The work shed signed up to do was covered by British law, and would be something to do with whatever that was necessary to keep British lives safe. The memo, however represented the actual twisting of diplomatic arms in order to secure a war which [was] based on lies., But it also represented an opportunity to show the world the tactics American and British officials were willing to employ in their push for an invasion. Weve said it before: The greatest threat to democracy from the media isnt disinformation, its the paywall. Id never seen anything like it. The story went around the world and the leak electrified the international debate during the weeks of diplomatic deadlock. Unfortunately. Today, I believe the Act serves as an illiberal, draconian piece of law, little more than a weapon of the state to deter any disclosure, no matter how much in the public interest it might be. Jack Straw, then the foreign secretary, has not been challenged on whether he authorised the operation to go ahead, although it is almost certain that he did. Six months later they released Nelson Mandela. David Dayen: I want to go to the questions now. Does your loyalty lie to your own conscious, does your loyalty lie to your marriage, does your loyalty lie to your government, does your loyalty lie to your country? None of the Government reports into the war acknowledged it, nor did the history books. WebKatharine Gun (ne Harwood), 47, is married to Yasar Gn, a Turkish Kurd, with whom she has a 13-year old daughter. Only later did I appreciate the extent to which the journalists involved Martin Bright, Peter Beaumont and Ed Vulliamy had to go in order to prove that the email was legitimate. Your Privacy Choices: Opt Out of Sale/Targeted Ads. The truth is that I didnt know who Katharine Gun was until my producer Ged Doherty called me up one day, we made Eye In The Sky together, and said, Have you ever heard of Katharine Gun? Thats one of those moments where you think: Sounds like I ought to have, but I hadnt. And it was there that, to our amazement and totally without warning, the CPS dropped the charges before the trial had even started. "But the more I think about what happened, the more angry and frustrated I get about the fact that nobody acted on intelligence. Some of those same birds are still flapping wings in the skies above Washington. Throughout her own court case, whatonly a few knew wasthat she was also fighting for the right of her husband, who is from Turkey, to remain in the UK. The more we find out that in fact the million-person march was a real cause of worry for Downing Street and for Blair personally, it makes you think we were so close and yet so far.". It was both exhilarating and just a little uncomfortable. [In the movie, Gun says I dont work for the government, I work for the people.]. I had, of course, signed the Official Secrets Act, content in the knowledge I was working within the law for Britains protection. Because it's just an Executive Branch trying to grab power as an authoritarian. And that I think was the motivation. And maybe if we went to work for Enron and we liked our job well enough, and its a job. Gavin Hood: Keira is wonderful and is absolutely professional, arrives perfectly prepared, very calm, no fuss. What is this paper? Healthy mother-of-two, 32, collapsed and died from brain bleed while she led fitness bounce class. Gabrielle Bruney is a writer and editor for Esquire, where she focuses on politics and culture. Following the trauma inflicted on Gun, the U.K. Attorney General dropped the case against her with no warning. Before 1989, there had been a Public Interest Defence to protect whistleblowers, but that was altered amid the furore surrounding the sinking of the Argentinian Navy cruiser, the General Belgrano, in the course of the Falklands War. It is written by Sara and Gregory Bernstein, a California-based husband-and-wife writing partnership who have worked with British director Jonathan Lynn. The same countries demanded immediate answers from the British government about its involvement in the spying. The case and the resulting anxiety never seemed far away. Hood said that this was a purposeful choice by Knightley. In real life, "the spellcheck largely happened through a series of phone calls," according to Bright, "because on a Sunday newspaper we don't work on a Sunday, and we don't work on a Monday. I was suddenly free and bewildered. She was a spythe communications she translated had been obtained covertly, but she did the work in the interest of protecting Britain. My job had been to listen to Chinese communications, translate them from Mandarin to English and produce reports for different government departments. Koza was in effect issuing a direct order to the employees of a UK security agency to gather "the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals or to head off surprises". So WMD may not have been as important, had they gotten that resolution. But I do want to give her credit that I think I didn't do her justice enough in the moment that she leaked that memo; it changed so quickly to war that we don't really get a moment to absorb the fact that as a result of her leaking that memo, there was no vote at the UN Security Council. So important was this email, I knew it might even derail the case that Tony Blair was making for joining the Americans in an invasion. Her late husband, Tom, a former special agent of the FBI and one-time head of counter-intelligence in New York, co-authored the Gun story. Spoilers to follow as well. First, I contacted someone to this day Ive never named them who had the details of a journalist and anti-war activist. One by one, all those who received the email approximately 100 people were taken in for a grilling. So I said to her at one point, and its in the movie because her interrogator said it too and you would ask her the same question, which is Katharine I hear all this, but it was a little muddy, you worked as a spy, you hacked peoples phones and computers, you do dirty tricks. Chile and Mexico and the other smaller countries were so outraged that they refused to even bring it to a vote. Marcia Mitchell is a writer, researcher, and the author of "The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War: Katharine Gun and the Secret Plot to Sanction the Iraq Invasion." ", Speaking to Gun, and seeing her in archival footage at the end of the film, it is clear that Knightley didn't try to emulate the look or sound of the real-life Gun. The British are quite British, you know. Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Keira calmly said: Oh, that was probably me. I still blush to the tips of my toes when I think about it. It was almost as if that request was asking for someone within their own nation to do this work; it wasn't asking another completely independent state for co-operation.". Iran, of course, isn't interested in dealing with him. My shock turned to anger as the significance sank in. It left me in an impossible predicament. Look at what happened to Reality Winner in this country. Perhaps they knew it would come out in the courtroom that the entire conflict was based on lies about Saddams weapons of mass destruction and that key UN officials could have been blackmailed. However, Gun was well aware that any attempt to release the memo would find her running afoul of Britains Official Secrets Act, which criminalizes the leaking of intelligence-related information. You can look up Nicole Mowbray, she wrote an article in The Guardian a couple weeks ago, about this worst day of her life. In fact, I had no idea what was going on. They had published not some coded version of events, but the email itself in full. Two hours later after this deep dive, I called Ged back and said, How come we dont know this story? I guess the answer to that is that her story was big news for the day, and then very quickly got crushed by a bigger story, which was the story of the invasion. '", "The scene where all of us receive this email and we're discussing the memo, that never happened. Despite the risk of a harsher sentence, I decided to plead not guilty because I felt strongly that my actions had been intended to prevent the unnecessary loss of life in an illegal war. For several years, just recalling the events would set my heart racing and my hands trembling. I don't know that consciously it did, it's just that I didn't know the story and so, for me, it was I asked Katharine, I flew to London, I met her for five days. However, when her friends start being interrogated about the leak, Gun confesses to being the whistleblower, leading to her being arrested and taken to court for breaching the Official Secrets Act. Enter Katharine Gun. Official Secrets is, for the most part, a historical account of these events in 2003, but as with nearly all films based on a true story, some things have been changed to aid the drama of the narrative. An insider with courage. The other kind of fight could be frightening and politically risky. 265 ratings46 reviews British secret service officer Katharine Gun's only crime was telling the truth, but she paid a steep price when she exposed a U.S.-U.K. spy operation to secure UN authorization for the Iraq invasion. A decade on, sitting in a cafe in Cheltenham, not far from GCHQ, I asked her if she still stood by what she had done. It should take the facts as they lead. Gavin Hood: Its a question of how conditioned are we to the conventional Hollywood structure. President Bush visits the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland, January 25, 2006. And then there is the Gulf of Tonkin incident that led America deeply into war against North Vietnam. However, the Pentagon says the US deployment is "in response to indications of heightened Iranian readiness to conduct offensive operations against US forces and our interests.". What did you think was going to happen? I didnt know the story and I googled her. By design. I even thought, naively, Id be able to keep my anonymity. Naturally, I was discreet. Guided by her conscience, Katharine Gun defied her government and leaked the memo to the press, setting off a chain of events that jeopardized her freedom, her safety, but also opened the door to putting the entire Iraq invasion on trial. Please, become a member, or make a one-time donation, today. It was like a neon sign that was flashing at me, Gun says. The contents were explosive, implicating America in a blackmail plot to swing UN votes in favor of an invasion. Truth and accountability were drilled into me as a child. If it was, who cleared it to be passed to GCHQ? To legitimize an invasion and get rid of Saddam, a new UN Security Council resolution, going beyond SC1441 and specifically sanctioning the invasion, was the answer. If Keira Knightleys remarkable performance in Official Secrets can help change that, the film will truly have been worthwhile. Perhaps it was no wonder that Tony Blairs government decided to abandon the case without offering any evidence. WebWhistleblower Katherine Gun, right, is played by Keira Knightly in the movie Official Secrets View gallery Gun was outraged after she learned - as part of her job with GCHQ - that Iran, meanwhile, says it doesn't want war, but will defend itself. Following the incident, Gun struggled to find work that she Before 1989, there had been a Public Interest Defence to protect whistleblowers, but that was altered amid the furore surrounding the sinking of the Argentinian Navy cruiser, the General Belgrano, in the course of the Falklands War. So she said, Can I just do nothing with my hair, put on the jeans like Katharine wore? So the wardrobe is accurate to Katharine's style. The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline. Which really, really, really happened. One is reminded of the January 31, 2003 Oval Office meeting with George Bush, Tony Blair, and Condoleeza Rice, in which the topic of provoking Iraq to start a war was particularly revealing. I believe that all of this should have been formally acknowledged as part of the history of the second Gulf War. Although the story made headlines around the world at the time of the leak and later at the time of her trial, which collapsed after the prosecution withdrew its evidence, it remains largely missing from the official narratives of the build-up to the Iraq war. Im gratified, too, that the film shows the love and support my husband gave me throughout this ordeal. David Dayen: The first thing I thought about when looking at this movie is that in most recent historical epics, the audience knows what's happening next. Do you go vote? So, to find that it would be dramatised on the big screen was as wonderfully welcome as it was astonishing. And I did the same for the journalists and the lawyers and everybody. I was only a junior analyst, but I knew the email was outrageous: the American government was asking Britain to spy on United Nations diplomats so they could be blackmailed into supporting an invasion of Iraq. There were some audience questions as well. What happened to Gun afterwards forms the basis of the film Official Secrets, which opened in New York and Los Angeles earlier this month and goes into wider release today. They failed. Gun disclosed details of the spying operation as it was happening to stop something she viewed as terrible happening in the future. However, her husband and the father of her daughters name is Yasar Gun. Id immediately be transported back to GCHQ and that email the anger I felt and the decisions I made. Gavin Hood: There is a kind of cognitive dissonance. As the title of the film script suggests, she was "The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War". [Ahmed is depicted in the film as strongly pro-war, resistant to running stories that conflict with his opinion.]. [Gun was charged with violating the Official Secrets Act in Britain, but ultimately the case never went to trial.]. This, despite credible evidence that Iran was in full compliance with terms of the agreement. Ive been impressed by the film-makers determination to stick to the facts Gavin Hood, the director, interviewed me at length over five days and I was consulted throughout the process. US firms waiting in the wings read to pump 'billions Parents' fury as schools STILL won't tell them if they are closed tomorrow as teacher strikes continue. It is to say that a government, for its own reasons may, either by design or through miscalculation, lead a country into an unnecessary and brutal war. So somehow in my rolodex, sometimes they sought me out. His philosophy comes from a military intelligence model, which actually, by the time you go to war, now it's about winning. I was glad to get back to what I hoped would be normality, but the effect on me had been traumatising. And people do this in every country; they spy, they listen to what are the Chinese going to do when they get to this conference. And she said, Yep, I have no problem being asked to listen in, in instances where I might help prevent a terror attack. What this memo suggested was neither of those things it was a bridge too far for her. Us, in any situation, wherever you work, I thought that's what this timeless about it. WebHer husband, Yaar Gn, is a Turkish Kurd. The truth was that in April of 2002, the two world leaders secretly had agreed on a plan to take out Saddam, all the while giving speeches insisting that the only motivation for even considering war was that horrific stockpile of deadly weapons. Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Every day we worked together for about five to six hours and then I referred back to her many times, subsequently, but I had literally just said, let's start at the beginning and let me hear first-hand from you your story and then I'll tell that story. It was what I was thinking, what I was feeling. His work has appeared in The Intercept, The New Republic, HuffPost, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and more. Since 2003, my life and Gun's have continued to cross from time to time. What It Feels Liketo Survive a Chemical Attack. And it was this book which eventually became the script for Official Secrets. In leaking it to the Observer, she was also doing something unprecedented in the history of espionage. You took this job and didnt even know what it was. And it's a tough profession in many ways. Gun said that the UK government still had some explaining to do: "I thinkthere need to be more questions asked about whether they responded to that request, why they felt it was within their scope of work to respond to that sort of request, and what is the manner of the relationship between UK politics and US politics. In the matter of a few years. Daniel Ellsberg, the celebrated American whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers about the build-up to the war in Vietnam, described it as "the most important and courageous leak I have ever seen".He added: "No one else including myself has ever done what Katharine Gun did: tell secret truths at personal risk, before an imminent war, in time, possibly, to avert it.". Were explosive, implicating America in a blackmail plot to swing UN votes in of! 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