He runs a media charity. "I never aligned myself specifically with the anti-war movement. With the operation blown, the chances of George W Bush and Tony Blair getting the consensus for a direct UN mandate for war were now near zero. And she thought she wouldnt get caught. Now there is the possibility that Gun's singular life will be made into a movie. But Katharine only ever leaked this one memo. Who, one must ask, is provoking whom? What It Feels Liketo Survive a Chemical Attack. Part of the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday & Metro Media Group, King Charles hosts von der Leyen at Windsor Castle, Police: Urgent search for Constance Marten's missing baby, Shocking video shows machete fight in broad daylight, Gabor Mat: No Jewish state without oppressing local population, Putin spy plane before being 'destroyed by pro-Ukraine Belarus group', Amplified jet stream could lead to 'disruptive snow in places', Pupils take to TikTok as they stage protest at Shenfield High School, Putin orders intelligence service to find 'scum' who oppose him, Moment supermarket cashier is attacked at work in New York, Police search allotment sheds for Constance Marten's missing baby, Huge urgent police search for missing baby of Constance Marten, Dashcam captures moment two cars collide on a roundabout. ", 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. In leaking it to the Observer, she was also doing something unprecedented in the history of espionage. Gun was visiting friends and family in Cheltenham when I talked to her, with the strain obvious on her face but still looking much younger than her 38 years. A thorough investigation began as soon as the staff started arriving at GCHQ on the Monday morning. Those are compelling and important qualities to see in characters that move through a story, and I feel like especially for women it's an under-valued active engine. ", Bright noted that apart from some small flourishes to heighten the drama, he didn't think Official Secrets had "any genuine liberties taken with the truth. 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. 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.". 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. Not good enough, the trio decided. 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. It is to say that we need to know the truth behind the decisions to act or not to act. When I got to the interview thats when they told me that its for GCHQ, I didnt know what GCHQ did. So, I think she entered the world out of a sort of strange curiosity. Photograph: Andy Hall for the Observer, en years ago, a young Mandarin specialist at GCHQ, the government's surveillance centre in Cheltenham, did something extraordinary. This content is imported from youTube. Sometimes movies can be an effective way to make forgotten stories part of our national narrative, and in that sense, Official Secrets comes not a moment too soon. And she said, I dont work for the government. That was my first thoughtwhat do you mean you dont work for the government? Rishi Sunak is urgently reviewing his private exchanges with Matt Hancock after bombshell leak of ex-Health 'Drinks cold in fridge at DH!' A script has been doing the rounds in Hollywood for five years. After the leak was published, hundreds of staff inside the building were questioned in order to discover the identity of the whistleblower. WebGun was followed, denied legal advice and her Turkish husband faced deportation. My shock turned to anger as the significance sank in. Just occasionally Naturally, I was discreet. "But the more I think about what happened, the more angry and frustrated I get about the fact that nobody acted on intelligence. 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. And it's not an easy question, it sounds easy, but I don't think it is. 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. By printing off the memo, putting it in her handbag and taking it home, she was already committing a serious breach of the Official Secrets Act. [In the movie, Gun says I dont work for the government, I work for the people.]. And those two are great actresses. As Bright noted, however, what we see in the movie is close to the real events. WebAttempts were made by the authorities to deport her husband, who grew disillusioned with Britain. It is probably still too early to tell. And Where Is Katharine Gun, JUST 36 HOURS TO GO IN OUR WINTER CAMPAIGN. KatharineGun did not stop the war,but was it all entirely in vain? That's the memo. Gun disclosed details of the spying operation as it was happening to stop something she viewed as terrible happening in the future. Is this a matter of threatening to launch a war, or is it a matter of responding to the US positioning itself for war? David Dayen: I want to go to the questions now. So when I sent the script to Keira, and I was very hopeful that she would do it because she does a lot of period dramas, and you dont often see her in a modern drama and I thought shed be great. I got that from Yasar. This is a special case because this story is very little-known in the United States. So it was a pretty awful thing to happen to her. Gavin Hood: After the spellcheck. First, I contacted someone to this day Ive never named them who had the details of a journalist and anti-war activist. Or at least, she could have been. I actually think the little memo lands on our lap more often than we think, even if it's just who I should vote for. Keira calmly said: Oh, that was probably me. I still blush to the tips of my toes when I think about it. And I went back in 93 and did another two years with the new Department of Health. And I did the same for the journalists and the lawyers and everybody. So she went along to this interview, and she was 28. She had received an email in her inbox asking her and her colleagues to help in a vast intelligence "surge" designed to secure a UN resolution to send troops into Iraq. Later, it turned out that the Attorney General had indeed judged the war to be illegal in his initial advice, but that fact was not revealed until six years later in 2010. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site. Her story, which reveals what a country will do when it wants war and claims it does not, is told in an updated book and a major motion picture soon to be released--Official Secrets (Keira Knightly is Katharine). WebAnd they failed, in part, I believe, because Katharine Gun leaked that memo, Official Secrets director Gavin Hood told Democracy Now!. "Obviously, we are compressing a story that took place in real life over a period of a year into two hours. During the American-lead 2003 campaign for United Nations support for an invasion of Iraq, Gun, who's played in the film by Keira Knightley, was a 28 year-old Mandarin translator working for the UKs Government Communications Headquarters, the nations equivalent of the American NSA. The British are quite British, you know. The truth is when she speaks to me, and she says, Gavin, we also go to lunch like everybody else in any other office. Give today. Some called her a traitor; others insisted she was a hero. This whole intelligence didn't match what the politicians were saying. David Dayen: As someone who works on a magazine, it's the ultimate copyediting failure. Please, become a member, or make a one-time donation, today. ", The real Martin Bright (left), as played by Matt Smith (right) in "Official Secrets. But depicting that climate, people who were not aware or active at that timedidn't realize how difficult this was to talk against the war both from the journalist's perspective and obviously someone who's in the intelligence community. The other was Coleen Rowley, former FBI special agent and counsel at the Minneapolis bureau, who blew the whistle on FBI and other shortcomings The email was demonstrating the depths to which the American and British governments would descend in order to get spurious legal cover for a war in the Middle East which would have utterly catastrophic consequences, as we know to our cost today. So there is sometimes a thought in my head that says: What if Katharine hadn't leaked that memo? The point of all of this is painfully obvious. Again. One is kind of what I thought it was, which is the CIA is the Central Intelligence Agency, walled off from politicians and the executive in a perfect world, where all the intelligence comes in, they analyze it and they then present their best intelligence estimates; this is pre-war, youre not at war, to the executive branch. Then, the following November, after eight months of worry, I was finally charged. Thankfully, time passes and the intensity of feelings fades. Surely, she thought, when people realised that the UK was being asked to collaborate in an operation to find out personal information that could be used to blackmail UN delegates, they would be outraged and the UK government would halt its slide into war. Her husband said its a job, its just a goddamn job, I work at a caf. The decision to leak it was almost instant I felt I had no choice. It was like a neon sign that was flashing at me, Gun says. You work for the government. But there's no way I would have expressed that to any of my colleagues," Gun explained. But, did it change the way I approached it? By Katharine Gun, Gchq Whistleblower For The Mail On Sunday, Published: 22:33 GMT, 26 October 2019 | Updated: 16:47 GMT, 8 November 2019. Exaggerating threats to provoke a war? It was written in technical language, but the meaning was clear enough: the Americans were asking around 100 people in GCHQ to gather information from the communications made by diplomats from six nations Angola, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Chile, Guinea and Pakistan all which were then sitting on the United Nations Security Council. Maybe thats rewarding. And he kept thinking, 'How am I going to portray this? [Gun's husband Yasar, a Kurd, was nearly deported back to the Middle East at one point, even though he had nothing to do with the leak.]. And in her case, she risked both her job and her freedom and whatever you think of her politically, I think that takes some guts. I grew up in South Africa in the seventies and eighties, when apartheid was really tightening and tightening and tightening. 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. Whistleblower Katherine Gun, right, is played by Keira Knightly in the movie Official Secrets, Gun was outraged after she learned - as part of her job with GCHQ - that the United States wanted Britain to assist in spying on fellow United Nations Security Council members to win a vote in favour of a planned war in Iraq. WebIn 2003, Katharine Gun exposed a plot by U.S. security officials to spy on United Nations members as they ramped up pressure to secure a resolution to go to war with Iraq, and 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. But she said she would still be prepared to give evidence to the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war. Had the film appeared any earlier, however, I dont think Id have been able to watch it, let alone help the makers. "There seems to be this blas attitude the spying goes on, everyone does it and so it's nothing to get all hot under the collar about. Iran, meanwhile, says it doesn't want war, but will defend itself. And it was this book which eventually became the script for Official Secrets. I know what it is like to watch the system become completely authoritarian. But ultimately, heres why I thinkthis might sound like a strange statement. It's a fascinating film that really evokes the dangers of speaking out in the post-9/11 age, as well as the press's inability to challenge the official story on Iraq, particularly the U.S. press, which really just blacked out the Gun leak entirely. 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." When my moment came, I found myself standing alone in the dock facing the judge and surrounded by lawyers, journalists and supporters. The case and the resulting anxiety never seemed far away. And then there is the Gulf of Tonkin incident that led America deeply into war against North Vietnam. Even though she didn't stop the war and some people are like what's the point if she didn't stop the warwell, the point is how do you sleep at night? You have the UN resolution, we're all doing this together to stop the genocide or something, or it's self-defense, we're going to be attacked, it's so clear we're going to be attacked that we have to take pre-emptive action. 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. And I know whose throat it really sticks in, is [British journalist] Ed Vulliamy, who I adore. At first, I heard nothing. In fact, I had no idea what was going on. The days and weeks dragged agonisingly by. She wasnt charged for eight months a gruelling period which is depicted as just a few Because it was toughthe guy wouldnt print his stuff. Yet to this day there has been barely a mention of the Bush regimes disgraceful demand in official histories of the period, as if its been deliberately written out. When Katharine Gun came across a memo while working for the British government in 2003, her whole world changed. For the Observer too, it was a story full of risks. That means that, in theory, the war could still be classified as an illegal war, Gun says. Provocation? Anyway, the Office of Special Plans and Abram Shulsky make an interesting Wikipedia read, it won't take you very long. To look at someone who I thought was quite accessible and ordinaryand she doesn't mind me saying this because Katharine is someone who keeps her head below and is quiet, and did something extraordinary. Look at what happened to Reality Winner in this country. If we give over, if we start believing the fake news, as you say, we're all doomed, man. But the Bush administration went to war anyway, using the pretext of weapons of mass destruction. And I thought: this is good. Then, we all started watching the invasion and we werent how we got into the war. British Secret Service Officer Katharine, then a young bride, risked everything to leak details of the Bush-Blair plan to coerce (possibly blackmail) members of the UN Security Council in order to win their votes to legalize invading Iraq. It turned out a copyeditor at The Observer had run the memo through spellcheck before printing it.]. Spoilers to follow as well. It was what I was thinking, what I was feeling. '", The reality was not nearly as dramatic as in the film, where Bright and his editor are together in a newsroom when the mistake is revealed, leading to them being dropped from interviews with a number of international news outlets. I didn't plan to have this movie out today and know what was going to be going on. Gun discusses her attempt to stop the Iraq War, which is the subject of the new movie Official Secrets. I was called on to look this way and that and smile until my face was stiff. Now someone else may beI don't know if I could hack people's phones and computers, personally. But any such illusions were shattered on the freezing cold morning of Friday, January 31, 2003, as I read and re-read the most extraordinary email from Americas intelligence service, the National Security Agency. Sorry to digress. To donate by check, phone, or other method, see our More Ways to Give page. In the film, when Gun is sent an email from someone high up in the U.S. government that reveals the U.S. covert plan, she decides to leak it to Bright, who works for the British newspaper The Observer, which then publishes it on their front page. Gavin Hood: There is a kind of cognitive dissonance. ", Keira Knightley and Katharine Gun at the London premiere of "Official Secrets. What resonates to me is the somewhat more, I hope, timeless thing. 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. For the future, I hope the film will help locate the missing pieces from the story. Its had far reaching and very negative impacts in all aspects of our institutions and our public life," Gun says. We were to target such things as phone calls and emails from their homes as well as their places of work. Healthy mother-of-two, 32, collapsed and died from brain bleed while she led fitness bounce class. Despite the millions affected by the Iraq War, its now far removed from British and American news cycles, displaced from the headlines by todays political turmoil. If the email did reach the newspapers, I reasoned, there would be no more than a discreet summary. Taking Vitamin D each day could cut your chances of getting dementia, study claims. Do you vote, do you analyze who you should vote for or do you just take it for granted? Feel free to republish and share widely. The true story of a British whistleblower who leaked information to the press about an illegal NSA spy operation designed to push the UN Security Council into sanctioning the 2003 invasion of Iraq. the waning support for public institutions today. Katharine Gun, former intelligence specialist turned whistleblower, discusses the new film "Official Secrets" which details why she leaked a classified memo. This and her other writings about intelligence issues have been critically acclaimed. That seems like the central undercurrent that is playing throughout the entire film. Katharine Gun, a shy and studious 28-year-old who spent her days listening in to obscure Chinese intercepts, decided to tell the world about a secret plan by the US government to spy on the United Nations. Most whistleblowers leak after the event to expose perceived wrongdoing. It wasone of the reasons I came to this country in 89 was because we were getting drafted, and I thought I cant do this. Katharine Gun and Martin Bright could be forgiven for fielding Hollywoods overtures with a degree of skepticism. Neither my friends nor my family knew what I did all day. And Assange is the same. Donald Trump also is saying he doesn't want war, which is probably true. But the falsehoods and unnecessary wars of yesteryear likely have influenced the waning support for public institutions today. Director Gavin Hood Writers Sara Bernstein Gregory Bernstein Gavin Hood Stars Keira Knightley Matt Smith Matthew Goode The contents were explosive, implicating America in a blackmail plot to swing UN votes in favor of an invasion. That would be awkward. Now the goal is not truth, it is victory. Actually, there were two incidents at sea, blamed originally on the North Vietnamese. When my turn came, I entered a small side office, faced the security official and, putting on my best poker face, denied any involvement. Progressive values. I sensed a slight flash of anger as she said: "It's not even a footnote in the history of Iraq." 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. Maybe that was naive, but she didn't think that. Then the story went Was the British government aware of it? You may not know the name Katharine Gun unless you live in the United Kingdom, but she was a pivotal figure in the run-up to the Iraq War. [In real life] I saw the email, I immediately thought, 'Oh, my God, this is shocking.' Why did the British authorities wait eight months before charging me and then drop the charges, claiming there was insufficient evi-dence for prosecution when I had confessed to the leak from the start? It was only later in the green room that I asked what all the fuss had been about, wondering aloud if it had been the environmental protest group Extinction Rebellion. As the working day came to close, I tried to project a sense of calm I didnt feel, walked out of the gates and put the incriminating email in the post. We even got as far as the Old Bailey. Gavin Hood: I asked her the same questions, and on about my second day interviewing her, I said to her, because I wasnt sure if I should make the movie; I mean, I needed to know whose story I was telling and if she was batshit crazy. He said she didnt even know what the job was. Moment fitness influencer asks man to move off park bench 'because he's 'ruining her livestream' - but Mortgage demand plummets to a 28-year low as average interest rates hit 6.71% - just as spring home buying Britain braces for brutal -9C Arctic snap: Met Office warns more snow and ice could lash the country next Is YOUR wood burner at risk? 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? WebWhen the film opens, Gun (Keira Knightley) is happily married to Yasar (Adam Bakri), a Turkish national living in the UK on a temporary visa, and passionately invested in When you support The American Prospect, youre supporting fellow readers who arent able to give, and countering the class system for information. The difficulties of translating Gun's story also made writing the climax of the film tricky. By the way, I know some amazing people in the intelligence services. So, I guess we all have a threshold. Following the trauma inflicted on Gun, the U.K. Attorney General dropped the case against her with no warning. EXCLUSIVE: Lanzarote sticks to its guns and insists it WILL limit tourists and move away from relying on Jeremy Clarkson is axed as Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Gavin Hood: Hes not in journalism. She hoped that if people know about the lengths to which theyve gone to legitimize an invasion of Iraq, then it would blow apart, and people will suddenly think, No, this isnt right, and the whole house of cards would come tumbling down.. On the other hand, she and Ben, to this day, feel they never got their day in court. In the matter of a few years. Gabrielle Bruney is a writer and editor for Esquire, where she focuses on politics and culture. Then, the following Monday, I printed out a copy of the email, folded it up, and tucked it carefully in my bag. 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. WebKatharine Gun was a young specialist working for Britains Government Communications Headquarters when she exposed a highly confidential memo that revealed the United Yet here was a story that had the capacity to derail the war altogether. Some called her a traitor; others Gun, a translator with the British intelligence service known as Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), received a document just before the war from an NSA manager, seeking British intelligence support in spying on members of the UN Security Council, to effectively blackmail them into voting for a second resolution that would make legal the invasion of Iraq. Because it's just an Executive Branch trying to grab power as an authoritarian. These superheroes, and I don't just mean superheroes in the movie sense, but larger-than-life big political figures, or Edward Snowden is almost mythical in his brilliance whether you like what he did or not, he is sort of not me. A manufactured provocation. She will not talk about it anything else. Much to the distress of our former partners in the Iran nuclear deal, Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the agreement and announced tougher sanctions. Does anyone have any questions? A transcript, lightly edited with explainers where necessary, follows. So, Im not really answering your question well, but her feeling was just: Now I dont belong in this company.

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