The movie
Show notes
Keira Knightley plays Katharine Gun, a translator for British intelligence who leaked an email exposing corruption by the forces seeking to invade Iraq in 2003, in this gripping true story. In early 2003, when the George W. Bush administration was pushing for an invasion of Iraq, with the support of Britain’s government, headed by Tony Blair, a story broke in The Observer , a weekly British newspaper published in London. A reporter had gotten hold of a top secret email from an official of the N.S.A., one of the United States intelligence agencies, sent to Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, asking for help in a secret and illegal effort to bug a group of United Nations offices, from countries that were on the fence about Iraq. The idea was to use information from wiretaps to pressure these countries to go along with the proposed invasion. After this email was printed on the front page of the newspaper, there was naturally an outraged reaction from the critics of Bush and Blair, while the security agencies tried to claim that the email was a fake, and at the same time scrambled to find the person who had leaked it. The leaker was a translator at GCHQ named Katharine Gun. Official Secrets , a film by Gavin Hood, dramatizes her story, and the consequences of what she did. We first see Gun, played by Keira Knightley, at her court appearance in 2004. She is charged with violation of the Official Secrets Act. How does she plead? Before we hear the answer, we flash back a year earlier as she arrives at her regular GCHQ job in the morning, bantering with fellow employees, including a conversation with one colleague that appears to be in Chinese. And as we discover eventually, Gun was born in Taiwan and is proficient in Mandarin, which is why she obtained this job as a translator. The email from the NSA is one of many such communications that appears on the screens of all the workers there, but she notices it, and is visibly upset by it. Like everyone
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