She failed. WebKatharine Gun (ne Harwood), 47, is married to Yasar Gn, a Turkish Kurd, with whom she has a 13-year old daughter. 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. He is just way out there in a whole other realm. So I said goodbye to my mom and moved to America. I could put a lens on, and now my job is, this actress is doing great work, lets not get tricky, lets just get the audience into her eyes so that you could see those cogs moving. the waning support for public institutions today. So we just worked on the performance from the very what if it's you? So that's who's running this show. 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. Unfortunately. However, she is not without disappointment about how little obvious difference she made. 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. We even got as far as the Old Bailey. 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. I sensed a slight flash of anger as she said: "It's not even a footnote in the history of Iraq." '", "The scene where all of us receive this email and we're discussing the memo, that never happened. Interestingly I think we faced a challenge, which some of you may or may not agree with. ", Left: Dave Benett/Getty. Though celebrated Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg would later call Guns actions the most important and courageous leak in history due to her efforts to save lives through preventing a war, she obviously didnt succeed in stopping the invasion. So, that's where we had to go for WMD. Look at what happened to Reality Winner in this country. You might say I am biased. 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. 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. We need a truth-sayer. So here we are in rehearsal, and we're talking one day about the look. Again. To tell too much more of the story would spoil the film, but one part of its ending is clear. They published the scoop in March 2003putting Gun directly in the crosshairs of law enforcement, and sparking a legal fight for her freedom. Please help keep the independent journalism of Common Dreams strong. 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. It is written by Sara and Gregory Bernstein, a California-based husband-and-wife writing partnership who have worked with British director Jonathan Lynn. WebGun, then 28, received an email about a U.S.-led operation enlisting the help of Britain to spy on other countries, in an attempt to blackmail them into supporting the Iraq War. My job had been to listen to Chinese communications, translate them from Mandarin to English and produce reports for different government departments. One by one, all those who received the email approximately 100 people were taken in for a grilling. And it's also true that we were then attacked by the Drudge Report for what would now be called 'fake news. And Where Is Katharine Gun, JUST 36 HOURS TO GO IN OUR WINTER CAMPAIGN. Keira calmly said: Oh, that was probably me. I still blush to the tips of my toes when I think about it. By Katharine Gun, Gchq Whistleblower For The Mail On Sunday, Published: 22:33 GMT, 26 October 2019 | Updated: 16:47 GMT, 8 November 2019. At first, I heard nothing. 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. And the reason? Hundreds of thousands were killed. Her husband said its a job, its just a goddamn job, I work at a caf. And those two are great actresses. 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. And Assange is the same. Its Straussian, over the top and pretentious but basically amounts to this. Those are compelling and important qualities to see in characters that move through a story, and I feel like especially for women it's an under-valued active engine. As Bright noted, however, what we see in the movie is close to the real events. 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. And I think thats why you get this very honest, pure, deeply felt performance. It was written in technical language, but the meaning was clear enough: the Americans were asking around 100 people in GCHQ to gather information from the communications made by diplomats from six nations Angola, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Chile, Guinea and Pakistan all which were then sitting on the United Nations Security Council. Quality journalism. She was charged As one of the journalists who broke the story, I feel a certain responsibility for how things have turned out. 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. And maybe they were right, I don't know. One is kind of what I thought it was, which is the CIA is the Central Intelligence Agency, walled off from politicians and the executive in a perfect world, where all the intelligence comes in, they analyze it and they then present their best intelligence estimates; this is pre-war, youre not at war, to the executive branch. By the way, I know some amazing people in the intelligence services. She said, I was naive. Since 2003, my life and Gun's have continued to cross from time to time. It was like a neon sign that was flashing at me, Gun says. 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.. 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. Gun discusses her attempt to stop the Iraq War, which is the subject of the new movie Official Secrets. To this day, however, there has been barely a mention of the year I spent living under a cloud. So important was this email, I knew it might even derail the case that Tony Blair was making for joining the Americans in an invasion. Anyway, the Office of Special Plans and Abram Shulsky make an interesting Wikipedia read, it won't take you very long. Gun made the choice to leak the document, which Martin Bright of The Observer in Britain published in a story on March 2, 2003. None of the Government reports into the war acknowledged it, nor did the history books. They failed. Gavin Hood: Yes, it really sticks in my throat too. 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. What do you think resonates? His work has appeared in The Intercept, The New Republic, HuffPost, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and more. Now the goal is not truth, it is victory. Copyright 2023 | The American Prospect, Inc. | All Rights Reserved, The Alt-Labor Chronicles: Americas Worker Centers, Official Secrets: A Conversation With Director Gavin Hood. 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 The poor woman is based on a real person. Times have often been tough, not least because of the itinerant life she has chosen for herself. When Official Secrets received its British premiere at Londons BFI Film Festival earlier this month, I was determined to wear something that held a special meaning and settled on a dress by an Iraqi designer. Gun was followed, denied legal advice and her Turkish husband faced deportation. Gavin Hood: Keira is wonderful and is absolutely professional, arrives perfectly prepared, very calm, no fuss. 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. 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. It turned out a copyeditor at The Observer had run the memo through spellcheck before printing it.]. WebKatharine Gun was a young specialist working for Britains Government Communications Headquarters when she exposed a highly confidential memo that revealed the United 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. [Ahmed is depicted in the film as strongly pro-war, resistant to running stories that conflict with his opinion.]. 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. By design. Katharine Gun, a British former government employee, faced two years imprisonment in England for the crime of telling the truth. 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. 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 start with hair, and then we start with glasses, and Keira says, "Gavin, what if I just was me?" "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. Daniel Ellsberg, the celebrated American whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers about the build-up to the war in Vietnam, described it as "the most important and courageous leak I have ever seen".He added: "No one else including myself has ever done what Katharine Gun did: tell secret truths at personal risk, before an imminent war, in time, possibly, to avert it.". When my moment came, I found myself standing alone in the dock facing the judge and surrounded by lawyers, journalists and supporters. The more we find out that in fact the million-person march was a real cause of worry for Downing Street and for Blair personally, it makes you think we were so close and yet so far.". 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 I was called on to look this way and that and smile until my face was stiff. They live on a smallholding, renting a house, in rural Turkey. Or at least, she could have been. Does anyone have any questions? The case and the resulting anxiety never seemed far away. At some point, as you probably know, Bush and Rumsfeld decided to bypass the CIA and take out that Office of Special Plans. 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. She wasnt charged for eight months a gruelling period which is depicted as just a few Naturally, I was discreet. 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katharine gun husband deported