Between 1992 and 1995, Rimington was in charge of MI5. At that time she argued for more openness of the secret service. “We are of course obliged to keep information secret to be effective, but that does not mean that we must be a completely secret organization,” said Rimington in a lecture in 1994. “Confidentiality is not imposed for himself. It is not a goal in itself.”
Rimington’s most successful book was at Risk (2004), which was also published in Dutch with the title The Invisible. In 1996 she was appointed as a member of the British knight order, the order of the bath. In 2009 she received an honorary doctorate in social sciences of Nottingham Trent University.