Cloak minus daggers for ex-MI5 boss

PAUL LASHMAR says do not expect a tell-all expose from a spymaster.

LONDON - Dame Stella Rimington is a woman of mystery as would befit the first woman head of MI5. For many years all we knew of her came from a grainy black-and-white photograph snatched with a telephoto lens outside her Islington home. This showed a tall, imperious woman in a smart coat and walking with purpose.

She has been the very embodiment of discretion. But there comes a time for every spy, after a lifetime of secrecy, that they want to tell their story. Rimington appears to be no different. The news this week that she wants to publish her memoirs has whetted the appetite of a public keen for a glimpse behind the bomb-proof net-curtains of MI5.

It could be a gripping read. Rimington helped undermine the 1980s coal strike, scored major coups against the IRA and set MI5 on its present post-Cold War course. Appointed director-general in 1991, when MI5 could have found itself redundant, she changed its objectives from counter-subversion and espionage to combating terrorism and later, organised crime. She retired in October 1995 and later became a director of Marks & Spencer.

The renegade MI5 officer David Shayler has protested that Rimington, his former boss, is being allowed to tell her MI5 story while he faces prosecution for telling his. But the circumstances could not be more different.

Since Shayler left the security service after five years in 1996 he has made allegations that British Intelligence was out of control and involved in acts of dubious legality. The British Government failed in its 1998 attempts to extradite Shayler from France for breaches of the Official Secrets Act. From his home in Paris Shayler has taken every opportunity to taunt the British Government and seek publicity for his case. His allegations have caused MI5 great embarrassment. They say Shayler has put agents lives at risk.

Unlike Shayler, Rimington has passed her book to the appropriate authorities for approval to publish. It is unlikely she has written anything they will feel the remotest need to censor.

Even so her book has come at a most embarrassing moment. In attempts to prevent the constant drip drip of leaks from Shayler in the British press, Special Branch are pursuing actions against a whole batch of British newspapers. As a result the Government and the intelligence services are facing accusations of stifling freedom of the press.

But despite its potential Rimington's book is likely to be rather dull and despite reports to contrary, these memoirs are not going to blow the lid off anything but a tin of Horlicks.

In the past Rimington has gone out of her way to deny some of the more colourful allegations against MI5 for instance that MI5 officers had conspired against Labour PM Harold Wilson in the early 1970s.

On another occasion she said about MI5 recruits, "The last sort of person we want is someone who thinks he is going to be like James Bond."

Certainly Rimington was not a naval commander like Bond. At the age of 24 the young Stella went to the University of Lancaster in 1959 to be trained as a historical archivist. She has said "If anyone at the time had told me I would end up the director general of MI5, I would have thought they had taken leave of their senses." She was never even a field operative but made her mark as the astute management of intelligence.

Rimington has carefully helped to create the image that MI5 is a rather bland bureaucracy and gives the impression that the most exciting thing ever to happen to her was being fined sterling 10 in 1997 for using her OAP pass before 9.30 am.

There was a glimpse of hope, when she was asked on BBC's Woman's Hour last year whether files had been kept by MI5 on Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Mandelson and Home Secretary Jack Straw. "If files were kept on them ... they would have been kept because they were linked with some organisation which was wishing to overthrow our democratic system." But pressed by interviewer whether these cabinet ministers "were really planning to overthrow the democratic system," Rimington conceded, "I think it is highly unlikely."

Despite some claims Rimington's book will not be the first autobiography by a former head of the Security Service. Post war MI5 chief Sir Percy Sillitoe, a former chief constable, wrote his memoirs. Self-censored and anodyne they might have been when it came to the spying bit, mainly playing up his role as a "moderniser" but they were the memoirs by a former head of MI5 nonetheless. Rimington might consider pinching the title, "Cloak without Daggers."

Rimington may know where MI5's skeletons are buried but she will not be resurrecting them for public examination. Rimington's memoirs will not be a romping tale of MI5 covert operations and dirty deeds against the red menace. There will be no intimate details of the sex lives of leading IRA figures recorded by secret microphones. More likely it is a civil service memoir defending MI5's recent record and discussing how British Intelligence was affected by the end of the Cold War. You can almost see the mandatory end chapter on "Whither MI5 in the 21st Century."

John le Carre will not be looking for a new job.

- INDEPENDENT