Retired Director General of the British Security Service (MI5) – perhaps best known to British tabloid readers as “Housewife Super Spy” – Dame Stella Rimington has reinvented herself through Women’s Liberation, the Cold War, and the War on Terror, all while helping to re-shape British intelligence’s openness, image and policies.
Stella Rimington
On June 20 the Chautauqua Institution was fortunate enough to host Dame Rimington as part of their speaker series, Spies, Technology and Espionage. The former secret agent lived up to the event’s scintillating title, regaling the audience with a personal history of MI5, leaving out none of the cloak-and-dagger intrigue.
When Rimington joined MI5 in the late 1960s, the agency’s “whole ethos was dictated by the fear of infiltration.” Secretive, inward-looking and risk-averse, the MI5 was loath to share information with other agencies or even the British government, as it must today. Decades later, in 1992, Rimington became the first Director General of MI5 to be publicly named.
Back to the 1960s, Rimington only gained access to the service through a chance tap on the shoulder. She had given up her career to support her husband, who worked for the British High Commission in India. “Somebody sidled up to me… and said, ‘Psst, do you want to be a spy?’ or something like that,” she recounted. She was recruited for who she was – the wife of a diplomat who could be trusted – not for what she could do.
At the time men, sometimes assisted by “well bred but not necessarily well educated women” ran MI5. Women in the service were seen as suitable for desk work but they were held back at actual intelligence gathering. Rimington, however, broke through the glass ceiling and became the first woman to complete courses on recruiting and running human agents, a crucial Cold War tactic.
The Cold War period with the service, remembers Rimington, seemed very dangerous at the time, but looking back it almost feels quaint. It all sounds like a spy novel now: agents were leaving secret packets of money behind loose bricks in exchange for documents; phones were tapped; human targets were marked and followed.
Image courtesy: MI5
The world today is much more dangerous than it was then, she said, and espionage much more complicated. Terrorism is, of course, the main concern for British intelligence post-Cold War, and it presents interesting dilemmas. Because terrorism is handled under criminal law in Britain, spies are under more pressure than ever to collect evidence that will hold up in court. Today’s terrorists are not organized, and their deep fanaticism makes it much more difficult to recruit moles. They also don’t have predictable objectives.
MI5 is currently aware of 200 terrorist networks in the UK alone, and Rimington said that each day they are trying to stop around 30 different plots. They are never going to be able to disrupt all, or even most, of these plots, she admitted. But, she believes that intelligence services will get more and more effective at dealing with them.
So what lies ahead for the intelligence sector? Rimington is sure that terrorism from extremist Islamist groups is going to continue and even escalate. She also knows that there will be unforeseen dangers.
“With all the security strategies in the world,” she said, “we just don’t know what will happen… and the best we can do, in my opinion, is to arrange things so that we can be flexible.”