Readings.com.au: Stella Rimington

Rip Tide: A Liz Carlyle Novel

When pirates attack a cargo ship off the Somalian coast and one of them is found to be a British-born Pakistani, alarm bells start ringing at London’s Thames House. MI5 Intelligence Officer Liz Carlyle is brought in to establish how and why a young British Muslim could go missing from his well-to-do family in Birmingham and end up onboard a pirate skiff in the Indian Ocean, armed with a Kalashnikov.

After an undercover operative connected to the case turns up dead in the shipping office of an NGO in Athens it looks like piracy may be the least of the Service’s problems. Liz and her team must unravel the connections between Pakistan, Greece and Somalia, relying on their wits – and the judicious use of force – to get to the truth. And they don’t have long, as trouble is brewing closer to home: the kind of explosive trouble that MI5 could do without …

Stella Rimington, former Director General of MI5, returns with a tense and heart-stopping spy thriller where the stakes are high and the enemy is always just out of sight.

Present Danger

MI5 intelligence officer Liz Carlyle has just been despatched to Northern Ireland. It s a promotion, and she ll be running agents her favourite activity but it also means being separated from Charles Wetherby, her old boss, recently widowed and a very close friend.

Present Danger

Dead Line

MI5 Intelligence Officer Liz Carlyle is summoned to a meeting with her boss Charles Wetherby, head of the Service s Counter-Espionage Branch. His counterpart over at MI6 has received alarming intelligence from a high-placed Syrian source. It's Liz s job to find out exactly what is going on and avert disaster. But, as she discovers, this time the real threat is far greater than she or anyone else could have imagined.

Dead Line

MI5 Intelligence Officer Liz Carlyle is summoned to a meeting with her boss Charles Wetherby, head of the Service’s Counter-Espionage Branch. His counterpart over at MI6 has received alarming intelligence from a high-placed Syrian source. A Middle East peace conference is planned to take place at Gleneagles in Scotland and several heads of state will attend. The Syrians have learned that two individuals are mounting an operation to disrupt the peace conference in a way designed to be spectacular, laying the blame at Syria’s door. The source claims that Syrian Intelligence will act against the pair, presumably by killing them. No one knows who they are or what they are planning to do. Are they working together? Who is controlling them? Or is the whole story a carefully laid trail of misinformation? It is Liz’s job to find out. But, as she discovers, the threat is far greater than she or anyone else could have imagined. The future of the whole of the Middle East is at stake and the conference deadline is drawing ever closer.

Open Secret: The Autobiography Of The Former Director Of MI5

Stella Rimington was educated at Nottingham Girls' High School, and Edinburgh and Liverpool Universities. In 1959 she started work in the Worcestershire County Archives, moving in 1962 to the India Office Library in London, as Assistant Keeper responsible for manuscripts relating to the period of the British rule in India. In 1965 she joined the Security Service (MI5) part-time, while she was in India accompanying her husband on a posting to the British High Commission in New Delhi. On her return to the UK she joined MI5 as a full-time employee. During her career in MI5, which lasted from 1969 to 1996, Stella Rimington worked in all the main fields of the Service's responsibilities -counter-subversion, counter-espionage and counter-terrorism -and became successively Director of all three branches. She was appointed Director-General of MI5 in 1992. She was the first woman to hold the post and the first Director-General whose name was publicly announced on appointment. During her time as DG she pursued a policy of greater openness for MI5, giving the 1994 Dimbleby Lecture on BBC TV and several other public lectures and publishing a booklet about the Service. She was made a Dame Commander of the Bath (DCB) in 1995 and has been awarded the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Laws by the Universities of Nottingham and Exeter. Following her retirement from MI5 in 1996, she has become a Non-Executive Director of Marks & Spencer, BG Group pIc and Whitehead Mann GKR. She is Chairman of the Institute of Cancer Research and a member of the Board of the Royal Marsden NHS Trust. She has two daughters and a granddaughter.

At Risk

For MIS Intelligence Officer Liz Carlyle the nagging complications of her private life are quickly forgotten at Monday's Counter-Terrorist meeting. An invisible may have entered mainland Britain. An 'invisible' - a terrorist who is an ethnic native of the target country, who can cross its borders unchecked and move about unnoticed - is the ultimate nightmare.

For Liz this signals the start of an operation that will test her to the limit. Who or what is the target? Where and who is the invisible? With each passing hour the danger increases. But as she desperately sifts the incoming intelligence and analyses the reports from her agents she finally realises that it is her ability to get inside her enemy's head that is the only hope of averting disaster.

Secret Asset

When MI5 Intelligence Officer Liz Carlyle learns from one of her agents that there have been suspicious meetings in the Islamic bookshop where he works, she feels almost instinctively that a terrorist cell is at work. Liz, immediately reports her findings to Charles Wetherby, her superior at MI5, and a surveillance operation is swiftly put into place. So when Wetherby pulls Liz off the case and tasks her to investigate a tip that many years ago a mole was planted in one of the branches of British Intelligence she feels distinctly marginalised. To Liz, the likelihood of a mole seems small, but if Wetherby is right then the potential damage to the Service itself could be immeasurable. In SECRET ASSET, the second Liz Carlyle novel, Stella Rimington once again brings all her experience as a former Director General of MI5 to bear in a truly compelling thriller that takes the reader into a world where no-one can be trusted and nothing is what is seems.

Illegal Action

Liz Carlyle has been transferred to Counter-Espionage, along with her research sidekick Peggy Kingsolving. Once the hub of MI5 operations, the department has been reduced in size since the end of the Cold War, and priority within the service is on counter-terrorism.

Yet there is plenty for Liz to do. In fact, there are more spies operating in London today than during the height of East-West hostilities. This includes Russian spies, who continue to operate in number. What's changed is their targets - now they spy on the international financial community that has made London its base in the last twenty years, as well as on the wealthy influential Russian 'oligarchs', many of whom have also come to London to live.

Liz learns of a Russian government plot to 'silence' one of these oligarchs, Nikita Brunovsky, who is an increasingly vocal opponent of the Putin regime. How he is to be kept quiet is unclear, but since the Foreign Office dread any kind of incident, Liz is assigned to keep it from happening.

Almost simultaneously, Liz and Peggy also learn of the presence of an Illegal Support officer in London, one Vladimir Rykov, who is putatively attached to the Russian embassy. An Illegal is someone who operates (often for many years) under a completely fabricated identity - and Rykov, it seem, has been sent to London to help an Illegal now based there.

To protect Brunovsky from his Kremlin foes, Liz goes undercover and joins the oligarch's retinue. As she tries to determine who around the Russian might be willing to betray him, she has to consider too whether this traitor may not also be the Illegal she and Peggy are seeking...