Hopefully this film will go some way to addressing that.” Katharine faced a double cruelty in that she was pursued by the state for the best part of the year and then was unable to call those responsible to account. “I’m not sure that anyone when they first decided to leak knew what the consequences would be, but the British state comes down very hard on people who leak official secrets. She was subsequently arrested and charged under the Official Secrets Act.įormer Observer reporter Martin Bright, who broke the story along with his colleagues Ed Vulliamy and Peter Beaumont, said: “The story of Katharine Gun, her bravery, and her preparedness to stick her neck out when almost nobody else would, has become one of the forgotten stories of the Iraq war, so I’m delighted that we’re finally going to be able to pay tribute to her courage. It cost Gun, who now lives in Turkey with her husband and daughter, her job. The story, one of the most important and delicate in the history of the Observer, ran even though the paper had controversially taken a pro-war stance weeks earlier. The belief was that doing so would help the US and UK governments to swing wavering countries in favour of a planned invasion of Iraq. The memo, a single sheet of paper, asked her and her colleagues to help the US government spy on UN security council delegations in New York. Gun, 28 at the time, was working as a Mandarin translator at GCHQ, the British government’s communications HQ in Cheltenham, when she leaked a confidential US National Security Agency email to the Observer. Katharine’s story is a very important piece of the Iraq war puzzle and one which has been missing for too long.” Even in the recent Iraq inquiry, which was otherwise very thorough, she was not called to testify. “It’s a story that has largely been overlooked.
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