Id immediately be transported back to GCHQ and that email the anger I felt and the decisions I made. Times have often been tough, not least because of the itinerant life she has chosen for herself. Ed, I know some people have said that Rhys Ifans [who plays Vulliamy] is slightly over the top. But ultimately, heres why I thinkthis might sound like a strange statement. We have a blondish-looking Katharine. Hood said that this was a purposeful choice by Knightley. I didnt know the story and I googled her. So WMD may not have been as important, had they gotten that resolution. And I went back in 93 and did another two years with the new Department of Health. 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. Its Straussian, over the top and pretentious but basically amounts to this. WebKatharine Gun wasn't looking for attention or any type of notoriety when in 2003, while working as a British intelligence specialist, she leaked a top secret memo. After the charges against her were dropped in 2004, she found it difficult to find a new I answered an advert in The Guardian newspaper for a translator. As the title of the film script suggests, she was "The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War". Problem number two: Do you shut up or do you speak up? Rishi Sunak is urgently reviewing his private exchanges with Matt Hancock after bombshell leak of ex-Health 'Drinks cold in fridge at DH!' WebWe speak with a British whistleblower whose attempts to expose lies about the Iraq invasion was called "the most important and courageous leak" in history by acclaimed Supported by Liberty, the prominent British civil-rights campaigning organiza-tion, Gun and her lawyer, Ben Emmerson (Ralph Fiennes), decided to cite grounds of necessity in order to contest the charges laid against her. Katharine Gun, former intelligence specialist turned whistleblower, discusses the new film "Official Secrets" which details why she leaked a classified memo. Happy and carefree, Id recently married my handsome husband and was working at GCHQ as a linguist. So right there, you are pulling out the highlights," said Hood of the key issue with making Official Secrets. "That really happened," Hood confirmed, though it did not go quite as it is shown in the film. David Dayen: So why do you think this is an important story to tell now in 2019? WebGun, then 28, received an email about a U.S.-led operation enlisting the help of Britain to spy on other countries, in an attempt to blackmail them into supporting the Iraq War. The difficulties of translating Gun's story also made writing the climax of the film tricky. So she went along to this interview, and she was 28. 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. Can dementia be spotted in CHILDHOOD? 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. 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. Because it was toughthe guy wouldnt print his stuff. David Dayen: And you were dealing with a story that was about a leak that didn't stop a war and leading to a trial that didn't happen. Six months later they released Nelson Mandela. WebKatharine Gun was a young specialist working for Britains Government Communications Headquarters when she exposed a highly confidential memo that revealed the United You took this job and didnt even know what it was. What is this paper? 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. As I walked down the red carpet, I had never in my life experienced the flash of so many cameras. We are no longer accepting comments on this article. Who knows whether they would've bent those other nations to vote for a resolution. At first, I heard nothing. So when, on the first Sunday of March, 2003, my leak appeared on the front page of The Observer newspaper, I was overcome with shock. By the time Gun and around 100 of her colleagues received the emailed memo that would change her life, she had already come to the conclusion that the arguments for war with Iraq were not really valid arguments, she tells me. There's an obvious scene of the immigration deportation. 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. 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. But the invasion was forced to proceed with the backing of Bushs coalition of the willinginstead of with the support of the United Nations. 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. 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. And I thought this is going to end in the worst civil war. And it was there that, to our amazement and totally without warning, the CPS dropped the charges before the trial had even started. We may earn a commission from these links. 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. Now the goal is not truth, it is victory. As opposed to trying to be Katharine Gun. The days and weeks dragged agonisingly by. Does anyone have any questions? We had planned to demand that the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith disclose the advice he had given on the legality of the war and so put the war itself on trial. That's the memo. Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. You see it most vividly in that scene where everybody stops calling Martin Bright, or they start canceling all the interviews. The other kind of fight could be frightening and politically risky. And isnt it also time to re-examine the Official Secrets Act? Unfortunately. But this specificinstance is the ugly truth of what goes on.". 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. 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. 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. And that's quite a depressing place to find yourself in when you feel so strongly and passionately about something. I spent the following hours doubled over the toilet bowl in absolute terror. [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.]. It was both exhilarating and just a little uncomfortable. There it was spotted by Debs Paterson, director of the critically acclaimed Africa United, who met Katharine Gun last week with a view to making the film of her life. Questioner: It was so heartening to hear you talk about that hero's journey because I feel like we so often take compassion, passion, integrity for granted as a call to action. Then, the world is safer until the sequel when it all happens again. 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.". 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 What did you think was going to happen? She said, You mean I dont have to wear a corset? To your point, in some way, she said to me, As a woman, its kind of ironic as an actress that I so often, even though Im in the modern world, that I have to find heroic women in period dramas wearing corsets. Theres something weird about that. 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? Some called her a traitor; others Then, we all started watching the invasion and we werent how we got into the war. Iraq All Over Again? By design. It turned out a copyeditor at The Observer had run the memo through spellcheck before printing it.]. Maybe thats rewarding. The contents were explosive, implicating America in a blackmail plot to swing UN votes in favor of an invasion. Martin Bright, who is in the movie very briefly I guess, is no longer in journalism as I understand it. For 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. I got that from Yasar. You dont have to agree with what she did, Im just telling you what she did. 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. This is a story about my life and my leak after all, and I still believe in the issues passionately. Now someone else may beI don't know if I could hack people's phones and computers, personally. 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. 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? Or at least, she could have been. The invasion was a huge blow, says Gun. Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). "One of the things that we discovered quite early on when he was interviewing me was that a lot of stuff was just happening in my head. In the years following, an author called Marcia Mitchell contacted me and said she was keen to write a book about my case. Made writing the climax of the film script suggests, she was keen to write a book about life! In 93 and did another two years with the backing of Bushs coalition of key! 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