Growing up in London, her family evacuated the city to escape German bombings during World War II. It wasn’t much safer: she survived the “Barrow Blitz” — intense bombings of Barrow-in-Furness, where the family moved. The Germans were targeting the city’s steelworks, once the largest in the world — her father worked there. Rimington said sheltering from the bombings made her claustrophobic; she always wanted to have an escape route. She also suffered anxiety and depression until her 30s. How did she overcome those obstacles? “Gradually. You gradually come to realize there are things you actually do quite well, and that everyone else is not super-brilliant.”
After studying archive administration at the University of Liverpool, Rimington took a job at the County Record Office in Worcester, and married. Her husband was offered a post as the First Secretary (Economic) for the British High Commission in New Delhi, India. After settling in, she was asked to work for another of the First Secretaries at the High Commission. After accepting, she discovered he was actually an agent of the British Security Service — MI5. She obtained her security clearance, working for MI5 for two years: her husband was returned to London, and she accompanied him. She liked the work enough that she applied for a permanent position at MI5, where she worked in all three of its branches: counter-espionage, counter-subversion, and counter-terrorism. One was particularly eye-opening. “I moved into counter-subversion [and began] to realize what was going on was, literally, subversion. The Soviet Union was trying to undermine western democracies by infiltrating areas which were levers [of society].” She was promoted often, rising to be one of the two Deputy Director General positions, and was dispatched to Moscow in 1992 to make the first friendly contact between the British intelligence services and their old nemesis, the KGB.
Upon Rimington’s return, she was promoted again — to Director General of MI5. It was not a cushy job: MI5 took over as the agency responsible for countering IRA terrorism on the U.K. mainland. Parliament brought intelligence services under committee scrutiny. The press apparently got wind of a woman being named to the position, and worked hard to learn her identity, even posting photographers around MI5’s headquarters. Rather than hide even more, Rimington took a different tack, arguing that the agency should become more transparent. On July 16, 1993, she not only allow photos of herself in the media, she released a 26-page booklet, The Security Service, which detailed MI5’s activities, operations and duties. She even spoke on BBC. “That was very strange,” she said years later, “having lived in the shadows suddenly to be on television talking about what we did.”
That even influenced James Bond: Judi Dench’s “M” is partly modeled on Rimington, starting with GoldenEye (1995). But there is one big difference with the real MI5: there are no agents “licensed to kill.” Should it have them? “No. No. MI5 is an intelligence organization, it’s not a direct action organization. It is trying to find out what people are planning, then prevent it by use of the law. So, no. No.” Rimington retired from MI5 in 1996 after 27 years, and was made a Dame Commander in the 1996 New Year Honours — the female equivalent of knighthood. She turned to writing, starting with her autobiography, Open Secret * (2001), which caused consternation in the agency. “I did have doubts as the process went along,” she said later. “But I knew there was nothing in it that was actually going to be damaging.”
After that, she turned to spy novels — and her hero spy was a heroine. “I was certain that my character was going to be female,” she said of her writing process. “I wanted her to reflect accurately what a female does in my former service.” She never really stopped writing: her 12th novel was released this year. “As the first avowed female head of any intelligence agency in the world,” said the current Director General of MI5, Sir Ken McCallum, “Dame Stella broke through long-standing barriers and was a visible example of the importance of diversity in leadership.” Stella Whitehouse Rimington died on August 3, at 90.