The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War. Thomas Mitchell M.
officers who arrested and interrogated her, as she does of the Cheltenham ‘regular police’ who held and confined her. The men from the Yard were thorough but kind, one in particular, whom she calls ‘Detective Inspector Tintin’, after a cartoon French boy who adventures around the world. ‘He is a little blond boy with a sticky-uppy flick in his hair,’ Katharine says of him. Because of the serious nature of Katharine’s crime, Scotland Yard conducted all post-arrest interviews and investigations.
Katharine was taken into police custody in Cheltenham, where she went through a booking process and then was led to the Custody Suite. Her personal belongings were taken from her – her handbag, watch, necklace, and her belt. There was no body search, but a female officer patted her down.
‘They were kind about it all,’ she says. ‘I knew they were just doing their jobs, and I tried to keep that in mind.’ This was not difficult to do, given that she had moved to a far distant mental place, one where she did not consider herself a criminal, where she saw herself as quite different from the usual jailhouse residents. She did not belong with the ‘addicts, drunks, and prostitutes’ who were the ‘regular customers’ of this place. Her mental and physical selves had separated.
‘Custody Suite’ was something of a misnomer. It was a single room with a bare cement floor. The bed was a block of cement holding a plastic-covered foam mattress. Next to the bed was a metal toilet without a seat, with no partition of any kind to offer privacy from police officers who opened the door without warning. ‘I was afraid I would be caught on the loo,’ Katharine says. Dinner that night was fruit juice and biscuits. She could have asked for a bowl of chilli but did not. As it turned out, this would be the menu item for breakfast.
Once the booking process was over, a duty solicitor was called on Katharine’s behalf, and she spoke to the woman over the telephone. Next, she was allowed to call her husband.
‘I guess we were both in shock at that stage, when we talked on the telephone. He had already come down to the police station, but they wouldn’t let him see me. They told him, “Oh well, we’re too busy at the moment processing this and that and whatever. Besides, we have to supervise the visit. Try later.” He was asking me on the phone if I was all right, and if I needed anything. He said he would keep trying to see me, but he had no idea what time that would be.
‘Yasar learned where I was when my manager called him. I had given her his mobile number and she called him almost straight away. From one o’clock until eight, then, he wasn’t allowed to see me. He was so worried.’
There would be no more questioning until a search of the Gun home in Cheltenham was completed, which meant not until the next morning. Yasar told Katharine that night that he found the search terribly upsetting. He had let the officers in the front door, then left the premises. Every inch of the place was searched, and only incidentals taken. These included two books in Turkish from among the dozens of books in the house. Curious, one might observe, that the searchers recognized and confiscated the Turkish texts.
‘As to what they were looking for, I think they were just trying to see if there was anything at all that would suggest a pattern of activity. I mean, they didn’t need evidence because I had already admitted that I had done it. They took my passport, my mobile phone. I didn’t have a computer at the time; they surely would have taken it if I had.
‘Later, everything was more or less back in the same position after the search, but you just knew things had been touched. I felt bad, because the house was a rented accommodation, rented from someone at GCHQ posted to London. I felt bad that it was his house being searched as well as our dwelling. I wanted to move after the search, but we continued to live there for over a year. The owner was very calm and dignified about it all. He didn’t say, as he could have, “How dare you get yourself in trouble while living in my property?” I think GCHQ had got in touch with him and alerted him to the search before it happened.’
Yasar would not sleep in the house the night of the search. It was eerie, being there, and he went to stay with a friend.
Sometime after eight o’clock Yasar was finally allowed to see Katharine. They met in a special visiting room, one where the prisoner enters one side of the room and the visitor the other. A glass partition in the centre separates criminal and visitor.
‘Yasar cried the minute he saw me. I would have cried if he had not, but the minute I saw him crying, I thought no, I’ve got to be strong. So I was saying, “Look, it’s going to be okay, don’t worry. I’ll be out tomorrow. Please don’t cry.” He brought me comfortable sweat pants and a jacket to keep me warm. There was only a thin brown blanket on the bed. He brought some books, but they wouldn’t let him give them to me. Anything he brought in like that had to be sealed.
‘We had only fifteen minutes. But because you can’t reach out and comfort each other, I don’t know if more time would be beneficial. You feel really helpless like that.
‘It was such a shock for Yasar. He married a nice, white, middle-class English girl, who had a nice, secure, sensible job with the government. A civil servant, well paid, and then she goes and lands herself in prison.
‘The police were quite considerate that night, as nice as they could be without jeopardizing their professionalism. They said to me, if I needed a cup of tea or anything like that, I could ring the bell.
‘The police said if I had trouble sleeping there would be a duty doctor in later that evening, and I could get a sleeping tablet if I wanted one. I did. I got a headache tablet and a sleeping tablet. I’d never taken a sleeping tablet in my life, so I was quite nervous. It worked a treat, and I didn’t wake up feeling groggy or anything. But I was thinking, if I take the tablet, will it knock me out instantly? Do I dare go to the toilet before I sleep? Suppose I end up falling asleep on the toilet? But no, it worked really well. I slept soundly, to my surprise.’
She saw both the solicitor and Tintin the next morning, meeting in a small, windowless interrogation room. Katharine learned the solicitor would be assigned to her only temporarily, until permanent representation could be arranged. She had no idea at the time what extraordinary, world-class representation that would turn out to be. In the meanwhile, it seemed painfully obvious that the duty solicitor was out of her depth in attempting to deal with a case that was far beyond her experience. The court-appointed solicitor was accustomed to working with ‘street kids’ in trouble. Katharine Gun was something else.
Tintin’s questions focused on the why and how of Katharine’s crime and on whether she had an accomplice. She explained her motivation, and the Scotland Yard officer seemed to accept what she had to say. Interrogation focusing on the question of an accomplice was another matter and reached a stage where Tintin, certain someone else was involved, pressured Katharine for answers. Fearful of betraying Jane, she began to cry, insisting that, ‘All the intentions were mine.’ In attempting to protect Jane, she had said at the time of her arrest and until this instant that she acted totally alone, that she had mailed Koza’s message directly to the newspaper.
Now, under enormous pressure, she asked Tintin, ‘Am I obliged to give a name?’ He said no. He did not need a name, certain he would learn by investigating communication records and other avenues just who it was Katharine had contacted the weekend prior to printing out the memo. Katharine believes she somehow let slip enough clues, perhaps through e-mail and telephone contacts, to lead investigators to Jane. ‘You just don’t know what they’re capable of,’ she says. ‘Experienced criminals do, but not people like me.’
Once the police identified Jane as the likely accomplice, they repeatedly questioned her, searched her home, interviewed her family. She denied everything. Without Katharine’s naming her and given Jane’s refusal to admit to complicity, she was never indicted; evidence was lacking for a conviction. She was furious with Katharine.
‘Jane said, “Oh, Katharine! How could you let your guard down?” She said I should have kept quiet and said “no comment,” that what I had done was “un-streetwise”. It was a bit of a tricky patch for a while, because Jane thought I had let her down, but now, in spite of it all, we are still friends.’
While in Bahrain, Yvonne Ridley received