Spy who came into the fold and led a quiet revolution

Independent Bath Literature Festival

Dame Stella Rimington was at the forefront of "a quiet revolution" that changed the way women were seen by MI5, she told the the Independent Bath Literature Festival.

"Running agents wasn't considered women's work," she said. "But in the 1970s and the rise of Women's Lib, we grew tired of being given second-class roles."

Dame Stella who rose to become director general of MI5 from 1992-96 and is now a best-selling author of spy thrillers, was scathing about the role of women in the late 1950s. Trained as an archivist, she left her job to go with her husband to New Delhi, where diplomatic wives had "little to do but coffee mornings and amateur dramatics".

One day, however, she got "a tap on the shoulder" and was offered a job as a clerk/typist. "I was given a little booklet which said MI5 was helping to protect the security of the state and said little more than that." In London, she was given a lowly job as an assistant officer and shared a room with two "well-bred but uneducated girls. At noon they'd bring out a bottle of sherry and two cut glasses."

Female members of the service were forbidden to talk about where they worked. "You could tell your fiancé, but not your boyfriend," she said. "You couldn't be undercover if everyone in the street knew what you were doing." At Christmas parties she had to have a cover story "but it often went wrong. If my cover story was that I bought boots for the army, I was sure to be introduced to a Major General."

With the Cold War at its height and bomb threats from the IRA, she had her hands full. "A new approach was needed and women turned out to be rather good at high-speed analysis," she said.

"You never had such a thing as 100 per cent knowledge and intelligence, so you had to make judgements about whether to take action or not."