The Honourable Dame Elizabeth Lydia Manningham-Buller, (Dame Eliza) DCB (born 14 July, 1948) is the current director general (DG) of MI5, the British internal national security agency, appointed in October 2002.

The second daughter of a former Lord Chancellor and Attorney General, Reginald Edward Manningham-Buller, 1st Viscount Dilhorne, Dame Eliza was educated at Northampton High School and Benenden School.

She worked as a teacher for three years at Queen's Gate 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 more-normal counter-espionage, Dame Eliza was active at the time of the Lockerbie bombing by Libya in 1988.

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 finally succeeded Sir Stephen Lander as director general in 2002, the second woman to take on the role after Dame Stella Rimington.

In September 2005 she made a speech which outlined the need for a debate about civil liberties, in the in the wake of more extreme terrorism, suggesting that Britain has to define what civil liberties are to be held as sacred and how far some can be undermined if necessary.

Her brother is John Manningham-Buller, 2nd Viscount Dilhorne. She was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the Bath in 2006.[edit]Marriage

Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller is married to David, whose surname has never been disclosed publicly; he has five children by his previous marriage, who are Dame Elizabeth's stepchildren.

"Her husband, David, is the son of a former lieutenant-colonel and a former lecturer in moral philosophy at St Andrews University. He has recently retrained as a carpenter. An Irish Catholic by birth, he is said to have once held strong left-wing views. According to friends, he did not know his future wife's profession during their courtship"