In his memoir of office, Decision Points, George W. Bush writes about going to see Tony Blair in the Azores in the last days before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was a crisis meeting because they had failed to get a second UN resolution, to give legal cover for the war. This was thought crucial to help Blair and his government survive a no-confidence motion in the House of Commons. After the meeting, the Brits and the Americans shook hands on the tarmac and walked to their planes. Bush remembers his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, saying to him: ‘I hope that’s not the last time we ever see them.’
The person responsible for the jeopardy to face Blair and the coalition in invading Iraq was — as well as Bush and Blair themselves — a young translator at GCHQ, Katharine Gun. She had leaked a secret email revealing what was called at the time an illegal ‘dirty tricks’ campaign to fix the UN vote. Just for a moment, some imagined that this might be enough to stop the Iraq war before it had begun. It wasn’t, of course, but hindsight and history may end up judging Gun’s decisions more kindly than Bush’s or Blair’s. A new film, Official Secrets, tells the story of her actions and subsequent arrest. She is played (with simmering intensity) by Keira Knightley.
Gun did not seek martyrdom and wasn’t searching for evidence to stop the war: the email ‘fell into her lap’. She had never planned a career in ‘intelligence’ and was slightly surprised to find herself working at GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), Britain’s electronic spying agency in Cheltenham. On the phone, she tells me how she came to be there. She was brought up in Taiwan — her parents moved there to work when she was three — and so was fluent in Mandarin.
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