Open Secret: The Autobiography of the Former Director-General of MI5

PROLOGUE

When I first opened my eyes, in May 1935, I might have thought, if I’d been capable of it, that I had not got too bad a deal. The world was a fairly safe and settled place and my family seemed a satisfactory though hardly glamorous one to be born into. Admittedly, my father had been unemployed and forced to try to earn a living selling the Encyclopaedia Britannica three years before, when my brother was born, but by the time of my birth, he had a secure job as a mechanical engineer in a firm with some good contracts. My parents had just bought a house with a garden in the new suburb of South Norwood. It would have seemed to most people, observing me as I first saw the light of day, that I was pretty well set up. But the fact that it was snowing on that May day should have warned that all might not be quite as secure and predictable as it seemed. And it wasn’t.

By the time I was four, everything had changed. The world was at war; my father’s job had disappeared; we had left our nice new south London suburb, by then far from the secure place it was intended to be, for a series of rented homes in the north of England. My safe life had become dangerous and insecure and I had become a frightened little girl.

From then on, nothing in my life ever turned out as expected. Having chosen a rather dull and safe career, I ended up as leader of one of the country’s intelligence agencies and a target for terrorists. Having conventionally married my schoolfriend, I ended up separated, a single parent. Having begun work in the days when women’s careers were not taken at all seriously and most lasted only between education and motherhood, I ended up advising ministers and Prime Ministers.

During my career, I have seen myself portrayed publicly in various different guises; in the 1980s I was Mrs Thatcher’s stooge, the leader of an arm of the secret state which was helping her to beat the miners’ strike and destroy the NUM. I was portrayed as the investigator of CND and even as the one who had ordered the murder of an old lady peace campaigner. In 1992, when I first emerged into the public gaze as Director-General of MI5, I became a sort of female James Bond, ‘Housewife Superspy’, ‘Mother of Two Gets Tough with Terrorists’. And finally, with the writing of this book, I have become to some a villain, ‘Reckless Rimington’, careless of our national security, opening the door to floods of reminiscences and damaging revelations. I don’t recognise myself in any of those roles.

The unexpected course of my life has involved me closely with some of the significant issues of the late 20th century: the rise of terrorism, the end of the Cold War and some of the big social questions – women’s place in society (how can work and family be combined?) civil liberties (how far should the state intrude on the citizens’ privacy to ensure their safety?) and open government (how much should the public know about the secret state and how should it be controlled?).

I have observed and participated in these issues from an unusual position, inside the secret state. But that does not mean my perspective is distorted or warped. Ian Fleming and John le Carré in their different ways have done the intelligence world few favours. The vast majority of those who work inside it are balanced, sane and sensible people, with a well developed sense of humour and a down-to-earth approach to the difficult issues they have to deal with. They have all the same problems in their lives as everyone else but they are, as I said publicly in 1994 in the Dimbleby Lecture on BBC TV, ‘positive, forward-looking and flexible and work hard to defend this country and its citizens against threats to its security’.