Former MI5 Director Creates a True-to-Life Heroine At Risk

January 19, 2005

Stella Rimington, author of the espionage novel At Risk (Knopf), is surely one of the most high-profile first-time spy-thriller writers of this or any year -- and, perhaps, the best informed.

The 69-year-old Ms. Rimington -- or Dame Stella Rimington, as she is properly known in her native England -- is the former Director-General of Britain's MI5 Security Service.

Her 30-year involvement in "the secret world" of spies and their masters began in the 1960s, "quite by chance," said the author by telephone from London, on the eve of a two-week American book tour. "I was in India, as the wife of a British diplomat. And I was tapped on the shoulder by the MI5 representative in the British High Commission in New Delhi and asked if I wanted a part-time job as, effectively, a clerk-typist, I suppose. So, as I wasn't doing anything in particular, I said yes, and I joined MI5, with almost no knowledge whatsoever of what it was all about."

Dame Stella Rimington

What vague impressions she had of the field she was about to enter came from a novel, Dame Stella said with a chuckle: "Just before I joined MI5, I'd been reading Kipling's Kim, which, of course, describes 'the Great Game' being carried on in India. And I suppose all I knew about MI5 was that it would probably involve people disguised as Afghan tribesmen on the northwest frontier."

She soon learned more about the realities of espionage, but she continued reading thrillers "by way of relaxation" as she rose through the ranks of MI5. "Which," Rimington said, "may seem a very strange way for somebody in my profession to relax, but that's how it was.… You'd find, I think, quite a lot of thriller-readers among intelligence officers."

Such informed readers recognize most thrillers are not all that true-to-life -- except, said Rimington, for the works of John le Carre, himself a former intelligence officer. "He, in my view, creates the world of the Cold War absolutely brilliantly -- that sort of sense … that you were never quite sure about anything really -- the 'wilderness of mirrors' sort of idea. Was it the fact really that people that you trusted were in fact working for the other side? 'Everything was possible' -- that sort of sense."

Something that hardly seemed likely even in fiction came to pass in 1992, when Rimington was named publicly by the government as the new head of the still super-secret agency.

"The reason they did that," Rimington explained, "was because for the very first time we had an act of Parliament covering our activities; and the government felt that it was only proper that the British public should know who was holding this statutory appointment. So I had the, whether you call it good luck or the bad luck, of being the first head of the service to be publicly announced. And because I was a woman as well, it became a sort of immediate media fest.… I wasn't at all what the media expected. They thought that this was an entirely male-dominated world, and I should be something like James Bond, or Smiley out of John le Carre. And I turned out to be a middle-aged lady with two children, and it really wasn't what they expected at all!"

Stella Rimington became a household name in Britain. Her celebrity increased in 2001 when, after having left MI5, she wrote her memoirs -- an act that met with "a certain degree of hostility" in the Establishment. "I think it was the shock that somebody like myself might think of writing an autobiography -- being the first one ever to have done it … caused some people to reel back in horror," Rimington explained. "In fact, it was never my intention to reveal any of the nation's secrets, and I didn't."

Having broken into print with a nonfiction book, Rimington soon took the leap into fiction. "I suppose being an avid thriller-reader, I've always had in the back of my mind the thought that I would actually like to write a thriller myself. And somebody in my former profession has got lots of potential plots in their head, based on aspects of what's happened or what they can imagine might happen."

But, she discovered, writing fiction was "a different thing altogether" from writing memoir. "I don't find a huge amount of difficulty in the plot, or the characters," she said. "What I think I find most difficult is the development of the plot so that it runs smoothly along, and you don't sort of lose your way down side tracks.… All that turns out to be quite difficult, really, even for an old thriller-reader like myself."

The acknowledgements page of At Risk thanks author Luke Jennings, "whose help with the research and the writing made it all happen."

"Luke has helped me with the difficulties which I described," Rimington said, "getting the plot to kind of work smoothly through, and not allow myself to go down side alleys and things. So I write first drafts, and he helps me with them; so that, together, we try and pull the thing into a sort of shape, where we have a beginning and an end."

In At Risk, 34-year-old Liz Carlyle, member of the British Intelligence Joint Counter-Terrorist Group, and her colleagues hunt for and seek to neutralize an anonymous terrorist agent believed at large in Great Britain and bent on an unknown destructive mission. The terrorist is an "invisible," which the book terms "the ultimate intelligence nightmare: the terrorist who, because he or she is an ethnic native of the target country, can cross its borders unchecked, move around that country unquestioned, and infiltrate its institutions with ease." Even as Liz struggles with this espionage crisis, she must cope with the vexing exigencies of her private life.

"Liz Carlyle is a fictional character, obviously," said Rimington, "but also, obviously, she has got large chunks of me in her, and large chunks, I think, of other female MI5 officers that I've known over the years. Although MI5 is no longer the sort of male-dominated world it was when I joined, Liz still feels, as I did (and still do, probably) that she's got to prove herself in lots of different ways. And she gets cross if she feels she's being patronized by her male colleagues."

There's a second Liz Carlyle adventure now in the works, with the title Secret Asset. Stella Rimington, first-time novelist, chuckles at the mention of this next thriller's announced publication date: "If I spend too much time touring around America, I don't think it will be out in August of 2005… We'll just have to see." --Tom Nolan

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