Beautiful vamps with a line in poisoned lipstick and purse-sized guns have been a stock in trade of spy thrillers. From Greta Garbo's glitzy screen portrait of Mata Hari in 1933 to the vixens of the Bond films, women and military intelligence have been seen as a recipe for disaster. E.H. Cookridge (MI6, retired) once wrote that the British secret service viewed female agents with hearty scepticism. "However clever," he warned, "they are always liable to change sides for the sake of a new dress."
The Home Office announcement this week that Stella Rimington, a 56-year-old mother of two, has been appointed head of MI5 has knocked another hole in this espionage fantasy. Mrs Rimington, one of MI5's two deputy-directors, has spent 22 years within the organisation, and once headed a section dealing with domestic subversion.
But whether having a woman control such a powerful agency will change public perceptions about women's role in espionage remains to be seen. In fiction, film and even histories of intelligence, women have been portrayed either as long-suffering secretaries with crushes on their bosses, or callous "honeytraps", hitting men where they are most vulnerable. Yet recent revelations from Eastern Europe have highlighted their importance as analysts of military and political intelligence.
Last month, one of the Soviet Union's most successful women agents, Ruth Werner, arrived back in Britain after a 40-year absence, to promote Sonya's Report, a book about her espionage career. First recruited in Shanghai when seven months pregnant, she accepted the risk, although capture meant almost certain death. Codenamed "Sonya", she eventually had three children by three different fathers, and realised that since no security service would suspect a woman knee-deep in nappies, she had an excellent cover. This was a rationalisation for having her children, whom she passionately wanted, in such dangerous circumstances. After working in Manchuria, Poland and Switzerland, she settled in Oxford, by now married to an Englishman and fellow agent. Her cover as an ordinary refugee housewife enabled her to transmit to Moscow for almost nine years.
In a recent interview, Ruth Werner brushed off any suggestion that her information came from pillow talk, saying "I am not a spy-thriller woman". Her story, however, is by no means anomalous. Women, both allied and enemy, have been involved in gathering military and political information since 1914. Most of them have refused to feed the sexual fantasy associated with their work. Marthe Richard, a French agent during the first world war, balked at orders to seduce Baron von Krohn, the German naval attache in Madrid. Although she eventually complied and sent vital information to Paris, she argued with her spymaster, Georges Ladoux, that there were more effective means of gaining the enemy's trust.
The methods of women spies have often been unconventional: Marthe Richard's lapdog provided endless excuses for snooping; Edith Katona recruited her mother for difficult missions in Italy and France during the second war, while double-agent Lily Sergueiev gained a German officer's trust in Paris by listening to his complaints about his mistress.
Nor has the traffic in information been all one way. In the mid Eighties, 25 Bonn secretaries were charged with handing over vital documents to their KGB boyfriends. In a reversal of the usual "honeytrap", Margret Hoke, who served five West German presidents, was charged in 1985 with leaking classified information to her KGB lover, Franz Becker. "That he was six years younger than me disturbed me at first, but he always seemed to dispel my doubts," testified the 52-year-old Hoke. 'He told me he wasn't interested in younger women."
Female spymasters, however, have been rare. At the outbreak of war in 1914, Britain's registry of enemy aliens was run by a Miss Lomax, who was praised by Sir Vernon Kell, MI5's first head, as a "paragon of efficiency". During the second world war, there were a few outstanding examples, such as Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, who ran a resistance network of 3,000 in France, and Vera Atkins who trained agents to "set Europe ablaze" for the Special Operation Executive. More recently, the MI6 career of Dame Daphne Park was revealed in 1988, in the memoirs of BBC director-general, Alasdair Milne.
Despite the evidence, spy fiction has clung to its Mata Haris. But now the promotion of women such as Stella Rimington, and the flood of memoirs from Eastern European agents may force espionage pundits and authors to revamp their vamps. Perhaps Mrs Rimington will even help to ditch the old FBI adage that "there has never been an espionage case in which sex did not play a part".
