Katharine Gun

whistleblower

Katharine Gun is a whistleblower and former employee of GCHQ, the intelligence and security organisation responsible for providing signals intelligence and information to the government and armed forces of the United Kingdom.

In 2003, age 27, while working as a Mandarin translator at GCHQ, she leaked to The Observer newspaper a secret memo exposing an illegal spying operation by the United States of America, looking for information with which to gauge sentiment of and potentially blackmail United Nations diplomats tasked to vote on a resolution regarding the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Her story is told in the 2019 film Official Secrets.

For full details of the story of Katharine Gun see the 22 September 2019 Observer article entitled Iraq war whistleblower Katharine Gun: ‘Truth always matters'

Photo credit Phil Fisk The Observer.

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