The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline. President Bush visits the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland, January 25, 2006. 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. And I went back in 93 and did another two years with the new Department of Health. Now, Trump says, he wants to see Iran back at the negotiating table. So she went along to this interview, and she was 28. Then, we all started watching the invasion and we werent how we got into the war. WebAnd they failed, in part, I believe, because Katharine Gun leaked that memo, Official Secrets director Gavin Hood told Democracy Now!. So it was a pretty awful thing to happen to her. 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". Gavin Hood: Yes, it really sticks in my throat too. Later, she gave the document to a friend, who passed it onto a contact in the anti-war movement, until it finally landed with journalists Martin Bright and Ed Vulliamy The Observer. Our institutions matter. Who knows whether they would've bent those other nations to vote for a resolution. Questioner: The only thing that I've wondered while watching the film, since it's a true story, is how could Ms. Gunn, who was a spy, who was a member of an intelligence agency, be surprised when her husband got deportedor when the government came after her husband, how could she be surprised when all of the different reactions she got came forward? It was both exhilarating and just a little uncomfortable. David Dayen: But he is not a headline journalist at a newspaper. Is this a matter of threatening to launch a war, or is it a matter of responding to the US positioning itself for war? So Im very proud of Keiras performance and I dont mind that she doesnt have blonde hair. After the charges against her were dropped in 2004, she found it difficult to find a new Donald Trump also is saying he doesn't want war, which is probably true. "On the one hand, she's free. 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. 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). WebI disappeared with my husband down to the coast in Brighton, on the coast of England, and spent some time away from the limelight, Gun said in the interview. The difficulties of translating Gun's story also made writing the climax of the film tricky. So, I guess we all have a threshold. When Official Secrets received its British premiere at Londons BFI Film Festival earlier this month, I was determined to wear something that held a special meaning and settled on a dress by an Iraqi designer. And for her, this was too much. Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Liberty, the civil rights organisation, and Ben Emmerson QC had already agreed to defend me and we prepared for trial. Sound familiar? She could easily have been me or you at your place of work, where something comes across your desk and you go, This doesn't smell right. Taking Vitamin D each day could cut your chances of getting dementia, study claims. Now the goal is not truth, it is victory. 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. By Katharine Gun, Gchq Whistleblower For The Mail On Sunday, Published: 22:33 GMT, 26 October 2019 | Updated: 16:47 GMT, 8 November 2019. Jeb Bush Just Botched the Iraq Question. Provocation? Truth about Covid care home testing row: Timeline lays bare what was said, by who and when. Gabrielle Bruney is a writer and editor for Esquire, where she focuses on politics and culture. However, she is not without disappointment about how little obvious difference she made. "Because I think people see thatthe leaders of both the US and the UK conceivably could be considered war criminals, and yet they are walking free.". Had the film appeared any earlier, however, I dont think Id have been able to watch it, let alone help the makers. Whistleblower and former employee of Britain's global surveillance center GCHQ (Government Communications Head Quarters) Katharine Gun smiles as she speaks to the media during a press conference February 25, 2004 in London, England. Six months later they released Nelson Mandela. The only thing that we altered in that is that I didnt have time to tell it for as long as it went on. To tell too much more of the story would spoil the film, but one part of its ending is clear. After the leak was published, hundreds of staff inside the building were questioned in order to discover the identity of the whistleblower. As the title of the film script suggests, she was "The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War". "But the more I think about what happened, the more angry and frustrated I get about the fact that nobody acted on intelligence. By the time the mid-eighties came around and I was a young law student, so Im looking at it from the side of the law, we had no right of access to lawyers in trial if you breached anything that was regarded as having to do with the emergency legislation. When you support The American Prospect, youre supporting fellow readers who arent able to give, and countering the class system for information. It's tough, the laws here are even stricter than in the UK. Because it's just an Executive Branch trying to grab power as an authoritarian. 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.". As a result, there never was any second UN resolution. 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. Some called her a traitor; others Truth and accountability were drilled into me as a child. 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. The editorial position should never be that. You work for the government. So right there, you are pulling out the highlights," said Hood of the key issue with making Official Secrets. Whatever, she blew the whistle ultimately revealing the truth behind the build-up to the Iraq War--regime change, disguised as terrifying threats of weapons of mass destruction. Katharine Gun, former intelligence specialist turned whistleblower, discusses the new film "Official Secrets" which details why she leaked a classified memo. "But that's partly my own fault because I haven't aggressively pursued a career. And I thought this is going to end in the worst civil war. It was what I was thinking, what I was feeling. Did that change your approach to presenting the film knowing that this was actually going to be somewhat of a surprise to people? The days and weeks dragged agonisingly by. 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. The memo from Frank Koza, chief of staff at the "regional targets" section of the National Security Agency, GCHQ's sister organisation in the US, remains shocking in its implications for British sovereignty. We need another Katharine Gun. 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. Whether you work for Boeing or Enron or Wallstreet? Though celebrated Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg would later call Guns actions the most important and courageous leak in history due to her efforts to save lives through preventing a war, she obviously didnt succeed in stopping the invasion. David Dayen: Just the notion that the paper would say, we're for the war, that was their editorial position. It is written by Sara and Gregory Bernstein, a California-based husband-and-wife writing partnership who have worked with British director Jonathan Lynn. According to the Guardian, So we're in this development meeting, and the executive looks at me and goes, Gavin, I mean we need her running down alleys more, someone needs to throw a brick through her damn window, and when does she don her cape? It was literally the line. Gavin Hood: There is a kind of cognitive dissonance. Please help keep the independent journalism of Common Dreams strong. WebKatharine Gun, as passionately embodied here by Knightley, skews too noble to be particularly interesting, and the film is weakest when its focused on her and her husband She wasnt planning to get caught and then the dilemma was, My friends are all going to have their lives ruined.. The risks Gun took in revealing the UN email's existence were huge. In the matter of a few years. 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. Gun made the choice to leak the document, which Martin Bright of The Observer in Britain published in a story on March 2, 2003. Gun disclosed details of the spying operation as it was happening to stop something she viewed as terrible happening in the future. 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. She now has a four-year-old daughter who she is bringing up in Turkey. We started working on this three years ago and even then it felt relevant in the sense that the challenges we talked about earlier: Where does my loyalty lie? He really wouldnt; that scene in the movie really happened. The spin in this country and in the UK was the threat of deadly weapons ready to be deployed by Saddam. As it was, a second UN resolution directly to authorise war against Iraq never materialised and air strikes began on 19 March 2003. Because it was toughthe guy wouldnt print his stuff. Quality journalism. And we keep that system alive. Us, in any situation, wherever you work, I thought that's what this timeless about it. She was a spythe communications she translated had been obtained covertly, but she did the work in the interest of protecting Britain. She leaked a memo, she thought she'd get away with it, and she faced another one of these little moral dilemmas which was a few days later all her friends were being interrogated. As I walked down the red carpet, I had never in my life experienced the flash of so many cameras. 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. And if, 16 years ago, you had told me that one day my life story would be portrayed by Keira Knightley, Id have laughed and changed the subject. If there had been a UN resolution, there would have been no need to make a WMD argument because there are two legal ways to go to war. You can look up Nicole Mowbray, she wrote an article in The Guardian a couple weeks ago, about this worst day of her life. She said, I thought that might be quite interesting and exciting. He is just way out there in a whole other realm. "Obviously, we are compressing a story that took place in real life over a period of a year into two hours. 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 maybe if we went to work for Enron and we liked our job well enough, and its a job. This meant that a lot of the things that we see Gun go through in the film actually took far longer in real life. The team of hawks circling George Bush had long wanted to take out Saddam Hussein, as did Bush. And I went, Oh, that's how much that superhero myth is in our system. We didn't end up making it with that studio. She didnt know where he was for three days and she took the train down from Charlton to London to see the MP, Nigel Jones, who said exactly what he says in the movie. ", Keira Knightley and Katharine Gun at the London premiere of "Official Secrets. Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Was the British government aware of it? I didnt know the story and I googled her. Cheering crowds have never been my sort of thing. The movie tells the story of Katharine Gun (played by Keira Knightley), a translator with the U.K.'s GCHQ who, in 2003, leaked top secret documents to journalist Martin Bright (Matt Smith) that revealed that the American government's plans to apply pressure on members of the U.N. Security Counsel to pass its war resolution. If if wasnt, what does that mean for the rule of law? And isnt it also time to re-examine the Official Secrets Act? 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." They had published not some coded version of events, but the email itself in full. Me, you, not some big picture. WebFor example, a scene where Gun tries to get her husband out of an immigration detention center actually played out over three days during which she did not know where he was. 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. I didn't plan to have this movie out today and know what was going to be going on. Who authorised the NSA email, for example? She failed. For the Observer too, it was a story full of risks. WebHer husband, Yaar Gn, is a Turkish Kurd. Now there is the possibility that Gun's singular life will be made into a movie. Would you risk your job? It remains entirely to the credit of Roger Alton, at the time the paper's editor, that he stuck with the story, despite its potential implications. WebKatharine Gun (ne Harwood), 47, is married to Yasar Gn, a Turkish Kurd, with whom she has a 13-year old daughter. I hadnt those moments where you think: Sounds like I ought to have, but I hadnt agreed defend... 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