Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. 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? First, I contacted someone to this day Ive never named them who had the details of a journalist and anti-war activist. He is just way out there in a whole other realm. 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. 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. I answered an advert in The Guardian newspaper for a translator. 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 She said, I thought that might be quite interesting and exciting. Well, you don't have one and get that almost anti-climactic moment that is a punch in the gut," said Hood. It is probably still too early to tell. But the Bush administration went to war anyway, using the pretext of weapons of mass destruction. But get out of that trailer as fast as possible, get onto the set, and work from inside? Some of those same birds are still flapping wings in the skies above Washington. The issue is provocation. One by one, all those who received the email approximately 100 people were taken in for a grilling. WebHer 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. And I thought this is going to end in the worst civil war. It was the first time I had worked with characters who were still alive, and they very much wanted it to be accurate or they wouldn't sign over their life rights. "But the more I think about what happened, the more angry and frustrated I get about the fact that nobody acted on intelligence. Ive already lost a dear friend, and I cant do thisget called up two months of the year, every year, for the next 12 years. 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. What might, IKeira Knightley, feel if I'm sitting at my desk and this happened to me?" She will not talk about it anything else. Truth about Covid care home testing row: Timeline lays bare what was said, by who and when. 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. And when we got to that point in the movie, I had to start montaging it because it was just taking too long to get to the end. So there is sometimes a thought in my head that says: What if Katharine hadn't leaked that memo? 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. I've seen that happen. When do the clocks change in 2023? I grew up in South Africa in the seventies and eighties, when apartheid was really tightening and tightening and tightening. America, Britain, and Spain withdrew their proposed resolution on invading Iraq when it became clear that it would not garner the necessary Security Council votes, in part because of the information Gun brought to light. "But that's partly my own fault because I haven't aggressively pursued a career. According to the Guardian, If we give over, if we start believing the fake news, as you say, we're all doomed, man. 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. 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. 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. Not good enough, the trio decided. But when Gun's lawyers threaten to question the U.K. Attorney General Lord Goldsmith about Britain's involvement in the Iraq war, the government drops their case against Gun. Katharine Gun and Martin Bright could be forgiven for fielding Hollywoods overtures with a degree of skepticism. Iran has been filmed loading missiles aboard some of its vessels. If if wasnt, what does that mean for the rule of law? This is not to say that Iran does not have a trick up its sleeve, or that wild-eyed Iranian hawks aren't circling its leaders. Then, the following Monday, I printed out a copy of the email, folded it up, and tucked it carefully in my bag. The team of hawks circling George Bush had long wanted to take out Saddam Hussein, as did Bush. Gavin Hood: Its a great question. [In the movie, Gun says I dont work for the government, I work for the people.]. What appealed to me in the end is that Katharine is in fact, far more like us. She wasnt planning to get caught and then the dilemma was, My friends are all going to have their lives ruined.. 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. But ultimately, heres why I thinkthis might sound like a strange statement. It is written by Sara and Gregory Bernstein, a California-based husband-and-wife writing partnership who have worked with British director Jonathan Lynn. "Obviously, we are compressing a story that took place in real life over a period of a year into two hours. She wasnt charged for eight months a gruelling period which is depicted as just a few Because I'm not ambitious it's not paramount for me to find myself in a high-paid job. 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. Anyway, the Office of Special Plans and Abram Shulsky make an interesting Wikipedia read, it won't take you very long. Gavin Hood: After the spellcheck. David Dayen: So why do you think this is an important story to tell now in 2019? The invasion was a huge blow, says Gun. I am an American citizen; I have a strange accent but Ive been here 25 years; my kids were born here. And she thought she wouldnt get caught. Sixteen years ago, I became headline news after I leaked an internal email from GCHQ, the communications intelligence gathering centre near Cheltenham. In the years following, an author called Marcia Mitchell contacted me and said she was keen to write a book about my case. Not only was the cable the most sensitive ever to be disclosed on either side of the Atlantic, it was also unique in its timing. Actually, there were two incidents at sea, blamed originally on the North Vietnamese. 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. Our institutions matter. 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. In fact, I had no idea what was going on. 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. [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.]. 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. Give today. She said to me, Gavin, I had no problem doing the work that involved a lot of listening in, in order to give information about trade negotiations, to give our country the advantage of trade negotiations when they go. And just coming from my perspective, the press, because a lot of this is a story about the press, and how they handle it. Throughout her own court case, what only a few knew was that she was also fighting for However, Gun added that this was nothing on the anxiety she felt when the memo she had leaked ended up on the front page of The Observer, which she called "the most stressful memo of my life. David Dayen: But he is not a headline journalist at a newspaper. 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. You are sitting in the intelligence services, and Ive spoken to many now because Ive made other films in that world and I have some interesting folks that Ive been able to talk to, and the struggle was were being disloyal if you dont toe a party line, as it were, but we know this isnt right. The point of all of this is painfully obvious. She got into a plea bargain, they still gave her five years. 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. Then the story went 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. What It Feels Liketo Survive a Chemical Attack. I was glad to get back to what I hoped would be normality, but the effect on me had been traumatising. Gun discusses her attempt to stop the Iraq War, which is the subject of the new movie Official Secrets. "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. The legal case against Gun was eventually dropped by the British government in 2004, after her lawyer, Ben Emmerson QC (played in the film with fabulous charisma by Ralph Fiennes), threatened to use disclosure to put the legal basis of the war itself on trial. 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. Not mine or The Observer's finest hour, has to be said. But she still was not uncomfortable with the other things we've talked about. I know what it is like to watch the system become completely authoritarian. Chile and Mexico and the other smaller countries were so outraged that they refused to even bring it to a vote. 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. That's the memo. 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 Unfortunately, perhaps, I have a conscience and my dishonesty gnawed at me persistently until the next day, when I confessed. "Financially it's the toughest," she said. It was what I was thinking, what I was feeling. You took this job and didnt even know what it was. Do you vote, do you analyze who you should vote for or do you just take it for granted? So that's who's running this show. She made the point that if you have Helen Mirren playing the Queen or Meryl Streep playing Maggie Thatcher, everybody knows those people and your judged on how well you impersonate, if you will, those people. Gun sacrificed so much when she decided to leak and has worked only intermittently since. Everyone involved assumed the project had run into the dust, but then it appeared on the Black List, a Hollywood website for unmade film scripts, which has featured Slumdog Millionaire and The King's Speech in the past. At some point, as you probably know, Bush and Rumsfeld decided to bypass the CIA and take out that Office of Special Plans. Sound familiar? 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? And Assange is the same. I didnt know until I looked really deeply into this that theres really two schools of thought. 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. David Dayen: One thing I think you depict really brilliantly in this story is what the climate was like at the time. Hundreds of thousands were killed. In technical speak, the Americans wanted the whole gamut of information which would give US policy makers an edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals in relation to Iraq. 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, Don't mention the Iraq war, William Hague tells cabinet, Tenyears on, the case for invading Iraq is still valid, Occupying Iraq: a US army veteran's ambivalence, Howthe Bush administration sold the war and we bought it, the story the paper published 10 years ago this weekend, was arrested, lost her job and faced trial under the Official Secrets Act, collapsed after the prosecution withdrew its evidence. This content is imported from youTube. My job had been to listen to Chinese communications, translate them from Mandarin to English and produce reports for different government departments. 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. Right: Entertainment One, Everyone Practices Cancel Culture | Opinion, Deplatforming Free Speech is Dangerous | Opinion. Problem number two: Do you shut up or do you speak up? As of 2020 Gun lives in Turkey and Britain. So it was a pretty awful thing to happen to her. And it's also true that we were then attacked by the Drudge Report for what would now be called 'fake news. Then, we all started watching the invasion and we werent how we got into the war. As a result of the story the paper published 10 years ago this weekend, she was arrested, lost her job and faced trial under the Official Secrets Act. WebKatharine Gun (ne Harwood), 47, is married to Yasar Gn, a Turkish Kurd, with whom she has a 13-year old daughter. 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. Unfortunately. Cheering crowds have never been my sort of thing. 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. So she went along to this interview, and she was 28. The difficulties of translating Gun's story also made writing the climax of the film tricky. 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. Copyright 2023 | The American Prospect, Inc. | All Rights Reserved, The Alt-Labor Chronicles: Americas Worker Centers, Official Secrets: A Conversation With Director Gavin Hood. The decision to leak it was almost instant I felt I had no choice. Im gratified, too, that the film shows the love and support my husband gave me throughout this ordeal. What do you think resonates? And I didnt have work where I was. Theres not a lot of work for translators; shes a Mandarin translator in England. After the charges against her were dropped in 2004, she found it difficult to find a new WebHer husband, Yaar Gn, is a Turkish Kurd. Is this a matter of threatening to launch a war, or is it a matter of responding to the US positioning itself for war? She went to this interview, the next minute were down this rabbit hole, the next minute my wifes telling the world. I was arrested for a breach of section one of the Official Secrets Act 1989 and held overnight in a cell in the basement of the Cheltenham Police headquarters. And she and many in her world knew, and many in the CIA knew, as Mel Goodman who's the man in the boathouse in Washington knew, that this was B.S. 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. WebAnd they failed, in part, I believe, because Katharine Gun leaked that memo, Official Secrets director Gavin Hood told Democracy Now!. In the runup to the critical vote on war in Iraq, Katharine Gun exposed a US plot to spy on the UN. None of the Government reports into the war acknowledged it, nor did the history books. 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. WebGun was followed, denied legal advice and her Turkish husband faced deportation. A translator for UK intelligence agency GCHQ, Gun read a brief from the US National Security Agency urging its British sister organisation to spy on members of the UN Security Council, to gain influence i n a vote They're more polite to their suspects. Keira said no one knows Katharine, and that's not an insult to Katharine. But the falsehoods and unnecessary wars of yesteryear likely have influenced the waning support for public institutions today. As the title of the film script suggests, she was "The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War". Warning: The following contains spoilers for Official Secrets. She failed. 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. 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). 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