Stella Rimington, first female head of British intel agency MI5, dies at 90

Stella Rimington, the first female head of Britain’s domestic security agency, MI5, and the widely credited inspiration for Judi Dench’s M in several James Bond films, died Aug. 3. She was 90.

Her family announced the death in a statement shared by her literary agency. They did not say where or how she died.

When she was appointed MI5’s next director general in 1991, Ms. Rimington became the agency’s first spy chief to be publicly named. Revealing the identity of the agency’s head had been a crime for years, until new laws aimed at transparency brought the appointment process into the open. She officially stepped in to the job in 1992 and, after retiring in 1996, she was made a dame by Queen Elizabeth II and wrote books, including a memoir and a series of spy thrillers.

MI5 Director General Ken McCallum said in a statement that Ms. Rimington was “the first avowed female head of any intelligence agency in the world” and credited her with ushering in “a new era of openness and transparency” at the intelligence service.

Stella Whitehouse was born in South London on May 13, 1935, and moved to the English countryside during World War II.

In a 2005 interview, she told The Washington Post that she learned Morse code by age 5 and would practice by pinging her fingers against the metal wall of a bomb shelter her family had set up in their living room. Frightened by the waves of German bombings, she later developed claustrophobia.

“There was no counseling. In those days, you just absorbed the experience and dealt with it however you could,” she said.

Ms. Rimington studied at the universities of Edinburgh and Liverpool, worked as an archivist and married a civil servant, John Rimington, accompanying him on a diplomatic posting to New Delhi in 1965. While there, she was recruited to join MI5’s office at the British High Commission, where she initially worked as a part-time clerk and typist, according to a biography on her website.

Her husband’s purview was developmental aid, but Ms. Rimington was working on reports about undercover CIA, KGB and MI5 agents.

“I was hooked,” she told The Post.

The couple returned to Britain in 1969, and she joined MI5 full time. Ms. Rimington rose through the ranks, serving as director of each of the agency’s operational branches - countersubversion, counterespionage and counterterrorism - before being appointed director general.

The decision to publicly name her was made without consulting her, The Post reported. She later called the announcement a “poisoned chalice,” with the resulting media scrutiny putting her at risk and necessitating repeated moves and even the use of false names for her family. “So, Mum, who am I today?” she said her daughters would ask as they left the house.

Her tasks at the agency included operations targeting the Provisional Irish Republican Army and Soviet agents working in Britain and, controversially, monitoring union leaders during the coal miners’ strike of 1984-85. She later said the spy agency may have been “overenthusiastic” in its investigations of left-wing groups during the Cold War, the BBC reported.

Soon after Ms. Rimington ascended to the top of MI5, Dench debuted as 007’s boss, M, in the 1995 movie “GoldenEye.” Her casting, as the head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service MI6, offered what the British Film Institute described as an “inspired comment” on the real-life changes in the top ranks of the country’s spy agencies. Previous iterations of M had been played by male actors, and the character was a man in Ian Fleming’s books, from which the film series was adapted.

Ms. Rimington told the BBC in 2001 that she found Dench’s performance “startling”; one of her daughters commented that Dench even “holds her hands the way I do.” Ralph Fiennes took over the role at the end of 2012’s “Skyfall.” (In real life, MI6 would not have a female head until this year, when Blaise Metreweli was announced as the incoming chief, set to start in October.)

After her life in public service, Ms. Rimington - who had a master’s degree in English and literature - turned to writing.

The publication of her 2001 memoir, “Open Secret,” caused backlash among some intelligence and government officials who argued that she was too candid about her years at MI5. But she said that she believed it would be beneficial for intelligence agencies if the public understood their work better.

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

Ms. Rimington wrote more than 10 novels, all thrillers set in the world of espionage with female protagonists. She told an Australian women’s magazine in 2004 that her former job provided plenty of inspiration: “Anybody who works in the intelligence world has got access to good material - a number of good plots are around.”

In addition to her husband, survivors include two daughters and five grandchildren.