"Because I think people see thatthe leaders of both the US and the UK conceivably could be considered war criminals, and yet they are walking free.". This, remember, was a conflict that caused the deaths of 179 British servicemen, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and caused countless more to suffer serious wounds, both physical and psychological. Now someone else may beI don't know if I could hack people's phones and computers, personally. I admitted the leak and my life was turned upside down. Official Secrets Trailer #1 (2019) | Movieclips Trailers, Imagine Donald Trump Running an Actual War. I became a mother, we moved countries and I have come to terms with that year of my life, though it will always define me in some ways. And we keep that system alive. We are no longer accepting comments on this article. I was suddenly free and bewildered. 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. Well, you don't have one and get that almost anti-climactic moment that is a punch in the gut," said Hood. Our institutions matter. And then there is the Gulf of Tonkin incident that led America deeply into war against North Vietnam. It's tough, the laws here are even stricter than in the UK. Though celebrated Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg would later call Guns actions the most important and courageous leak in history due to her efforts to save lives through preventing a war, she obviously didnt succeed in stopping the invasion. ", Speaking to Gun, and seeing her in archival footage at the end of the film, it is clear that Knightley didn't try to emulate the look or sound of the real-life Gun. It is written by Sara and Gregory Bernstein, a California-based husband-and-wife writing partnership who have worked with British director Jonathan Lynn. 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. The editorial position should never be that. 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. The concern among many Americans is that claims of an unprovoked, deadly attack by Iran are exaggerated. I've seen that happen. And just coming from my perspective, the press, because a lot of this is a story about the press, and how they handle it. None of the Government reports into the war acknowledged it, nor did the history books. Its Straussian, over the top and pretentious but basically amounts to this. Id immediately be transported back to GCHQ and that email the anger I felt and the decisions I made. Gavin Hood: Yes, it really sticks in my throat too. Throughout her own court case, whatonly a few knew wasthat she was also fighting for the right of her husband, who is from Turkey, to remain in the UK. It was only later in the green room that I asked what all the fuss had been about, wondering aloud if it had been the environmental protest group Extinction Rebellion. For the future, I hope the film will help locate the missing pieces from the story. To look at someone who I thought was quite accessible and ordinaryand she doesn't mind me saying this because Katharine is someone who keeps her head below and is quiet, and did something extraordinary. The email, which was sent by an American NSA official, suggested that the US was just as well aware that it couldnt earn UN support through valid arguments alone: The memo outlined a plan to bug diplomats from non-permanent UN Security Council Nations Chile, Pakistan, Bulgaria, Guinea, Angola, and Cameroon in search of intelligence that could be used to cajole and possibly even blackmail them into supporting the invasion. Ed, the real Ed, is absolutely delightful. 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. So here we are in rehearsal, and we're talking one day about the look. It was like a neon sign that was flashing at me, Gun says. Last week in Los Angeles, I got to interview the director, South African-born Gavin Hood, after a screening. And I thought: this is good. She didnt know where he was for three days and she took the train down from Charlton to London to see the MP, Nigel Jones, who said exactly what he says in the movie. So, I guess we all have a threshold. And maybe if we went to work for Enron and we liked our job well enough, and its a job. Look at what happened to Reality Winner in this country. So we just worked on the performance from the very what if it's you? So there is sometimes a thought in my head that says: What if Katharine hadn't leaked that memo? WebGun sacrificed so much when she decided to leak and has worked only intermittently since. But my point is simply this: The underpinnings of this country matter. 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. Does anyone have any questions? "On the one hand, she's free. Katharine Gun, a British former government employee, faced two years imprisonment in England for the crime of telling the truth. Today, I believe the Act serves as an illiberal, draconian piece of law, little more than a weapon of the state to deter any disclosure, no matter how much in the public interest it might be. When Katharine Gun came across a memo while working for the British government in 2003, her whole world changed. Hundreds of thousands were killed. She said, I thought that might be quite interesting and exciting. And it's a tough profession in many ways. David Dayen: So why do you think this is an important story to tell now in 2019? If Keira Knightleys remarkable performance in Official Secrets can help change that, the film will truly have been worthwhile. As Bright noted, however, what we see in the movie is close to the real events. And that I think was the motivation. If the email did reach the newspapers, I reasoned, there would be no more than a discreet summary. Problem number two: Do you shut up or do you speak up? Sound familiar? 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. They live on a smallholding, renting a house, in rural Turkey. 265 ratings46 reviews British secret service officer Katharine Gun's only crime was telling the truth, but she paid a steep price when she exposed a U.S.-U.K. spy operation to secure UN authorization for the Iraq invasion. She was horrified and leaked the email to the Observer. 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. Seven times I've submitted articles to you with an alternate point of view, and seven times you've turned me down. If if wasnt, what does that mean for the rule of law? Its had far reaching and very negative impacts in all aspects of our institutions and our public life," Gun says. If it was, who cleared it to be passed to GCHQ? The team of hawks circling George Bush had long wanted to take out Saddam Hussein, as did Bush. Now the goal is not truth, it is victory. Liberty, the civil rights organisation, and Ben Emmerson QC had already agreed to defend me and we prepared for trial. Gun disclosed details of the spying operation as it was happening to stop something she viewed as terrible happening in the future. And maybe they were right, I don't know. If I was writing this as fiction, I need a much longer court case, right? 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. The paper had taken the controversial decision to back intervention in Iraq. The only thing that we altered in that is that I didnt have time to tell it for as long as it went on. The days and weeks dragged agonisingly by. Throughout her own court case, what only a few knew was that she was also fighting for 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. You have no idea. 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. "You get to the end, and there's this court case. Whistleblower Katherine Gun, right, is played by Keira Knightly in the movie Official Secrets, Gun was outraged after she learned - as part of her job with GCHQ - that the United States wanted Britain to assist in spying on fellow United Nations Security Council members to win a vote in favour of a planned war in Iraq. WebIts the tale of whistleblower Katharine Gun, a former translator for the UKs Government Communications HQ, who leaked a top-secret memo in 2003 on the eve of a divisive US-led war. Keira said no one knows Katharine, and that's not an insult to Katharine. That kind of propaganda has to stop. Cheering crowds have never been my sort of thing. The point of all of this is painfully obvious. She was charged They had published not some coded version of events, but the email itself in full. But again, I cant help but make some small jokes about these things. Following the trauma inflicted on Gun, the U.K. Attorney General dropped the case against her with no warning. 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. Whatever, she blew the whistle ultimately revealing the truth behind the build-up to the Iraq War--regime change, disguised as terrifying threats of weapons of mass destruction. Weve said it before: The greatest threat to democracy from the media isnt disinformation, its the paywall. What might, IKeira Knightley, feel if I'm sitting at my desk and this happened to me?" I never thought Id be choosing a dress for a red carpet appearance at a major film festival. And he kept thinking, 'How am I going to portray this? By the time Gun and around 100 of her colleagues received the emailed memo that would change her life, she had already come to the conclusion that the arguments for war with Iraq were not really valid arguments, she tells me. Before 1989, there had been a Public Interest Defence to protect whistleblowers, but that was altered amid the furore surrounding the sinking of the Argentinian Navy cruiser, the General Belgrano, in the course of the Falklands War. Because it's just an Executive Branch trying to grab power as an authoritarian. ", Join half a million readers enjoying Newsweek's free newsletters, Keira Knightley's Birthday: Her 15 Best Movies Ranked, 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, Keira Knightley as Katharine Gun in "Official Secrets. Do you go vote? When I was a young law student, we studied the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights. They're more polite to their suspects. [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. 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. Please, become a member, or make a one-time donation, today. 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 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. Me, you, not some big picture. Even though she didn't stop the war and some people are like what's the point if she didn't stop the warwell, the point is how do you sleep at night? Was it because we had demanded the Attorney Generals legal advice as part of my defence? First, I contacted someone to this day Ive never named them who had the details of a journalist and anti-war activist. 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? Gavin Hood: I asked her the same questions, and on about my second day interviewing her, I said to her, because I wasnt sure if I should make the movie; I mean, I needed to know whose story I was telling and if she was batshit crazy. What do you think resonates? That's the memo. Every day we worked together for about five to six hours and then I referred back to her many times, subsequently, but I had literally just said, let's start at the beginning and let me hear first-hand from you your story and then I'll tell that story. They failed. Then, the world is safer until the sequel when it all happens again. Then the story went Went to work for Enron and we liked our job well enough and! 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