The spy who tried to stop a war: Katherine Gun’s Courage of Conscience

A KC-135 Stratotanker prepares to refuel a B-2 Spirit bomber during in the “Shock and Awe” campaign of “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image or file is in the public domain in the United States.

by Stefan Schindler

Katherine Gun was 27 in January 2003, working in England as a translator and intelligence analyst for the British secret service.  At that time, the American and British governments were beating the drums for war against Iraq.

Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, but President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, echoed and amplified in the British and American mainstream news-media, claimed Iraq did have such weapons.  They argued that a preemptive attack on Iraq was therefore justified.  Bush and Blair sought United Nations approval for the war, knowing that such approval would give the war a veneer of legitimacy.

Risking prison and the ruination of her life, marriage, and career, Katherine Gun released a classified memo to the press.  The memo was from America’s National Security Agency (the NSA).  The memo was to GCHQ (Government Communication Headquarters, the British equivalent to the NSA), where Ms.. Gun worked in one of its specialized branches.

The classified memo asked England’s secret service to spy on U.N. Security Council diplomats, and to pass their findings to the National Security Agency.  That information could then be used by the Bush Administration to bribe and blackmail targeted U.N. diplomats to vote in favor of the war.

Knowing that she was breaching England’s Official Secrets Act, and thereby committing what the law calls “treason,” Ms. Gun hoped that publication of the secret memo in Britain’s press would force a public reexamination of the war’s legitimacy, and, ideally, prevent the insane loss of life and tragic suffering that war would surely entail.

Ms. Gun was well aware of the Anglo-American push for war against Iraq.  It was the major news of the day.  However, to Ms. Gun, it didn’t sound right – it didn’t feel right – as Iraq had long been enduring international sanctions and Anglo-American surveillance.  The claim that Iraq had WMDs didn’t make sense.  To check the validity of her intuition, Ms Gun informed herself further by reading books on Iraq’s recent history and its tensions with the West.

Thus, already suspicious of the Bush-Blair trajectory toward another act of international violence, Ms. Gun viewed the memo as confirming illegal activities in support of an illegal war.

She felt an instantaneous revulsion at the moral hypocrisy of so-called statesmen; she saw the memo’s explosive potential; and she felt an obligation to the British people to show them that they were being lied to and manipulated.

Throughout February, 2003, Gun’s memo did not appear in the press; then, in early March, it did appear, two weeks prior to the American start of the bombing of Iraq which President Bush called “shock and awe.”

Publication of the memo caused an international sensation.  GCHQ began an immediate hunt for the whistleblower.  Ms. Gun at first denied that she was the leak.  The following day, not wanting her colleagues to suffer suspicion and humiliation, she confessed.

Arrested and interrogated, Ms. Gun was asked if she worked for the British government.  She said no, governments come and go; she works for the British people; she “does not gather intelligence so the government can lie to the British people.”

Out on bail, it was eight months before Katherine Gun was charged with violating the Official Secrets Act.  Her defense team prepared a “defense of necessity” case on her behalf.

“Defense of necessity” means that a person has legitimately violated the law in order to prevent harm or loss of life.  (For example, breaking the speed limit in order to get a grievously wounded person to a hospital.)

In preparing a “defense of necessity” case, Gun’s legal team was putting the war itself on trial.  The prosecution would be forced to reveal the various Anglo-American “dirty tricks” designed to drum up support for the war.

On the first day of the trial, the prosecution dropped all charges, and Katherine Gun was a free woman.

Release of the memo did not stop the war, but it did cause the U.N. Security Council to deny approval for the war, depriving Bush and Blair of the U.N. blessing they were hoping for.

The Katherine Gun story was barely covered in America’s news media, yet it parallels in highly relevant and fascinating ways Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in early 1971, Ellsberg risking prison to try to halt the ongoing slaughter in America’s Indochina holocaust (euphemistically called The Vietnam War).

To learn more about Katherine Gun’s odyssey, I recommend the 2008 book The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War, by Marcia Mitchell and Thomas Mitchell.  I also recommend the film based on that book.  Called Official Secrets and released in 2019, the film stars Keira Knightley.

On youtube, I recommend Amy Goodman’s interviews with Gun at “Democracy Now;” also on youtube, the “True Spies” podcast, Episode 14, “The Spy Who Said No.”

Katherine Gun has recently been nominated for The Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award.  In an interview for Vanity Fair (August 30, 2019), she offers this reflection as the fruit of her experience:

“In any walk of life, you can choose to do the right thing.  At the end of the day, we are accountable to our conscience.  We should think about that and remember that.”

Enemies of the State . . .

President George W. Bush addressing the media, National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Md., Jan. 25, 2006. In the public domain. Photo by Eric Draper.

 

This is the third post in a series on Two Paths in the Woods by guest author Dr. Anthony Marsella.

A popular tactic used by “national security agencies” to neutralize critics does not involve directly interfering with an individual’s efforts to promote peace and social justice or to be a voice for moral actions.

Rather, these agencies simply collect and collate extensive information from surveillance, monitoring, and searching archives from distant years. At some point, if the critic becomes too “unbearable” to the agency, they simply begin the process of neutralization by releasing “offensive” information gleaned from many sources, and systematically destroying the critic’s character and moral standing.

All our lives involve sins of commission and omission. Some are apparent and well-known. Others may be buried in the privacy of the critic’s soul. But  agencies intent on “neutralization”  engage in building a systematic profile designed to destroy the words and ideas of the critic. This is done by using different cooperating sources to affirm their conclusion. Was this not what occurred in Nazi Germany, STASI East Germany, Fascist Italy, Communist USSR, North Korea – “Enemies of the State”?

Is this not what is happening in the USA and its allies today?

These destructive acts, whether done by a person, society, or nation, are equally violent and devastating, leaving scars on minds and bodies that are painful and memorable for the agony they have carried. We accuse, vilify, slander, denigrate, abuse, and malign individuals, groups, races, religions, nations, and the very planet on which we live through choices we make and utter each day. This is the way it begins! This is the root of hate and violence. This is the seemingly innocent path that leads so easily to broader acts of violence, destruction, killing, and war.

Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii. Dr. Marsella’s essay was originally published by Transcend Media Service at https://www.transcend.org/tms/2014/10/two-paths-in-the-wood-choice-of-life-or-war/ . We will publish excerpts from it intermittently over the next few months.

1984–trumped

Little Sister says, “Now is the time to read or reread George Orwell’s 1984.” It is available online.

1984 is a disturbing portrayal of perpetual war, massive propaganda, government control of the media, and ubiquitous surveillance. Published in 1949, it is a chilling nightmare of a novel foretelling a future wherein people live in constant fear of Big Brother, who can monitor their every behavior from their own televisions.

Consider this information and decide for yourself whether that future is now.

The novel and the film based on it are horrifying, but–despite Orwell’s fertile and perhaps diabolical imagination–he failed to envision the wonders of technology with which Little Big Brother has flooded our communities, devices with the ultimate potential to track all our activities all the time.

For example, an updated version of 1984 would include:

Maybe what we need in 2014 is a less dystopian novel, 2014, in which Winston Smith, the hero of 1984, pulls together the shreds of democracy and faces down Big Brother. At his back he has:

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Terrorism personified: The Boko Haram in Nigeria (Part 3 of Fundamentalism vs. Extremism)

Third in a series by guest contributor Emmanuel C. Mbaezue

Map of Nigerian states with Boko Haram activity between 2010-2013
Nigerian states with Boko Haram activity between 2010-2013. By Nerika, used under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. From Wikimedia Commons

At first they started as a political interest group, seeking, since the 1999 elections, to return the “Northern Oligarchy” in Nigeria to power. But today, the true face of the group has been revealed and their real intentions exposed.

Boko Haram has gone from a politico-religious extremist group to global terrorists—at least according to the global terrorist watch list published by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

As the state of unrest, chaos, and political instability in Nigeria continues to worsen, Boko Haram has consistently taken advantage of the situation, using it to expand their frontiers and strengthen their affiliation with other terrorist groups operating in sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb region, and the horn of Africa.

In recognition of this deepening crisis, the African Center for Strategic Studies (ACSS), in collaboration with intellectuals from both Africa and the U.S., recently came together to deliberate on this developing situation under the platform of “understanding and mitigating the drivers of Islamist extremism in Northern Nigeria.”

This video provides information about those discussions. It also serves as introduction to the development of extremism within a context of colonialism and post-colonialism and its links to religion in Africa, with a focus on Nigeria, Africa’s most populous Muslim country.

Emmanuel Chukwuemeka Mbaezue has a Master of Science in Conflict Management and Peace Studies from University of Jos, Jos, Plateau State. He is a member of the Institute of Chartered Mediators and Conciliators, and works as a paralegal counsel at the Legal Aid Council for the Federal Ministry of Justice in Nigeria.