Mr Bakatin’s response to my opening remarks was friendly and welcoming. As for my request, he said that he would do what he could to look into the harassment, but in a surprisingly frank admission of his position, he added that he doubted whether he would be able to do anything about it. Turning to the man who had been in charge of the welcoming party at the airport, my one-time acquaintance from Delhi, he said that he knew that when enquiries were made, he would be told that it did not happen. That turned out to be true. Before we left, we were told that if such things occurred, it was not the KGB which was responsible. For a time after our visit such incidents became much rarer. I believe that later on they started again.
Mr Bakatin lasted only about six months in that post, and by January 1992 his imminent departure was announced. Others tried to push ahead with his reforming policies but eventually after a couple of years things began to go slowly into reverse and the successor organisations to the KGB took on many of its characteristics. Bakatin has since written a book about his time in charge, Izbavleniye ot KGB (Getting Rid of the KGB). But when my own appointment as Director-General of MI5 was made public, shortly after our visit to Moscow, he was still in post. Amongst all the congratulations I received, the letter from him, still head of the KGB, was the one I most enjoyed. It seemed the crowning unexpectedness of that whole unexpected period.
I recently had a rather extraordinary sidelight on that episode. In the autumn of 1999, I visited Kazakhstan with a delegation from BG plc, on whose Board I sit as a Non-Executive Director. We had gone there to look at the work the company and its partners are doing on the oil and gas fields in the north of the country. The very competent security men who were looking after us, who were employed by Group 4, were all ex-KGB men. They knew exactly who I was and we developed a very friendly rapport on the basis of our past employment. I told them I had been to Moscow to visit their headquarters in 1991 when Bakatin was the Chairman. ‘Ah yes,’ they said. ‘That was a very low period for the KGB. We thought all our influence was being taken away.’
The KGB in Moscow were not at all interested in our presentations about laws and oversight arrangements. They could not wait for Mr Bakatin to leave so we could get down to discussing the protocol they wanted me to sign, which would set out the terms of our future collaboration. I got the very obvious impression that if I had signed such a document, as a few Western services did, it would have been used as part of a public relations campaign the KGB were engaged in to prove their democratic credentials to their own citizens. It was obvious from all the meetings we had that at that stage, not surprisingly, they had little idea where they or their country were going.
On the second day we had meetings in another building within the Lubyanka with what we took to be the intelligence services of the group of independent states which was just being formed. There was no clear explanation given at any stage of who anyone was or what they represented. When we asked how they intended to organise themselves and operate now the USSR was being abolished, they just did not know.
In the gaps between our meetings, we sightsaw in temperatures colder than I had experienced. We filed past Lenin, still lying in state in his mausoleum, paid our ‘respects’ at Stalin’s memorial and went inside the marvellous cathedrals in the Kremlin, where religious services were again being held. While we did so, we were followed around closely by some part of the KGB, clearly not the A Team, as they were fairly conspicuous. ‘Perhaps,’ we thought, ‘they are making sure no harm comes to us,’ but I think it more likely that in that massive bureaucracy, people were merely doing what they always did.
One afternoon we drove out to Chekhov’s house outside Moscow. It was clear that we had got there before the local surveillance officers expected us. When we arrived we were the only group present, but a few minutes after we had gone into the house, there was a sound of running feet and suddenly a panting lady joined us, trying, without much success, to appear like an interested tourist looking round the house. In the evening we attended the Bolshoi ballet, sitting in the front row of the stalls in gilt armchairs, reserved for guests of the KGB.
As well as the request for an end to harassment, I wanted to establish what scope there was for a reduction in the espionage attack by the KGB on this country. It seemed to me not unreasonable to expect that if the Cold War was over, there should be less aggressive spying. This was a matter for the First Chief Directorate, the foreign intelligence arm of the KGB, so on the second evening of our stay, the head of the First Chief Directorate, Mr Primakov, later Russia’s Foreign Minister and briefly Prime Minister, invited me to a meeting to discuss that topic. My small party and I drove in the Ambassador’s Rolls Royce to what seemed in the dark to be a rather leafy suburb, to what I took to be a KGB safe house.
It was difficult to avoid the feeling that we had somehow slipped into a James Bond film and that reality had become confused with fiction. It was a dark, cold and snowy night. As I was taking off my snow boots in the hall, Mr Primakov materialised on the stairs to welcome us. We went upstairs to a lamplit sitting room, furnished with heavy curtains and drapery behind which anything could have been lurking. We had a brief, rather cool discussion. I asserted that in the new post-Cold-War conditions, there was much scope for cooperation on security matters, like terrorism and serious organised crime. However, if there was to be true cooperation, the level of KGB espionage on the UK should be reduced. Mr Primakov made it very clear that in his view that was a ridiculous idea. I was barking up completely the wrong tree. Espionage would continue to be necessary, for the defence of Russia, and they would continue to engage in it at whatever level they chose.
It was clear that the conversation was not likely to be very fruitful, so we called it a day before too long and he disappeared behind the draperies. When I regaled the Ambassador later with my account of this meeting over dinner, another frisson passed through the waitresses.
We went once more to that house the next evening for a farewell dinner with our new KGB ‘friends’ and the Ambassador. Mr Primakov did not reappear, but a fair cross-section of the others we had met did. I sat next to the man who was heading the KGB’s PR department, who advised me most sincerely, but surely with his tongue firmly in his cheek, of the need for intelligence services to be more frank and open. A couple of years later, one of his successors in that post was reported to have said, ‘There are friendly states, but no friendly intelligence services,’ a sentiment which characterised the nature of our ‘cooperation’ with the Russians for years to come.
Much champagne was drunk on that occasion and innumerable toasts, with many references to the number of women in top positions in the UK, along the lines of ‘Your Queen is a lady, your Prime Minister is a lady and now in MI5, dear Mrs Rimington, we have a lady.’ I made a speech in English, my colleague and the Ambassador made speeches in Russian. Everyone on the KGB side made a speech in one or the other language. The wheel had come full circle from the cocktail party in the Russian embassy in New Delhi in 1968.
If the level of later cooperation had matched the level of bonhomie that night, we would between us have cracked the problems of terrorism and organised crime for all time. Unfortunately it did not and it took several years for any real collaborative work to be done with the KGB’s successor organisations, the SVR and FSB, and when I left MI5 in 1996, cooperation had still not reached any significant level. In the new democratic Russia many of its former officers have joined new élites of various kinds and are making reputations and fortunes for themselves.
That will surely always remain the most extraordinary period of my life. Up to that point, it was inconceivable that I would ever visit the former Soviet Union or the countries of Eastern Europe, let alone that I would meet our opposite numbers there. For someone in my position, travel there, even on holiday, was prohibited until the early 1990s. The nearest I had got was looking over the wall into East Berlin in the early 1980s, seeing the desperately run down blocks of flats on the other side, t
he spikes and dogs in no-man’s land and the guards in the watch towers, and thinking how awful it was. Yet ten years later I met my German colleagues in East Germany at the hotel in Potsdam where Churchill, Truman and Stalin met in 1945 to organise the occupation of Germany.
I still find it hard to get used to being able to travel freely behind the former Iron Curtain. My feelings persisted into the summer of 1999 when I spent a holiday in Poland and found myself being punted on a raft down the river which forms the boundary between Poland and Slovakia. It was unimaginable, when I first worked in MI5 that that could ever happen, unless I had been under cover on some operation.
20
WHEN I GOT back from Moscow in the middle of December 1991, there was still no news about who was to succeed as Director-General. Speculation was growing, as everyone knew that the then Director-General’s sixtieth birthday was in February and that was when he would retire. But one day, shortly before Christmas, after a meeting, I was asked to stay behind and he said, ‘Congratulations. You are to be the next Director-General.’ By then, it did not come as a great surprise to me, but thinking about it now, it is, to say the least, rather strange that no-one had thought to ask me if I wanted the job. Whatever process had brought us to the point of my being told that I’d got it, this certainly was not open competition. No applications had been asked for and I had neither applied nor been interviewed, or not knowingly at any rate. What would have happened if at that late stage I had said I did not want it, I don’t know. But I did not say that, though it soon became clear that what I was being offered was something of a poisoned chalice.
At the same time as I was told that I had got the job, I was also told, almost by the way, that the appointment and my name were to be publicly announced, and the announcement would be in the next few days. It did not take me a moment’s thought to realise that there was likely to be a sensation. It was the first time the appointment of a Director-General of MI5 had ever been formally announced. What’s more, I was a woman and the first woman to hold the post, and that alone was bound to cause a stir. When I had recovered from the shock, I said, ‘I’m not sure this is a very good idea.’ I rang up the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, Clive Whitmore, to tell him so. But he seemed to think I was making a lot of fuss about nothing and anyway, ‘The Prime Minister has agreed,’ he said. It was clear that the powers-that-be in Whitehall had taken all the decisions and had signed up the ministers and trying to unscramble anything at that stage would not be a good way to start my period in office.
Unfortunately for me, they had been so focused on taking the decision that they seemed to have given no thought to the impact it would have, or how the inevitable furore should be handled. I asked what arrangements had been made to brief the press. Apart from the announcement, which was not to be accompanied by a photograph, for security reasons – the Provisional IRA were active in Great Britain at the time – nothing was laid on. It was not envisaged that I would give interviews and comment from me was to be restricted to a two-line statement of pleasure as part of the press statement.
Even I, inexperienced in the ways of the media as I was in those days, thought that was rather asking for trouble. The principle behind making the announcement was one I approved of. It was the logical outcome of the Act of Parliament which had been passed in 1989 to put the work of MI5 on a fully legal basis. The post of Director-General had thus become a statutory one and so, the thinking went, the public had a right to know who was holding the appointment. Truth to tell, there was also a good ‘equality’ angle to the story, which the government’s advisers had not missed. But the way the announcement was handled was a disaster, though as it turned out not a PR disaster, but a personal disaster for the girls and for me. Though I think we managed to turn it later to an advantage for MI5, its effect on our personal lives was permanent.
I decided that Harriet and I would go away from home the day of the announcement and stay away for a couple of days to let the furore die down, as I rather naïvely thought. Sophie was away at university. So we parked the dog with the security staff at the office and went to stay in a hotel in Half Moon Street, just round the corner from our Curzon Street office. We watched the TV news that evening, as they tried with difficulty to cope with the government’s announcement. They had no photograph, nobody knew anything about me and they didn’t know who to ask for a comment. In the end John, who as Director-General of the Health and Safety Executive occasionally appeared on TV when there was a disaster of some kind, agreed to comment. He told an astonished nation that they were lucky to have someone like me to look after them.
It was an extraordinary experience. Having spent all my career being anonymous and trying to keep in the shadows, saying as little as possible about myself or my work, I suddenly saw myself plastered all over the TV and the newspapers. The appointment became an international story and our contacts all over the world were sending us articles from newspapers from Hong Kong to Buenos Aires.
Unfortunately, I had not managed to contact Sophie to tell her what was going to happen, and she later told me that she was sitting in her digs that evening with the TV on in the corner of the room when she suddenly realised that they were talking about her mother. She said, ‘I thought you must have done something wrong, because I knew you were not supposed to talk about your work.’
After a couple of days, during which the story continued to run, Harriet and I got fed up with cowering in a hotel. It was too uncomfortable and we were worried about the dog, so we packed up, collected him from the office and went home.
The trouble was that Ian Fleming and John le Carré, depending on your taste in reading, had done their jobs too well. They had convinced us all that the world of intelligence was full of intrigue and excitement involving men like Alec Guinness or Sean Connery. When a middle-aged woman popped up as the only representative they had ever been told about, looking as someone said to me ‘as if you could have been a teacher’, no-one knew how to react. Their readers thought MI5 was just like the spy stories; that it had not changed since the days of Vernon Kell before the First World War. Not surprisingly, they did not know things had moved on. By saying nothing at all about ourselves and what we did, we had allowed the myths to continue. The semi-covert handling of the announcement of my appointment had merely made things worse.
But there’s no doubt at all that most of the excitement was caused because I was a woman, not at all what the spy story writers had told them the head of MI5 was like. The press was all over the place on this angle. At first, the headline writers tried to get me back where women belonged, in front of the kitchen sink. ‘Housewife Superspy’, said one. ‘Mother of Two Gets Tough with Terrorists’ and ‘Queen of All Our Secrets’ were some other efforts. Then we had the love interest. ‘MI5 Wife in Secret Love Split’, proclaimed the Sun. When the girls heard this on the Today Programme, they rushed out to buy the Sun, behaving just as the headline writers intended, thinking they were about to learn something amazing and scandalous about my private life. How disappointed they were when they found that all it said was that John and I were living separately.
Then I became ‘Woman of Mystery’, and people were invited to phone in if they knew anything about me. Later on I became a hard-eyed manipulator of Whitehall. Even later still, I was repackaged as ‘M’, Ian Fleming’s Head of MI6, and played by Judi Dench in several James Bond films. The Oxford Union asked whether Judi Dench and I would appear together to address them, I can’t remember on what subject, but, as ever, the substance would have mattered less than the appearance.
That was the beginning of one of the most uncomfortable periods of my life. The press inevitably found out very quickly where we lived. Lots of people in Islington knew us. The children had lived there most of their lives and had many friends and we had lived in the same street for nearly ten years by then though the neighbours had no idea what I did for a living. They were very surprised indeed to find that the quiet lady who lived in the house up
the road had turned out to be someone famous.
Photographers camped outside the house, determined to be the first to get a photograph. In the absence of anything better, the New Statesman’s blurry picture of me walking up the street in the black-and-white coat got lots of outings. The coat itself had long ago gone to a jumble sale but at that point it could probably have been sold for a large sum, the hype was so great. Before long the photographers succeeded, as inevitably they would, and several desperately unflattering pictures appeared of me unloading my shopping from the boot of the car on a Saturday morning, wearing tatty old jeans and a Barbour and looking as dishevelled as most people do in those circumstances. Some of the newspapers, entering into the spirit of things, printed their snatched photographs with a black band across my eyes, which made me look a lot worse. One of those pictures appeared in one newspaper to illustrate an article about British women in public life, asking why they always looked so much worse than the French. The French were represented by a photograph of Elizabeth Gigou, then the French Minister for Europe, leaning nonchalantly on her office desk, beautifully coiffured and wearing Dior, Yves St Laurent or something similar. That taught me what all women in public life have to learn fast, that you’d better look as good as you can, whatever you are doing, in case there is a telephoto lens about. Otherwise you risk looking ridiculous, and whatever institution or organisation you represent looking ridiculous with you. When I see Cherie Blair, slimmed down by remorseless exercise, stoically wearing her designer clothes on holiday, I know how she’s feeling.
After that, it was open house for the press and in due course the Sunday Times, fresh from its triumphs over the revelations about the marriage of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, chose to do an in-depth enquiry into my private life. Using a private investigator, they obtained details of my bank account – they even put some small sum of money into it under a spoof Russian name which they claimed was that of the head of the KGB – a list of the numbers which had been called from my home phone, which branch of Marks & Spencer I bought my Saturday shopping from, and various other things. I was rung up on a Saturday morning by a Sunday Times reporter, who told me proudly that they had obtained the information by covertly following me around and that they were going to publish it, on the grounds that it was in the public interest to know how vulnerable I was to terrorists. He added that if they wanted to they could get details of my medical records too. I was not sure what the public interest angle in that would have been but at the time it did not seem worth complaining, though I did later make a complaint to the Data Protection Commissioner, without any noticeable result.
Open Secret Page 27
