Please, become a member, or make a one-time donation, today. "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. 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. For me as a journalist who was really getting started around that time, this climate of fear that was in place in the United States and also in the UK. Maybe that was naive, but she didn't think that. Direct to your inbox. Following the trauma inflicted on Gun, the U.K. Attorney General dropped the case against her with no warning. When my turn came, I entered a small side office, faced the security official and, putting on my best poker face, denied any involvement. Some called her a traitor; others insisted she was a hero. 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. 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. His work has appeared in The Intercept, The New Republic, HuffPost, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and more. We have a blondish-looking Katharine. [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. But I know some folks because of films I made like Eye in the Sky, and before that I made a film called Rendition. 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. 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. I had, of course, signed the Official Secrets Act, content in the knowledge I was working within the law for Britains protection. I know what it is like to watch the system become completely authoritarian. 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. And I think thats why you get this very honest, pure, deeply felt performance. 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 Yet here was a story that had the capacity to derail the war altogether. He is wonderfully articulate but super pissed off, and his PTSDbecause hes been in Iraq for yearsmanifests at just disdain for that certain person you mentioned. 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. His most recent book is Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power.. Ed, the real Ed, is absolutely delightful. 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. Maybe thats rewarding. The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline. Truth about Covid care home testing row: Timeline lays bare what was said, by who and when. Ms Gun worked as a translator at the GCHQ building in Cheltenham, pictured. For several years, just recalling the events would set my heart racing and my hands trembling. Amazing lady, shes still a journalist. Donald Trump also is saying he doesn't want war, which is probably true. Is this a matter of threatening to launch a war, or is it a matter of responding to the US positioning itself for war? And in her case, she risked both her job and her freedom and whatever you think of her politically, I think that takes some guts. We all, in some ways, make these decisions. Interestingly I think we faced a challenge, which some of you may or may not agree with. But any such illusions were shattered on the freezing cold morning of Friday, January 31, 2003, as I read and re-read the most extraordinary email from Americas intelligence service, the National Security Agency. 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. I even thought, naively, Id be able to keep my anonymity. Had the film appeared any earlier, however, I dont think Id have been able to watch it, let alone help the makers. Can dementia be spotted in CHILDHOOD? That means that, in theory, the war could still be classified as an illegal war, Gun says. Photograph: Andy Hall for the Observer, en years ago, a young Mandarin specialist at GCHQ, the government's surveillance centre in Cheltenham, did something extraordinary. You have no idea. Gavin Hood: Its a great question. Sound familiar? But that shouldn't be the philosophy pre-war when you're trying to decide whether to go to war. And then there is the Gulf of Tonkin incident that led America deeply into war against North Vietnam. 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. 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. The risks Gun took in revealing the UN email's existence were huge. [In the movie, Gun says I dont work for the government, I work for the people.]. After the initial flurry of media interest, I was left to figure out how to move on with my life and that proved hard. During the American-lead 2003 campaign for United Nations support for an invasion of Iraq, Gun, who's played in the film by Keira Knightley, was a 28 year-old Mandarin translator working for the UKs Government Communications Headquarters, the nations equivalent of the American NSA. I spent the following hours doubled over the toilet bowl in absolute terror. 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? That's the memo. 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. Or at least, she could have been. Gun made the choice to leak the document, which Martin Bright of The Observer in Britain published in a story on March 2, 2003. 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. But ultimately, heres why I thinkthis might sound like a strange statement. 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. Then the story went As a result, there never was any second UN resolution. This is a story about my life and my leak after all, and I still believe in the issues passionately. 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. Sixteen years ago, I became headline news after I leaked an internal email from GCHQ, the communications intelligence gathering centre near Cheltenham. And the reason? It almost started with, well, would I have the courage to do what she did in another setting maybe? 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. This content is imported from youTube. She will not talk about it anything else. Across the world, millions protested the invasion of Iraq, doing their own small parts to attempt to prevent the war. But again, I cant help but make some small jokes about these things. The truth is when she speaks to me, and she says, Gavin, we also go to lunch like everybody else in any other office. Thankfully, time passes and the intensity of feelings fades. We go to the canteen and we talk.. Naturally, I was discreet. Guided by her conscience, Katharine Gun defied her government and leaked the memo to the press, setting off a chain of events that jeopardized her freedom, her safety, but also opened the door to putting the entire Iraq invasion on trial. Who, one must ask, is provoking whom? The comments below have been moderated in advance. Was the British government aware of it? This was her first or second week at the paper. 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. WebWhen the film opens, Gun (Keira Knightley) is happily married to Yasar (Adam Bakri), a Turkish national living in the UK on a temporary visa, and passionately invested in Unfortunately, perhaps, I have a conscience and my dishonesty gnawed at me persistently until the next day, when I confessed. Gavin Hood: After the spellcheck. Perhaps it was no wonder that Tony Blairs government decided to abandon the case without offering any evidence. 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. So she went along to this interview, and she was 28. 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. Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Ed, I know some people have said that Rhys Ifans [who plays Vulliamy] is slightly over the top. 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. He said she didnt even know what the job was. And I thought: this is good. When you have the initial GCHQ induction course for new arrivals, she said, they tell you not to trust journalists, to be careful to keep everything confidential. Still, she printed off the memo, tucked it into her purse, and took it home. To legitimize an invasion and get rid of Saddam, a new UN Security Council resolution, going beyond SC1441 and specifically sanctioning the invasion, was the answer. Now, Trump says, he wants to see Iran back at the negotiating table. 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? It is probably still too early to tell. I answered an advert in The Guardian newspaper for a translator. Surely, after 16 years, we are entitled to have answers. Gun disclosed details of the spying operation as it was happening to stop something she viewed as terrible happening in the future. 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. Who knows whether they would've bent those other nations to vote for a resolution. Yet to this day there has been barely a mention of the Bush regimes disgraceful demand in official histories of the period, as if its been deliberately written out. 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. 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. When I got to the interview thats when they told me that its for GCHQ, I didnt know what GCHQ did. So, I think she entered the world out of a sort of strange curiosity. 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's based (and born and raised) in Brooklyn, New York. 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. What we have in this country is very precious, and in a sense, when I make these kind of films I don't know if I consciously do it, it's actually reminding about us that authoritarianism and governments gone awry are not okay, and what makes us strongoh, that sounds terribly pretentious, but I think you see where I'm coming from. She said, I worry what's going to happen, they'll go, Ooh, I don't know if I like Keira Knightly in blonde hair, what's she done to her nose, does she have glasses on? Because they don't have a comparison to make, until you see her at the end of the movie. To donate by check, phone, or other method, see our More Ways to Give page. 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. And I did the same for the journalists and the lawyers and everybody. If if wasnt, what does that mean for the rule of law? 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. 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. And maybe they were right, I don't know. By the time the mid-eighties came around and I was a young law student, so Im looking at it from the side of the law, we had no right of access to lawyers in trial if you breached anything that was regarded as having to do with the emergency legislation. The case and the resulting anxiety never seemed far away. 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. '", 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. Then the most almighty cacophony erupted, a roar so loud we could barely hear to speak. She said, I was naive. 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. WebKatharine Gun, as passionately embodied here by Knightley, skews too noble to be particularly interesting, and the film is weakest when its focused on her and her husband Unfortunately. 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? A script has been doing the rounds in Hollywood for five years. Gun sacrificed so much when she decided to leak and has worked only intermittently since. This is a special case because this story is very little-known in the United States. But the Bush administration went to war anyway, using the pretext of weapons of mass destruction. She went to this interview, the next minute were down this rabbit hole, the next minute my wifes telling the world. ", Hood added: "You know, to this day, I mean, the real journalistic question is, who would like to go and really press Lord Goldsmith and Ken McDonald for the reasons why they really dropped their case? After a police interview, at which I repeated my admission, I was released on bail to await the decision of the Crown Prosecution Service. On the other hand, she and Ben, to this day, feel they never got their day in court. And she said, I dont work for the government. That was my first thoughtwhat do you mean you dont work for the government? 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. Would you risk your job? To separate fact from fiction, Newsweek spoke to the real Gun and Bright, as well as Official Secrets director Gavin Hood. David Dayen: No problem. It's tough, the laws here are even stricter than in the UK. WebKatharine Guns husbands photo revelations are not made by her yet. 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. It was what I was thinking, what I was feeling. Actually, there were two incidents at sea, blamed originally on the North Vietnamese. "You get to the end, and there's this court case. EXCLUSIVE: Lanzarote sticks to its guns and insists it WILL limit tourists and move away from relying on Jeremy Clarkson is axed as Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Which really, really, really happened. [In real life] I saw the email, I immediately thought, 'Oh, my God, this is shocking.' ", "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. 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. David Dayen: But he is not a headline journalist at a newspaper. Some of those same birds are still flapping wings in the skies above Washington. She had been following that war, as many of us had, for a year. Your Privacy Choices: Opt Out of Sale/Targeted Ads. Gavin Hood: And that really happened. The spin in this country and in the UK was the threat of deadly weapons ready to be deployed by Saddam. 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. As of 2020 Gun lives in Turkey and Britain. [Ahmed is depicted in the film as strongly pro-war, resistant to running stories that conflict with his opinion.]. And then, she said when she got in therenow bear in mind that she still is bound by the Official Secrets Act. Abandoned blue sleeping bag, tents and several wooden shelters are found in woodland close to where police Don't just stick to the Malbec! To tell too much more of the story would spoil the film, but one part of its ending is clear. I've seen that happen. WebGun was followed, denied legal advice and her Turkish husband faced deportation. WebGun sacrificed so much when she decided to leak and has worked only intermittently since. 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 Neither my friends nor my family knew what I did all day. David Dayen: How did you think Keira Knightley was an asset in showing that emotional journey throughout the movie? At first, I heard nothing. The story of Katharine Gun, a whistle-blower who exposed NSA spying in the lead-up to the Iraq War, gets the Hollywood treatment. But the invasion was forced to proceed with the backing of Bushs coalition of the willinginstead of with the support of the United Nations. Theyre talking about diplomatic negotiations, and having all the cards on the table, but behind that what theyre doing is trying to bribe UN diplomatic members to vote for a war which has no legal justifications, Gun says. However, the Pentagon says the US deployment is "in response to indications of heightened Iranian readiness to conduct offensive operations against US forces and our interests.". Such a law is not compatible with openness, transparency, accountability and justice. Now the goal is not truth, it is victory. That would be awkward. When do the clocks change in 2023? I grew up in South Africa in the seventies and eighties, when apartheid was really tightening and tightening and tightening. Following the incident, Gun struggled to find work that she Or at least, she could have been. And it was there that, to our amazement and totally without warning, the CPS dropped the charges before the trial had even started. Whether you work for Boeing or Enron or Wallstreet? ", The real Martin Bright (left), as played by Matt Smith (right) in "Official Secrets. Because it's just an Executive Branch trying to grab power as an authoritarian. 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. However, her husband and the father of her daughters name is Yasar Gun. When Katharine Gun came across a memo while working for the British government in 2003, her whole world changed. Did that change your approach to presenting the film knowing that this was actually going to be somewhat of a surprise to people? 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. 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. The editorial position should never be that. But this specificinstance is the ugly truth of what goes on.". The real-life Gun said: "The attempt at deportation kind of spiked my stress level again for another period of my life." David Dayen: how did you think Keira Knightley was an asset in showing that emotional journey throughout movie. Rounds in Hollywood for five years and Ben, to this interview, the Attorney! Of the story went as a result, there were two incidents at,!, after 16 years, we are entitled to have, but I.! On Gun, the next minute my wifes telling the world please, a! 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