Open Secret

by Stella Rimington

  The situation became even more heated when a small conference centre at the top of our street took a booking for a conference with a security theme. It had nothing to do with us or with any part of government, but the Islington police judged that security protection was needed, and closed the road with barriers and police cars. Not surprisingly, the neighbours and the local paper, the Islington Gazette, connected this with my presence in the road, and everyone began to regard me as a thoroughly undesirable neighbour. People with whom I had been on nodding terms for several years, suddenly started to say things like: ‘I wish you wouldn’t go to work just as I’m taking my daughter to school,’ with the clear implication that if someone tried to shoot me and missed, they might hit them. Another neighbour wrote to the Islington Gazette to complain that my helicopters, ceaselessly circling overhead were keeping his family awake. The helicopters were part of the policing of the Arsenal football matches and had nothing at all to do with me. I went to a meeting of the neighbours, to try to calm all this down, but I did not have much success, in fact I think I made matters worse. When one of the neighbours on the other side of the road let in a press photographer and a large picture of our house appeared prominently in the Independent, there seemed no option but to pack up and go. With the level of Provisional IRA activity at the time, it was clearly not safe for us to stay.

  Having decided we had to move, the question became where to? Though it had long been the custom for certain ministers and military Chiefs of Staff to have secure accommodation provided for them, no such arrangement had previously been necessary for the heads of the intelligence agencies, who had until then been protected by anonymity and lived the life of ordinary private citizens. This was a new situation, and it took many discussions in Whitehall and some time to sort out. But though it was uncomfortable for us, it was a bit of a joke for others that the Director-General was wandering around the town, living out of a suitcase, with nowhere to lay her head. In an article in the Spectator about my brush with the Sunday Times, Auberon Waugh told the probably apocryphal story of Roger Hollis, the Director-General under Macmillan, who lived in an unguarded house in Campden Hill Square in West London. At one point, according to Waugh, the Prime Minister’s private secretary took to telephoning him at home and saying, ‘Aha, villain! I know your secret,’ then hanging up. The calls were eventually traced to the Prime Minister’s office and there was a great stink.

  After the Independent photograph, my security advisers wanted me to go quickly while they assessed the situation, so we – Harriet, dog and I – moved into a flat at the top of some offices we had in those days in Grosvenor Street. It was the most uncomfortable and unsuitable place to be for any length of time. To take the dog for a walk, you had to descend several floors in a lift and walk through miles of corridors, past the guards to the street. It was practically impossible for Harriet to invite her friends in to see her. We felt as though we were in prison. In the daytime, the dog had to come into my office, where the security guards looked after him. After a bit they made him an honorary member of their team, as Alpha 7, with a pass on his collar showing a photograph of a dog, which they had cut out from a magazine. He went on the regular security patrols with them and was rather proud of his new status, but he was the only member of the family who was enjoying himself.

  As part of the process, we went to look at a Whitehall building, where some of the ministers who need particular security protection live. There was one vacant flat, which it was thought for a time we might have. But when Harriet saw that cavernous place, with its immense, high rooms filled with the most decrepit, albeit antique, furniture, and realised that all her friends would have to pass the scrutiny of armed policemen to visit her, she burst into tears and said that whatever happened she was not going to live there. Even though I pointed out what a splendid view we would have of the Trooping of the Colour, she was not to be persuaded. For her it had all become just too much. I began to worry that if this went on much longer, I was going to lose all my family. That was a sacrifice I was not prepared to make, for my career or the country. So we went back home to consider what to do next.

  It was tough for the girls. Harriet was just starting work for her A Levels. She was often alone in the evenings during that period when I was working late or away and she was scared stiff. She told me later that she did not know what she was more afraid of, the press at the front door or creakings on the stairs in the evenings, which might be the IRA creeping in at the back. It was not Harriet the journalists were after, so though she had to run the gauntlet of the photographers, she could go in and out of the front door with impunity. But while we were sticking to the ‘no photograph’ policy, I had to slink out through the gate at the back, into someone else’s garden, and reappear out of the side door of a house in the next street. It was all very disruptive to my daily schedule.

  Sophie had a rough time too, even though she was away. A flat in north London where she sometimes stayed with friends was raided by the anti-terrorist squad who were looking for a group of IRA suspects in connection with the bomb at Harrods. She was not there when the police broke in, but her friends were spread-eagled on the floor and taken in for questioning. Not surprisingly, they all thought she was to blame and no-one believed the truth which was that the police had raided the wrong address. That story, which featured under prominent headlines in most newspapers (typically in the Daily Star as ‘Spy Chief Girl in IRA Cop Gaffe’) convinced some journalists that there was no smoke without fire and that if she was not a terrorist she must belong to an extreme left wing student group. They demanded interviews on the grounds that it was in the public interest. Some turned up unannounced at the door of a remote cottage where she was living at the time, when she was there alone, and without saying who they were, thrust cameras and a microphone into her face, confusing and terrifying her.

  The advice continued to be that we should move, and that advice became more urgent when some men who were arrested in connection with one of the bombing raids in London proved to have a newspaper cutting which made it clear where we lived. So we put the house on the market. Clearly we were never going to be able to live there again. We went underground, an ironic outcome of greater openness. Our new covert life was not easy, particularly for the girls. It is difficult to lead a normal young life if you have to be careful all the time whom you invite to the house, and give your telephone number to. Their particular worry centred on their car. It was registered and insured in another name, and they were always worried in case they were stopped by the police or had an accident. They used to say before they went out, ‘Now just tell me again, Mum, who am I?’

  The whole of my time as Director-General was dogged by our unsettled living arrangements, because even when it was agreed where we should live, it was a place that needed a lot of work to make it habitable. Harriet and I camped there surrounded by builders for more than a year. Our first Christmas dinner there, nearly two years after I took up the job, was held in a room furnished with garden chairs and lit only by candles in bottles.

  I bought another house for my retirement, but unfortunately I was just beginning to move myself in, during the winter before I retired, when something froze in the roof over a long weekend when I was away, and the next thing I knew was that all the ceilings had collapsed and the place was a total wreck. The massive damage was only discovered when a neighbour rang the estate agent who had sold me the property, and through a circuitous route the news came into my office that water could be heard running in my house. I was in a meeting with the Prime Minister at the time, introducing my successor, so a colleague went to investigate. When he opened the door, water was pouring down the stairs and out of every door frame and light fitting, there was about a foot of water in the basement and all the carpets were squelching. They hardly dared tell me what had happened, and I was forbidden to go and look, until pumping and debris-clearing operations had finished. All that took more than a year to sort out. So my last few months as
Director-General, just like my first years, were overshadowed by living problems.

  The initial excitement of the announcement of my appointment took a long time to die down. More than a year after I was appointed things were still quite hysterical. I was invited to one of HM The Queen’s regular lunches for people in public life. There were a number of famous people there, including the then manager of the England football team, Graham Taylor, and Linford Christie. However, the press got wind that I was there, and assembled at the gates of Buckingham Palace to take my photograph as I left. At the time, on the advice of my security advisers, we were still pursuing the ‘no photograph’ policy, so with the connivance of the Royal Household, I slunk out ignominiously through the Royal Mews after lunch was over. But that did not put the reporters off, and we had, ‘Oh to be a Fly with the Spy at the Palace’, covering an article about what I might have said to my fellow guests.

  For the first few years I was bombarded with requests to make public appearances of various kinds, all of which were most unsuitable for a public servant and a successor of Vernon Kell. By every post came invitations – would I appear on Wogan or the Clive Anderson Show or Have I Got News for You? Would I be interviewed by Vogue, or be a guest on Masterchef or sit on the sofa with Richard and Judy? I had no illusions that most of it was because I was a woman, and the press still liked to play to what it perceived as the sexism of its readers. None of the male Permanent Secretaries in Whitehall was asked to do any of it and nor did I take up the invitations.

  There is no doubt that our first steps into openness could easily have been better handled. But there’s also no doubt that there would have been far less fuss had I been a man. When later on the names of the heads of the other two intelligence agencies, MI6 and GCHQ, were publicly announced, there was hardly a ripple, though by then some of the lessons of handling such announcements had been learned. When I retired and my successor was named, we had become much more adept at these things and as he was a man and the announcement was expected, thankfully he had none of the same furore to put up with.

  In spite of the media reaction, to my colleagues and the intelligence community, in this country and abroad, my appointment came as no particular surprise. Nearly half the staff of MI5 was female by that time and although many of them still worked as clerks and secretaries, there was also a fair percentage of women in the intelligence officer and other professional grades, though they were not as well represented at the top as they will be in the near future. I have made fun of some of my male colleagues of the ’70s, describing them as old-fashioned and traditional in their attitudes, but whatever criticisms can be laid at the door of some of them, I had been allowed to progress up the hierarchy without ever feeling that to get on I had to pretend to be or to think exactly like them. Whatever popular fiction would have us believe, there is no typical MI5 officer, no overpowering ‘house style’, to which everyone is required to conform. On the contrary, diversity, individuality and even eccentricity have always been tolerated, provided that there was a clear willingness to work within the operational and legal rules.

  By the time I became Director-General, MI5 had been through a series of huge institutional shocks, bringing about big changes in its culture, the type of people it employed and the way it managed its resources, both human and financial. Even our task was changing. As we moved away from the priorities of the Cold War and with legislation and oversight, we began to emerge uneasily from behind the veil of secrecy which had hidden us for most of my working life. We had coped with all this change with what I think in retrospect was quite surprising sang-froid, calmly getting on with the task in hand. But there was a strong sense that though we had moved on a long way, we had not yet arrived anywhere. As Director-General I had been turned into a public figure; we were about to move to a new high-profile building and to take on, quite publicly, major new terrorism responsibilities. In marketing jargon, where should we position ourselves in this new world order? Who were we now? My role would be to find an answer to that question. The chaotic start to my period as Director-General made this urgent both professionally and privately.

  As Director-General my approach was collegiate, a style which I found worked well, although, as I have learned in the last few years, it is scorned by many of our business leaders. It is a style which comes more naturally to women, who tend on the whole to feel more able than many successful men to look for and create consensus, and more inclined to ask for and listen to advice. The Board of Directors became a group of equals where our strategies and policies were discussed, a far cry from the Directors’ meetings I had attended some years before. I encouraged my Directors to behave corporately and not as barons each representing their own fiefdoms, though they needed little encouragement on this as they all had views on the issues and were anxious to air them. We also listened to the advice and experience of people from various walks of life outside the public service; I was determined not to fall into the mistake of earlier days in allowing ourselves to be cut off from the outside world.

  We went off to the country for the first ever Board ‘Awayday’, and over a weekend we did our SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) and sang songs round the piano in the evenings. The management gurus would have been proud of us. Many things emerged from that occasion and its successors, which produced a strategic agenda. But the one thing that emerged most clearly, not least as a result of the intense interest of the press in my appointment and the nonsense that many of them wrote, was the huge gap between the perception of MI5 and the reality.

  As long as I could remember, we had suffered from ill-informed and often hostile comments on our affairs. It was in large part our own fault because we had never commented and never sought to put the record straight, though some of us had long thought that we should, and there’s no doubt that silence had harmed our reputation and with it, to some extent, our effectiveness. External perceptions mattered more than they had in the days of the Cold War. Then secrecy was more important than public understanding. Now the balance had changed. As MI5 moved more and more into work against terrorism, it was inevitable that more of its activities and investigations would come to public attention, whether we liked it or not, if only through trials in the courts. It was important that juries and judges believed the evidence our officers would give. If their entire knowledge of MI5 was based on James Bond films or John le Carré novels, or even on the sort of reporting which was at that time common in the press, they might think not a word we said could be trusted.

  In any case it was undermining for the morale of the staff, who were being called on to work hard in sometimes dangerous circumstances, to see misleading and silly stories about what they were supposedly doing continually appearing in the newspapers. I had got fed up with the ‘MI5 Blunders’ headline, which seemed to be permanently made up and ready for use above any story in which the intelligence services figured. So the task was to get rid of that headline once and for all and to raise the level of debate about security matters. It was a mission to inform, using my high public profile as a way of doing it.

  Clearly, an effective intelligence service cannot be entirely open about itself. Details of specific operations, techniques, the names of agents must always remain secret. But there is much that can and should be aired about the need for secret organisations in a democracy and how they should be controlled. There were risks, and many people ready to warn of them, not least some members of the Service who feared that greater openness would raise the profile and therefore the risks of terrorist attack. And they had a valid point. It was a question of balancing the risks and the rewards. ‘It will be a slippery slope,’ they said. ‘You may think you can set boundaries on what you will say, but the press will push remorselessly and you’ll find yourselves saying more and more.’ ‘A wise virgin keeps her veils,’ Simon Jenkins warned us in The Times.

  I felt entirely confident about the story we had to tell and reasonably confident that we could s
tick to the boundaries we had set ourselves. We were an effective, well run, legally based and overseen organisation, of which the country could and should be proud. Like any organisation, we would not always get everything right, but when we did not, we were prepared to explain ourselves. We listened to the warnings, but decided that an even wiser virgin knows exactly how many veils she can cast off while remaining safe.

  So an openness programme was drawn up in the hope of getting us off the back foot and into the lead. We did not take advice from PR consultants, but worked it out for ourselves. The various steps were obvious, though they were not achieved without a considerable amount of angst elsewhere in the system. A first step was to publish a booklet about MI5, putting some facts into the public domain for the first time. It is now in its third edition. The process of getting the first edition off the stocks would have made a good episode of Yes Minister. After much debate about the principle and the content – every word of the draft text was scrutinised in case it said something that somebody might regret at some time in the future – Whitehall reluctantly acquiesced and the Home Office even agreed that when it was published, I should present it to the media at a launch conference at the Home Office.