![]() ![]() The side of that history that Gun didn’t really know in its fullest detail until she worked on the film was the drama of how the story made it into the pages of the Observer. In the very typical British manner, we just pretended we had never met.” I ended up, bizarrely, teaching a couple of my former colleagues at GCHQ. I was teaching Mandarin in the local college in Cheltenham. I was very concerned about joining any kind of organisation like Stop the War, and being used as a focal point or something. ![]() Just trying to figure out what to do next. How did she go about rebuilding her life? ![]() But my closest friends stuck by me.”ĭoes she tell her story when she meets new people? Certain friends did not want to see me any more, or be seen with me – some people get very paranoid. Presumably the events mark a before and after in her life. There is a sense of, ‘Did it really happen?’ ‘Is that really me?’” It was like watching a case that was very similar to my own. “I watched it in San Francisco, at the premiere, and my friend from childhood who lived there was with me. Photograph: Courtesy of Sundance Institute Keira Knightley as Katharine Gun in the film Official Secrets. The comedown after they dropped the case, and trying to recover from that, was quite stressful.” After the case was dropped I did some media for 24 hours and then I immediately decided to run away and hide and not pursue the story any more. “Before I was charged, before my name came out, my biggest worry was that I would become a known person. “That is a difficult question,” she says. She grew up in Taiwan, where her father had gone to teach, and her accent is hard to place. Gun is a singular presence, and she answers with characteristic care, speaking slightly haltingly, weighing her words. I ask her first if it is gratifying to finally have it out there? When Gun was approached with the idea for a script by Gavin Hood (who had recently made Eye in the Sky, the film about drone warfare, with Helen Mirren), the pair of them first talked for five days in London, getting the story straight. One foundered for lack of funds, another strayed further from the truth than she would have liked. There have been other attempts to make a film over the years. We sat in the bar of a city centre hotel, and talked about the ancient history of 2003. I met her in August in Durham, when she was on a brief visit to see her father. For the past nine years she has been living in Turkey with her Turkish husband and their 11-year-old daughter. Gun had, of course, been forced to abandon her career in the civil service and finally, struggling for work, left Britain altogether. The legal case against Gun was eventually dropped by the British government in 2004, after her lawyer, Ben Emmerson QC (played in the film with fabulous charisma by Ralph Fiennes), threatened to use disclosure to put the legal basis of the war itself on trial. No one else – including myself – has ever done what Gun did: tell secret truths at personal risk, before an imminent war, in time, possibly, to avert it.” ![]() Ellsberg has called Katharine Gun’s action “the most important and courageous leak I have ever seen. Her performance reminds you of the sentiment of Daniel Ellsberg, the man who famously leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971, revealing the full truth of American involvement in Vietnam. She is played, with steely English resolve, by Keira Knightley. A film, Official Secrets, has been made of her story. Gun’s words will, in the coming weeks finally receive the much wider audience they deserve. Truth has a habit of finding a voice, however. Her whistleblowing was not enough to change the path of history, of course, and her last-gasp act of courage was all but forgotten in the brutal “shock and awe” of war. Sixteen years have passed since Katharine Gun said those words, but they still ring in the air. The Observer’s front page story on 2 March 2003. ![]()
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