";s:4:"text";s:27059:"Who knows whether they would've bent those other nations to vote for a resolution. Which is to say that GCHQ was being asked to dig dirt on foreign officials so that they could be blackmailed, bribed or both in order to secure a UN resolution authorising an invasion. Her 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. 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. One is reminded of the January 31, 2003 Oval Office meeting with George Bush, Tony Blair, and Condoleeza Rice, in which the topic of provoking Iraq to start a war was particularly revealing. 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. After the initial flurry of media interest, I was left to figure out how to move on with my life and that proved hard. And those two are great actresses. Part of the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday & Metro Media Group, King Charles hosts von der Leyen at Windsor Castle, Police: Urgent search for Constance Marten's missing baby, Shocking video shows machete fight in broad daylight, Gabor Mat: No Jewish state without oppressing local population, Putin spy plane before being 'destroyed by pro-Ukraine Belarus group', Amplified jet stream could lead to 'disruptive snow in places', Pupils take to TikTok as they stage protest at Shenfield High School, Putin orders intelligence service to find 'scum' who oppose him, Moment supermarket cashier is attacked at work in New York, Police search allotment sheds for Constance Marten's missing baby, Huge urgent police search for missing baby of Constance Marten, Dashcam captures moment two cars collide on a roundabout. David Dayen: One thing I think you depict really brilliantly in this story is what the climate was like at the time. '", "The scene where all of us receive this email and we're discussing the memo, that never happened. And she said, I dont work for the government. That was my first thoughtwhat do you mean you dont work for the government? 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. 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. Ed, I know some people have said that Rhys Ifans [who plays Vulliamy] is slightly over the top. the waning support for public institutions today. She wasnt planning to get caught and then the dilemma was, My friends are all going to have their lives ruined.. She talks about having read all these books [about the war]. Warning: The following contains spoilers for Official Secrets. So Im very proud of Keiras performance and I dont mind that she doesnt have blonde hair. David Dayen: How did you think Keira Knightley was an asset in showing that emotional journey throughout the movie? 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. ", Left: Dave Benett/Getty. You dont have to agree with what she did, Im just telling you what she did. 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. Please help keep the independent journalism of Common Dreams strong. 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. "And she then said: 'My way into this is what would I as the unadorned, no-makeup, no-fancy-edges Keira Knightley what would I feel like if this memo landed on my desk?'". It was an interesting experience because you couldn't really go bending things the way you thought would be more dramatic, you just have to make the story itself and hope there was enough drama there. Not mine or The Observer's finest hour, has to be said. Gavin Hood: And that really happened. 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. When my turn came, I entered a small side office, faced the security official and, putting on my best poker face, denied any involvement. In one pivotal scene in the film, all of Gun and Bright's work is nearly undone by one mistake, as a member of The Observer team accidentally changed the American spelling of the memo into British spelling, something The Drudge Report then used to discredit the memo. Do you go vote? It's tough, the laws here are even stricter than in the UK. For the future, I hope the film will help locate the missing pieces from the story. Following the trauma inflicted on Gun, the U.K. Attorney General dropped the case against her with no warning. We must not be flummoxed by exaggerated claims of threats against America and our interests. His exact words to describe the intelligence method is, The goal of the intelligence is not the truth, but victory. That is a quote from Shulsky. 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. Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. She got into a plea bargain, they still gave her five years. That kind of propaganda has to stop. Please, become a member, or make a one-time donation, today. For the Observer too, it was a story full of risks. I don't think I've ever met a more determined character and she remained utterly convinced of the justice of her cause: "There's nothing subsequent to the invasion that makes me think it was the right decision made by Bush and Blair." WebGun sacrificed so much when she decided to leak and has worked only intermittently since. The real-life Gun said: "The attempt at deportation kind of spiked my stress level again for another period of my life." 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. 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. Perhaps they don't trust him to keep his word. 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. They failed. "That really happened," Hood confirmed, though it did not go quite as it is shown in the film. Gavin Hood: Yes, it really sticks in my throat too. So, Im not really answering your question well, but her feeling was just: Now I dont belong in this company. His work has appeared in The Intercept, The New Republic, HuffPost, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and more. And it's not an easy question, it sounds easy, but I don't think it is. 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. She had received an email in her inbox asking her and her colleagues to help in a vast intelligence "surge" designed to secure a UN resolution to send troops into Iraq. I don't think she thought they would deport her husband, I really don't think she thought that. But, did it change the way I approached it? 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. You see it most vividly in that scene where everybody stops calling Martin Bright, or they start canceling all the interviews. To me, it was a way of showing that Iraq cannot be dismissed as a horror show of suffering, but is an ancient and sophisticated culture that goes back thousands of years. ", 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. I was 27 when it all began. Enter Katharine Gun. 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 The Observer, which then publishes it on their front page. ", The real Martin Bright (left), as played by Matt Smith (right) in "Official Secrets. (Photo by Scott Barbour/Getty Images). 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 As of 2020 Gun lives in Turkey and Britain. She's based (and born and raised) in Brooklyn, New York. 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. Its Straussian, over the top and pretentious but basically amounts to this. Instead, the American coalition was forced to stake its claim to a legal invasion on grounds of self defense, including now-infamously untrue claims about weapons of mass destruction. Then, the following November, after eight months of worry, I was finally charged. And they failed, in part, I believe, because Katharine Gun leaked that memo, Official Secrets director Gavin Hood told Democracy Now!. And maybe they were right, I don't know. I didnt know until I looked really deeply into this that theres really two schools of thought. Right now my priorities are to ensure I am there for my daughter.". The days and weeks dragged agonisingly by. She was charged Taking Vitamin D each day could cut your chances of getting dementia, study claims. Give today. We need another Katharine Gun. I even thought, naively, Id be able to keep my anonymity. Today, I believe the Act serves as an illiberal, draconian piece of law, little more than a weapon of the state to deter any disclosure, no matter how much in the public interest it might be. Where do you draw the line? 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. Not good enough, the trio decided. 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. Most whistleblowers leak after the event to expose perceived wrongdoing. She thought wow, they need a Mandarin translator at GCHQ. Some called her a traitor; others And that I think was the motivation. 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? As the Trump administration shreds norms of American governance like a Shih Tzu going to town on a roll of toilet paper, the last worst president is largely silent, busied with .css-umdwtv{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-decoration-thickness:.0625rem;text-decoration-color:#FF3A30;text-underline-offset:0.25rem;color:inherit;-webkit-transition:background 0.4s;transition:background 0.4s;background:linear-gradient(#ffffff, #ffffff 50%, #d5dbe3 50%, #d5dbe3);-webkit-background-size:100% 200%;background-size:100% 200%;}.css-umdwtv:hover{color:#000000;text-decoration-color:border-link-body-hover;-webkit-background-position:100% 100%;background-position:100% 100%;}canine portraiture and now the subject of nearly fond nostalgia. My shock turned to anger as the significance sank in. This is my second brief moment of fame. If Keira Knightleys remarkable performance in Official Secrets can help change that, the film will truly have been worthwhile. President Bush visits the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland, January 25, 2006. And then, she said when she got in therenow bear in mind that she still is bound by the Official Secrets Act. So we start with hair, and then we start with glasses, and Keira says, "Gavin, what if I just was me?" 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. 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.. Gavin Hood: Its a question of how conditioned are we to the conventional Hollywood structure. The concern among many Americans is that claims of an unprovoked, deadly attack by Iran are exaggerated. 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 Truth about Covid care home testing row: Timeline lays bare what was said, by who and when. One by one, all those who received the email approximately 100 people were taken in for a grilling. Maybe thats rewarding. 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. This included a particular focus on the "swing nations" on the security council, Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria and Guinea, "as well as extra focus on Pakistan UN matters". They live on a smallholding, renting a house, in rural Turkey. 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. 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. Or at least, she could have been. When I was a young law student, we studied the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Was the British government aware of it? You have no idea. I actually think the little memo lands on our lap more often than we think, even if it's just who I should vote for. And I didnt have work where I was. Theres not a lot of work for translators; shes a Mandarin translator in England. 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. Gun disclosed details of the spying operation as it was happening to stop something she viewed as terrible happening in the future. Gun had, of course, been forced to abandon her career in the civil service Katharine Gun and Martin Bright could be forgiven for fielding Hollywoods overtures with a degree of skepticism. We need a truth-sayer. [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.]. Chile and Mexico and the other smaller countries were so outraged that they refused to even bring it to a vote. 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. 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. The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline. Again. And I went back in 93 and did another two years with the new Department of Health. Why did the British authorities wait eight months before charging me and then drop the charges, claiming there was insufficient evi-dence for prosecution when I had confessed to the leak from the start? Following the incident, Gun struggled to find work that she 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. 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.". Now, Trump says, he wants to see Iran back at the negotiating table. It was like a neon sign that was flashing at me, Gun says. By printing off the memo, putting it in her handbag and taking it home, she was already committing a serious breach of the Official Secrets Act. Then, the following Monday, I printed out a copy of the email, folded it up, and tucked it carefully in my bag. And I did the same for the journalists and the lawyers and everybody. 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. Look at what happened to Reality Winner in this country. 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? Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. The other was Coleen Rowley, former FBI special agent and counsel at the Minneapolis bureau, who blew the whistle on FBI and other shortcomings This was her first or second week at the paper. They're more polite to their suspects. 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. 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). 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. 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. Six months later they released Nelson Mandela. The decision to leak it was almost instant I felt I had no choice. Martin Bright, who is in the movie very briefly I guess, is no longer in journalism as I understand it. But she still was not uncomfortable with the other things we've talked about. The team of hawks circling George Bush had long wanted to take out Saddam Hussein, as did Bush. By the way, I know some amazing people in the intelligence services. You can look up Nicole Mowbray, she wrote an article in The Guardian a couple weeks ago, about this worst day of her life. 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. 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. It should take the facts as they lead. He said: "Very close. But Katharine Gun, whos now the subject of a new film, the Gavin Hood-directed Official Secrets, did a lot moreand became one of the most important political whistleblowers that most Americans have never heard of. 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. Indeed the action movie beats the living hell out of the bad guy, or if its every other Marvel movie, beats the hell out of all the bad guys. 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. And Assange is the same. Maybe that was naive, but she didn't think that. The point of all of this is painfully obvious. So that's who's running this show. WebAnd they failed, in part, I believe, because Katharine Gun leaked that memo, Official Secrets director Gavin Hood told Democracy Now!. ", "I think Gavin had a really difficult time telling this story because it doesn't fit into a normal sort of storytelling mode," said Gun. [In real life] I saw the email, I immediately thought, 'Oh, my God, this is shocking.' 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. Official Secrets is, for the most part, a historical account of these events in 2003, but as with nearly all films based on a true story, some things have been changed to aid the drama of the narrative. 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. "Still no regrets," she said. You work for the government. It is probably still too early to tell. "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. She will not talk about it anything else. 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. Progressive values. The only thing that we altered in that is that I didnt have time to tell it for as long as it went on. Just occasionally What is this paper? So, I guess we all have a threshold. They had published not some coded version of events, but the email itself in full. And I thought: this is good. 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. I sensed a slight flash of anger as she said: "It's not even a footnote in the history of Iraq." Iraq All Over Again? Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Id immediately be transported back to GCHQ and that email the anger I felt and the decisions I made. So she said, Can I just do nothing with my hair, put on the jeans like Katharine wore? So the wardrobe is accurate to Katharine's style. Naturally, I was discreet. But she said she would still be prepared to give evidence to the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war. 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. David Dayen: But he is not a headline journalist at a newspaper. So here we are in rehearsal, and we're talking one day about the look. It turned out a copyeditor at The Observer had run the memo through spellcheck before printing it.]. It wasone of the reasons I came to this country in 89 was because we were getting drafted, and I thought I cant do this. Ten years ago, a young Mandarin specialist at GCHQ, the government's surveillance centre in Cheltenham, did something extraordinary. I believe that all of this should have been formally acknowledged as part of the history of the second Gulf War. 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. Gun made the choice to leak the document, which Martin Bright of The Observer in Britain published in a story on March 2, 2003. 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. 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. But I talk to people and there does seem to be a sense of failure that, despite all the campaigning and all the marching and all the protesting and everything they did, it made not a ha'porth of difference. Some of those same birds are still flapping wings in the skies above Washington. David Dayen: As someone who works on a magazine, it's the ultimate copyediting failure. 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 A manufactured provocation. Now the goal is not truth, it is victory. I dont know if theyd have discovered me eventually, but the fact is I couldnt live a lie for ever. Gavin Hood: Keira is wonderful and is absolutely professional, arrives perfectly prepared, very calm, no fuss. I got that from Yasar. 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. 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. ";s:7:"keyword";s:30:"katharine gun husband deported";s:5:"links";s:484:"What Are Old Cast Iron Sinks Worth,
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