When Stella Rimington was appointed Director General of MI5 in 1996, she became Britain’s most successful ever woman spy. That didn’t prevent her from having to cope with a deluge of sexist and demeaning treatment, though. When the tabloid press exposed her identity as head of the Security Service soon after her promotion, she was subjected to a deluge of demeaning commentary. The London Evening Standardfocussed on her appearance, advising her to visit “a decent hairdresser” and to try “some subtle makeup.”
The Times used a hacker to break into her bank account, while the Sun focussed on the fact that she was a single mother. When her autobiography was released – a truly historic publishing event given her position at the top of the secret state – the Evening Standard suggested that the book could only have been motivated by “vanity, an unhealthy dose of self-importance and possibly the loneliness of a single woman.” When her first novel appeared in 2004, journalists were similarly dismissive, speculating that, because the book was crafted in such convincing detail, a woman couldn’t possibly have written it.
Ever since that time, Rimington has devoted a significant part of her energy to fighting back against the sexist culture that surrounds the British secret state. When she went public for the first time in 1993 with a printed guide The Security Service: MI5, she made clear that as Director General, she wanted MI5 to move decisively beyond the old image of middle-aged ex-military-men. Almost half of the agency’s staff were women, with a growing number of women officers, and she was fully committed to seeing that trend continue. The magnitude of this culture change will not have been lost on insiders. When Rimington herself was recruited to the service in the late 1960s, literally all of the officers were men and all of the assistants were women. She was called on by means of the proverbial ‘tap on the shoulder’ because the MI5 representative in New Delhi, where she was living as the wife of a British official, needed someone to stuff envelopes. ‘First Secretary wives,’ it was felt, could be trusted, and were ideal candidates for clerical work. As Rimington wrote in her autobiography Open Secret, only a small group of women dared to challenge the masculinist culture that continued to dominate British intelligence for decades after that, and even fewer who managed to break through that glass ceiling and become officers. Rimington was literally the first woman to rise all the way through the ranks to the head of the agency.
On her retirement, Rimington turned to fiction, introducing a new spy heroine, MI5 officer Liz Carlyle, who would continue this struggle by other means. A complete anti-Bond figure, Liz is serious, conscientious and professional: that’s how she gets results. Liz is utterly appalled by extra-judicial killing (unlike Bond with his ‘license to kill’) and wins out through her acumen, sensitivity and rigorous investigative skills. In the course of a growing series of novels, she has to tackle a variety of cases involving terrorism, organised crime and counter-espionage. At the same time, however, a constant feature is that Liz is always having to battle sexism and low-level sexual harassment at the hands of male colleagues. At the climax of At Risk, for example, Liz is on the cusp of success in the counter-terrorism investigation she is running against two jihadis. As events accelerate towards their conclusion, she is nevertheless told by a senior policeman “why don’t you get some sleep, young lady?” While the men from MI6, Special Branch, the RAF and SAS spend a testosterone-fuelled night staking out the wrong target, it’s up to Liz’s professionalism, tenacity and cool head to save the real target from assassination.
With Liz Carlyle, Rimington made a brave attempt to pioneer a new kind of spy fiction, breaking the mould of the Cold War thriller. The fact that a writer with her unique experience has so continually stressed the difficulties facing female officers and the macho culture that still pervades British intelligence, however, should make us think again about sexism in the secret state. If Rimington’s portrayal is even partially authentic, the agencies have a long way to go to enter the twenty-first century.
Jago Morrison
Brunel University London
Previously published as Stella Rimington | Writers in Intelligence