Eliza Manningham-Buller
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The Honourable Dame Elizabeth Lydia Manningham-Buller, DCB (born 14 July 1948) is the current Director-General of MI5, the British internal national security agency, appointed in October 2002.
The second daughter of Attorney General and Lord Chancellor Reginald Edward Manningham-Buller, 1st Viscount Dilhorne, Manningham-Buller was educated at Northampton High School and Benenden School. She worked as a teacher for three years at the Queen's Gate school in London, having read English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford from 1971 to 1974, before joining the Security Service.
Specialising in counter-terrorism rather than MI5's then more-normal counter-espionage, Manningham-Buller was responsible for international counter-terrorism at the time of the Lockerbie bombing in 1988. She was a senior liaison working out of Washington 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 Sevice the next year, Manningham-Buller was 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 finally succeeded Sir Stephen Lander as Director-General in 2002, the second woman to take on the role after Dame Stella Rimington .
Manningham-Buller is married with five stepchildren. Her brother is John Mervyn Manningham-Buller, 2nd Viscount Dilhorne.