Former MI5 chief Stella Rimington says her new novel won`t be like James Bond

Stella Rimington made it to the top of MI5, the British intelligence agency, in 1992, becoming the first woman in that position. She had survived that once male-dominated club, spending decades toiling in secret to stay ahead in the Cold War, outsmart would-be attacks by the Irish Republican Army and wrestle with the emerging challenges of international terrorism - reports the Washington Post (USA).

She is now retired from the service and the author of "At Risk," a thriller she hopes will become one in a series. In an interview Wednesday at a hotel near the International Spy Museum, Rimington, 69, said her books will bring home that individuals involved in intelligence work "are ordinary people and not all men in bowler hats with rolled umbrellas under their arms."

"People need to know who you are because you need their support if you are going to work on protecting them," she said. "We are not right-wing nuts going around killing people like in spy movies."

As a child growing up during World War II, Rimington had to leave the comforts of a London apartment for the countryside of Essex. But her family was not spared the anxieties and uncertainties of the times. Many days were spent in a bomb shelter set up in their living room. By age 5, Rimington had learned Morse code and would flick the metal walls of the shelter to produce reverberating pings.

The family was forced to move again, as the waves of German bombers continued. She remembers being a frightened child, and she later developed claustrophobia. Yet life went on. "There was no counseling. In those days, you just absorbed the experience and dealt with it however you could," she said.

She attended the University of Edinburgh and later married John Rimington, an Oxford graduate who became a diplomat.

In 1966, at the height of the Cold War, her husband was posted to New Delhi. She went along with him and was offered a secretarial job with MI5. While her husband oversaw developmental aid, she was typing up reports about CIA, KGB and MI5 agents posing as agriculture secretaries and technical advisers. "I was hooked," she said.

When the couple returned to London, she took a full-time job with MI5. "I was starting out in a world I knew nothing about," she said. Her first job was monitoring members of the Communist Party in the official vetting process for government job applicants.

In the 1970s, as the IRA was becoming more threatening, she was moved to the office of counterespionage, which conducted surveillance on Russians and Eastern Europeans who were working covertly in the United Kingdom. Rimington said she was the duty officer the night a Bulgarian dissident was purportedly stabbed with a poisoned umbrella tip on the Waterloo Bridge in London. A tiny pellet containing ricin, a deadly poison, was injected into the man by a Bulgarian secret agent, and the substance oozed out into the dissident's body, killing him, Rimington explained.

This classic Cold War incident was overtaken by even deadlier scenarios. In 1988, for example, Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 people on board and 11 people on the ground.

"Terrorism for us comes from different sources, which is why the concept of a war on terrorism can never accurately deal with the problem," she said. "I am afraid terrorism is going to recur coming from different sources, and it is something we are going to have to deal with for a long time."

Based on her experiences at airports in the United States, she said there should be a better balance between protection and risk. She found the security heavy compared with that in Europe. On the other hand, she said, the integration of many European countries has turned out to be a security weakness by making it easier for people to move from country to country without inspection.

Because Britain is a multicultural society, "the government is having to deal with these potential threats but perpetually asking itself how to deal with them without restricting our freedoms," she said. "This is a classic dilemma. How do we protect people yet refrain from intruding on their private lives?"

She cautioned against acting on unreliable information, giving the example of the misinformation about weapons of mass destruction that led to the war in Iraq. "It is a bit like the wilderness of mirrors," she said.

As for her thrillers, "my potential plot is in my head. I hope that my novels are more accurate than some others," she said. "Unlike in James Bond movies, the heroes are not about constant action, but they also sit quietly and think to figure out what it all means and what the next piece of the puzzle is."

In a memoir titled "Open Secret," published in 2001 after she left MI5, Rimington chronicled the agency's transformation from an introverted, male-dominated and anonymous place into an organization more open to the population it is meant to serve and protect.

When she became director general in 1992, her bosses, without consulting her, decided to announce the name of the agency's leader to the public for the first time, probably to publicize the equality that had taken hold inside the institution. It turned out to be a "poisoned chalice," she wrote.

The news media hounded her, taking photographs that put her at risk and forcing her, just as during her wartime childhood, to move repeatedly. She also had her family use false names. Her two daughters would rush out the door to a date asking, "So, Mum, who am I?"

She remains pragmatic about it all. "The war experience gave me a very down-to-earth attitude that the world is a dangerous place and you have to deal with things as they are," she said. "You just went on with it."

Thanks to `JP` for the alert.

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