Author: Stella Rimington
ISBN No: 009 179360 2
Review date: 16/12/2025
No of pages: 0
Publisher:
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
The best and most successful spies are the quiet, apparently boring and dull people who go on doing the same thing year after year, and the best counter-espionage officers are those who match them for perseverance.' So says Stella Rimington.
‘The best and most successful spies are the quiet, apparently boring and dull people who go on doing the same thing year after year, and the best counter-espionage officers are those who match them for perseverance.’ So says Stella Rimington, former head of MI5, in her autobiography Open Secret. The intelligence world she unveils has much in common with security: there’s no public praise for success, but failure is plain to see in ruins and casualties. Before and after publication of her memoirs, debate raged over whether she was right to go public, let alone whether her book would be any good. The book rather skates over the last years of her career (1969-1996) – the last four as Director-General. We learn she had to go’ underground’ and suffered phone and letter stalkers because she was identified. She had to leave her Islington, London home for an MI5 flat in Grosvenor Street, where security guards looked after her dog, taking it on patrol and giving it a photo-ID badge. You can understand why she is light on details that could hinder current operations, and why the authorities were against publication. Take this anecdote from 1999, when she visited Kazakhstan as a board member of BG plc about the gas and oil industry. ‘The very competent security men who were looking after us, who were employed by Group 4, were all ex-KGB men.’ Group 4, whose Security Support Services arm has lately set up a regional office in Kazakhstan, like any security firm will not like to have their name and the KGB in the same sentence. (Though Rimington does say she had a friendly rapport with the ex-enemy spies.) She drops names and anecdotes well: MI5 boobed when they gave the visiting Mrs Thatcher a whisky of the wrong strength. Her story is of one woman’s rise to the top. The early 1970s secret service comes across as ‘male-dominated and old-fashioned’ (her words) with a ‘lack of prioritisation’. Some men were downright boozy and lazy. If you think of the world since September 11 as bleak, recall 1973. Rimington points out that the IRA bombing and miners’ strikes made for a ‘feeling that civilised life was coming to an end’. She worked on the Cold War, counter-terrorism, and counter-subversion during the 1984 miners’ strike. I wonder if even Rimington appreciates her remarkable self-journey, using her management skills and gift for putting her best foot forward (hence this book’). You can see it even in her clothes and hairstyle, from the photos. One criticism is that Rimington is writing ‘Whig history’ – telling the story of MI5 as one of gradual change for the better, leading to the ideal present. She ends by wondering aloud if the public services have become over-accountable. ‘It does seem to me to be a characteristic of contemporary thinking that when something goes wrong, rather than addressing ourselves to the reason for failure, we instinctively rush to add another layer of regulation and oversight.’ So you’re not applying to chair the Private Security Industry Authority then, Stella’ Open Secret: The Autobiography of the former Director-General of MI5, by Stella Rimington.
