And nor do newspaper stories. This is viewer supported news. But as it happened, I wasnt called up on Monday. I was the U.S. correspondent indeed, but very soon I was in Najaf, Nasiriyah, Fallujah, unembedded, watching this bloody carnage, thisthe implosion of this country. The Observers front page story on 2 March 2003. That accountability is key. In the movie, her husband (Adam Bakri) is initially portrayed as a civilian, perceiving her job to be mundane. You hardly told anybody what you had done. MARTIN BRIGHT: Yes, we had a great, a dramatic moment at the Q&A session. I wish wed pushed it harder with the boss class within The Observer. You know, in the end, there was a feeling, I think, whatI know that Katharine and I have talked about this a lot. KATHARINE GUN: to police custody, yes, and kept overnight in a police cell. We sat in the bar of a city centre hotel, and talked about the ancient history of 2003. She grew up in Taiwan, where her father had gone to teach, and her accent is hard to place. You have the U.S. in the longest war in U.S. history, in Afghanistan. [3], Katharine Harwood moved to Taiwan in 1977 with her parents, Paul and Jan Harwood. (modern). Before I knew it, I had spent two hours researching Katharine. 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.. She had received an email in her inbox asking her and . The woman in her 20s attempted to stop the war and firmly stood to her truthful morals. We have sort of, you know, I want to take my country back from all those Portuguese nurses and Polish plumbers, that we really must get rid of, and sort of whats best for Britain. You know, we dont have an opposition in our country, whereas you do in yours, thank god. Im on the whole a fairly shy person, she confessed in an interview. AMY GOODMAN: And your feelings at that time, Katharine? [9] Gun spent a night in police custody, and eight months later was charged with breaking the Official Secrets Act. In an interview with Democracy Now!, Gun explained, After they charged me, thats when they tried to deport my husband. ED VULLIAMY: Thank you. We rely on contributions from our viewers and listeners to do our work. White bread, white Trump, white, or this America, the one of every color, creed? You know, we dont have that. Just trying to figure out what to do next. And Mr.. ED VULLIAMY: Its a story of endeavor, to no avail. And I was tasked to set up a website to look into this. But I felt this information was explosive, it needed to get out. [11], The case came to court on 25 February 2004. is a 501(c)3 non-profit news organization. AMY GOODMAN: Who is played in the film by? How am I possibly going to do that? But this gets out, and suddenly you see it on the front page of The Observer when you go to buy, what, milk in the morning for you and your husband. But it may say more about the BBC than it does about him, that with this track record you can get to the top. And all of a sudden the news media is not interested in how we got into the war. Timpf, 32, and Friscia, 34, tied the knot . We still dont know who Frank Koza is, or hes still not given a public interview about about what went on. Truth has a habit of . And after about three weeks of this meeting these extraordinary people, I said to Jed, I think I think I would like to do this. And thats where the story came from. Soon after, they moved to Turkey in 2011, and for the most part, the family has stayed away from the public eye. Authorities had attempted to deport Yasar back to the Middle East. AMY GOODMAN: So, the Daily Mail, very sympathetic also to President Trump. is katharine gun still married to yasar. KATHARINE GUN: And also, Im justwell, whether its natural inclination or whether its what was kind of drummed into us at GCHQ, but it was, you know, this the sense of being private and not trusting journalists or people who are trying to ferret out information from you. So I was . This was a huge story, crushed by a bigger story. And that if the perpetrators in these situations get away scot-free, that has a knock-on effect. Theyre going to send him back to Turkey. Few are aware that her husband had also been thrown into troubled waters when Gun blew the lid off the alleged spy efforts in 2003. But on the other hand, its just a deeply personal story aboutand I hope Katharine will forgive me saying thisabout an ordinary person, like one of us, who does something extraordinary. As soon as I opened the door and he saw me coming in, and he could see something was wrong, and thenand I said, Theyve taken him. And he went, The bastards! So, anyway, I was on the phone. She was 27. KATHARINE GUN: Devastation. Some of the information that would have been revealed at her trial, in particular Lord Goldsmiths conflicting arguments as to the legality of the invasion, did not fully emerge until the publication of the report of the Chilcot inquiry in 2016. I mean, no ones going tono crocodile tears over that. But my closest friends stuck by me.. For the past nine years she has been living in Turkey with her Turkish husband and their 11-year-old daughter. We could haveyou know, you always have regrets, dont you? In 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 she leaked the . [5] In February, she travelled to London to take part in the demonstration against the impending invasion of Iraq. AMY GOODMAN: This is the NSA guy who wrote the memo. She was the real-life translator who photocopied . Katharine Gun's case can also be very relevant for Julian Assange's defense: "Within half an hour, the case was dropped because the prosecution declined to offer evidence. Yes. I think most people have red lines that they wont cross. AMY GOODMAN: Were going to leave it there, and I want to thank you all so much for being with us, Katharine Gun, the whistleblower; Observer journalists at the time, Martin Bright and Ed Vulliamy; and Gavin Hood, who is the director of Official Secrets, the story of Katharine Gun revealing the lies that led to the Iraq War on both sides of the ocean, in Britain and the United States, and led to so many deaths. AMY GOODMAN: You mean period dramas of strong women have to be a hundred years ago. And the situation, the toxic abomination of Brexit in our country, has sort of rehabilitated Blair in a sort of bizarre way. He gets more and more pressure from Blair. He didnt know I had leaked this memo. Her whistleblowing was not enough to change the path of history, of course, and her last-gasp act of courage was all but forgotten in the brutal "shock and awe" of war. And, of course, I was sitting in the restaurant waiting for her to come in, and I had no idea what to expect. So, from a dramatic point of view, you have someone whos just going to their job every day, as most of us do, happens to be a spy working for GCHQ, but could have been a person working for an accounting firm or Enron or Boeing or any other organization, who sees something that is simply wrong, sees, you know, and says, GAVIN HOOD: and says, Im going to speak up.. Macdonald stated that Gun would not have received a fair trial without the disclosure of information that would have compromised national security. Please do your part today. AMY GOODMAN: And so, what did you do when they said, Were going to take each one of you into a room.. There is no single answer to that, she says, but Bright had the best stab at it: The only thing you can do is do your job right, and be a good citizen., In other words, she says, whatever your job is, do the things that you are supposed to do. AMY GOODMAN: What did you think about your own prime minister? ED VULLIAMY: Yes. At the time, Katharine Gun was working for Britains Government Communications Headquarters, known as GCHQ. Gun was outraged by the email, and took a printed copy of it home with her. AMY GOODMAN: And so, you had to sell this. Yes, in 2003, Gun was working for British intelligencethat's . AMY GOODMAN: And this is a critical moment, when you say October, because thats when the U.S. Senate voted to authorize war. In the very typical British manner, we just pretended we had never met, she recalled. And they had already taken him down into the custody suite, which is, by the way, where I had been before. AMY GOODMAN: Shes then arrested. Her whistleblowing was not enough to change the path of history, of course, and her last-gasp act of courage was all but forgotten in the brutal shock and awe of war. After competing in the singing competition, she launched an acting career and was . This is her story. I mean, we had imagined all sorts of things about who our source might be. AMY GOODMAN: And then what happened? Iraq now, nightmare. At the time, as I well remember, the paper was split in response to the talk of war. [25][26] Together with journalist Peter Beaumont, Gun advised and consulted over the years it took to make the film and they are "very happy with the result.[20]. KATHARINE GUN: Well, I mean, its terrifying. There is a sense of, Did it really happen? Is that really me?. What does she hope people will take from the film? And, with great respect, I think he did. I wish I could have written that scene. Gun is grimly amused to see his current return to the moral high ground over Brexit. I mention those lines about working for the people rather than the government. "[22], In January, 2019, the film Official Secrets, recounting Gun's actions in 2003, received its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, with Keira Knightley playing Gun. Good for him. Youre, KATHARINE GUN: And then I was taken away. The simple fact is, she says: Truth always matters at the end of the day., Official Secrets is released on 18 October. And when he didnt come out, I was panicking, you know, and I ran inside. When do you first meet, you, the person who exposed this story, Martin Bright, and Katharine Gun? Mr. Davies, in his book, has done more recently, AMY GOODMAN: And he said to you, Martin, at least in the film, This will jeopardize our access.. So, where is Gun now? British linguist, translator and whistleblower, This article is about the British whistleblower. Gun is on Mondays episode of the Guardian podcast Today in Focus, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. Guns words will, in the coming weeks finally receive the much wider audience they deserve. We continue our conversation now with Katharine Gun, the whistleblower and former employee of GCHQ. A full trial might have exposed any such documents to public scrutiny, as the defence was expected to argue that trying to stop an unlawful war of aggression outweighed Gun's obligations under the Official Secrets Act. Gun had, of course, been forced to abandon her career in the civil service and finally, struggling for work, left Britain altogether. So I saw people going in and coming out and going in and coming out. GAVIN HOOD: Ben Emmerson. And at the end of the Q&A, I went to try and find him, and hed gone. 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. But I wasnt thinking about myself really. I met her in August in Durham, when she was on a brief visit to see her father. We 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 Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. There is a small group of us, she says. GAVIN HOOD: She did work for the attorney general, right up until a matter of weeks or so before the war, at which point, when he changed his mind, under massive pressure, having visited Washington and spoken to Gonzales and all the various lawyers who worked for Rumsfeld and Bush and Cheney, and theyd sold him on this idea of using Resolution 678, which authorized the 1991 Gulf War, and said, Really, that war didnt end, and were really still at war with Iraq. The country, at the time, was being drummed into war by the Blair government, desperate to achieve the United Nations sanction for the imminent American-led invasion of Iraq. AMY GOODMAN: And these ambassadors are the ambassadors of? Gun owned up to the leak a few days later to save her GCHQ colleagues from a witch-hunt. And yeah, it was, AMY GOODMAN: And what did you think, whenbefore you had seen Katharine and met her, what did you imagine she would be like, this young woman, 27-year-old woman of conscience, who. And nor did the story end. is katharine gun still married to yasar. Oh, yeah. AMY GOODMAN: So, before the time of the trial, Katharine, youthey have clamped down on you. And I did this sort of dive. So, 600,000 Iraqi people died. The online Drudge Report used the fact that the reproduced NSA memo used English spelling to cast doubt on its veracity. KATHARINE GUN: So, on Wednesday morning, I called in sick. And that was it. I took up teaching. AMY GOODMAN: But so, did you have any conversations with the former prime minister at the time, Tony Blair? Gun was outraged after she learned - as part of her job with GCHQ - that the United States wanted . I think its important for people to find that truth and follow through on it, Gun opined, and its certainly worth remembering. KATHARINE GUN: No, she hasnt. If you are a journalist, check and double-check your sources. In 2003, Katharine Gun, a young specialist working for Britain's Government Communications Headquarters, exposed a highly confidential memo that revealed the United States' collaboration with . But you areis this part of the film true, where you have the authorities come in and say, Were questioning everyone, because someone here did this.. One foundered for lack of funds, another strayed further from the truth than she would have liked. When Gun was approached with the idea for a script by Gavin Hood (who had recently made Eye in the Sky, the film about drone warfare, with Helen Mirren), the pair of them first talked for five days in London, getting the story straight. The day before the trial, Gun's defence team had asked the government for any records of legal advice about the lawfulness of the war that it had received during the run-up to the war. You know, banks of civil servants couldnt do that. AMY GOODMAN: Well, explain that. And its sothe nonpermanent members, who realized they were being hacked and their personal things were beingin order to try and blackmail them into a vote. Katharine Gun (ne Harwood), 47, is married to Yasar Gn, a Turkish Kurd, with whom she has a 13-year old daughter. What I did is a very unusual thing to do, because the results are not generally good. I am currently reading a book about how to blow the whistle. I felt like saying, I tried to tell you this seven times, and you would not let me print it. You know, it's tough. You were just waiting. However, Yasar could not be there for her trial as Gun, and her associates worried that his presence would turn Guns story into that of his as a refugee in Britain. In January that year, Katharine Gun was copied into a classified memo sent to GCHQ by a senior figure in the NSA, its US equivalent. Now, the defense of necessity is usually used in very more simple circumstances. And he says, Well, I called Elizabeth Wilmshurst, who is the assistant attorney general, who had resigned. You dont know who the GCHQ person is. Katharine Teresa Gun (ne Harwood;[1] born 1974) is a British linguist who worked as a translator for the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). You know, we had it in October 2002. AMY GOODMAN: The San Francisco Film Festival. I was calling Nigel Jones, my MP. The author advocates anonymity. Film-makers generally like to glamorise newspaper offices, making them All the Presidents Men hothouses of high-level argument and intrigue. I was very exercised about what was happening. I think our problem now, and I think this applies on both sides of the Atlantic, is that we have populist politicians for whom that doesnt matter. Also with us, the director of Official Secrets, Gavin Hood. I work for the British people. This is a rush transcript. And through the lights, I couldnt quite see who the guy was. Director Gavin Hood resists this for the most part though I cant recall Martin being applauded into the office the morning after the story broke (muttered sarcasm and grudging praise was more likely the tone). AMY GOODMAN: How rarely a woman actress, an actor, gets to play, you know, the protagonist, the solid, strong hero, Gavin. In 2003, she leaked top-secret information to The Observer, concerning a request by the United States for compromising intelligence on diplomats from member states of the 2003 Security Council.The diplomats were due to vote on a second United . The film -- quite plausibly -- depicts the charges being dropped against Gun for the simple reason that the British government feared . Within half an hour, the case was dropped because the prosecution declined to offer evidence. He says, Wait a minute. The people who went in and smashed it up in 2003, do they watch the news? We knew for sure. GAVIN HOOD: This amazing lawyer, with great dignityElizabeth Wilmshurst, whos in the movie, Ralph Fiennes playing Ben Emmersonhas the cup of tea with her. Now, that doesnt mean we shouldnt try to hold them to account. It is not often that a persons character is revealed in two sentences. And you said in places like Chile. But as we said last night, this is the purpose of Albert Camuss great story La Peste, when Dr. Rieux is given the child dying of plague. You know, I mean, once itsif you plead guilty and you go away for three months, and its, you know, maybe not so bad as going away for two years, but still I would have had a record. "The U.S. government, through the NSA, was spying in violation of international law on other UN Security Council members in order to better coerce them to back the invasion of Iraq. She becomes the corporate sister-daughter, she dives into the power suit and high-waisted pants or Katharine Hepburn moment. And whats so marvelous about what Gavins done is to just sort of bring this back into the present. Yes and no. Before I was charged, before my name came out, my biggest worry was that I would become a known person. Enter Katharine Gun. And they had already taken him down into the custody suite, which is, by the way, where I had been before, Gun revealed. I felt awful after I denied it. MARTIN BRIGHT: We didI tell you what, though, we did feel that we had failed. These were, as I said before, bitter times. I think. ED VULLIAMY: But my point is not against Mr. Ahmed. GAVIN HOOD: Almost a million. Im going, No, II dont. He said, Just google Katharine Gun and official secrets. So I googled official secrets Katharine Gun, becausethe title of our film comes from the Official Secrets Act, which is what she breached when she leaked the memo. The trials and tribulations of daringly telling the truth and facing its consequences must certainly not be a light burden to bear. And towards the end of the Q&A session, an elderly gentleman put up his hand and said, Im very interested in the issue of Frank Koza. The cop says, you know, Heres your ticket. Youre guilty of breaking the speed, but youre guilty of a crime. Katharine Gun is a British Linguist and Iraq War Whistleblower. So, Lord Goldsmith decides to prosecute Katharine Gun. I could not get it in. March 29, 2023 Posted by is vimto squash good for you; KATHARINE GUN: No, I felt a huge sense of relief after I had, you know, confessed. Shes pregnant. Shes not wearing tons of makeup. Interview: Whistleblower Katharine Gun. Never mind the number injured. And I called Jed back, and I said, This is an amazing way into how we got into the Iraq War, thatwhy isnt it better known? And he saidI said, Could I come and meet Katharine? Did everything change? What happened next is the subject of a new Hollywood movie starring Keira Knightley as Katharine Gun. And so, we talked about motherhood and all sorts of things, but I was just so impressed with how intelligent she was and how incisive she was in getting to the crux of the matter. GAVIN HOOD: Thats exactly right. And they failed, in part, I believe, because Katharine Gun leaked that memo. AMY GOODMAN: The people Martin was fighting to get this story out. You know, any tiny lingering doubts we had about whether this was a sophisticated Russian forgery, as some people suggested, or, you knowwe absolutely knew that this was real. Counted amongst the likes of Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and John Kiriakou is Katharine Gun, a whistleblower whose actions revealed the shocking underbelly of international politics and also inspired a big-budget movie that introduced many to the issue. AMY GOODMAN: What was it called? Inside the world of ministers secrets, Iraq war whistleblowers trial was halted due to national security threat, Permanent Record by Edward Snowden review the whistleblowers memoir, 'They wanted me gone': Edward Snowden tells of whistleblowing, his AI fears and six years in Russia, I had a moral duty: whistleblowers on why they spoke up, 'You've caused an international incident': how my work mistake came back to haunt me, Fortheir eyes only: the secret stories ministers dont want you to read, Take it from a whistleblower: Chilcot's jigsaw puzzle is missing a few pieces, Hollywood beckons for whistleblower who risked jail over Iraq dirty tricks. So, I thought it would be great. Then we see her become this woman who's starting to really know herself and starting to try and identify her own feminine being and trying to find her own place in the boardroom as a woman, as an entity, as a sister and . This is Democracy Now! And as Martin has just said, and as Katharine put it so well in the film, you know, wars, unlike football and basketball games, do not end when the whistle blows. "That story" concerns British whistleblower Katharine Gun, played by Keira Knightley in a film that premiered at Sundance festival in January.Fluent in Mandarin, the 28-year-old Gun was . Her upbringing later led her to describe herself as a "third culture kid". Plead out. Its incredibly daunting, you know. Your question about now, this is all terribly relevant. 101 years old Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson was an American mathematician whose orbital mechanics calculations as a NASA employee were critical to the success of the first and subsequent crewed spaceflights in the United States. [16], Her husband, Yaar Gn,[17][18] is a Turkish Kurd. Therefore, it is not surprising that Gun chose to move away from the center point of all the chaos once it died down. AMY GOODMAN: So you just thought this was routine. You know, I felt totally at ease in her company. The relationships that form as a result of Gun's acting are quite inspiring. 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. This is, sadly, a story of failure. [5], On 13 November 2003, Gun was charged with an offence under section 1 of the Official Secrets Act 1989. He succumbed to his wounds and Knight dragged his body downstairs, skinned him, and hung his body from a meat hook in the living room. There are almost no defenses to this act. Why did you come in? Among them were Reverend Jesse Jackson, Daniel Ellsberg (the US government official who leaked the Pentagon Papers), and Congressman Dennis Kucinich. And then I went on to interview Martin and Ed and then Ben Emmerson, the lawyer. Instead, Jake suffered a fatal bicycle accident. Jed didnt sort of put the two of us together. Who is her husband? My GCHQ career obviously came to an end. And the other way is the good, old-fashioned self-defense. She said, you know, its ironic that here we are in the age when women now have the vote, and theyre supposed to beand were all supposed to be equal, and yet so many roles are still about women being the sidekick, women being raped, so much violence, use ityou know, a woman whos in jeopardy. KATHARINE GUN: I was waiting outside in the police station, yes. [12] At the time, the reasons for the Attorney-General to drop the case were murky. And they attempt to deport your husband, who is a? The memo was a top-secret request to monitor the private communication of UN delegates for scraps of information, personal or otherwise, that could be used to give the US an edge in leveraging support for the invasion. AMY GOODMAN: So, Katharine, as all of this is unfolding, the U.S. and Britain bomb Iraq. AMY GOODMAN: You only lasted what? You didnt have that kind of support. Sorry, no pun intended, Katharine. So I tried to look for work. But, yes, I did. It is loud, clear, confident, creative, interesting. ED VULLIAMY: Well, he was the political editor at the time, who was giving me a lot of trouble over getting my cooked intelligence story into the paper. There are 15 members of that council, and there are these nonpermanent members who could swing the vote in favor of an invasion of Iraq in U.N. resolution. The first is a U.N. resolution for war. So, you get this memo. My marriage to my husband was very new at that juncture, and he had a very unstable status in the UK. How did she go about rebuilding her life? I ask her first if it is gratifying to finally have it out there? Following the incident, Gun struggled to find work that she loved, and her husband had grown disillusioned with Britain. Frequent Fox News guest and conservative commentator Mary Katharine Ham announced the death of her husband, Jake Brewer, on Sunday morning in a heartfelt Instagram post . (In fact, those -our and -ise endings had been introduced by an Observer editorial assistant, innocently following house style guidelines as she copied out the memo into the system.) I mean, MI6 couldnt do that. Do you think shed meet with me? Because I think we were both a little skeptical of each other. AMY GOODMAN: The networks, like Fox, and The Drudge Report, CNN refused to interview you, saying that this couldnt be a real memo because, unfortunately, your newspaper translated it into British. Maybe? We thought maybe it would be some crusty old senior guy from a rival agency. But she sails in with Gavin and comes straight up to me and goes, Oh, Katharine! and gives me a big hug. The second act of the movie is concerned with the internal newspaper politics of that decision. And yeah, it was absolutely terrifying. When asked by Salon how it felt to see a famous actress act out her life for an audience . You dont do you? Guardian Australia acknowledges the traditional owners and custodians of Country throughout Australia and their connections to land, waters and community.
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