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Elizabeth Manningham Buller
Baroness Elizabeth Manningham-Buller DCB was Director General of MI5, the British internal national security agency, from 2002 until 2007. Dame Eliza became a crossbench life peer in 2008.
In the beginning
Eliza worked as a teacher for three years at Queen's Gate School, Kensington in London, having read English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford from 1971 to 1974, before joining the Security Service.
Specializing in counter-terrorism rather than MI5's then-classical counter-espionage, she was active at the time of the Lockerbie bombing by Libya in 1988. During the early 1980s she was one of only five people who knew that Oleg Gordievsky, the deputy head of the KGB at the Soviet embassy in London, was actually a double agent.
She was a senior liaison working out of Washington, D.C. to the US intelligence community over the period of the first Gulf War, before leading the newly-created Irish counter-terrorism section from 1992 when MI5 were given the lead responsibility for such work (from the Metropolitan Police).
Having been promoted to the Management Board of the Security Service the next year, Dame Eliza became the director in charge of surveillance and technical operations, later becoming director of Irish counter-terrorism.
She was appointed Deputy Director General in 1997, and succeeded Sir Stephen Lander as Director General in 2002, the second woman to take on the role after Dame Stella Rimington. She is credited with making the agency more open: she established a website and recruited agents through newspaper advertisements. Under her direction, terror risk assessments were made public for the first time.
Eliza was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the Bath in 2005. She retired from MI5 on April 2007, and was replaced by her deputy Jonathan Evans. That month marked the end of her 33rd year in the security service.
Leadership Speaker
Eliza is a perfect choice if you are after a leadership keynote for your upcoming event.
