![]() ![]() “Her story is about so many different kinds of loyalty: loyalty to your personal conscience, your family and relationships, your government, your country, which does not necessarily equate to the government, and to greater humanity in general. “She didn’t simply dump a tranche of information but instead felt compelled, as a matter of necessity, to leak one particular document as evidence of a deep corruption that was likely to lead the world into an illegal war. “Katharine is an extraordinarily loyal person, who still considers herself bound by the Official Secrets Act,” Hood says. There are echoes, too, of films such as In the Name of the Father (1993), with their emphasis on the unequal fight between an ordinary individual and the government machine. Hood, who spent hours talking to Gun, her lawyers and the journalists involved, in addition to working from an early script by Gregory and Sara Bernstein, prefers to invoke comparisons to classics such as Silkwood (1983), The Insider (1999) and All the President’s Men (1976). Some recent films about whistleblowers, such as The Fifth Estate (2013), starring Benedict Cumberbatch, and Oliver Stone’s Snowden (2016), have flopped at the box office. Katharine Gun at Bow Street magistrates court in 2003 after being charged with breaching the Official Secrets Act. She really responded to Katharine’s bravery and strength of character.” “I take it as a huge compliment that she has agreed to do this film. “Keira’s presence in this movie is indispensable in terms of star power,” says Hood of the long-planned project, which was previously set to star Natalie Dormer and had Justin Chadwick attached to direct. Official Secrets also marks a rare contemporary role for the 32-year-old Knightley, who recently told the US trade magazine Variety that she didn’t “really do films set in the modern day because the female character nearly always gets raped” She said that she was, however, interested in modern scripts where women weren’t “there to be the loving girlfriend or wife”. Hopefully this film will go some way to addressing that.” Katharine faced a double cruelty in that she was pursued by the state for the best part of the year and then was unable to call those responsible to account. “I’m not sure that anyone when they first decided to leak knew what the consequences would be, but the British state comes down very hard on people who leak official secrets. She was subsequently arrested and charged under the Official Secrets Act.įormer Observer reporter Martin Bright, who broke the story along with his colleagues Ed Vulliamy and Peter Beaumont, said: “The story of Katharine Gun, her bravery, and her preparedness to stick her neck out when almost nobody else would, has become one of the forgotten stories of the Iraq war, so I’m delighted that we’re finally going to be able to pay tribute to her courage. It cost Gun, who now lives in Turkey with her husband and daughter, her job. ![]() The story, one of the most important and delicate in the history of the Observer, ran even though the paper had controversially taken a pro-war stance weeks earlier. The belief was that doing so would help the US and UK governments to swing wavering countries in favour of a planned invasion of Iraq. The memo, a single sheet of paper, asked her and her colleagues to help the US government spy on UN security council delegations in New York. Gun, 28 at the time, was working as a Mandarin translator at GCHQ, the British government’s communications HQ in Cheltenham, when she leaked a confidential US National Security Agency email to the Observer. Katharine’s story is a very important piece of the Iraq war puzzle and one which has been missing for too long.” Even in the recent Iraq inquiry, which was otherwise very thorough, she was not called to testify. “It’s a story that has largely been overlooked. ![]()
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