British spy who was groomed in Delhi

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON, SEPT. 9. New Delhi may not exactly be an ideal place for breeding world-class spies, but one of Britain's top sleuths and a former head of its secret service MI5, Dame Stella Rimington who is currently at the centre of a heated controversy over her coming memoirs, cut her teeth in the corridors of the British High Commission in Chanakyapuri.

Ms. Rimington, who has sparked a political row by writing about her time in the secret service, was the ``bored'' wife of a British diplomat in New Delhi in 1965 when MI5 recruited her to do a little snooping on the side. ``They have offered me a job working in the secret part of the High Commission, for five pounds a week, which I think I will take,'' she wrote home describing it as a welcome change from doing amateur dramatics for Delhi's anglophile theatre lovers. There is a photograph of Ms. Rimington, taken in 1968, shaking hands with the then President, Dr. Zakir Hussain. By then she had been an MI5 recruit in New Delhi for three years.

To know what precisely were her functions, one would have to wait until the memoirs are published, expected later this week, but given her meteoric rise in a service dominated by ``tweedy guys with pipes'' those early days in the Indian capital must have been pretty productive. One story says she was simply doing a ``little work as a clerk/typist'' but those who know a thing or two about spies point out that they come in many garbs - mostly under the least conspicuous of covers.

Ms. Rimington, who rose to become the first woman chief of MI5 and the first-ever agency head to be officially identified (until then the MI5 boss used to be a shadowy figure whose name was an official secret), has accused the British Government of trying to block the publication of her memoirs, ``Open Secret: From Bored Housewife to Head of the Secret Service''. She has in turn been attacked by the Government, MPs and her agency peers for betraying secrets of the ``family'' for ``30 pieces of silver'', a reference to the £ 600,000 advance she is believed have got for the book. Her critics, including a former KGB agent who worked for Britain, say it is unethical for former intelligence agents to disclose the internal functioning of an agency whose mainstay is secrecy. The Home Office has expressed its ``regret and discontent'' over her decision to publish.

In an interview to The Guardian which has paid a huge fee to publish extracts from the memoirs, starting on Monday, Ms. Rimington alleged that a whispering campaign was launched against her after she submitted her manuscript to Whitehall for vetting. She said she was shocked by ``some of the nastiness'' she suffered at the hands of the very people with whom she had worked and who were now trying to kill her book. There were attempts to ``deter, scare, and humiliate'' her - and it was ``quite upsetting because suddenly you go from being an insider to being an outsider and that's quick a shock.'' For the first time, she said, she realised what it must be like for ``outsiders'' to deal with the state. The memoirs have been heavily ``bluepencilled'' by the Home Office with all the ``inconvenient'' bits removed.

The final version is said to be too sanitised to generate headlines but there are references to MI5 keeping files on suspected left-wingers and civil rights activists some of whom are now Ministers in the Blair Government such as Mr. Jack Straw and Ms. Patricia Hewitt. There are also suggestions of BBC journalists being vetted by MI5 and prospective MPs being monitored to see ``if there is anything important - so the Prime Minister can take into account when he forms his Government.''

Ms. Rimington, who retired in 1996, is the latest in the growing list of former British spies who have controversially written about their career in MI5 - the most famous being David Shayler and Peter Wright. The Official Secrets Act bans any former member of the intelligence service from disclosing anything about their work and yet, from time to time, the have- been spies keep crawling out of the woodwork much to the Government's embarrassment.

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Section  : International
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