Dame Stella Rimington, the first woman to lead MI5, passes away

Sue Turnbull for The Conversation

Wollongong: Dame Stella Rimington, former director general of the UK’s domestic counter-intelligence and security agency, MI5, and author of several spy thrillers, has died this week, aged 90.

A decade ago, Rimington came to Melbourne to promote her latest spy thriller, featuring her alter ego Liz Carlyle, also an MI5 agent. I was invited, as convenor of Sisters in Crime Australia, to interview her before an appreciative audience at Readings bookshop in Hawthorn.

They were clearly delighted to be hearing from a real-life spy – especially one widely credited as the blueprint for Judi Dench’s version of M in the Bond movies.

Tall, elegant, impeccably dressed and sharp as a stiletto, Dame Stella was everything we wanted her to be: a woman who had made it to the top in the macho world of espionage.

Her literary legacy includes a 2001 autobiography, Open Secret, (widely seen as disappointing) and several spy thrillers, which gained a dedicated following.

Her 2004 debut thriller, At Risk, was praised in the Guardian as “a cracking good thriller” with “nitty-gritty insider detail”. Together, her books provide a fascinating insight into a clandestine world more usually presented from what she herself described as a masculine point of view.

“When you think about it, all fictional spies are blokes, and spy writers when I started were chaps too,” she told the Edinburgh International Book Festival of her Liz Carlyle novels in 2015.

“So I was certain that my character was going to be female. I wanted her to reflect accurately what a female does in my former service.” Both of her female protagonists, Carlyle and CIA agent Manon Tyler (in her final two novels), reflected aspects of her own personality.

Their adventures, blended with the challenges of ordinary life – relationships, workplace politics, insecurities – took readers around the world as they dealt with “fictional” threats to the nation.

An accidental spy

Sir Richard Moore, head of MI6, the foreign intelligence branch of the UK secret service, has called Rimington a “true trailblazer”. MI5 itself states it “underwent far-reaching transformation under Dame Stella’s leadership”, reports the BBC.

But she never set out to be a spy. Born in South London in 1935, she went to Edinburgh University in 1954, where she earned a master’s degree in English and literature – which shows where a good humanities degree can get you.

After training as an archivist, she married John Rimington, who she accompanied to India when he took up a position at the High Commission in New Delhi.

After two years of tea parties and amateur dramatics, Rimington was asked to help out with some office work for one of the First Secretaries, who just happened to be working for MI5. As she later explained, she was subsequently “tapped on the shoulder”. Eventually, she would climb from the “typing pool to the top”.

Her elevation was never going to be easy in the hard-drinking, masculine culture of the 1970s secret service, when women were paid much less than their male counterparts.

Describing herself and her female colleagues as “restive”, Rimington admitted it took something of a rebellion in the ranks before women were recognised as equals, culminating in her appointment as the first female director of MI5 in 1992.

She was also the first head of MI5 to be publicly identified, before retiring in 1996. Her family were forced to flee their London house to escape the tabloids, which published headlines like “Housewife super spy”.

She later said it was the point where she “felt most unsafe”. She was, however, broadly in favour of greater public openness about the UK’s intelligence services.

Given the presumed end of the Cold War, the major threats Rimington had to deal with were largely those of domestic terrorism: threats she was required to report to then prime minister John Major. Apparently, there was often very little information to go on, at which point Major would respond “Oh well, Stella, do your best”, which she invariably did.

Booker judging and a publishing uproar After her retirement, Rimington maintained an active public life, joining the boards of such venerable British institutions as Marks and Spencer.

In 2011, she served as chair of the judging panel for the Man Booker Prize. This created something of a stir, when the judges espoused “readability” and the ability to “zip along” as criteria they would use to assess the prize. This did not go down well – and some critics called the subsequent shortlist “was the worst in decades”.

Defending the judges’ decision at the awards ceremony, Rimington had the temerity to compare the publishing world to the KGB, thanks to its use of “black propaganda, destabilisation operations, plots and double agents”. Sounds like a great idea for a crime novel – of which she wrote a few.

Her autobiography and novels had to be submitted to MI5 for vetting and clearance. She was occasionally asked to change names and places.

Asked to write a new introduction to an anthology of stories edited by Hugh and Graham Greene, The Spy’s Bedtime Book, Rimington suggested the spy novel is “in a special class of literature in which the real and the imaginary can be mixed in any proportion, so long as they both are present”. Arguably, this is true of all literature.

The world is still dangerous As Rimington informed the audience at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne in 2012, the world is still a dangerous place. Then, she pointed to the continuing rise of domestic terrorism, instability in the Middle East and Putin’s ongoing aggression towards the West. How right she has proved to be – which is hardly any consolation.

“There’s so much to discover in spy stories,” she once said. “It’s a small ‘lifting of the curtains’ of a world that people know exists but don’t know much about.” Rimington was an exceptional woman whose books document the challenging times she lived through, from an insider’s unique perspective on the front line. The line between the reality of Stella Rimington and the fiction she created may be hard to draw – which makes them fascinating reading.

(Sue Turnbull is an Honorary Professor of Communication and Media Studies at University of Wollongong)