And it's a tough profession in many ways. The spin in this country and in the UK was the threat of deadly weapons ready to be deployed by Saddam. They're more polite to their suspects. Director Gavin Hood Writers Sara Bernstein Gregory Bernstein Gavin Hood Stars Keira Knightley Matt Smith Matthew Goode Iraq All Over Again? Was it because we had demanded the Attorney Generals legal advice as part of my defence? 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. Eventually, it was widely held that at least one of the reports of the attacks, and perhaps even both, were false. Gavin Hood: Hes not in journalism. The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline. And that's quite a depressing place to find yourself in when you feel so strongly and passionately about something. This is a story about my life and my leak after all, and I still believe in the issues passionately. Liberty, the civil rights organisation, and Ben Emmerson QC had already agreed to defend me and we prepared for trial. Healthy mother-of-two, 32, collapsed and died from brain bleed while she led fitness bounce class. 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. She wasnt charged for eight months a gruelling period which is depicted as just a few And Assange is the same. Or at least, she could have been. In a year that the U.S. president is accused of pressuring foreign governments for political gain, the story behind the film Official Secrets seems particularly timely. She said, I was naive. 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. 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. Direct to your inbox. It turned out a copyeditor at The Observer had run the memo through spellcheck before printing it.]. 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. [In real life] I saw the email, I immediately thought, 'Oh, my God, this is shocking.' Twenty-eight, pretty naive. Americans find it hard to believe that it could happen, but it happens, it happens fast. But, maybe if I didn't know and maybe if I went into that job and discovered oh my God, maybe I really can stop a terrorist attack today. 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. She was horrified and leaked the email to the Observer. Gun sacrificed so much when she decided to leak and has worked only intermittently since. 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. The other was Coleen Rowley, former FBI special agent and counsel at the Minneapolis bureau, who blew the whistle on FBI and other shortcomings So right there, you are pulling out the highlights," said Hood of the key issue with making Official Secrets. Does anyone have any questions? But that shouldn't be the philosophy pre-war when you're trying to decide whether to go to war. That seems like the central undercurrent that is playing throughout the entire film. Was the British government aware of it? 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 "Financially it's the toughest," she said. His work has appeared in The Intercept, The New Republic, HuffPost, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and more. Anyway, the Office of Special Plans and Abram Shulsky make an interesting Wikipedia read, it won't take you very long. A script has been doing the rounds in Hollywood for five years. Provocation? I admitted the leak and my life was turned upside down. Where do you draw the line? 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. Then the story went 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. Thankfully, time passes and the intensity of feelings fades. Rishi Sunak is urgently reviewing his private exchanges with Matt Hancock after bombshell leak of ex-Health 'Drinks cold in fridge at DH!' 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. The film also captures my determination to do what I believed was right and reveals how divisive the Iraq War was, particularly highlighting the anger within certain sections of the intelligence services as the sabre-rattling statements of Mr Blair and his spokesman Alastair Campbell were accepted without proper challenge by some in the media. And it was this book which eventually became the script for Official Secrets. I had, of course, signed the Official Secrets Act, content in the knowledge I was working within the law for Britains protection. David Dayen: As someone who works on a magazine, it's the ultimate copyediting failure. 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. This and her other writings about intelligence issues have been critically acclaimed. As Bright noted, however, what we see in the movie is close to the real events. You might say I am biased. Powerful Commons committee could look at case for banning stoves in towns and Love Island hit by hundreds of Ofcom complaints from furious viewers over 'toxic femininity' row and Movie As easy as buying a loaf of bread: Undercover footage reveals how laughing gas is being sold from local Could Northern Ireland become the UK's Silicon Valley? 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. 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. And that I think was the motivation. "We started wondering whether we should do the blonde hair and the glasses and wondering about prosthetics, but one point Keira said to me, 'You know, the last thing I want is the audience to say, 'Oh, I don't know if I like her blonde,'" said Hood. It is probably still too early to tell. 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. If it was, who cleared it to be passed to GCHQ? Some called her a traitor; others insisted she was a hero. The email, which was sent by an American NSA official, suggested that the US was just as well aware that it couldnt earn UN support through valid arguments alone: The memo outlined a plan to bug diplomats from non-permanent UN Security Council Nations Chile, Pakistan, Bulgaria, Guinea, Angola, and Cameroon in search of intelligence that could be used to cajole and possibly even blackmail them into supporting the invasion. Me, you, not some big picture. Seven times I've submitted articles to you with an alternate point of view, and seven times you've turned me down. "That really happened," Hood confirmed, though it did not go quite as it is shown in the film. 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. 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. He runs a media charity. 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. 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. The risks Gun took in revealing the UN email's existence were huge. Right: Entertainment One, Everyone Practices Cancel Culture | Opinion, Deplatforming Free Speech is Dangerous | Opinion. When Katharine Gun came across a memo while working for the British government in 2003, her whole world changed. 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? Since 2003, my life and Gun's have continued to cross from time to time. Meanwhile, Kamal Ahmed, who is the guy at The Observer, is now the editorial director of the BBC. The editorial position should never be that. 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. Such a law is not compatible with openness, transparency, accountability and justice. Gavin Hood: Yes, it really sticks in my throat too. 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. But ultimately, heres why I thinkthis might sound like a strange statement. Hood said that this was a purposeful choice by Knightley. If the email did reach the newspapers, I reasoned, there would be no more than a discreet summary. I know what it is like to watch the system become completely authoritarian. She was a spythe communications she translated had been obtained covertly, but she did the work in the interest of protecting Britain. The truth is when she speaks to me, and she says, Gavin, we also go to lunch like everybody else in any other office. 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. Gavin Hood: And that really happened. Gabrielle Bruney is a writer and editor for Esquire, where she focuses on politics and culture. I was glad to get back to what I hoped would be normality, but the effect on me had been traumatising. '", 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. The central issues of whistle-blower protection, public interest disclosures, journalistic freedom and the accountability of our elected representatives continue to be just as relevant today. Progressive values. 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. 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.. A thorough investigation began as soon as the staff started arriving at GCHQ on the Monday morning. 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 His philosophy comes from a military intelligence model, which actually, by the time you go to war, now it's about winning. Do you go vote? Donald Trump also is saying he doesn't want war, which is probably true. 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. That kind of propaganda has to stop. Gun had hoped the leak would prick the conscience of the British public, large sections of which were already taking to the streets in opposition to the war. What is this paper? The increasing presence of US Navy ships and a B-52 bomber task force in their neighborhood might provoke the Iranians to load up their missiles. We need a truth-sayer. Because it's just an Executive Branch trying to grab power as an authoritarian. 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. 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. Never mind that invading another country for the purpose of regime change is illegal according to international laws to which the United States is a signatory. WebGun sacrificed so much when she decided to leak and has worked only intermittently since. According to the Guardian, So, I guess we all have a threshold. She will not talk about it anything else. Instead, the American coalition was And isnt it also time to re-examine the Official Secrets Act? 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. So I said goodbye to my mom and moved to America. She had been following that war, as many of us had, for a year. 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. "Still no regrets," she said. Keira said no one knows Katharine, and that's not an insult to Katharine. So, to find that it would be dramatised on the big screen was as wonderfully welcome as it was astonishing. the waning support for public institutions today. WebAnd they failed, in part, I believe, because Katharine Gun leaked that memo, Official Secrets director Gavin Hood told Democracy Now!. I answered an advert in The Guardian newspaper for a translator. 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. 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. So here we are in rehearsal, and we're talking one day about the look. [U.S. media dropped the story because the Drudge Report noted that the NSA memo in The Observer had British spellings for words like favourable, which nobody in the U.S. would write. Would you risk your job? However, she is not without disappointment about how little obvious difference she made. 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. 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. Give today. 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. Id immediately be transported back to GCHQ and that email the anger I felt and the decisions I made. In the matter of a few years. 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. They failed. 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. And maybe if we went to work for Enron and we liked our job well enough, and its a job. I never thought Id be choosing a dress for a red carpet appearance at a major film festival. You dont have to agree with what she did, Im just telling you what she did. Sorry to digress. 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. Exaggerating threats to provoke a war? The poor woman is based on a real person. We go to the canteen and we talk.. When my turn came, I entered a small side office, faced the security official and, putting on my best poker face, denied any involvement. But get out of that trailer as fast as possible, get onto the set, and work from inside? 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. As the title of the film script suggests, she was "The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War". 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. In the runup to the critical vote on war in Iraq, Katharine Gun exposed a US plot to spy on the UN. Some of those same birds are still flapping wings in the skies above Washington. Gavin Hood: After the spellcheck. You can look up Nicole Mowbray, she wrote an article in The Guardian a couple weeks ago, about this worst day of her life. Gavin Hood: Its a question of how conditioned are we to the conventional Hollywood structure. Following the incident, Gun struggled to find work that she Ms Gun worked as a translator at the GCHQ building in Cheltenham, pictured. As of 2020 Gun lives in Turkey and Britain. ", Join half a million readers enjoying Newsweek's free newsletters, Keira Knightley's Birthday: Her 15 Best Movies Ranked, 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, Keira Knightley as Katharine Gun in "Official Secrets. As it was, a second UN resolution directly to authorise war against Iraq never materialised and air strikes began on 19 March 2003. Or at least, she could have been. David Dayen is the Prospects executive editor. And she said, I dont work for the government. That was my first thoughtwhat do you mean you dont work for the government? 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. 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 Please help keep the independent journalism of Common Dreams strong. But she still was not uncomfortable with the other things we've talked about. It sounds big with Katharine but that's what inspired me. A transcript, lightly edited with explainers where necessary, follows. Or, in this case, when the Office of Special Plans was set up, youve got Feith and someone like Abram Shulsky, whose philosophy of intelligence is very different. 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 So we start with hair, and then we start with glasses, and Keira says, "Gavin, what if I just was me?" WebIts the tale of whistleblower Katharine Gun, a former translator for the UKs Government Communications HQ, who leaked a top-secret memo in 2003 on the eve of a divisive US-led war. Actually, there were two incidents at sea, blamed originally on the North Vietnamese. We were to target such things as phone calls and emails from their homes as well as their places of work. Then, the following November, after eight months of worry, I was finally charged. After the leak was published, hundreds of staff inside the building were questioned in order to discover the identity of the whistleblower. When you support The American Prospect, youre supporting fellow readers who arent able to give, and countering the class system for information. The British are quite British, you know. 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". 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. Only now, more than a decade and a half later, is this disturbing sequence of events once again receiving the attention it deserves thanks to Official Secrets, a brilliant new movie starring Keira and former Doctor Who, Matt Smith. 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. 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? What might, IKeira Knightley, feel if I'm sitting at my desk and this happened to me?" Enter Katharine Gun. It was like a neon sign that was flashing at me, Gun says. As a film of her story is planned, she tells of her anger and frustration but not her regrets, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, Katharine Gun back in Cheltenham last week: 'This is the ugly truth of what goes on.' This is a special case because this story is very little-known in the United States. 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. WebKeira Knightley stars in this true story about Katharine Gun, a British intelligence officer who exposed the US government's efforts to force the UN Security Council to sanction the 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.". 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 think thats why you get this very honest, pure, deeply felt performance. David Dayen: I want to go to the questions now. You took this job and didnt even know what it was. You have no idea. So, that's where we had to go for WMD. When do the clocks change in 2023? So somehow in my rolodex, sometimes they sought me out. I became a mother, we moved countries and I have come to terms with that year of my life, though it will always define me in some ways. Unfortunately. Who, one must ask, is provoking whom? Now the goal is not truth, it is victory. And we keep that system alive. We were in development with a particular studio, and I don't mean to be funny after such a heavy film but sometimes we need a little bit of humor. For several years, just recalling the events would set my heart racing and my hands trembling. It is to say that we need to know the truth behind the decisions to act or not to act. After the charges against her were dropped in 2004, she found it difficult to find a new Naturally, I was discreet. 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. Not good enough, the trio decided. 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? He really wouldnt; that scene in the movie really happened. But she said she would still be prepared to give evidence to the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war. The concern among many Americans is that claims of an unprovoked, deadly attack by Iran are exaggerated. Who knows whether they would've bent those other nations to vote for a resolution. The comments below have been moderated in advance. KatharineGun did not stop the war,but was it all entirely in vain? Problem number two: Do you shut up or do you speak up? And she thought she wouldnt get caught. 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. At first, I heard nothing. 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. Look at what happened to Reality Winner in this country. There were some audience questions as well. Ten years ago, a young Mandarin specialist at GCHQ, the government's surveillance centre in Cheltenham, did something extraordinary. Unfortunately, perhaps, I have a conscience and my dishonesty gnawed at me persistently until the next day, when I confessed.