI6 'are going to have their hands full' with new Chinese 'super-embassy'
The Chinese 'super-embassy', which will be housed in the former Royal Mint building in London, is expected to get the green light ahead of Sir Keir Starmer's visit to Beijing at the end of the month.
A former CIA director has told Andrew Marr that "MI5 and MI6 are going to have their hands full" with the new Chinese super-embassy.
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John Brennan, who ran the agency between March 2013 and January 2017, warned that China uses its embassy's diplomatic presence to carry out intelligence collection activities around the world.
The Chinese 'super-embassy', which will be housed in the former Royal Mint building in London, is expected to get the green light ahead of Sir Keir Starmer's visit to Beijing at the end of the month.
The development will cover 22,000 square-miles and will be the largest Chinese diplomatic mission in Europe.
Downing Street believes housing China's premises on a single site has security advantages, with MI5 and MI6 not having raised any formal objections to the plans.
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Mr Brennan told Andrew Marr on LBC: "MI5 and MI6 are going to have their hands full because the Chinese are very rapacious in terms of their appetite for information, whether it be on security issues, financial matters, technology and so on.
"They have very strong capabilities, they're highly technologically proficient and they use their embassy's diplomatic presence in order to carry out these types of collection activities against countries such as the uk.
"I think the British government can do things to try to restrict their activities at this mega embassy. But again, I just feel for my former colleagues at MI5 and MI6 that are going to have to deal with very aggressive Chinese intelligence capabilities."
The new embassy approval comes after MI5 issued a "high alert" warning to MPs towards the end of last year that Westminster staff were being targeted by spies acting for China.
Security minister Dan Jarvis said he had been warned that Chinese agents, often masked through cover companies and head-hunters, had been attempting to "recruit and cultivate" individuals with access to sensitive information.
Labour backbenchers fear the embassy will put the UK at risk, with the site sitting alongside some of the country's most sensitive communications cables, responsible for transmitting financial data to the City of London.
Unredacted plans for the embassy, obtained by the Telegraph, show that a chamber that will sit directly alongside the fibre-optic cables.
Mr Brennan has advised the Prime Minister to be "cautious" with what he allows China to do inside the UK and to increase the resources of MI5 and MI6 "because their workload is going to increase".
He said: "I don't know whether or not he can stop them, it would cause a real bilateral diplomatic row. But he can place limits on what Chinese are able to do in that embassy in terms of the number of diplomatic personnel and other types of things.
"I would tell the Prime Minister that he needs to be very, very prudent and judicious and cautious as far as what he allows the Chinese to do inside of the UK and he does have formidable capabilities in very professional services, the MI5 and MI6, and he needs to increase resources because their workload is going to increase significantly."