Official Secrets

Sunday, Jan. 25, 2004 By J.F.O. MCALLISTER

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Standing in the dock of a London court last week, Katharine Gun was yet another reason why Tony Blair can't put the Iraq war behind him. She was a translator at Britain's secret eavesdropping agency, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). But last year, as the U.S. and Britain prepared to invade Iraq, she came across an e-mail from Frank Koza, deputy chief of the Regional Targets section of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), asking GCHQ to mount a "surge" of spying against members of the U.N. Security Council whose votes would be crucial to passing a second resolution authorizing war. This request would probably not have shocked most of the target diplomats — the NSA is widely known to intercept communications even from allies — but Gun was outraged at what she considered an attempt to subvert the U.N. So she leaked the memo to the Observer newspaper, which printed it last March. Now she faces a possible two years in jail for allegedly violating the Official Secrets Act.

Gun will not go quietly. The actor Sean Penn and Daniel Ellsberg, Vietnam War whistle-blower, have taken up her cause. She claims the defense of "necessity": that her leak was required to "expose serious ... wrongdoing on the part of the U.S. government," and "to prevent an illegal war in which thousands ... would be killed." Her trial, expected in the fall, will rehash the war's legality — still a touchy subject for Blair, especially since no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have been found.

Gun's best defense may be her earnestness. Her legal team cites the precedent of Clive Ponting, a defense official who passed to an M.P. evidence that Margaret Thatcher's government had misled Parliament about details of when and where the Argentinian ship General Belgrano was sunk during the Falklands War. Ponting confessed, and the judge virtually ordered the jury to convict, but they honored his act of conscience and acquitted him.