Meta Ramsay obituary: The former MI6 chief who took part in one of the most audacious operations of the Cold War

But she said that as a Scot and a lifelong socialist, her proudest achievement was helping to steer through the 1998 Scotland Act which established the Scottish Parliament.

She had entered politics after taking compulsory retirement from MI6 at the age of 55, becoming foreign policy adviser to Labour leader John Smith, an old university friend, before entering the House of Lords and becoming a government minister under Tony Blair.

Having been on MI6’s Iraq desk at the time of the first Gulf War in 1991, she was an outspoken supporter of Mr Blair’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003, even after it was shown that Saddam Hussein no longer had weapons of mass destruction.

Margaret Mildred ‘Meta’ Ramsay was born in July 1936 in Glasgow into a solidly working class family – her father was an engineering pattern-maker, while her mother was the daughter of a Jewish refugee from Ukraine.

Determined that she should have a good education, her parents saved up so they could afford the £10-a-term fees to send her to Hutchesons’, a local private school where she won prizes for debating.

From there she won a place at Glasgow University, reading for a general degree covering the arts, languages, philosophy and science.

She quickly established herself as a star of the debating society, going on to win election as the first woman president of the Scottish Union of Students. As well as Mr Smith, her circle of friends included Donald Dewar, Scotland’s founding first minister.

After graduating, she moved into international student politics, joining the International Student Conference which had been set up in the early 1950s to counter the influence of the communist-controlled International Union of Students.

At that time, she was not yet working for British intelligence but it was on one of her trips abroad, she said, that she was first approached by someone from the Ministry of Defence.

From there it was “a natural progression” to enter the Foreign Office and then MI6 – or the Secret Intelligence Service, as it is more formally known.

The service she joined was still very male-dominated – at times much to her frustration. She recalled one occasion in the 1970s when she came across a woman she thought would make a “perfect” agent runner, only to be told by the head of recruitment that they were not looking for women.

While she believed the passing of the Equal Opportunities and Sex Discrimination Act in 1975 led to some improvement, she was just one of two women to break into the senior ranks of MI6 in the 1970s and 1980s.

It could also be extremely dangerous. “If you get yourself into a difficult situation, the adrenalin goes so hard your training kicks in, it prepares you,” she remembered.

The exfiltration of Mr Gordievsky from the Soviet Union was the only specific MI6 operation she ever discussed publicly – and then only after Mr Gordievsky had himself gone public with details of his extraordinary escape.

For more than a decade, he had been Western intelligence’s most important source on the Soviet Union, revealing to shocked Western leaders just how close the two sides had come to nuclear war.

But by 1985 his identity had been compromised by a CIA double agent who was selling secrets to the Russians, and an elaborate plan was activated to spirit him to safety.

The final leg involved smuggling him across the border into Finland in the boot of an MI6 officer’s car – his wife changing their baby’s nappies while they waited at the frontier to distract the border guards’ sniffer dogs.

As station chief in Helsinki, Ms Ramsay was closely involved – although she remained reticent about her own role. She was, however, hugely admiring of Mr Gordievsky who she came to know well.

After retiring from MI6 in 1991, she worked briefly as a consultant for a private security company, Control Risks, before her old university friend, Mr Smith, came calling and she took up the position of his foreign policy adviser.

Following his unexpected death in 1994, she was nominated for a life peerage by his successor, Mr Blair, entering the Lords in 1996 as Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale.

When Labour swept to power in the general election the following year, she was made a minister in the Lords, speaking for the Foreign Office, Scottish Office and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.

After leaving government she was made a deputy Lords speaker in 2002, and in 2005 she was appointed to the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee which oversees MI6, MI5 and GCHQ.

Lady Ramsay never married or had a family. “There just wasn’t the right man at the right time, or if the time was right, the men weren’t,” she said.