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. Then, the following November, after eight months of worry, I was finally charged. 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. "But that's partly my own fault because I haven't aggressively pursued a career. Iraq All Over Again? After the initial flurry of media interest, I was left to figure out how to move on with my life and that proved hard. Can dementia be spotted in CHILDHOOD? Surely, she thought, when people realised that the UK was being asked to collaborate in an operation to find out personal information that could be used to blackmail UN delegates, they would be outraged and the UK government would halt its slide into war. Then the most almighty cacophony erupted, a roar so loud we could barely hear to speak. Yet I do think Keira perfectly captures the strain I was under, the isolation and fear. Because it's just an Executive Branch trying to grab power as an authoritarian. As the title of the film script suggests, she was "The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War". 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. Two hours later after this deep dive, I called Ged back and said, How come we dont know this story? I guess the answer to that is that her story was big news for the day, and then very quickly got crushed by a bigger story, which was the story of the invasion. Again. "I think part of the reason Gavin included it was just to kind of share that thought process.". I had, of course, signed the Official Secrets Act, content in the knowledge I was working within the law for Britains protection. Gun, her husband, and their four-year-old daughter shed their coveted privacy long enough to allow Katharine to be one of two former Sam Adams Award winners to present this year's award. "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?'". So right there, you are pulling out the highlights," said Hood of the key issue with making Official Secrets. Martin Bright, who is in the movie very briefly I guess, is no longer in journalism as I understand it. To tell too much more of the story would spoil the film, but one part of its ending is clear. Gavin Hood: Yes, it really sticks in my throat too. 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. But the Bush administration went to war anyway, using the pretext of weapons of mass destruction. This and her other writings about intelligence issues have been critically acclaimed. David Dayen: Just the notion that the paper would say, we're for the war, that was their editorial position. She will not talk about it anything else. Copyright 2023 | The American Prospect, Inc. | All Rights Reserved, The Alt-Labor Chronicles: Americas Worker Centers, Official Secrets: A Conversation With Director Gavin Hood. Do you vote, do you analyze who you should vote for or do you just take it for granted? Now someone else may beI don't know if I could hack people's phones and computers, personally. 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. You took this job and didnt even know what it was. 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. Gavin Hood: Its a great question. The other was Coleen Rowley, former FBI special agent and counsel at the Minneapolis bureau, who blew the whistle on FBI and other shortcomings And it was there that, to our amazement and totally without warning, the CPS dropped the charges before the trial had even started. Over the weekend, I got to work. In technical speak, the Americans wanted the whole gamut of information which would give US policy makers an edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals in relation to Iraq. 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? Do you go vote? "I never aligned myself specifically with the anti-war movement. The case and the resulting anxiety never seemed far away. Only now, more than a decade and a half later, is this disturbing sequence of events once again receiving the attention it deserves thanks to Official Secrets, a brilliant new movie starring Keira and former Doctor Who, Matt Smith. We typically, in the movie business, ever since Joseph Campbell wrote The Hero of A Thousand Facesand Im not meaning to be sarcastic because thats a great piece of work, but it spoiled the idea that every development executive is reading these books because the hero we meet and then something upsets their world and the antagonist that must equal the hero, and eventually we go through these loops and the hero triumphs in the end. It is written by Sara and Gregory Bernstein, a California-based husband-and-wife writing partnership who have worked with British director Jonathan Lynn. Later, she gave the document to a friend, who passed it onto a contact in the anti-war movement, until it finally landed with journalists Martin Bright and Ed Vulliamy The Observer. So thats how the scene happened, but she didnt know where he was for three days, he was at Harmonsworth, before she got him out. And I did the same for the journalists and the lawyers and everybody. [Ahmed is depicted in the film as strongly pro-war, resistant to running stories that conflict with his opinion.]. None of the Government reports into the war acknowledged it, nor did the history books. 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. It was both exhilarating and just a little uncomfortable. 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. [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.]. 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 David Dayen: One thing I think you depict really brilliantly in this story is what the climate was like at the time. I didnt know until I looked really deeply into this that theres really two schools of thought. 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. Following the trauma inflicted on Gun, the U.K. Attorney General dropped the case against her with no warning. My job had been to listen to Chinese communications, translate them from Mandarin to English and produce reports for different government departments. However, her husband and the father of her daughters name is Yasar Gun. For the future, I hope the film will help locate the missing pieces from the story. Seven times I've submitted articles to you with an alternate point of view, and seven times you've turned me down. We all, in some ways, make these decisions. He really wouldnt; that scene in the movie really happened. WebThe Katharine Gun Case. "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. 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. It turned out a copyeditor at The Observer had run the memo through spellcheck before printing it.]. Questioner: It was so heartening to hear you talk about that hero's journey because I feel like we so often take compassion, passion, integrity for granted as a call to action. ", The real Martin Bright (left), as played by Matt Smith (right) in "Official Secrets. Amazing lady, shes still a journalist. The story of Katharine Gun, a whistle-blower who exposed NSA spying in the lead-up to the Iraq War, gets the Hollywood treatment. Your Privacy Choices: Opt Out of Sale/Targeted Ads. By Katharine Gun, Gchq Whistleblower For The Mail On Sunday, Published: 22:33 GMT, 26 October 2019 | Updated: 16:47 GMT, 8 November 2019. However, she is not without disappointment about how little obvious difference she made. 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. The comments below have been moderated in advance. This whole intelligence didn't match what the politicians were saying. Most directly, it bolstered opposition to the US position from Chilean and Mexican diplomats weary of American "dirty tricks". What do I do? And that was my way in. So, Im not really answering your question well, but her feeling was just: Now I dont belong in this company. The email was demonstrating the depths to which the American and British governments would descend in order to get spurious legal cover for a war in the Middle East which would have utterly catastrophic consequences, as we know to our cost today. 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. 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. The memo from Frank Koza, chief of staff at the "regional targets" section of the National Security Agency, GCHQ's sister organisation in the US, remains shocking in its implications for British sovereignty. She failed. 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Taking Vitamin D each day could cut your chances of getting dementia, study claims. Koza was in effect issuing a direct order to the employees of a UK security agency to gather "the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals or to head off surprises". Maybe that was naive, but she didn't think that. She said, You mean I dont have to wear a corset? To your point, in some way, she said to me, As a woman, its kind of ironic as an actress that I so often, even though Im in the modern world, that I have to find heroic women in period dramas wearing corsets. Theres something weird about that. It's tough, the laws here are even stricter than in the UK. The team of hawks circling George Bush had long wanted to take out Saddam Hussein, as did Bush. Surely, after 16 years, we are entitled to have answers. So here we are in rehearsal, and we're talking one day about the look. Now there is the possibility that Gun's singular life will be made into a movie. We have a blondish-looking Katharine. And people do this in every country; they spy, they listen to what are the Chinese going to do when they get to this conference. And she said, Yep, I have no problem being asked to listen in, in instances where I might help prevent a terror attack. What this memo suggested was neither of those things it was a bridge too far for her. Had the film appeared any earlier, however, I dont think Id have been able to watch it, let alone help the makers. I did feel like, Well, I failed.. But, did it change the way I approached it? Donald Trump also is saying he doesn't want war, which is probably true. 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 Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. So, to find that it would be dramatised on the big screen was as wonderfully welcome as it was astonishing. But I do want to give her credit that I think I didn't do her justice enough in the moment that she leaked that memo; it changed so quickly to war that we don't really get a moment to absorb the fact that as a result of her leaking that memo, there was no vote at the UN Security Council. We must not be flummoxed by exaggerated claims of threats against America and our interests. This was her first or second week at the paper. Meanwhile, Kamal Ahmed, who is the guy at The Observer, is now the editorial director of the BBC. There's an obvious scene of the immigration deportation. Not good enough, the trio decided. She thought wow, they need a Mandarin translator at GCHQ. Gabrielle Bruney is a writer and editor for Esquire, where she focuses on politics and culture. For all the relief, there was a weird sense of anti-climax that we would now be unable to give our side of the story to the public. 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. David Dayen: As someone who works on a magazine, it's the ultimate copyediting failure. 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. A thorough investigation began as soon as the staff started arriving at GCHQ on the Monday morning. Me, you, not some big picture. It sounds big with Katharine but that's what inspired me. Ive already lost a dear friend, and I cant do thisget called up two months of the year, every year, for the next 12 years. This, despite credible evidence that Iran was in full compliance with terms of the agreement. Weve said it before: The greatest threat to democracy from the media isnt disinformation, its the paywall. 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. 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. "You get to the end, and there's this court case. WebKeira Knightley stars in this true story about Katharine Gun, a British intelligence officer who exposed the US government's efforts to force the UN Security Council to sanction the 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. 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. (Photo by Scott Barbour/Getty Images). And they failed, in part, I believe, because Katharine Gun leaked that memo, Official Secrets director Gavin Hood told Democracy Now!. The story went around the world and the leak electrified the international debate during the weeks of diplomatic deadlock. I even thought, naively, Id be able to keep my anonymity. If there had been a UN resolution, there would have been no need to make a WMD argument because there are two legal ways to go to war. The movie tells the story of Katharine Gun (played by Keira Knightley), a translator with the U.K.'s GCHQ who, in 2003, leaked top secret documents to journalist Martin Bright (Matt Smith) that revealed that the American government's plans to apply pressure on members of the U.N. Security Counsel to pass its war resolution. 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