“Should I be Mother?”: The Women of British Intelligence and HAPGOOD
The title character of Tom Stoppard’s play is a woman in a male-dominated profession. Meet her real-life counterparts.
The title character in Tom Stoppard’s Hapgood — onstage September 6 through October 14, 2018 at Lantern Theater Company — is a high-ranking, sharply intelligent, and dedicated officer for British espionage forces. As an MI5 spymaster, Elizabeth Hapgood runs operations and manages double agents. She is codenamed “Mother” and plays the role both at work and at home. She is the sole female agent in an office, profession, and play populated by men — and as far as her real-life counterparts go, a bit ahead of her time.
Official agencies for espionage in Britain were founded in 1909, when Mansfield Cumming became the first head of what would eventually become MI6, the organization responsible for overseas espionage. Cumming was a former commander with a taste for speed and danger, which resulted in a car crash that left him with a prosthetic leg. According to legend, he would test potential agents in interviews by stabbing the prosthesis with a pen knife; if the candidate flinched, they were out.
Cumming was paired with Captain Vernon Kell, who headed up domestic espionage efforts — what would eventually become MI5. Men continued to run both the domestic and global espionage agencies for nearly 90 years after their founding. Women were not permitted to spy for the first several decades of the agencies’ histories; they could operate only in secretarial and administrative roles.
It was not until 1967 that a young archivist named Stella Rimington began doing small tasks for MI5. Rimington eventually demanded a permanent position, asking “Why can’t women be officers like the men?” in an open letter. Her request was satisfied, and from 1969 to 1990 she worked in counter espionage, counter subversion, and counter terrorism, as well as identifying “subversives” in civil service. In 1991, three years after Hapgood’s London premiere, Rimington visited Moscow as part of the first friendly visit between British intelligence and Russia’s KGB. Upon her return in 1992, she was promoted to director general, becoming the first woman to run MI5, the first director general to be identified publicly, and the world’s first female head of an intelligence agency. Rimington ran MI5 until her retirement in 1996.
Rimington has also made a mark on pop culture: she is a prolific spy novelist and was the inspiration for Judi Dench’s “M,” the head of MI6 in seven modern James Bond films. According to Rimington, Dench was spot on; she called the portrayal “startling…really very good. She even holds her hands the way I do.”
Rimington’s autobiography provides some insight into what it was like to be a woman in the male-dominated field of British intelligence. She shares that until the mid-1980s, the agency was run without concern for how women might enter or experience the workplace. This left female officers to make their own way, as in the case of one woman who found a pile of dirty laundry on her desk, along with a demand that she clean the clothes. Instead, she threw the pile out the window.
Rimington also writes of her struggle to balance parenting her two daughters as a single mother and her espionage work — much as Hapgood must with her young son. Rimington once set one daughter up to do her homework in a safehouse while meeting a source. Her family also had to move once journalists snapped a picture of Rimington, compromising her location. For Rimington and Hapgood, spy work can never be entirely separated from their home lives.
Once Rimington broke British espionage’s glass ceiling, the way was paved for Eliza Manningham-Buller, who ran MI5 from 2002 to 2007 as the second woman to head the agency. Throughout her career, Manningham-Buller specialized in counter terrorism and — like Stoppard’s Elizabeth Hapgood — worked with double agents. In the 1980s, Oleg Gordievsky, a high-ranking KGB officer at the Soviet embassy in London, was a double agent; Manningham-Buller was one of only five people who knew his role for the UK.
Though only two women have run MI5 — and to date, no woman has headed MI6 — they helped pave the way for a more equal work force. Today, there are more women working in the agency than there would have when Stoppard was writing Hapgood. According to MI5, 40% of their 3,500 employees are currently women.
Hapgood is onstage at the Lantern September 6 through October 14, 2018. Visit our website for tickets and information.
