The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War. Thomas Mitchell M.
after the marriage ceremony, Yasar was picked up by immigration authorities and taken into police custody, where he was held incommunicado until the following morning. Rushed to Heathrow airport, he was prepared for deportation to Turkey. In their home with her family now up in the north of England, Katharine was on her own and near panic. The fear that she would never see her husband again was suffocating.
Katharine made an urgent call to a solicitor, begging, ‘Please help us.’ They were legally married, she explained. She was a UK citizen! How could this happen? With help, the mess was untangled, government officials called officers at the airport, and the bridegroom was released just moments before the plane bound for Turkey left the gate. A devastatingly close call.
Yasar’s visa, extended, was still temporary. He had asked for asylum, given unsettled political issues in Turkey. They were awaiting an answer. Finally, eventually, Katharine put her money – and Yasar’s safety – on anonymity. It was an egregiously unfortunate wager.
By the afternoon Katharine had decided to make one call, to tell one person about the Koza message. (She has guarded that person’s identity throughout the whole affair.)
‘I called the person that I ultimately sent the e-mail to. I haven’t named her in public and I won’t. Let’s just call her Jane. She was the only person I talked to about this, and I could trust her. I knew how she felt about the war, about the impending invasion of Iraq. We both felt pretty much the same way about the whole issue. I also knew that she had been in contact with a member of the media who probably would help. I didn’t know anybody else whom I could trust and who had a contact like that. So I called Jane to tell her what I’d seen. I didn’t go into details; I just said that I’d received an e-mail I thought was damaging enough that, if it were leaked, might have the effect of preventing the war – or at least delaying it until other options had been exhausted. I asked her if I could send it to her, or perhaps she suggested that I could send it to her.’
On Sunday morning, Katharine and Yasar had a ‘lie-in’, then a big Turkish breakfast of olives, cheese from his home country, tomatoes, cucumbers, lots of toast, and a big pot of tea. Together they cleared away the breakfast things, chatted easily, read the voluminous Sunday newspaper. Later they took a ride out into the countryside, stopping at a picturesque little village for afternoon tea. It was all so deceptively normal.
As usual, Yasar fell asleep to soothing music, drifting off long before his wife on Sunday evening. This night, it would take Katharine an uncharacteristically long time to fall asleep, music or no. She was remembering the GCHQ staff memo of one week ago.
‘Concerns from a moral or ethical standpoint [regarding war against Iraq] are a personal matter,’ it acknowledged. Worries shouldn’t be kept to oneself. Anyone having reservations about what they were asked to do should contact the Welfare Office, the staff counsellor, or one of three specifically named senior officers. No, she thought. A slow-moving, red-taped, and supremely protective bureaucracy was not the answer.
Unwritten, but clear in its intent, was a warning to GCHQ staff. And that was what was keeping her awake.
CHAPTER 3: Four Weeks That Changed Everything
More of a concern to us was that we would be joined in the prosecution. To publish is an offence under the Official Secrets Act as well. We were as culpable as Katharine. But they’re cowards. So they preferred to take on the little guy – in this case, little woman – rather than us big guys.[1]
– Martin Bright, Observer editor
What I hoped was that people would see what was happening and be so disgusted that nobody would support the war in Iraq. And if anybody would go to war it would be the United States going it alone. And I even hoped that the US general public would somehow realize that they were being dragged hook, line, and sinker into the war.
– Katharine Gun, to the authors
AN UNSUSPECTING YASAR drove his wife to work on Monday morning, stopping at the GCHQ gate long enough to give her a quick squeeze and a kiss before reaching across to open the passenger door for her. She gave him a smile, climbed out of the car, and stood watching until the red Metro was out of sight. As she turned to enter her secret world, she felt transparent, as if everyone around her would see through her and into her. Would see the pounding heart and knotting stomach. Would see into her mind and be appalled by the conspiracy of her thoughts.
The final decision to act had been made. When? She wasn’t certain. Possibly in those first few minutes on Friday, when Koza’s message appeared on her screen. Perhaps during the solitude of her walk to the café to meet Yasar after work, or while talking with Jane later. At some point, there was no emotional turning back. More likely, it had been there, the finality of it, after her talk with Jane.
‘This morning, Monday, I worked in a different office from the one I normally worked in, so I thought it would probably be a good idea to print a copy off from that computer, rather than the one that was my normal terminal. Obviously, this is all an indication of how I was trying to remain as anonymous as possible. I brought up the e-mail, looked at it one more time, then copied it and pasted it to a different window. I printed it off and put it in my handbag. Of course, if I were caught, that’s where anyone would look, wouldn’t they?
‘I was planning to take the e-mail outside GCHQ’s grounds, which is already breaking the law, regardless of whether or not you make it public. You weren’t, without prior permission, permitted to take classified documents off GCHQ territory. I knew exactly what I was doing.’
Up to this point, it is true that Katharine had broken no law. Once she removed the copied document from the premises, which she fully intended to do, she could be charged with high crime against her country. The thought made her ill, and throughout the day she reminded herself that this was something right, that she was not a criminal. What she was doing, however, identified her as precisely that.
‘I guess some people would accuse me of being naïve, in that I didn’t consider the ramifications of what this act would be for me personally. And that’s probably true, in the sense that I’ve never done anything really bad. I mean, I had never done anything that could be considered a crime. It made it very difficult to consider what I was doing as a criminal offence. In fact, it felt like it was the only morally right thing to do. Oh, I was of course frightened and nervous, but – and it’s hard to explain – I didn’t feel frightened or torn apart by my decision, once it was made.
‘So, call me naïve if you will, but obviously if I’d been selling state secrets to somebody considered to be an enemy, an arch-rival, that would be a totally different issue. If I had been leaking information not in an attempt to prevent unnecessary loss of life, that would have been different. There are degrees of breaches of official secrecy, and I didn’t feel that mine was a criminal offence. I believed I was doing the right thing.’
The following day Katharine posted Koza’s message to Jane. When it arrived, Jane read the words that had so distressed Katharine and decided to pass it along as agreed. Had she known what was to come later, Jane might well have destroyed the message the minute it reached her. But she did not know, and she felt confident that her friend Katharine would not betray her, that she would not be considered a co-conspirator.
By that Monday morning when Katharine was printing Koza’s message, other recipients were responding in quite a different way. It is assumed that Sir Francis, in his last two months as the head of GCHQ, responded both favourably and immediately, authorizing cooperation with the NSA. According to sources close to the intelligence services, the US request for UK cooperation was indeed ‘acted on’ by the British.[2]
At the time Koza’s request arrived in the United Kingdom, there were at least some intelligence and other government officials asking critical questions, secretly of course, about the legality of an invasion. The whole business was sticky, and it seemed fairly obvious that the United States was asking for help not only with electronic black bagging, but also with what could become