This is the book Whitehall did not want anyone to read, and as a
former Director-General of the Security Service, with twenty-seven
years' experience of the organisation, one can understand the
government's reluctance to encourage insiders to make indiscreet
disclosures. However, Dame Stella is the most unlikely person to
compromise national security, and she has revealed that the only
passage deleted from her manuscript concerned MI5's role in the
failed attack by the Provisional IRA on Gibraltar in 1988. On that
occasion three well-known Irish republican terrorists, under
constant surveillance by MI5 watchers, were shot dead by SAS
soldiers before they could detonate their bomb, but Rimington's
account does not even acknowledge that MI5 played any role at all
in the incident. Packed with mildly amusing anecdotes, usually
barbed to take long-delayed swipe at some unfortunate contemporary.
This is not a 'hit-and-tell', but more a catalogue of complaints
about how her necessarily covert career affected her family, and
how her impressive rise in a male-dominated environment supposedly
was handicapped by glass ceilings. Her colleagues, unsurprisingly,
are dismayed at her hypocrisy, having advised so many retirees to
hold their tongues under threat of losing their pensions, and
amazed at the number of grievances she has nurtured silently for so
long. The impression is of a rather na ve, self-absorbed,
competent, chippy bureaucrat who failed to find the confidence that
others took for granted, and who appears to have been unable to
exercise the power commonly associated with her status and her
quite unique responsibility. Has Dame Stella acted 'To Defend the
Realm', as MI5's motto requires? Certainly she has presented a
remarkable account of her many frustrations, but she will have won
no friends in so doing. Review by: Nigel West (Kirkus UK)
Stella Rimington was educated at Nottingham Girls' High School, and Edinburgh and Liverpool Universities. In 1959 she started work in the Worcestershire County Archives, moving in 1962 to the India Office Library in London, as Assistant Keeper responsible for manuscripts relating to the period of the British rule in India. In 1965 she joined the Security Service (MI5) part-time, while she was in India accompanying her husband on a posting to the British High Commission in New Delhi. On her return to the UK she joined MI5 as a full-time employee. During her career in MI5, which lasted from 1969 to 1996, Stella Rimington worked in all the main fields of the Service's responsibilities - counter-subversion, counter-espionage and counter-terrorism - and became successively Director of all three branches. She was appointed Director-General of MI5 in 1992. She was the first woman to hold the post and the first Director-General whose name was publicly announced on appointment.
During her time as DG she pursued a policy of greater openness for MI5, giving the 1994 Dimbleby Lecture on BBC TV and several other public lectures and publishing a booklet about the Service. She was made a Dame Commander of the Bath (DCB) in 1995 and has been awarded the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Laws by the Universities of Nottingham and Exeter. Following her retirement from MI5 in 1996, she has become a Non-Executive Director of Marks & Spencer, BG Group plc and Whitehead Mann GKR. She is Chairman of the Institute of Cancer Research and a member of the Board of the Royal Marsden NHS Trust. She has two daughters and a granddaughter.
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