\n<\/p>\n
Stella Rimington, the first female director of MI5 and the first head of the domestic spy agency to be publicly named, has died aged 90.<\/p>\n
She died on Sunday night \u201csurrounded by her beloved family and dogs and determinedly held on to the life she loved until her last breath\u201d, her family said in a statement.<\/p>\n
MI5 paid tribute to Rimington. Ken McCallum, its current chief, said she was \u201cthe first avowed female head of any intelligence agency in the world\u201d and praised her for breaking \u201cthrough longstanding barriers\u201d. She was, he added: \u201cA visible example of the importance of diversity in leadership.\u201d<\/p>\n
An accidental spy, recruited in the mid-1960s as a typist when her husband, John, was posted to India on diplomatic service, Rimington rose through the ranks to end up as chief of the Security Service between 1992 and 1996.<\/p>\n
After her appointment as director general, she was the first chief of the agency to be named, although no photograph was supplied at first and the only image available was a blurry picture of her in the street wearing a distinctive raincoat.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m proud that I was the first woman DG and that, during the time I was there, MI5 changed from being an old-fashioned closet organisation,\u201d she said in an interview in 2011 as she reflected on her secret career.<\/p>\n
In her first interview after leaving the agency in 2001, with the Guardian, Rimington said she was drawn to the world of espionage despite the fact that when she started at the agency \u201cthere were all of these tweedy guys with pipes\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cI still thought the essence of the cold war and spies and stuff was fun. You know, going around listening to people\u2019s telephones and opening their mail and stuff,\u201d she added, though she also conceded MI5 was \u201coverenthusiastic\u201d during the cold war.<\/p>\n
Rimington held roles in MI5 units tackling counter-subversion, counter-espionage and counter-terrorism, and she acknowledged that MI5 was involved in assessing threats to national security posed by leaders of the miners\u2019 strike in 1984-85.<\/p>\n
She was also involved in debriefing the star British agent Oleg Gordievsky after he was extracted from the Soviet Union by MI6 in the mid-1980s. Gordievsky said later he \u201cliked her as a woman immensely\u201d, though Rimington said in a documentary she was unaware of the romantic impression she had made on the defector.<\/p>\n
During her time as MI5\u2019s director general she oversaw an agency making a wider transition from tackling the cold war threat to terrorism, and was the first agency chief to give a public lecture to the BBC.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Rimington turned to writing after leaving MI5, including her autobiography, Open Secret, published in 2001. <\/span> Photograph: Dan Chung\/Reuters<\/p>\n \u201cI have set out in this lecture to show that a security service such as MI5 is compatible with personal liberty within our democracy,\u201d she said. Such was her profile, she was considered a model for Judi Dench\u2019s portrayal of M, the fictional chief of sister agency MI6, in a series of James Bond movies.<\/p>\n After leaving MI5, Rimington principally became a writer. Her first book was a memoir, Open Secret, published in 2001, though there was a furious row about her decision to write an autobiography at the time. Particular objections came from the SAS, and she was ordered to remove all references to the elite special forces.<\/p>\n A series of novels followed, eight with Liz Carlyle, an MI5 officer as the lead character, and two more with Manon Tyler, a CIA agent. In one of her books, Rip Tide, published in 2011, she sent up American officials who imagined that al-Qaida could be bombed into submission.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m tweaking the Americans\u2019 tails,\u201d she said, having previously argued in 2009 the US had \u201cgone too far with Guant\u00e1namo and the tortures\u201d in an interview with a Spanish newspaper.<\/p>\n Born as Stella Whitehouse in 1935, she moved from London to Barrow-in-Furness aged four, and remembered the port town being repeatedly bombed during the war. She married John Rimington in 1963 and they had two daughters, but the couple separated in 1984.<\/p>\n Rimington and her husband never divorced, however, and she and John became friends again later in life, living together during the Covid lockdown. \u201cYes, we argued, but we\u2019ve mellowed. It\u2019s a good recipe for marriage, I\u2019d say: split up, live separately, and return to it later,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Stella Rimington, the first female director of MI5 and the first head of the domestic spy agency to be publicly named, has died aged 90. She died on Sunday night \u201csurrounded by her beloved family and dogs and determinedly held on to the life she loved until her last breath\u201d, her family said in a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14039,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[5289,689,2527,5966,7686,7685,7684],"class_list":{"0":"post-14038","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-aged","9":"tag-chief","10":"tag-dies","11":"tag-female","12":"tag-mi5","13":"tag-rimington","14":"tag-stella"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14038\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}