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Oct 19, 2019 · "Official Secrets" is the new film starring Keira Knightley as real-life whistleblower Katharine Gun. Newsweek spoke to Gun, the journalist she leaked the document to and movie director Gavin...
Oct 15, 2019 · October 15, 2019, 1:00am. It wasn't that she was naive. Katharine Gun knew exactly the sort of work she was employed to do; two years into a job at GCHQ as a Mandarin "analyst" and "translator",...
- Michael Segalov
Aug 30, 2019 · Official Secrets: How a Real-Life Spy Tried to Stop the Iraq War. “In any walk of life, you can choose to do the right thing,” whistle-blower Katharine Gun, whom Knightley plays in the...
Aug 30, 2019 · She was a spy—the communications she translated had been obtained covertly, but she did the work in the interest of protecting Britain. She also opposed the pending war.
- Iraq Invasion: The War Drums Beat
- Katharine Gun: The Official Secret
- Smuggling Out Intel on Iraq
- Us Dirty Tricks
- GCHQ on The Warpath Over Leaked Iraq Memo
- Katharine Gun in The Dock
The saber-rattling began just after 9/11. US President George W. Bush singled out Iraq as part of an ‘axis of evil’ along with Iran and North Korea. Britain claimed Baghdad had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that could be used within 45 minutes. Not everyone believed Iraq was enriching uraniumto ramp up its nuclear arsenal, however. Katharine Gu...
Katharine’s job at GCHQ was to gather signals intelligence - emails and phone recordings - to translate into English, then supply any intelligence to the UK Foreign Office and Ministry of Defense. She was also cleared to read sensitive GCHQ emails, which is how she stumbled on a memo from the US National Security Administration (NSA). The three par...
The GCHQ translator sat down in another section of GCHQ, clicked on the NSA email, then copied and pasted it into a note document. Once it was printed, Katharine slipped it into her purse: “For the rest of the day, it felt as though it was burning a hole through my handbag.” Bag searches were rare and Katharine was relieved to sail through security...
Katharine had written the name ‘Frank Koza’ on her copy, so Martin turned to Ed Vulliamy, the paper’s New York reporter. They needed to find out if Frank Koza existed and, if so, did he really work for the NSA? Weeks went by. The clock ticked down to the March 2003 invasion. Katharine began wondering if the email wasn’t really a big deal after all....
“My heart literally stopped,” she said. “I felt like I had a target on my back and a neon sign on the front of my forehead saying ‘Guilty’”. She stumbled home and told her husband. His advice? “Keep schtum.” But the news went viral. Mexico and Chile were apoplectic. Pakistan was outraged. GCHQ was on the warpath. The war was imminent and GCHQ had a...
“It's very daunting, quite an overwhelming place to be in when your opposition is the government,” Katharine said. “It was like an out-of-body experience.” It became even more surreal when the UK prosecutor said the British government would offer no evidence. Katharine was free to go. “There was sort of a gasp and maybe a cheer,” she recalled. It w...
Aug 30, 2019 · But, many in the U.S. might not know the story of the 2003 British whistleblower named Katharine Gun who, unlike Snowden and Manning, leaked government secrets to protect the public ahead of time.
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Sep 3, 2019 · In Official Secrets, Knightley plays Katharine Gun, a British intelligence operative who found herself at the center of an international political scandal in 2003. Gun, then 28, received an...
