Mother Superior jumps the gun
Henry Porter
OPEN SECRET by Stella Rimington Hutchinson, £18.99, pp. 296, ISBN 0091793602 he Mother Superior has said she is willing to have sex. Prior to getting into bed she consults a number of senior members of her church about what she can and can't do. Naturally they're alarmed to hear she is considering such a step. They oppose it and advise that because of her vows there is almost no act they can sanction. Surprisingly, the Mother Superior readily agrees to the conditions because she still desperately wants to go ahead with the experiment, if only on the grounds that no mother superior has done it before.
That is broadly the unpromising history of Stella Rimington's memoir, and many may wonder what can be had from an encounter in which the vows of the former Director of the Security Services remain to all intents and purposes untested. The knowledge also that platoons of government weeders have crawled through every paragraph of her book may not encourage readers to believe it's worth much beyond what has been filleted in the Guardian's skilful serialisation. Yet when read closely, Open Secret yields many surprising revelations about Dame Stella's personality.
She was born in May 1935 into a family which was obviously loving but also joyless and hard up. Her father had served and been wounded in the first world war and suffered acutely from stress-related illnesses. As the family moved from one rented house to another during the war she too became prone to extreme anxiety. She spent air raids in Liverpool visibly shaking and for a long time afterwards suffered from migraines and quite severe claustrophobia. As a young adult she was unable to sit in the middle of a row at a concert and when she saw she couldn't easily get out of a room she would break into a cold sweat and start to tremble.
Not perhaps the type you'd expect to end up running British counter-espionage and anti-terrorist operations, and eventually the whole of MI5. Indeed her early career as an archivist with the Worcestershire county archives and India Office library suggests that a rather mousy, pernickety person lay behind what a university careers adviser had described as an 'ill-made face'.
Her distinguishing trait, which first expressed itself in her role at the archives and later was to propel her ascent in MI5, is the need to control and organise things around her. She doesn't dwell on this because, aside from the theme about her struggle as a woman in a man's world and the problems of being a single parent, she is tight with emotional information. Possibly this intense desire to have everything organised is also evident in her obsession with property and domestic security. She rarely misses an opportunity to describe the advantages, frustrations and dimensions of each new home. What interested me was the rather puzzling need of the mistress spy to record the humdrum details of sitting tenants, damp courses, decorating decisions and the leaking boiler that killed her two cats, Burgess and Maclean.
Rimington was first recruited into the secret world in Delhi, where she was posted with her husband John. They returned to England and a dreary existence in Woking, 'living in someone else's house as people of no significance at all'. Having successfully applied to MI5, which was then housed in a number of different buildings in central London, she found herself on the drab frontiers of the Cold War, a world that consisted of tightly controlled cardindex systems, drunks and paranoiacs, sexist ex-colonials and spinsters who 'partake' of sherry at the end of the day. In other words, pure Le Carre, although she insists that he misrepresents the service of those days and is responsible for a general misunderstanding of what spies did and do.
In the early years she doesn't appear to have been particularly committed and, even after rising to an unprecedented level for a woman, she applied to be headmistress of Roedean. Since she had not the slightest experience of education, it was hardly surprising that she failed to get the job. It says something about her confidence that she thought she had a chance. By now she had separated from her husband John, a successful civil servant, and was bringing up two daughters by herself, so she had to forget life on the outside and make the best she could of MI5. Not long afterwards her big break came.
At one point in her narrative she tells us that she disliked ambiguities of all kinds. 'I am a very practical person. I don't like sitting around theorising. Above all I like to get on with things, to get things done. So sorting out muddles and getting facts or information in order is what I really enjoy.' In this one hears an echo of the early Margaret Thatcher and it is certainly this approach which helped Rimington to become firstly director of counterespionage, then counter-terrorism and in 1990 deputy director general. A year later, just after she returned from a surreal series of meetings with the KGB in Moscow (Agenda: How to run a security service in a democracy), she was appointed director
general and found herself all over the papers.
At this point the book becomes very oblique indeed and I have to say rather frustrating. The five years in the job were extremely interesting, but she only touches on MI5's successful bid to take over Scotland Yard's role as premier agency in the fight against the IRA. She says almost nothing about the subsequent victory over the IRA, which is surely one of the most substantial achievements of any agency in the world; nothing about the emerging threats from other terrorist and crime organisations; and sweet FA about the internet's implications for her line of work.
Of course one understands why she can't go the whole way for us, but the realisation only serves to underline the weirdness of her semi-commitment to the reader. You wonder what on earth she is up to. Is it plain old egotism, or merely the desire to taste the forbidden pleasures of self-expression, however limited? Either way, I was fascinated by this peculiar book (who couldn't be when the author omits even to give her family name?) and I cannot see that her unwitting self-exposure as partMrs Pooter represents the slightest threat to the nation's security.
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