What has to be understood is that most whistle-blowers are not natural activists – this one certainly wasn’t. We usually work in anonymous jobs, far from the spotlight. We are not campaigners or journalists or wannabe celebrities craving a platform. Our conscience tells us we must reveal what we know. We do that, we blow the whistle, and overnight the whole media circus descends on us. You just don’t know what to do … that’s why we stick together.[1]
– Katharine Gun
SPEAK OUT, KATHARINE Gun invited government workers. Speak out when you have information about illegal government activity. Coinciding with the third anniversary of her arrest, published in the British press but directed to Americans as well, her invitation pointed to ominous similarities between Iran nuclear-threat rhetoric and the rhetoric that preceded the pre-emptive strike against Iraq. It all sounds too much like military inevitability. What are the facts, she wanted to know, and what, instead, is politically driven hype spun by the same sources who fictionalized the WMD story? Where does the truth lie, and who will tell it?
Katharine admits, ‘The fact that Iran thinks its answer to generating power lies in nuclear energy is worrying.’ But she finds the cause of worry not in the possibility of weaponization, which can be monitored, but rather in the critical problem of maintaining safety. ‘We should be encouraging Iran to seek safer alternatives, just as our environmentalists lobby governments to seek safe, renewable sources of energy.’
In addressing government workers, Katharine said, ‘follow me’.
One must ask – follow her where? To a promising career forever destroyed? To the possibility of years behind prison bars? To a life where earning a modest living is an unrelenting struggle, to where even decent, honourable people think she should have been executed? There are still some who feel this way, including the wife of a distinguished British diplomat who told the authors more than three years after the case against Katharine collapsed, ‘They should shoot her.’ This, from an intelligent, well-educated, thoughtful, and seemingly caring person.
Despite angry comments from her detractors, Katharine continues to urge those ‘in a position to do so’ to disclose misleading or false information from government sources. For example: ‘Don’t let intelligence be fixed around policy ever again.’ Expose the prevaricators. And do it now, not later.
The issue of immediacy is one that whistle-blower icon Daniel Ellsberg stressed when praising Katharine Gun for revealing the NSA spy plot within days of learning of it. Ellsberg delayed in leaking the Pentagon Papers until 1971 – a mistake, he says, and one he sorely regrets. American lives could have been saved in Vietnam if only he had gone to the media a year earlier.
‘Like so many others, I put personal loyalty to the president above all else – above loyalty to the Constitution and above obligation to the law, to truth, to Americans, and to humankind. I was wrong.’[2]
Ellsberg believes that Katharine’s revelation was critical in denying the attack an acceptable legitimacy. To Ellsberg, Katharine is the ultimate model for whistle-blowers: conscience-driven with a keen sense of timing.
Katharine, much in the way Ellsberg does, talks about the crushing ramifications of egregious government deception, and what could have been – a war averted, lives saved, respect for international accords, confidence in the integrity of government.
In the centre of the spin, in the eye of the rhetorical vortex, was the Big Lie. ‘It’s been more than four years now, with the knowledge that there were no WMD in Iraq, that the intent was regime change all along, that because of the lie, lives were destroyed and hundreds of thousands have suffered untold misery.’ Do we think, she asks, that those who set out to invade Iraq on false charges are ‘too bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan’ to take similar action against Iran? Or, perhaps, somewhere else in the Middle East?
In December 2007, an unnamed individual (who may or may not have been aware of Katharine’s appeal to potential whistle-blowers) revealed that her former agency, GCHQ, had been involved in espionage operations against Iran. Not only that, GCHQ had, of course, been sharing that intelligence with the United States. In Washington, ‘speaking on the condition of anonymity’, a source leaked the news that British intelligence gatherers were so occupied. No doubt, data collected were invaluable in developing the US National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear programme.[3]
It can be assumed that the wires continue to hum productively on Menwith Hill and at the NSA in Maryland. Togetherness in the world of the listeners.
Katharine was first approached to speak out against war shortly after the case against her collapsed and while she was still very much in the news. The invitation came from the UK Stop the War Coalition, an organization that frequently holds rallies in Central London locations like Trafalgar or Parliament Square, often drawing huge crowds. Katharine declined.
‘At the time, the thought of speaking out in front of hundreds or even thousands of people scared me.’ There was an even more important reason for declining. ‘I also didn’t want to draw additional attention to myself, as Yasar’s immigration status had not yet been settled. Our main focus at that time was to try and find a solution to allow him to remain in the United Kingdom with me.’
Katharine’s reluctance to make public appearances lessened as time went on, although being in the political limelight was not easy. It was not simply a matter of shyness. Katharine believed the secret service remained quite interested in what she did and said.
‘I was terribly nervous when I talked about what had happened. My heart raced, my hands shook, and I felt as though I were reliving that frightening period of time. It’s only in the last year or so that those feelings have subsided, only now that I’m more confident about speaking in public,’ she said in late 2007. There has been no official negative reaction to her appearances thus far. But she does not delude herself. It could come at any time.
Anyone watching Katharine on television or listening to a radio interview would never suspect that she had ever felt insecure or frightened. She is articulate, poised, seemingly confident. There is no hesitancy, no struggle for words, as she discusses war and peace, global ethics, international accords. She is, as some have said, ‘a great interview’.
‘I was, and still am, torn about what I should now do, about what more I can do,’ she admits. ‘My close friend once said that many people try to speak out, but no one listens because that person has no platform. She said I have a platform and I should use it. But, looking back, it didn’t come naturally to me, and I decided to be selective about what I said and when I said it.’ There are times, she notes, when it is absolutely essential to take a stand.
Katharine says, ‘Truth telling and whistle-blowing are crucial after a war as ill-advised as Iraq.’ If the truth had been known by the public earlier, perhaps Saddam Hussein could have been disposed of through other means, potentially effective strategies ignored by two governments secretly set on war. The truth did indeed come late, long after that first leak of Katharine’s, when others in government and the intelligence community followed her lead, including bold, outspoken Clare Short. Still, learning the truth even now allows ‘piecing together the facts’, a piecing together that, if the world is ready to learn, may well avoid further chaos and destabilization in the Middle East.
At every opportunity, Katharine continues to press for truth telling, both in the United States and abroad. Is she encouraging others to break the law? Yes, indeed, would answer the ‘let’s shoot her’ proponents; absolutely not, would answer the whistle-blowers.
The potentially deadly international implication of manipulation and falsification of intelligence is only one reason for speaking out on both sides of the Atlantic. Without someone’s telling the truth, Americans would not be aware of shocking dirty secrets that have so dishonoured their country since 9/11 – the clandestine ‘terrorist flights’ to foreign countries for the purpose of torture, the brutal and humiliating treatment of prisoners and detainees in US care abroad, the disgraceful and absolute disregard for the Geneva Conventions. British citizens would not have learned about Tony Blair’s blatant deception concerning Lord Goldsmith’s opinion on the war’s legality, the real substance of the prime minister’s pre-war meetings with George W. Bush, or the misleading and false statements in the infamous 2002 Iraq dossier. They would never have known of the attack on truth that, like a disease, plagued the days before the war.
It seems appropriate that the word whistle-blower originated in the country where Katharine was born, used in reference to uniformed bobbies whose whistles signalled discovery of a criminal act. Wherever used, the word conveys a very distinctive meaning clearly understood by everyone who has revealed secret information – trouble. Trouble for the person with the whistle and trouble for the reason it’s blown. It means pain, sometimes agonizing and, almost always, of lengthy duration. To blow the whistle on a perceived wrong is an act of courage or foolishness or a bit of both. Not everyone gets caught, but everyone is fearful.
Those who reveal illegal or embarrassing government secrets pay, as Katharine did, a high price for their acts of conscience. Like her, they pay in the currency of lives interrupted and careers destroyed, of being called traitors at worst and unpatriotic at best. Whistle-blowers have to be tough and determined, knowing full well the measure of the opponents and the height of the deck stacked against them. There are wounds that do not heal, even when someone wins, as did prestigious social scientist Dr Marsha Coleman-Adebayo. Settlement of her case against the US Environmental Protection Agency included a $600,000 award from the government.[4] But win or lose, whistle-blowing is no game for sissies. All of which make some of the most improbable of this category the most courageous.
‘There is something about Katharine Gun that makes her seem an unlikely candidate for whistle-blowing,’ observed BBC political staffer Ben Davies.[5] And yet, Davies continues, ‘this rather shy thirty-year-old’ had leaked details of the NSA spy operation against members of the UN Security Council. Davies’s first impression of Katharine was on target. Meeting her is an unsettling experience; she is hardly what one expects. There is a poignancy, a legitimacy, a sweetness about her that is inescapable. One expects toughness, an obvious fighting spirit, even a bold recklessness. Perhaps conscience, in her case, works quietly and doesn’t neon-light itself in this petite, courteous young woman.
What is frankly astonishing is that so many other whistle-blowers also seem to be ‘unlikely’ candidates, high-level, distinguished government workers or seemingly unremarkable, ‘ordinary’ people. A diverse group of individuals sharing a common experience, they are a global ethic in human form. This coming together of the like-minded has resulted in initiatives to encourage and support whistle-blowers through the establishment of dozens of truth-telling alliances – like the informal group Katharine helped bring together – and organizing high-profile meetings, some focusing on government and some on the private sector.
In May 2007 forty public interest organizations participated in the Whistleblower Week in Washington, its purpose to highlight contributions of whistle-blowers and to garner congressional support for restoring and strengthening legislation protecting federal whistle-blowers.[6]
At one of the first events that week, author Marcia Mitchell was asked to testify on the Katharine Gun/NSA/GCHQ case and appeared before a distinguished Capitol Hill panel. Hers was the only testimony relating to involvement of a foreign government in a domestic operation. Katharine, whose job in England kept her from being present, was there in spirit. The part-time teacher of Chinese cannot afford to miss work.
The list of sponsors and organizers of the historic Whistleblower Week in Washington evidences a broad base of support. They include the National Whistleblower Centre, the National Treasury Employees Union, the No Fear Coalition, the American Federation of Government Employees, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Project on Government Oversight, the Government Accountability Project, Whistle-blowers USA, Common Cause, the US Bill of Rights Foundation, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and a great many others. It was an amazing and diverse coalition.
There is no question that momentum for organizing has been building over the years since the Iraq War was launched. In September 2004 Katharine was invited to attend an American University symposium in Washington, DC, ‘When Silence Is Complicity’, the first-ever gathering of high-level national security whistle-blowers. Here Katharine spoke before a packed auditorium of faculty and students. And it was here that British Katharine and Americans Daniel Ellsberg and prestigious former CIA intelligence analyst Ray McGovern joined in the informal truth-telling alliance, here in the US capital that she met so many others like herself.
‘This was the first time I’d met Sibel Edmonds, Coleen Rowley, and others who had spoken out before and after the war on Iraq,’ Katharine says. ‘I felt at home and part of a supportive network with these wonderful people.’
Edmonds was fired by the FBI and Rowley was allowed to retire from the Bureau after both leaked information concerning the 9/11 terrorist attacks. They are seen as heroes throughout the whistle-blower community. All three women – Gun, Edmonds, and Rowley – have been recognized by the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence, a group of mainly former CIA colleagues promoting truth telling.[7] The organization honours devotion to truth, ‘no matter the consequences’. The annual Sam Adams award went to Rowley in 2002, Gun in 2003, and Edmonds in 2004.
Also participating in the American University symposium was Maj. Frank Grevil, a Danish intelligence officer arrested for leaking pre-war classified documents reporting that no weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq. Parallels were drawn between Gun and Grevil. Both intelligence officers, just weeks before the war was launched, provided the media with critical secret information potent enough to raise public ire and create political upheaval.[8]
Katharine had met Grevil earlier, during an anti-war conference in Denmark. It was her first public appearance of this nature, a hearing on the Iraq War convened at Christianborg, on 15 April 2004 – not quite two months after the case against her had collapsed.
‘One reason for putting together our informal coalition was to help people like us, like Frank and Coleen and Sibel, hold their lives together when the going gets tough and, honestly, it does,’ Katharine says. ‘And Sibel, probably more than most, knows just how tough it can get.’
Edmonds lives with court decisions and media restrictions that are extraordinary – ‘Kafkaesque’, she says. Not only were all records associated with her case retroactively reclassified as secret, but also every government document bearing Edmonds’s name or birth date – like her driver’s licence and passport.
The government has been kinder and gentler with Rowley. Rowley claimed the agency bungled a chance to thwart the 9/11 attacks by blocking Minneapolis agents from searching the possessions of jailed terrorism suspect Zacarias Moussaoui. In Rowley’s case, then FBI director Robert Mueller promised there would be no retaliation and granted her permission to publish articles about civil liberties, ethics, and integrity. Intelligence guru McGovern credits Rowley with a monumental achievement. ‘If it weren’t for Coleen Rowley, there would have been no 9/11 commission … The whole thing would have been covered up.’[9]
Coming at this time was the Truth-Telling Project, an effort to encourage whistle-blowing by government workers, a project Katharine applauded.
Daniel Ellsberg explained it this way: ‘The project urges current and recently retired government officials to reveal the truth to Congress and the public about governmental wrongdoing, lies and cover-up. It aims to change the norms and practices that sustain the cult of secrecy and to de-legitimize silence that costs lives.’[10]
In a letter seeking ‘Patriotic Whistleblowers’, the project wrote, ‘Thanks to our First Amendment, there is in America no broad Official Secrets Act [as in the more restrictive United Kingdom], nor even a statutory basis for the classification system’ – which should be encouraging to those considering going public with insider information (but could hardly be reassuring to Sibel Edmonds).
There are only three types of information whose disclosure is expressly criminalized by the US Congress, explains the letter: communications intelligence, nuclear data, and the identity of US intelligence operatives. This last, of course, is what got Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby into trouble. The first, had she been a US citizen, would have done the same for Gun.
The project called for specific documents that deserved disclosure, including several concerning ‘prisoners from the war on terrorism’, reports on inquiries into intelligence activities before and after 9/11, redacted segments of various other government reports, and predictions and analyses focusing on the post-war occupation and restoration of civil government in Iraq.
Well understanding a reluctance to respond to its call, the project cautions that doing so can entail danger and the inevitable high cost. But a ‘continued silence brings an even more terrible cost’.
It was a ‘continued silence’ that Katharine Gun’s conscience rejected.
It would seem that fired senior intelligence analyst Mary McCarthy was the ideal respondent to whistle-blowing pleas from both Ellsberg and, later, Gun. McCarthy was sent packing in 2006 for leaking information to the media on the CIA’s prisons abroad, precisely one of the disclosures called for in the project’s appeal. It appears that McCarthy was one of the sources Washington Post reporter Dana Priest used in researching the secret prison story that won the journalist a Pulitzer as well as outrage about her lack of patriotism.
An ‘unnamed former senior intelligence official’ said most CIA officers would agree that McCarthy should be among the missing at the agency. After all, he said, ‘the ethic of the business is not to leak’.[11]
McCarthy’s detractors say she should have stayed within official channels rather than going to the media. ‘This is what they’ve said about me,’ Katharine says, noting the similarity between her leak and McCarthy’s. ‘But my complaint would have been lost in bureaucratic red tape. Nothing would have happened if I’d worked within the system.’
Katharine worries about the fate of whistle-blowers and leakers. She has said that, although she was arrested and charged with high crime, she paid far less for telling the truth than did UK weapons expert Dr David Kelly, whose death still troubles her. Kelly died following the Blair government’s naming him as the source of information regarding ‘sexing up’ pre-war Iraq intelligence.
Controversy over Kelly’s death – suicide or murder – led to an investigation chaired by British Law Lord Hutton. Hutton concluded that Kelly was a suicide, who ‘probably killed himself because of extreme loss of self-esteem’. Chalk up one dead whistle-blower, killed by deception, vindicated long after the truth was leaked about sexing up WMD intelligence.
‘I fared far better than he did,’ Katharine says.
Because of Katharine Gun’s criminal act two weeks prior to the strike against Iraq and the acts of those who followed her lead – sometimes, like Kelly, at great cost – a saddened public has learned about the insidious and clandestine use of deception and nuance as tools for political purpose. This has been particularly true when the purpose is to ratchet up fear and to gain support for controversial and perhaps illegal measures taken in the name of national security.
A fearful populace can be kept silent and acquiescent by the spectre of evil terrorists ready to strike the United States once again. This is not to say that the threat does not exist, but rather that, because of it, exaggerated fear and irrational response can be manipulated at will.
Just like in the Cold War, when the feared bogeyman was a Communist said to be lurking in every corner of government, in neighbours’ homes, and on university campuses across the country.