Meet the Authors March 2012

 

 

To read an extract from Rip Tide, click here.

 

Dame Stella Rimington’s extraordinary career as Head of Britain’s national security agency, MI5, began in India. It was 1965, and she was a dutiful but bored expatriate wife, supporting a diplomat husband. Her life changed one day when someone from the local British Embassy asked if she’d be interested in working as a part-time clerk and typist for the MI5 office in the British High Commission in New Delhi. She was. And, in fact, found herself party to the ‘tap-on-the-shoulder’ method of recruitment that was standard back then in the security services. Once back in London, she joined up as a full member of staff and, for the next twenty-seven years, steadily worked her way up the ladder of Britain’s internal security organisation, culminating in her appointment as Director General in 1992. She was the first woman ever to hold the position and later referred to it as ‘the best job in the world’. 

 

Working in such a male environment, however, wasn’t easy. Back in the 1960s MI5 was like an exclusive club for mainly public-school-educated males. The prevalent view in the ranks was that women ‘were not really suitable’, as Rimington puts it. She remembers having to remind herself, ‘I was never a chap, and I am not going to behave in the same way as chaps behave. I never have and I never will.’

 

In an exclusive interview with Reader's Digest, she goes on to explain, ‘When I joined, women were restricted in what they were allowed to do. It was really a two-tier career system. Women were asked to deal with the clerical end, the papers, sorting out the files, doing a bit of intelligence assessment or analysis if we were thought to be quite bright. But the “sharp end” intelligence work—dealing with the sources and doing the front-line investigation—was off the map for women. As the 1970s came along, with women’s liberation and sexual- discrimination reform, etc, things began to change and we were allowed, rather tentatively at first, to move into more of the sharp end work.’

 

So, in the novels, has the career of her heroine, Liz Carlyle, mirrored her own?

 

‘It’s broadly similar, but when I joined MI5, it was the height of the Cold War. The majority of the service’s work was counter-espionage, countering the efforts of the Soviet Union and its allies to spy and subvert Western democracies by spreading world communism. Later, countering terrorism began to be very important in the UK because we had our own home-grown terrorism in Northern Ireland. So I spent most of my career in a mixture of counter-espionage and counterterrorism. Liz Carlyle’s career slightly mirrors mine, but in a more modern, up-to-date way.’

 

So how closely do Liz’s experiences resemble what Stella Rimington herself had to do, day by day, as an intelligence officer?

 

‘One of the things I had to avoid was having Liz in meetings all day, because in her “real” life she’d spend quite a lot of time discussing the situation and working out what to do back at the office rather than out on the street. And that does not make compelling reading! So, I’ve had to inject more frontline action into her life that might not perhaps be entirely and totally accurate.’

 

From the moment her career took off in MI5, Stella Rimington was determined to do things differently—in particular, with more openness. Controversy followed her, especially when she decided to reveal her identity after taking on the Director General mantle in 1992. By tradition, this position had been shrouded in secrecy. Rimington felt, however, that it was high time the institution emerged from the shadowy world of cloak-and-dagger espionage that had predominated during the Cold War era.

 

The novels—six to date—all have a ring of topicality to them. Does she plan them around topical happenings?

 

‘Yes, I do. I’m very interested in what’s going on. I do see in various current events the elements of a plot because I’m interested in what lies behind what one is reading. For example, with Rip Tide, I read that some young British people had turned up in Somalia and that led me to wonder how young men who are brought up in the UK end up fighting with al-Qaeda in Somalia?’

 

Is there any advice she would give to someone entering MI5 today?

 

‘I would tell them that it is a very important and worthwhile job and that they will find it satisfying and absorbing. Nowadays all the work of the service is open to women, and all the family-friendly working practices that you would expect to find in any modern-day employment are in place. But because of the necessity for secrecy, the job will inevitably affect their private life, and they’ll have to be prepared for that.’

 

Nowadays, apart from writing best-selling novels, working on the speaker circuit and acting as an advisor to the boards of some of Britain’s biggest companies, Stella Rimington takes great joy in spending time with her grandchildren. Like her intrepid and hard-working heroine, Liz Carlyle, she seems to go from strength to strength, whatever the occasion. Yet there is something of the outsider in her, too.

 

‘I am different without a doubt. Anybody who knew me, or knows me, knows that.’