Stella Rimington: The spy who brought MI5 out of the shadows

Independent

2 days ago

In the summer of 1967 Stella Rimington, the bored wife of a junior diplomat in New Delhi, was approached by another British official with a proposition: would she be interested in 'helping out' in his office?
The author of the request was 'a baronet and a bachelor' best-known among staff at the British high commission for his 'excellent Sunday curry lunches' and for 'driving round Delhi in a snazzy old Jaguar'.
He was also the senior liaison officer for MI5 – the British security service – in the Indian capital, and when the diplomat's wife accepted his offer of employment it was to mark her entry into the shadowy world of intelligence.
It was a curiously low-key start for a remarkable 29-year career marked by a series of 'firsts' – culminating in her appointment as the UK's first woman spymaster.
In that time she found herself pitted against Russian espionage agents and IRA terrorists as well as, more controversially, domestic 'subversives' including the leaders of the 1984 miners' strike.
Dubbed the 'housewife superspy' when she became the first female director general of MI5 – and the first to be named publicly – she did much to bring the service out of the shadows and explain its role to the public.
While she struggled with the publicity – she was forced to move out when the press discovered where she lived – she nevertheless appeared delighted when she was credited as the model for Judi Dench's M in the James Bond movies.
The greater openness she inaugurated went too far for some when, after leaving, in another first, she became the first former director general to publish her memoir.
In retirement she took on a number of non-executive directorships – including for Marks & Spencer, using her surveillance skills to eavesdrop on customers to pick up what they were saying about the company's products.
She also drew on her experiences to forge a successful second career as a thriller writer, with a series of novels about the fictional MI5 officer Liz Carlyle.
Stella Whitehouse was born on May 13 1935 in South Norwood, a comfortable middle class suburb in south London, the second of two children.
Following the outbreak of the Second World War, they moved first to Wallasey and then to Barrow-in-Furness, where her father had taken a job at a steel works.
Both towns were hit hard in the Blitz and the nightly bombing raids left her with an acute fear of being trapped in confined spaces that was to last well into adulthood.
Only with the end of the war was she able to resume proper schooling, first at the local Croslands Covent School and then at Nottingham High School for Girls after the family moved to the Midlands.
After excelling academically, she won a place to read English at Edinburgh University, where in her final year she became friendly again with her future husband, John Rimington, whom she had first met in Nottingham.
Following her degree, she took a course in archive administration at Liverpool University, followed by jobs first at the County Record Office in Worcester and then the India Office Library in London.
That came to an end in 1965, when her husband, whom she had married two years earlier, was offered a posting as first secretary (economic) in New Delhi and the couple sailed for India.
The routine of life as a diplomatic wife soon began to pall, so she jumped at the opportunity of work with MI5, even though it turned out to be mostly clerical and 'not particularly exciting'.
Nevertheless, on their return to London in 1969, she decided to seek a permanent job with the service, initially as 'something to keep me interested and amused' until she started a family.
The organisation she joined she soon found was a 'land of eccentrics' peopled largely by war veterans and ex-colonial service officers, with a heavy drinking culture.
The 'two well-bred ladies of a certain age' who were entrusted with her training would each day at noon produce a pair of glasses and a bottle of sherry for a 'rather elegant pre-lunch drink'.
It was also a service with a 'strict sex discrimination' policy with women confined to administrative and support roles while the frontline work – such as recruiting and running agents – was for men only.
Her early assignments including helping to identify potential communist infiltrators in rural Sussex and working on the newly formed Northern Ireland desk set up in response to the start of the Troubles.
After becoming pregnant with the first of her two daughters, Sophie, she found her determination to return to work after the child was born was met with 'incomprehension' within the service.
She was not particularly enthusiastic herself, but needed the money, although matters improved when she was given the chance to work on the 'main enemy' – the Soviet Union.
The defections of the Cambridge spies – Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean – still cast a long shadow over the intelligence community, fuelled in part by the conspiracy theories of MI5 officer Peter Wright who was convinced there was another Russian mole within the organisation.
Mrs Rimington was tasked with re-interviewing John Cairncross – later identified as the so-called 'fifth man' in the group – who had made a partial confession to spying in the 1960s, but failed to extract any new leads from him.
Nevertheless, her persistence paid off when she finally persuaded her bosses to make her a full MI5 officer, after complaining that male graduates recruited straight from university were being brought in over her head.
A further breakthrough followed when it was agreed she could train as an agent-runner, the view having long been taken that potential informants would be unwilling to talk to a woman.
In her memoir she recalled the difficulties of juggling her new role, which frequently involved going under cover, with bringing up a young family.
On one occasion she received a call from a nanny to say her younger daughter had been taken to hospital with convulsions just as she was preparing for a crucial rendezvous with a potential defector.
In the event she managed to make it to the meet, after first checking in at the hospital, but had to borrow money from the would-be defector to pay for all the taxis involved.
'Whether the apparent scarcity of funds available to British intelligence influenced his decision or not, I don't know,' she wrote. 'But he did eventually decide not to make the jump across.'
Nevertheless, her career was by this stage firmly on an upward trajectory and in 1983 she was appointed an assistant director – the first woman to hold the post – with responsibility for counter-subversion.
Initially, she thought it was something of a backwater but that quickly changed with the advent of the miners' strike the following year.
She later recalled 'agonising' over whether it was legitimate for MI5 to monitor Arthur Scargill and other union leaders – finally concluding that they should as Mr Scargill had declared his aim was to bring down the government of Margaret Thatcher.
When MI5's involvement became known it nevertheless proved highly controversial, leading to claims it had engaged in a 'dirty tricks' campaign against the miners, which Mrs Rimington always denied.
Promotion, to director of counter-espionage, saw her embroiled in further controversy when Peter Wright – by now retired and thoroughly embittered – published his notorious Spycatcher memoir.
It included his now long-discredited theory that former director general Roger Hollis had been a Russian spy as well as a startling claim that a group of MI5 officers – himself among them – had tried to bring down Labour prime minister Harold Wilson.
Although Wright later withdrew the allegations, his description of how MI5 had 'bugged and burgled' their way across London led to demands that the service should be brought more firmly under ministerial control with its surveillance powers set on a statutory footing.
At first Mrs Rimington was reluctant, producing an internal policy paper arguing against legislation, but after accepting that change was inevitable she became an enthusiastic proponent, sitting on a joint working group with the Home Office which drew up the landmark Security Service Act.
By now both the service she had first joined in the 1960s and the threats it faced were very different.
With the end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991 she led a three-strong delegation to Moscow in an extraordinary attempt to establish friendly relations with their erstwhile adversaries in the KGB.
Despite a warm welcome, with a visit to the Bolshoi Ballet and with much champagne flowing, when she suggested to the Russians they might cut back their espionage in the UK as a prelude to greater co-operation on issues such as counter-terrorism, the idea was dismissed as 'ridiculous'.
Any disappointment was short-lived. On her return to London she was greeted with news that she was to be the next director general, despite not having been interviewed for the post, or even asked whether she wanted it.
Furthermore, John Major's government had decided that now the service was on a statutory footing, thanks to the legislation she helped draw up, her appointment should be announced publicly – the first time any British intelligence chief had been openly identified.
The announcement – in a brief, two-line statement with no accompanying photograph – caused a media sensation, not least because she was the first woman to head any of the agencies, for which she was ill-prepared.
Her elder daughter, Sophie, was away at university and only learned the news from the television, while their home was soon surrounded by journalists.
In the absence of any official photograph, a blurry snatch shot taken some years earlier was widely circulated, before photographers finally managed to capture a rather unflattering image of her leaving the house.
Amid all the furore, it soon became apparent that she could not carry on living there, and she was forced to move into secure accommodation with her younger daughter (she had separated from her husband some years earlier).
Despite such an inauspicious start, Mrs Rimington used her time as director general to bring gradually bring the service out of the shadows, dispelling some of the myths and misconceptions built up around it.
In 1993, MI5 published a short booklet which, for the first time, put some facts into the public domain, while she appeared alongside then home secretary Michael Howard in an official photocall to launch it.
A further step towards greater openness followed when, despite much official hand-wringing, she was given permission to deliver the prestigious BBC Dimbleby lecture on the role of the security services in a democracy.
She was made a dame in the 1996 New Year's Honours list.
Her heightened public profile led to sniping in Whitehall that 'Stella likes the limelight' – a perception only enhanced when, five years after her retirement in 1996, she chose to publish her memoir, to the fury of many of her former colleagues.
Such criticisms did not stop her speaking out in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the US 'war on terror' to warn that draconian new laws simply played into the hands of the terrorists by spreading fear and alarm.
Alongside her post-MI5 writing and business commitments she even found time to chair the judging panel for the Man Booker Prize for literature, although her comment that they were looking for 'readability' found her once again in the firing line from critics who accused her of 'dumbing down' the award.
During the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020, she reconciled with her husband, moving in together during lockdown.
'It's a good recipe for marriage, I'd say,' she said. 'Split up, live separately, and return to it later.'