Katharine Gun | |
|---|---|
| Born | Katharine Teresa Harwood 1974 (age 50–51) |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | St Mary's College, University of Durham |
| Occupation | Linguist |
| Organization | Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) |
| Known for | whistle blowing |
Katharine Teresa Gun (néeHarwood;[1] born 1974) is a British linguist who worked as a translator for theGovernment Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).[2] In 2003, she leakedtop-secret information to a friend who passed it toThe Observer. The information concerned a request from the United States forcompromising intelligence on diplomats from member states of the 2003United Nations Security Council, who were due to vote on a secondUN resolution on the prospective2003 invasion of Iraq.[3]
Katharine moved toTaiwan in 1977 with her parents, Paul and Jan Harwood. Her father studied Chinese atDurham University and taught atTunghai University in the city ofTaichung, central Taiwan. She has a younger brother who was teaching in Taiwan.[4]
After spending her childhood in Taiwan, where she attendedMorrison Academy until age 16, she returned to Britain to study for herA-levels atMoira House School, a girls'boarding school inEastbourne. Her upbringing later led her to describe herself as a "third culture kid".[5] In 1993 she began studying Japanese and Chinese atDurham University.[5]
She graduated with anupper second-class degree, then took a job as an assistant English teacher with theJET program inHiroshima, Japan.[6] She left teaching in 1999, and after some temporary jobs, finding it difficult to find work as a linguist, she applied to GCHQ in 2001 after reading a newspaper advertisement for the organisation.[6] She was previously unaware of GCHQ, and later said, "I didn't have much idea about what they did...I was going into it pretty much blind. Most people do."[5]
Her regular job at GCHQ in Cheltenham was to translateMandarin Chinese into English.[5] While at work at GCHQ on 31 January 2003, she read an email from Frank Koza, the chief of staff at the "regional targets" division of the American signals intelligence agency, theNational Security Agency.[7]
Koza's email requested aid in a secret operation tobug the United Nations offices of six nations:Angola,Bulgaria,Cameroon,Chile,Guinea andPakistan. These were the six "swing nations" on the UN Security Council that could determine whether the UN approved the invasion ofIraq.[8] The plan might have contravened Articles 22 and 27 of theVienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which regulates global diplomacy.
Outraged by the email, she took a printed copy of it home.[5] After contemplating the email over the weekend, she gave it to a friend who was acquainted with journalists.[5] In February, she travelled to London to take part inthe demonstration against the impendinginvasion of Iraq.[5] She heard no more of the email, and had all but forgotten it until Sunday 2 March, when she saw it reproduced on the front page ofThe Observer newspaper.[5] Less than a week after theObserver story, on Wednesday 5 March, she confessed to herline manager at GCHQ that she had leaked the email, and was arrested. In a BBC interview withJeremy Paxman, she said that she had not raised the matter with staff counsellors as she "honestly didn't think that would have had any practical effect".[9] She spent a night inpolice custody, and eight months later was charged with breaking theOfficial Secrets Act.[5] While waiting to hear whether she would be charged, she embarked on a postgraduate degree course in global ethics at theUniversity of Birmingham.[5]
On 13 November 2003, she was charged with an offence under section 1 of theOfficial Secrets Act 1989.[10] Her case became acause célèbre among activists, and many people stepped forward to urge the government to drop the case. Among them, from the US, were the ReverendJesse Jackson,Daniel Ellsberg (the US government official who leaked thePentagon Papers), andCongressmanDennis Kucinich.[11]
The case came to court on 25 February 2004. Within half an hour, the case was dropped because the prosecution declined to offer evidence.[12] At the time, the reasons for theAttorney-General to drop the case were unclear. The day before the trial, the defence team had asked the government for any records of legal advice about the lawfulness of the war that it had received during the run-up to the war. A full trial might have exposed any such documents to public scrutiny, as the defence was expected to argue that trying to stop an unlawfulwar of aggression outweighed her obligations under the Official Secrets Act. She was defended byAlex BailinQC.[13] Speculation was rife in the media that the prosecution service had bowed to political pressure to drop the case so that any such documents would remain secret.[12] A government spokesman said that the decision to drop the case was made before the defence's demands were submitted.[12]The Guardian newspaper had reported plans to drop the case the previous week.[14] On the day of the court hearing, Gun said, "I'm just baffled in the 21st century [that] we as human beings are still dropping bombs on each other as a means to resolve issues."[12] In May 2019The Guardian said the case was dropped "when the prosecution realised that evidence would emerge ... that even British government lawyers believed the invasion was unlawful."[15]
The film about Katharine Gun suggests that the case against her was dropped because Gun’s defence team asked for disclosure of the attorney general’s initial legal advice to Tony Blair before the invasion. In September 2019,Ken Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions, confirmed the case against her was dropped because a fair trial would not have been possible without the disclosure of information that would compromise national security.[16]
Gun's husband, Yaşar Gün,[17][18] is a TurkishKurd.[19] As of 2020[update], Gun lives in Turkey and visits Britain.[20] After the charges against her were dropped in 2004, she found it difficult to find new employment. As of 2019[update], she had been living in Turkey for several years with her husband and their 11-year-old daughter.[21][22]
Gun received theSam Adams Award for 2003 and was supported in her case by the UK human rightspressure groupLiberty and in the US by theInstitute for Public Accuracy. Following the dropping of the case, Liberty commented, "One wonders whether disclosure in this criminal trial might have been a little too embarrassing."[12]
Two years after her trial, Gun wrote an article titled "Iran: Time to Leak",[23] which askedwhistleblowers to make public any information about plans for a potential war against Iran. She urged "those in a position to do so to disclose information which relates to this planned aggression; legal advice, meetings between theWhite House and other intelligence agencies, assessments of Iran's threat level (or better yet, evidence that assessments have been altered), troop deployments and army notifications. Don't let 'the intelligence and the facts be fixed around the policy' this time."[23]
In January 2019, the filmOfficial Secrets, recounting Gun's actions in 2003, received its premiere at theSundance Film Festival, withKeira Knightley playing Gun.[24]Daniel Ellsberg praised the swiftness and importance of Gun taking action, saying it was in some ways more significant thanhis own whistleblowing on theVietnam War.[25] In July 2019, in a lengthy interview on the US programDemocracy Now!, Gun,Gavin Hood (the film's writer, director and producer), as well asMartin Bright andEd Vulliamy (the journalists who broke the story of the leaked memo) discussed the events that the film describes.[26][27] Together with journalistPeter Beaumont, Gun advised and consulted over the years it took to make the film and they are "very happy with the result.”[20][22]
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