To exert pressure, the British authorities attempt to deport her husband Yasar Gun, a Turkish Kurd.

The British Government decides to charge her with violating the Official Secrets Act, tasking Director of Public Prosecutions Ken Macdonald with leading the prosecution. She is arrested and detained for a night before being released on remand.įollowing the outbreak of the Iraq War, Katharine seeks the services of the Liberty lawyers Ben Emmerson and Shami Chakrabarti. Seeking to prevent an invasion of Iraq and to protect her fellow GCHQ colleagues from prolonged suspicion, Katharine confesses to leaking the memo. Katharine's actions prompt GCHQ to launch an internal investigation. However, Martin is able to produce the original memo, confirming its authenticity. The Drudge Report attempts to discredit the document as a fake after a young staffer named Nicole Mowbray inadvertently changed the text from American to British English using spell check. The publication of the leaked memo in March 2003 generates considerable public and media interest. Despite the Observer 's pro-war stance, Peter convinces the newspaper’s editor Roger Alton that the leaked memo is worth publishing. To verify the authenticity of the leaked memo, Martin enlists the help of the Observer's Washington, DC correspondent Ed Vulliamy in contacting the memo's author Frank Koza, the Chief of Staff at the 'regional targets' section of the National Security Agency.

The Observer foreign editor Peter Beaumont allows Martin to investigate the story in the interests of journalism. Angered that the United Kingdom is being led into a war on false pretences, Katharine leaks the memo to a friend involved in the anti-war movement, who passes it to anti-war activist Yvonne Ridley, who in turn passes it to The Observer journalist Martin Bright. In early 2003, GCHQ analyst Katharine Gun obtains a memo detailing a joint United States and British operation to spy on diplomats from several non–permanent United Nations Security Council member states Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria and Guinea to 'dig dirt' on them and influence the Security Council into passing a resolution supporting an invasion of Iraq. The film had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on 28 January 2019 and was released in the United States on 30 August 2019, by IFC Films, and in the United Kingdom on 18 October 2019, by Entertainment One. Keira Knightley stars as Gun, alongside Matt Smith, Matthew Goode, Adam Bakri, Indira Varma and Ralph Fiennes. Official Secrets is a 2019 British drama film directed by Gavin Hood, based on the case of whistleblower Katharine Gun who exposed an illegal spying operation by American and British intelligence services to gauge sentiment of and potentially blackmail United Nations diplomats tasked to vote on a resolution regarding the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Official secrets review