Former head of the British domestic security services Dame Stella Rimington, perhaps the world's best-known female spy, has spoken of a career that involved monitoring IRA bombers in the 1980s and of how the nature of the terrorist threat has changed.
She was speaking at the RSA Conference in San Francisco on Thursday.
Dame Stella, widely recognised as the real-life model for the character M in the James Bond films, joined the Security Service (MI5) in 1968 and worked in counter-terrorism, counter-subversion, and counter-espionage during her service.
She told a packed conference hall at the Moscone Center that working on espionage and counter-espionage was a "slow, careful job".
Terrorism arrived in Britain in the 1980s with the IRA and later from the Middle East, she said.
“All of a sudden we were dealing with an enemy that was very different to what we had dealt with before,” she said.
The work of the domestic intelligence service needed “people with nerve” and people who were prepared to take risks, in circumstances where if they got it wrong “there are going to be horrendous consequences and broken glass and bodies on the pavement”.
Monitoring of suspects
She said the objective of the intelligence services was to arrest the perpetrators and to get them into court. In the case of the IRA, monitoring of suspects would often take place over a long period of time.
It was a question of how long you were prepared to wait, and in the case of the IRA the services would often wait quite a long time, watching suspects bringing in their bombs and moving them to the site and planting them. Then the police would move in and arrest them.
Dame Stella said that when the nature of terrorism changed and the intelligence services began dealing with suicide bombers, they could no longer afford to wait.
“You have to move in fast. It’s all the time a balancing act.”
Dame Stella also spoke of her time in New Delhi in the late 1960s as the wife of a British diplomat, “running coffee mornings and thrift sales or appearing in amateur dramatics”.
She was subsequently recruited as a clerk-typist for the British security services based there, “even though I didn’t know how to type”.
She said it was “really quite an interesting time, even to be working as a clerk-typist for British intelligence” when India linked east and west during the Cold War and was “full of spies”.
On her return to London, she found she had been recruited as a junior assistant officer – “the women’s grade”.
At that time, she said, intelligence involved “blokes with kettles opening the letters”, and people monitoring phone calls.
“The world was a much simpler place but we did gather the intelligence [by] those means,” she said.
She also recalled headlines from her early days as head of the intelligence services: “Mother of two gets tough with terrorists.”
In the MI5 of the 1960s there was “this great sort of sex division”, she said.
“It was absolutely taken for granted that women could not run human sources.”
Nervous organisation
MI5 at that time was also “a very closed organisation. It was very nervous; paranoid almost.”
There were still people around in those days who had known the Soviet spies Philby, Burgess and McLean.
“It was the wilderness of mirrors . . . nothing is quite what you think it is; you can’t quite trust anybody. That is an incredibly unhelpful environment, particularly for a secret organisation,” Dame Stella said.
In 2009, Dame Stella warned the British government it risked creating a “police state” by exploiting fears over terrorism to erode civil liberties.
She said interfering with people’s privacy played straight into the hands of terrorists.
“It would be better that the government recognise that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties,” she said. “[That is] precisely one of the objects of terrorism: that we live in fear and under a police state,” she added.
In 1992, she was appointed director general of MI5 and was the first woman to hold the post. She published her autobiography, Open Secret, in 2002 and also writes spy novels under the pseudonym Liz Carlyle.
Some 40,000 security professionals have been attending the RSA Conference at the Moscone Centre in San Francisco this week. The major theme of the event organised by the security division of Dell/EMC is business-driven security.
The conference concludes on Friday.
