In the 20 months since she was named chief of MI5, Britain's domestic security service, Stella Rimington has rung up several firsts:
She is the first woman to head one of Britain's secret agencies, the first MI5 director to appear before cameras at a news conference, the first British intelligence chief to publish a booklet disclosing the organization's goals and staffing, and the first person from the secret world ever to have her photograph appear in a gossip magazine.The photograph appeared this summer, when Hello!, a breathless weekly filled with glossy celebrity pictures and tattle, showed the 58-year-old Rimington sipping white wine at the Royal Academy, a photographic indiscretion that did not sit well with some governmentministers.
For all the celebrity of fictional British spies - from the dashing James Bond to the bookish George Smiley - Her Majesty's secret services have always been, in real life, the most reclusive and monkish of the Western intelligence agencies, a closed and secret society of faceless bureaucrats, most of them men, toiling from drab and unmarked office buildings in deepest London.
Until Prime Minister John Major broke tradition and publicly revealed the names of both Ri-ming-ton and Sir Colin McColl, the less publicly known chief of MI6, Britain's intelligence-gathering agency, the identity of the people who headed the two services were seldom spoken aloud. Until last year, in fact, Sir Colin and everyone else who has run MI6 were ritually referred to as "C," the unofficial Whitehall code name that dates back to Capt. Mansfield Cumming, the first spy chief in 1909.
But with the Cold War ended, and even the redoubtable Smiley retired by his creator, John le Carre, Britain's real-life intelligence agencies are changing too, as Ri-ming-ton's expanding public profile dramatically attests.
cobwebs of secrecy" cloaking much of Britain's government, but also both MI5 and MI6 will soon adopt a higher physical profile too, when they each move into conspicuous, and expensive, new headquarters now under construction on opposite banks of the Thames.
For Rimington, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc in Eastern Europe has brought not only a predictable shift in emphasis - MI5 now focuses most of its resources on combating terrorism rather than counter-espionage - but in staffing. Forty percent of its 2,000 employees are women, and an equal percentage are 40 or younger.
"We are not a bowler hat brigade staffed by ex-army officers," said Rimington, appearing at her first and only meeting with reporters last month, to introduce "MI5: The Security Service," a $7.50, 36-page booklet that is part of her campaign "to demystify" the agency.
Last year, the government turned over to MI5 the chief responsibility for combating the Irish Republican Army, and the agency now works closely with Scotland Yard's Special Branch. A pie chart in Rimington's booklet shows that the IRA and other domestic threats now consume 44 percent of her agency's resources. Surveillance of international terrorist threats, including Middle Eastern groups, accounts for 26 percent of resources.
Phillip Knightley, the author who has written extensively about British intelligence, said the new openness of MI5, in particular, was a blunt political reaction to the new world order. "They felt quite threatened by the the end of the Cold War," Knightley said. "What are the spy-catchers going to do when there are no more spies to catch? So they made up their mind to grab the high publicity ground, the high media ground, and to stake out a clear position on terrorism."
At the same time, Knightley acknowledged that Rimington, who earns about $116,000 a year in her new post, has clearly captured the public imagination. "A woman, a separated woman at that, a single mother," he said, ticking off some of her biographical details. "She has all the politically correct attributes."
Over her 22 years in the Security Service, Rimington oversaw the MI5 branches responsible for both domestic subversion - including efforts by Communists to penetrate British labor unions - and counterterrorism.
Unlike many others who have risen to the top of Britain's secret world, Rimington did not attend either Oxford or Cambridge. She graduated from Edinburgh University, with a degree in English, and her first job at MI5 was as an archivist.
Her increasingly frequent appearances in press clippings - nearly 300 to date - also are likely to include the kind of detail that does not usually accompany stories about her male colleagues: that she wears her hair in a page-boy cut, has what a Scottish paper described as "intense blue eyes," is fond of "chunky jewelry" and favors clothes from Marks & Spencer, a department-store chain that offers good value if not exactly high fashion.
But in deciding to let the light in on Britain's intelligence agencies, and in giving Rimington leave to become a quasi-public figure, the prime minister has also provoked some critics, including le Carre.
"Am I wiser, are you, for knowing that the head of MI5 is female, 58, likes amateur drama, is separated from her husband, has grown-up children and a vulnerable face?" he asked in an essay for The Times of London. Le Carre went on to wonder whether Rimington was allowing herself to be used as a "visual aid" for the prime minister, to help prop up his poor political standing.
At the same time, Major's political rivals have said the vaunted openness does not go far enough. Tony Blair, a Labor Party official, says there must be greater accountability, particularly since spending on MI5 and MI6 has yet to suffer the same cuts suffered by the armed forces and defense departments.
"It is essential there is proper independent scrutiny of the secret services," Blair says, in order to bring Britain into line "with normal standards of international practice in today's world."
-Novelist John le Carre
in an essay for The Times of London