Like her character Liz Carlyle, Stella Rimington rose through the ranks of the M15 Security Service as an agent runner, and later head of the counter-subversion, counterespionage, and counterterrorism branches.

American thriller readers are becoming acquainted this season with the byline of Stella Rimington, author of the well-received debut espionage novel, At Risk (Knopf). But in her native England, the 69-year-old Stella Rimington—Dame Stella Rimington, that is—has been a household name since 1992, when she became the first publicly revealed head of Britain’s MI5 Security Service.

The decision to reveal the identity of MI5’s chief came after Parliamentary restructuring of that organization, recalls Rimington, who was in the States recently for her first American book tour. “I really approved of the decision, in principle, because I’ve always felt that our intelligence services should be as open as they possibly can...unfortunately, I don’t think it was very well done. There was no proper sort of press strategy. And because it was at a time when the IRA was extremely active on the streets of London, we decided that we wouldn’t issue a photograph, for security reasons.”

Adding to the media hubbub was the fact that Stella Rimington was the first female Director-General of MI5. “So the press had this, as they regarded it, amazing announcement about this woman in a man’s job,” Rimington says, “and no photograph to go with it, and nobody to sort of appear on the telly and say anything.” A frustrated press responded by ferreting out Rimington’s home address. “We’d always just lived in an ordinary London street, relying on my anonymity. They came and camped outside the house and caused my younger daughter, who was living at home at the time, immense agitation really—not knowing whether she was supposed to be more scared of the press at the front door, or the IRA creeping up the stairs at the back. We had to sell our house, and move, and really live undercover—which is a very strange way to begin a period of greater openness,” Dame Stella concludes with an understated chuckle, “but that’s how it was.”

As a novelist, Rimington (who left MI5 in 1996) now has at least the option of exacting civilized revenge on such former tormentors. Note this thumbnail-observation of “a young man in a leather jacket and a lilac tie” made by Intelligence Officer Liz Carlyle, the protagonist of Rimington’s At Risk:

Journalist, thought Liz. Almost certainly tabloid. That particular blend of the metropolitan and the downmarket was unmistakable.

Having to deal with the press was an undreamt of issue when Stella Rimington began her 30-year MI5 career with an entry-level position in 1966.

“Nobody knew very much about British intelligence services in those days,” remembers Dame Stella, then the wife of a British diplomat in India, “so I wasn’t unique in not knowing what I was getting into! But it was a very exciting time to join, because even though I was only a clerk-typist, I got involved quite quickly in, effectively, the Cold War. It was going on very actively in India in those days, when the Russians and—well, the West, were sort of fighting it out for influence in that part of the world. And our job was to try and find out who the Soviet spies were, and their East European colleagues, and, you know, try and prevent them from doing any harm.”

As she rose through the ranks of the domestic security service, Rimington at one point became, like her fictional 34-year-old character Liz Carlyle, an agent runner; as well as at different times head of the counter-subversion, counterespionage, and counterterrorism branches. And, like Liz, she sought to strike a balance between work and personal obligations, and between having a semblance of a social life and the need to maintain a very low profile.

“You know, most people sort of take it for granted that they’ll go to a drinks party with their neighbors down the road at Christmas,” Rimington points out, “but if you work in the secret world, you have to be quite careful, even about things like that; because you know that the first thing that will happen is that somebody’s going to say to you, ‘And what do you do?’ And you’ve either got to sort of make up some cover story for the evening, or get some sort of second-sight about this question coming up and move rapidly on to another group of people so you never have to answer it.”

FORA.tv clip "The Private Life of an M15 Spy" (2009)

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At different times, Stella Rimington says, she posed as different women. “Depending upon what I was doing, I had various covers, as you have to if you are doing the sort of sharp-end of intelligence work. You do find yourself masquerading as other people, or something other than what you are, in order to achieve your objective. Depending on the circumstances and the danger of the situation you’re in, you might well have to ‘live your cover,’ as it’s called—doing what you’re pretending to be.” Asked if she could give an example, she says, “No, I’m afraid I can’t! Because that gets too close to, you know, talking about operations.”

But all this makes it hard for a person in the covert world to have relaxed social relationships, Rimington says. “And I think that’s reflected in the descriptions in the book about Liz’s private life: how none of her relationships ever really seem to work out quite well.” Liz “never quite squares it,” the author notes, “whether what she actually wants to do is go on doing what she’s doing, or whether she’d rather give it all up and go and work with Mum in the nursery-garden in the country. She’s always asking herself that question: ‘Is this really what I want to do?’ As was I. At one stage, I applied to be headmistress of a girl’s boarding school; I wondered whether I would pack it all in and go and be a schoolteacher!”

That momentary crisis passed. And when Rimington did at last leave the secret world, it was to do something even more interesting: write her memoirs—another first, for an MI5 director-general. “I knew that whatever I wrote, I was going to have to submit for clearance,” says Rimington, “because those are the rules. And that if I wrote anything too extreme, then it obviously wasn’t going to get cleared. So in a way, all the time I was self-censoring myself; and that made it more difficult perhaps than it would have been for anybody else.”

Her autobiography, Open Secret, was published in England in 2001. After that, writing fiction seemed a natural next step to Rimington, a longtime reader of espionage and detective novels. The result (also vetted before publication by her former employers) was At Risk, in which Liz Carlyle and colleagues in the British Intelligence Joint Counter-Terrorist Group hunt an anonymous agent (an “invisible”) known to be at large in Great Britain and bent on a de- structive mission. Rimington says fiction writing proved to be “less easy” than doing nonfiction. “I don’t find a huge amount of difficulty in the characters, because somebody in my former profession is bound to be extremely interested in people; a good part of the world of intelligence-gathering is about dealing with people: human sources of information, who are often in quite difficult and dangerous situations. What I think I find most difficult is the development of the plot, so that it runs smoothly along and you don’t sort of lose your way down sidetracks.”

In doing At Risk, Rimington had the help of English writer Luke Jennings: “I write first drafts, and he helps me with them; so that, together, we try and pull the thing into a sort of shape, where we have a beginning and an end.” Rimington is at work on a second Liz Carlyle adventure, she says, titled Secret Asset. Informed that this book is already announced at an online site for publication in August, 2005, its author responds, with an- other dry chuckle, “We’ll see about that.”

Reviewers have of course placed Stella Rimington in the tradition of such previous espionage professionals-turned-authors as John le Carré and Charles McCarry. While the new novelist says she’s read and admired such writers (especially le Carré), it’s quite a different sort of thriller-writer whose work Rimington most enjoys.

“Dorothy Sayers,” she says, “is absolutely my all-time favorite, and I am really sad that she didn’t write more novels. I often reread her. I suppose my favorite is Busman’s Honeymoon, which sort of typifies something which I really like about the thriller: a sense of strange things happening in very safe sort of places.” That’s why she set At Risk in Norfolk, Rimington says: “A kind of safe, rural part of England—but you just get this feeling that anything could be happening there. And the same in Busman’s Honeymoon: they go off to this marvelous sort of Elizabethan house to have their honeymoon, and lo and behold there’s a body in the cellar. “And,” this former diplomatic-housewife whose segue into a life of intrigue came about “quite by chance” says, “that's the sort of thing I rather like.”

A Stella Rimington Reading List

LIZ CARLYLE SERIES
At Risk, 2004
Secret Asset, 2005 Illegal Action, 2007
Dead Line, 2008
Present Danger, 2009
Rip Tide, 2011

NONFICTION
Intelligence, Security and the Law, 1994
Open Secret: The Autobiography of the Former Director-General of MI5, 2001

This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Spring Issue #89.