British royals, politicians and universities are easy targets for Chinese spies, the first female director of the intelligence agency says - and one reason she’s written a thriller about it.
For an 89-year-old, Stella Rimington is surprisingly of the moment. She is just about to publish her 12th spy novel, and even in the year and a bit it took her to write it, the plot - which concerns Chinese intelligence penetration of Britain’s universities - has only become more topical.
Rimington, the first female director general of MI5 - and the first to be publicly identified when she was appointed - depicts a world in which Beijing’s Ministry of State Security sends Chinese students to the UK to steal new technology, bully their colleagues and bribe leading academics with bursaries and scholarships in exchange for turning a blind eye to their activities.
In 2022 MI5 issued an “interference alert” against Christine Lee, a businesswoman well known in Westminster for having “knowingly engaged in political interference activities” on behalf of Beijing, including donating more than £500,000 ($1 million) to the Labour MP Barry Gardiner. Lee lost an appeal against MI5 last month. A parliamentary group that warns about Chinese influence was embarrassed when it turned out to be advised by a man now charged with spying for China: the researcher Christopher Cash is due to stand trial this year.
Most recently it was revealed that the Duke of York had gone into business with, and invited to Buckingham Palace, another man, Yang Tengbo, who has been banned from the UK on national security grounds and denies claims that he is a Chinese agent.
Rimington, who has the stern bearing of a schoolmistress but a subversive glint in her eye that is common among those of a certain age who no longer care whom they offend, is not impressed - with the politicians or the royals. “I find that quite surprising, actually, because members of parliament are briefed on the things to look out for and the pits not to fall into. They do seem to behave pretty naively - not only the parliamentary people, but the royal family, who are certainly briefed on all kinds of things that might be circling around.”
She pauses, contemplating the recent revelations about Prince Andrew. “Maybe he’s just the weakest link.” There is more than a trace of Anne Robinson’s curled lip as she dismisses another quiz show contestant in the way this line is delivered. I suggest that is a verdict on him that his brother the King would share. “Yes, I think he probably would, actually,” she says.
Having got the measure of Andrew and dismissed the political class, Rimington delivers the big news that she is hanging up her keyboard for good. The Hidden Hand will be her final book. “I think it’s my last one because my eyesight is going and I can no longer see to type,” she explains. “The idea of retiring and doing nothing is just awful to me. But my family are getting quite cross now and saying, ‘You’ve got to retire.’”
The Hidden Hand is a brisk and enjoyable tale. The protagonist, Li Min, is a pioneer of deep fake videos, which she begins the book regarding as a technical rather than a moral challenge. She is compelled by the Chinese authorities to transfer from Harvard to a fictional Oxford college, St Felix’s, where Beijing is funding an institute. Her handler, Deng, orders her to target the daughter of a US military man.
The most interesting thing about the book, however, is the picture it paints of naive academics and institutions ill-equipped to deal with a world where Britain’s adversaries play by different rules. The Chinese students live off campus under the watchful eye of an outsized enforcer called Mr Chen. It is only when one of them disappears that the new head of the institute, a former diplomat, contacts an old friend in intelligence. Manon Tyler, a young CIA officer who featured in Rimington’s previous book, is sent in undercover to befriend Li Min and find out what has been going on.
The book is a warning to those who still don’t see China as an enemy. “Most people haven’t experienced any aggression from any Chinese person,” Rimington observes, “and not enough has been said publicly about the threat.” Even in her time running MI5, she admits, “I can’t remember us taking the Chinese particularly seriously.” Her period in charge, between 1992 and 1996, coincided with threats from Russia and Irish republicanism, and the emergence of the Islamist terror threat. “We were far more focused on the Russians and Northern Ireland,” she says.
Today this activity is of a different order. “When you look at the scale of what’s going on, it’s huge,” Rimington says. “The Chinese are buying up companies. They are sending loads of students to all our best universities. Those I’ve met don’t speak very much English.” But the security service has finite resources in a world of seemingly infinite threats. “It has to focus on the areas where the biggest threat comes from. That’s still Russia and the Middle East and far-right groups.”
Despite the glut of publicity about Chinese infiltration, Rimington says: “This government has got a very mixed attitude to the Chinese. The prime minister was delighted to have met Mr Xi.” This month the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was criticised for travelling to Beijing as government borrowing costs soared.
This ambiguity gives cover to the “useful idiots” in universities who admire Chinese civilisation and strength, and regard claims of subversion as racist or irrelevant. In The Hidden Hand, these idiots are embodied by Arthur Cole, the founder of the new institute and a near-demented collector of Chinese pottery, who is pleasingly morally compromised by the end. “There’s no reason why the universities don’t know what’s going on. They’re briefed about the risk, but the money is important to them,” Rimington says.
I wonder, given how effective an intelligence infomercial The Hidden Hand is, whether anyone at her old employer was feeding her information. “That’s not the way they behave,” Rimington says. “I only know one working member of MI5 and he is very prone to say nothing or nod, so he’s not exactly a great source.”
Under the rules, former intelligence officers are even supposed to submit fiction for vetting to ensure they have not revealed classified information. Unlike the CIA, which runs a fine-tooth comb over the words of Rimington’s fellow spy novelists David McCloskey and Ilana Berry, this is a system more honoured in the breach. “I submitted my autobiography and the first few novels,” Rimington explains. “They once asked if I could change the name of a pub because it happened to be a pub where they were doing something, but I don’t bother any more.”
When we meet in her London flat (location top secret) Rimington expresses doubts about whether young people share the same sort of concerns about keeping their country safe that led her to a life on the front line. She joined MI5 in 1969. “I was born four years before the Second World War broke out, and everything I knew when I was a child was fear and loud bangs and being taken out of my bed in the middle of the night and down to an air raid shelter. I started off my life with terrible claustrophobia - I couldn’t be in the Tube unless I was right by the door.”
She shook this off in her mid-twenties, but her need for security never left her. “In my early thirties I had a fairly untrusting attitude to the world, which is probably why when somebody came along and offered me the job in the security service I took it with enthusiasm.” She was immediately put to work combatting subversion by monitoring the Communist Party of Cornwall. “There were about 80 of them,” she recalls. “But the Communist Party of Great Britain had, I think, 60,000 members, so it was a serious outfit.”
Rimington sees in the younger generations an obsession with their atomised lives rather than global or national stability. “So many people are now lost in dramas on their phones that they’re not really living in the real world at all. A lot of people don’t concern themselves with politics or what’s going on with foreign news and I think that’s worrying. If Mr Putin did decide to turn his attention to western Europe, I don’t know how we would react.”
Having dealt with the West and the rest, and conflict between the generations, Rimington saves her final comments for the battle of the sexes. Her lead characters - Manon Tyler and Liz Carlyle in her first ten books - are women. Which of them is her? “Both.” Does she think the secret world is now fully accepting of women? “When I joined the service, recruiting human sources was the one thing they said women couldn’t do - which is the area that most requires the skills that women have.”
She fixes me with a look. I realise that I’d probably be an easy mark. “There are some quite intelligent men, although there are a lot of stupid men as well, self-focused men.” How many are in politics? She silently mouths, “Quite a few.” She then adds, “I have to say, the women in politics are equally worrying.”
With that she signals that I should turn off the tape so she can tell me about prime ministers she has known. Fortunately she has a higher opinion of them than Prince Andrew. But I’m afraid all of that is classified.
The Hidden Hand by Stella Rimington (Bloomsbury) is on sale now.
Written by: Tim Shipman
© The Times of London
A 'suspect vessel', the Michalis San, was near the incident, headed for Russia.