Meta Ramsay described herself in her latter years as an “international affairs consultant”, while her former career was summarily defined in Who’s Who as having been a member of HM Diplomatic Service. In reality, Ramsay, who has died aged 89, was the spy who perhaps should have been appointed the first woman “C”, the head of the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6.

On retirement from MI6, as required at the age of 55 in 1991, she was the most high-ranking woman in the service, yet it would still be more than three decades until the first female “C”, with Blaise Metreweli securing that distinction only last year. Ramsay went on to play an active part in Labour politics when her old friend John Smith was leader, and subsequently in the House of Lords during Tony Blair’s government.

It was Ramsay’s bad luck that her 22 years as an intelligence officer (a post that was never, of course, officially confirmed or denied by the service) coincided with a period of profound misogyny in appointments within MI6. “The most serious problem was the fact that I was a woman,” she said in a rare interview in later life, and it was to her credit that she became one of only two women to rise to a senior rank during her operational career.

Ramsay was angered that although women had been widely deployed with immense success as agents in the second world war, during the second half of the last century their roles were often downgraded, consigning many of the clerical “Miss Moneypennys” to becoming the forgotten women of British intelligence.

She herself was assigned to the Stockholm station for three years in 1970, the year after being signed up, and she later ran the Helsinki station for four years from 1981 – both of these posts being significant on what has been called the “Moscow watch”. Predictably, there is no record of her role in the intervening eight years. The only operation that she ever acknowledged was the successful exfiltration of the double agent Oleg Gordievsky, a former KGB colonel, through Helsinki in 1985.

He had been betrayed by the CIA traitor Aldrich Ames, and escaped across the border from the Soviet Union in a thrilling episode of derring-do. Ramsay was later wholly opposed to Gordievsky participating in a 1990 edition of BBC television’s Panorama. “She was utterly convinced that the security organisation ought to remain secret and have no relationship whatever with the press in any circumstances,” said the journalist Tom Mangold, who conducted the interview.

Born Margaret in Langside in the south of Glasgow, she was an only child. Her father, Alexander Ramsay, was an engineering pattern-maker from Govan, working in the shipyards and for Rolls-Royce aero engines. Her mother, Sheila (nee Jackson), was the daughter of a Jewish woman who had arrived in Glasgow’s Gorbals district as a refugee from the pogroms in Ukraine. Meta went to Battlefield primary school then Hutchesons’ girls’ grammar school before heading to Glasgow University, graduating with a general degree.

There, she was a member of the “golden generation” who became luminaries in Scottish politics, journalism and public affairs. They included Smith, his future wife Elizabeth Bennett (now Lady Smith of Gilmorehill), Scottish first minister Donald Dewar, Liberal Democrat leader Menzies Campbell and lord chancellor Lord (Derry) Irvine. From 1958 for a year Ramsay was the first woman at the university to be president of the Students’ Representative Council, and subsequently the first female president of the Scottish Union of Students.

In 1960 she moved on to the international stage, working for three years in the co-ordinating secretariat of students’ unions at Leiden, in the Netherlands, set up to counter communist influence in other student bodies in western Europe, and then for four years as the manager of the fund for International Student Co-operation. It was in these posts that she was presumed to have attracted the attention of the intelligence service that she formally joined in 1969. She also graduated from the Institute of International Studies in Geneva.

After her service in the field she worked at MI6 headquarters from 1987 to 1991, officially as a Foreign Office counsellor. She was in charge of the counteraction department, “doing nasty things to nasty people”, as she once put it. This covered the period of the first Gulf war, and Ramsay would later opine that she had “blood on her hands” because, in her view, the Americans pulled out too soon and thus let down the Kurds and the Shia Muslims. She backed the Iraq war in 2003, by which time she was a Labour peer under Blair.

After leaving the intelligence service she briefly worked in hostage rescue for the Control Risks consultancy, until Smith appointed her as his foreign policy adviser on becoming Labour leader after the 1992 election. When Smith died she became political adviser to Robin Cook, as shadow trade and industry secretary, and she joined the House of Lords in 1996 on Blair’s recommendation. When he took office the following year he made her a government whip, and until 2001 she was a frontbench speaker on foreign affairs, culture, media and sport – and also on Scottish affairs until devolution was enacted. Her proudest achievement, she would say, was as co-chair from 1997 to 1999 of the constitutional convention that set up the Holyrood parliament.

She was a member of the intelligence and security committee (1997; 2005-07), and of the joint committee on national security strategy (2010-14). She had a role in a number of international political and security organisations, and garnered a number of honorary degrees. She also played a role in Jewish affairs, speaking out latterly against antisemitism “creeping out of its hiding place again”.

Ramsay was always professionally uncompromising. She was also smart as a whip, great company and fun. An elegant woman who dressed often in amethyst silk jackets with matching nail polish, as a politician she would drum those manicured nails on the table to make her point. Like others of her generation in intelligence, she never married – until 1973 it would have meant immediately leaving the service – commenting casually once that it would be difficult to explain at home the broken fingernails caused by “things that you do with machinery or guns”.

Ramsay had once considered being an educational psychologist, and she revealed her comprehension of the psychology of the job of an intelligence agent in an interview with the Herald two years ago. She said it was “tricky”, “like being an actor” and also a cross between “priest and psychiatrist”. She thought of herself as a public servant, “just doing the best for your country”, and said: “I wanted to achieve something positive and helpful to the fight and the cause of democratic socialism.”