Stella Rimington: the day I met the KGB

The former MI5 chief turned novelist discusses over lunch her strangest meal ever, the state of the secret services – and the advantages of owning a dog

• 
• • Tim Adams
  • The Observer, Saturday 15 June 2013

Stella Rimington. Illustration: Lyndon Hayes

The strangest meal Dame Stella Rimington ever had was soon after the Berlin Wall came down, when the senior members of Britain's secret services met their counterparts at the Lubyanka in Moscow. Having spent nearly 40 years Tinker Tailor Soldier Spying on each other, desperate for scraps of information, here they were walking through the front door of the KGB building. "We must have looked like something out of the zoo to them," she says, "and they did to us. We had only defectors' accounts of these people, and suddenly here they all were in front of us."

Was there, I wonder, a sudden sense of shared humanity, a celebration of the final thawing of the cold war?
"No, there wasn't," she says, with a quick laugh. "It was more like wild animals looking at prey they could no longer eat. They were in this highly disturbed state where everything they had taken for granted about the future no longer applied. But one thing was for sure – they were going to hang on to their own positions and power. [Boris] Yeltsin had put a professor in charge in the hope of democratising and modernising them. He didn't last more than a few months."

Old habits dying hard, the Russian intelligence services still followed the Brits around Moscow on that trip and when they had a private dinner they knew their conversation was being recorded and all the ham-fisted waiters were KGB men. "Suddenly we didn't care at all. There was a hysteria around the table so we all started saying various things that caused the waiters to twitch and raise their eyebrows. It was quite the weirdest day of my life."

Rimington, now 78, is recalling these events in the Red Lion and Sun in Highgate, a gastro pub not far from her London home. My recording machine is in plain sight on the table. I guess in retirement all working lives seem another country, but few can seem as foreign a place as that of the ex-head of MI5. She attempts to bridge that gap by writing spy fiction; the seventh of her novels featuring her young alter ego Liz Carlyle is about to be published. She lives mainly in the country, and as she says: "Sitting, as I was doing the other day, in Norfolk imagining someone in difficulty in the Yemeni desert is tremendously relaxing."

Rimington is a surprisingly informal and warm presence, giving hardly a clue in her manner of her former power. Others worry about her security, but she doesn't. If she does venture out for lunch it will almost always be to a gastro pub for which she is spoilt for choice near both her homes. She likes this one because it is "cosy, unfussy and they have kept the original fixtures" and orders decisively the asparagus and salmon with nicoise salad, and a glass of sauvignon blanc. "The nature of my career has made me wary of social things," she says. "Initially, there was the need to not tell people what you did. You would slightly dread the question because you know you would have to make up some story."
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