Official Secrets
Katharine Gun was a translator/analyst at GCHQ in Cheltenham in 2003 when the United States and Great Britain were trying to get a UN Resolution to attack Iraq. She was presented with evidence of this pretext (that was declared legal very late in the game in Britain) and decided to leak it. When the authorities clamped down on everyone in her department, she chose to put her personal wellbeing behind the moral opposition to an unjust war, and she confessed. You might remember Tony Blair’s “calculus of risk”: well Katharine Gun made a similar but ultimately very different decision. This superb film about Gun, who is played by Keira Knightley in by far her best performance to date, should be a required watch for everyone. It’s tricky to separate the original context from this dramatic retelling, but it’s a film that should be seen with The Post and All The President’s Men and any film that concerns itself with the real life struggle between an individual and the system ...