Stella Rimington, who battled a fiercely protective old boy’s network to become the first woman to lead MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence service, and whose tenure as the country’s spymaster was widely seen as an inspiration for James Bond’s first female boss in the movie franchise, died on Sunday. She was 90.
The Security Service announced her death in a statement on Monday without specifying the cause or place of death.
In her nearly 30-year career in MI5, Ms. Rimington faced obstacles in that male-dominated world every step of the way, even into her retirement, when she was chastised by intelligence veterans for publishing memoirs that, in the end, turned out to be revealing of her career path but not much else.
When she was appointed in 1992 to head MI5, Ms. Rimington drew skepticism from longtime observers of the intelligence community, many of them men.
“She has all the politically correct attributes,” the journalist and author Philip Knightley told The New York Times. Others, including the spy novelist John le Carré, dismissed the appointment as a public relations gesture by the faltering John Major government.
In fact, by the time she was named head of MI5, Ms. Rimington had a solid record of accomplishment across the major branches of the Security Service, including countersubversion, counterespionage and counterterrorism. Her cool demeanor and reputation for quiet competence, according to Bond aficionados, helped shape the character of “M” starting with Judi Dench’s portrayal in “GoldenEye” in 1995. (The Bond movies involved a fictional agent of MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence agency.)
Ms. Rimington was said to be the first woman in Britain to be named an intelligence officer, in the mid-1970s, after eight years of junior-level toil. That first big step was in many ways the hardest.
“It did not matter that I had a degree, that I had already worked for several years in the public service, at a higher grade than it was offering, or that I was 34 years old,” she wrote in her 2010 memoir, “Open Secrets.” “The policy was that men were recruited.”
She went on to running her own espionage agents, some of them reluctant to work for a woman, and took over as head of countersubversion and counterterrorism in 1983.
Ms. Rimington made a mark within the agency during a miners’ strike in the 1980s, spying on the leadership of Britain’s National Union of Mineworkers. She was promoted to head counterterrorism and espionage efforts in the latter part of the decade, when she helped investigate the bombing of a Pan Am jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.
Early on, Ms. Rimington was also involved in countering attacks by the Irish Republican Army in its campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland. That record, in the view of some analysts, made her a natural for the top job when it became open.
“She’s chosen on ability, not on her gender, and not because it was politically correct,” Helen Fry, a British historian who specializes in intelligence, said in an interview. “She followed on the career of thousands of British women in intelligence.”
Ms. Rimington was under a double set of pressures when she was appointed: Not only was she a woman, but, unusually, her name was announced to the public under Mr. Major’s new policy of openness in the intelligence services. Identified in the newspapers, she was followed by paparazzi and photographed sipping white wine at the Royal Academy.
All of which was “unthinkable,” Ms. Fry said; previously, journalists could be prosecuted for naming the head of MI5.
But Ms. Rimington handled it “in her own style,” Ms. Fry said, honed by a rigorous wartime childhood under German bombings. “We tended to live in places that were the targets for German bombing raids,” Ms. Rimington recalled in an interview. “So I had a great sense of insecurity in my early life, and I have been trying to compensate for that ever since.”
Within a year of her appointment, MI5 published a public brochure for the first time, broadly explaining how the agency employed tactics like eavesdropping and telephone tapping, but giving little operational detail, according to a BBC article from that time.
Ms. Rimington also introduced a program to release historical Security Service files to the National Archives, making them available to the public.
“A security service does not conflict with democracy, even though it must work largely in secret,” she said in 1994, “provided it is properly overseen and controlled, as it is in this country.”
Stella Whitehouse was born on May 13, 1935, in London, the daughter of David and Muriel Whitehouse. Her father was a mechanical engineer and draughtsman; her mother, a nurse and midwife. Her father was a World War I veteran who had fought at Passchendaele in Belgium and, she recalled, was emotionally scarred by the experience.
The war years remained a vivid memory for Ms. Rimington into adulthood: “Hiding under the stairs, windows were blown out and ceilings fell down,” she later recalled, adding, “Claustrophobia plagued me into adulthood.”
She attended Nottingham Girls’ High School and went on to University of Edinburgh, where she studied English literature. Postgraduate studies in archiving and the study of records set her on an early career path.
Ms. Rimington began her MI5 career in 1965 in India working as a part-time clerk for the Security Service in New Delhi, where her husband, John Rimington, was a civil servant in the British High Commission. He survives her — having lived apart, the two reunited in later years — along with their two daughters, Sophie and Harriet, and five grandchildren.
Ms. Rimington was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the Bath in 1996, after retiring from MI5.
“As the first avowed female head of any intelligence agency in the world, Dame Stella broke through longstanding barriers and was a visible example of the importance of diversity in leadership,” Ken McCallum, the current MI5 director general, said in a statement.
In 2002, Eliza Manningham-Buller became the second woman to be named MI5 director general, serving until 2007. In June, Blaise Metreweli became the first woman to lead MI6.
When Ms. Rimington announced plans in 2001 to publish an autobiography, ultimately titled “Open Secret,” she was initially criticized for potentially sharing too much information.
“She is doing herself no favors at all, and she should shut up because she is bringing contempt on herself and the whole business,” Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s former press secretary Sir Bernard Ingham, said.
But the published book was later criticized for revealing too little. In a review in The Guardian, the journalist David Rose described it as “dull reiterations of MI5’s legal parameters.”
After her retirement in 1996, Ms. Rimington followed a career path set by other former British intelligence officers, including le Carré and Ian Fleming: She wrote spy thrillers. Ms. Rimington created Liz Carlyle, an MI5 agent working in a male-dominated arena who tracked post-Cold War Russian spies and French arms smugglers.
In interviews, reporters were excited to ask the talkative former MI-5 spymaster for her thoughts on James Bond. She told The Times in 2012 that Bond was “extremely well trained, but the difficulty is that he doesn’t seem to know where the boundaries lie.”
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans, and is now a Domestic Correspondent on the Obituaries desk.
Lynsey Chutel is a Times reporter based in London who covers breaking news in Africa, the Middle East and Europe.
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