Dame Stella Rimington: 'A good spy is able to talk to anybody'

After serving as the first female leader of the British intelligence agency MI5, Stella Rimington now writes espionage thrillers.

Spies need special training and some intelligence, the 89-year-old tells Saturday Morning, but the most important prerequisite by far is natural friendliness.

“I would look for a personality that was able to talk to anybody - an open, friendly personality which also contains the commonsense and the strength not to have to tell everybody what's going on.”

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When Rimington started working at MI5 in the 1950s, women were regarded as in-house "helpers"she says.

"[Working outside] was not for ladies, that was what men did. The ladies were stuck back at headquarters, filling in forms and writing up reports - they did not go out and gather the intelligence.

“We made a sort of protest to the bosses of ‘why are we doing all this sort of support work? … In the end, they had to accept a few of us, send us on the courses and allow us to allow us to try our hand. Of course, we turned out to be perfectly capable.”

When Rimington became MI5's Director-General in 1992, she received "a great deal of heel-clicking and hand-kissing" from European contemporaries before being accepted as “an ordinary person”.

As the first national intelligence director to become a public figure, she was the first to speak publicly about threats - a “cautious beginning” to the greater openness of security agencies today.

She hopes "the proper relationship between secrecy and openness" can be maintained by English intelligence leaders in the face of potential threats to come.

“There seems to me to be a serious threat from governments like President Trump's to the intelligence services, to secrecy, to efficiency, etc, from the strong man who wants to control things and appoint everybody to wherever he feels it's appropriate. I'd be fascinated to know how United States intelligence services are coping with the new situation there.”

Although the female-led spy thrillers Rimington has written since 2004 are are meant to be entertaining rather than explanatory, they sometimes feature characters that resemble her former MI5 colleagues, she says, and are "realistic" in covering current security threats.

Her latest -The Hidden Hand - follows a Chinese student forced by her government to become an 'intelligence thief' at Oxford University.

Although British members of parliament have been “almost naive” on the subject, Rimington says, China has “certainly risen well up the list of threats” to British security since the 1990s.

“The dilemma we face with China is that it's partly a friend, partly a commercial ally, and partly a potential threat or enemy that's becoming increasingly difficult to deal with.”

Due to an inherited and incurable form of macular degeneration, Rimington's eyesight seriously declined while writing The Hidden Handand she's "rather sad" to report that it may well be her final book.

“When I started [my eyesight] was fine, but it became more and more difficult, and I had to recruit members of the family to type what I was dictating.”

If there's to be no further writing projects, she will “while away her time quite nicely” from this point - with two dogs that need walking, five grandkids and an infinite number of audiobooks available.

“To sit quietly listening to other people’s books on Audible … I find it's a wonderful way to pass the time when I feel more like sitting down than gardening.”

Dame Stella Rimington discusses the difficulty of juggling life as a mother and a spy: