Standing up to warmongers

Ex-GCHQ worker recalls her bid to prevent Iraq war

- SERENA WYLDE

WHISTLEBLOWERS don't wake up one morning and decide to cause a furore. In the main, they are ordinary people going about their lives and business, when suddenly something lands square in their lap that they know they have to act upon.

The decision catapults them into a frightening world of unknowns and imponderables. Their lives are forever changed, but they rarely regret their decision.

Katharine Gun was a Mandarin Chinese translator employed by the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the surveillance centre of UK intelligence, based in Cheltenham.

In January 2003, in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, she and another 100 employees were sent a top secret memorandum by U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) requesting British assistance to spy on the office and private communications of the delegates of six non-permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC).

America and Britain were trying to force through a UNSC resolution to justify their invasion, essential to its legality under international law, as the weapons of mass destruction narrative had been known by investigative journalists since October 2002 to be a fabrication by a faction within the CIA. The votes of the six non-permanent UNSC member countries were crucial to securing the resolution. Therefore, the spying operation was intended to gather leverage with which to bribe, threaten or blackmail them into voting accordingly.

At the tender age of 28, Katharine made the decision to take a copy of the memo out of GCHQ and, through intermediary contacts, leaked it to Observer journalist, Martin Bright.

Bright, who had no idea who the original source of the leak was, set about attempting to verify its authenticity, and enlisted the help of the