Stella Rimington: The spy who brought MI5 out of the shadows

IN THE summer of 1967 Stella Rimington, the bored wife of a junior diplomat in New Delhi, was approached by another British official with a proposition: would she be interested in "helping out" in his office?

- Gavin Cordon looks at her life

The author of the request was “a baronet and a bachelor” best known among staff at the British high commission for his “excellent Sunday curry lunches” and for “driving round Delhi in a snazzy old Jaguar”.

He was also the senior liaison officer for MI5 - the British security service - in the Indian capital, and when the diplomat's wife accepted his offer of employment it was to mark her entry into the shadowy world of intelligence.

It was a curiously low-key start for a remarkable 29-year career marked by a series of “firsts” - culminating in her appointment as the UK’s first woman spymaster.

In that time, she found herself pitted against Russian espionage agents and IRA terrorists as well as, more controversially, domestic “subversives”, including the leaders of the 1984 miners’ strike.

Dubbed the “housewife superspy” when she became the first female director-general of MI5 - and the first to be named publicly - she did much to bring the service out of the shadows and explain its role to the public.

While she struggled with the publicity she was forced to move out when the press discovered where she lived she nevertheless appeared delighted when she was credited as the model for Judi Dench's M in the James Bond movies.

The greater openness she inaugurated went too far for some when, after leaving, in another first, she became the first former director-general to publish her memoir.

In retirement, she took on a number of non-executive directorships including for Marks & Spencer, using her surveillance skills to eavesdrop on customers to pick up what they were saying about the company’s products.

She also drew on her experiences to forge a successful second career as a thriller writer, with a series of novels about the fictional MI5 officer Liz Carlyle.

Stella Whitehouse was born on May 13, 1935, in South Norwood, a comfortable middle-class suburb in south London, the second of two children.