The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War

On Katharine’s screen was a blatant invitation to a conspiracy. The United States was mounting an illegal intelligence operation against the UN Security Council member nations – and their representatives – that would cast the deciding vote on a resolution for war against Iraq. At the moment, the undecided were resisting US pressure for an ‘aye’ on launching a pre-emptive strike.

The purpose of the operation was explained – to collect ‘the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to US goals’. Clearly, the principal goal was war. Sooner rather than later. Called for was listening in on not only office communications, but also ‘domestic’, private conversations.

Britain was asked to join ‘a surge effort … against UNSC members Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria and Guinea’, with special attention on Pakistan. Other UN delegations not sitting on the Security Council at the moment were also good targets because they could ‘contribute related perspectives insights whatever.’ The message, sent by the NSA’s Frank Koza, recognized that ‘we can’t afford to ignore this possible source’.

As for timing, Koza wrote, ‘this effort will probably peak (at least for this specific focus) in the middle of next week, following the SecState’s presentation to the UNSC’. It was important to know how the ‘swing voters’ reacted to Colin Powell’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) pitch to the Security Council and, it seems, to collect secrets that could manipulate those reactions, ensuring that they would be ‘favorable to US goals’.

‘I sat there, mesmerized, appalled by the fact that the public rhetoric of George Bush and Tony Blair, especially Tony Blair at that time, led us to believe that all efforts were being directed toward securing a diplomatic resolution to the matter of Iraq, not toward an inevitable war. They talked of other options: Saddam Hussein being forced to give up his WMD, or having to leave Iraq. It seemed so hypocritical that they were saying this on the one hand in public, and behind everyone’s back, they were desperately trying to seek a yes-vote to the second resolution to justify a war that they obviously wanted. They were willing to use any means to get what they wanted.

‘It seemed to me, as I sat there thinking, that if people knew what really was going on, they would understand that the intent all along was war, not disarmament. I asked myself: How could anybody even hope for a chance of resolving the issue peacefully when the motives of the US administration were so apparent, so blatant? Besides, I didn’t think that the job of the intelligence services was to manipulate, to politicize intelligence. I don’t believe you should tailor intelligence to a political agenda. I was angry – angry about their trying to manipulate the vote in the Security Council.

‘I knew there were others like me at GCHQ who were worried about this rush to war, who had serious questions in mind.’

By a strange coincidence, a memorandum had been circulated to staff exactly one week earlier. It read, ‘I know from the questions you have asked … that some of you have concerns about the legal or ethical basis of war against Iraq – if and when it happens – and GCHQ’s part in it.’ ‘Well,’ assured the senior officer responsible for the memorandum, ‘there is no question of any member of GCHQ being asked to do anything – at this or any other time – which is not lawful.’

It is likely that the author of the memorandum to staff believed what he wrote so convincingly. Further, he assured, ‘British troops do not go into action unless the Attorney General has advised the Prime Minister that their action is lawful.’ The directive also quoted the prime minister’s remarks from two weeks earlier, when he promised he would never commit British troops to a war he thought was ‘wrong or unnecessary’. Besides, the government ‘has shown its commitment to trying to resolve this difficult situation by agreement with the international community, through the United Nations’.

Through the United Nations. By doing what the Koza message asked? Creating a false coalition? Would the United Kingdom join the United States in this apparent hypocrisy?

That night, after work, Katharine did not take the bus but instead walked several miles into town through the dark and the cold, wanting to be alone with her thoughts. One in particular, she says, ‘was already running around in my head, that this was explosive stuff’. She reached the café shaking with a combination of cold and rattled nerves, pulled off her heavy sweater, and folded into a chair to watch her husband finish his chores before closing. Nothing was said, not a word about the Koza message. He could not know, not at this point. It was a matter she would have to decide for herself, unless, of course, she had already decided. She thinks, perhaps, she had.

‘To be honest, I must admit that the decision to leak the e-mail was instantly in my mind as soon as I read it, not finally made, but certainly in my mind. It was there because of the nature of the message and the impact on me.

‘At the time, all I could think about was that I knew they were trying really hard to legitimize an invasion, and they were willing to use this new intelligence to coerce, perhaps blackmail delegates, so they could tell the world they had achieved a consensus for war. I felt so strongly, and I knew there was so much public anxiety and anger about a pre-emptive strike, about rushing into war, that I didn’t really think about my own personal circumstances at that stage.’

It is along about here in Katharine’s story that her critics howl. What did she think the NSA and GCHQ were doing? Knitting sweaters for poor children in third world countries? She was in the spy business, for God’s sake, they will say. And what was afoot in the business at the moment was a spy operation. Surreptitiously, clandestinely collecting information. The United States and United Kingdom were simply trying to acquire information about the positions of the various target countries. Nothing new – in fact, so old hat as to be boring. So what, they ask, was her problem about a bit of high-stakes eavesdropping at the United Nations?

‘Yes, it was eavesdropping,’ Katharine agrees, ‘and that’s what I did for a living.’ But what she did in the normal course of her work was something quite different, as she sees it, from what GCHQ was being asked to do by the NSA. ‘This request was far more than attempting to collect information on negotiating patterns, on likely responses to draft proposals.’ It was how the information was to be used. Here Katharine and her colleagues were being asked to help manipulate those patterns and responses, to legalize what otherwise might well be an illegal war. Much later, in the spring of 2005, what was going on was described to the public as tailoring intelligence to fit policy.[2]

‘You’re being asked to participate in an illegal process with the ultimate aim of achieving an invasion in violation of international law,’ Katharine says. An illegal process with the imprimatur of a bogeyman on the loose.

Ultimately, Katharine believed that if the Koza message was released to the public, people would see clearly that, despite official government pronouncements about seeking a diplomatic resolution to the Iraq problem, behind-the-scenes unofficial government was in pursuit of quite a different solution. And that solution would allow the United States and United Kingdom governments to claim that a unified United Nations believed Iraq was in contravention of Security Council resolutions and was an imminent threat to world peace. War, then, would be both legal and necessary.

Timing was a significant issue.

‘We were all aware that Hans Blix and the WMD inspectors had not yet had a chance to complete their work. From the beginning it had been estimated that it would take them at least six months once in place to provide any kind of realistic assessment. They had been there about three months when Koza’s message arrived. This was troubling, I would guess, for a lot of us.’

Yasar worked on Saturdays. For Katharine, this Saturday was a day of moving about in something of a fog, the real world obscured behind a hazy scrim, where the words of the NSA memo were all that seemed clear, spelling out what would happen if she were to reveal its contents.

‘At no point during the weekend did I consider telling any of my family members, or even Yasar, because I didn’t want to jeopardize anyone else. I wanted everyone else to be wholly innocent of the affair. But also, at the back of my mind, I was thinking that if I did it, I would do it anonymously. And, hopefully, no one would ever know it was me. We regularly see in the press leaks from official sources, and there never seems to be any kind of retribution, anybody being arrested or charged for making those leaks.’

The question that tortured her throughout the weekend was this: Will I get away with it? She felt confident that she would, that she could remain anonymous. Later, she realized that she didn’t know how to play the game, didn’t know the unwritten rules.

‘I knew there are people, especially those who work in London in both the civil service and the intelligence service, who brief journalists very much below the radar, sort of unofficially, without jeopardizing their positions. And they get away with it. You read about the leak, oh, not one of this nature, but you never hear about who was responsible or a manhunt under way to find the source. No one is punished. No one is identified. This is what I hoped for. This is what I expected.’

Looking back, Katharine recognizes the problem. The ‘official unofficial’ briefings – call them ‘controlled leaks’ – are for the most part institutionalized. A selected journalist, one from each major news entity and each category of news within that entity, communicates directly with his or her assigned contact within an intelligence service. There are unwritten ground rules. The intelligence contact is never named and the information provided is reported to have come from ‘known reliable’ or ‘unnamed government’ sources. The arrangement is mutually beneficial; journalists get information for their stories, and the government releases certain information it wishes to get to the public without having it attributed to a specific individual. Amateurs like Katharine are not allowed to play the game.

There was a caution that kept returning, a fear that had to be placed into the emotional conflict of indecision. Or, perhaps a decision made but not yet wholly accepted. It was the critical matter of Yasar’s safety.

They were wildly in love, these two, the blonde, petite Englishwoman and her ‘beautiful, beloved’ husband. Just six months earlier, Katharine had married the man of her dreams, the tall, dark Mediterranean charmer with finely chiselled features and a quick, expansive smile. They met at the café where he worked, where she would go for coffee in the evenings after leaving GCHQ. He would wink from across the counter, and she was enchanted. ‘He was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen,’ she says.

The café, small, unpretentious, was a comfortable, intimate place, ideal for chatting after work, when the chat had to be about anything but work. Filled with light, the café was perfect for people from GCHQ, whose days were spent in a darkness that had nothing to do with either natural or artificial illumination.

Most evenings, Katharine was accompanied to the café by a male GCHQ colleague. Yasar, eyeing pretty Katharine seated with her companion, assumed she was ‘taken’, which was not true. The man with her was a friend, not a boyfriend. Since Yasar made no advance other than a wink now and then, Katharine assumed he was not interested. This, too, was not true. Finally, unaccompanied to the café, Katharine winked back. He came to stand beside her.

‘I’m going to the cinema,’ she said, and then, surprising them both, ‘what are you doing later?’ He had a break, he told her. Would she like to go for a walk? Yes, she would very much like that; she had time for a walk before the picture started. From that moment on, Katharine Harwood had no space in her life for any other man. Winking led to frequent evening walks, which eventually led to dating. They were married in an intimate ceremony attended by a small group of friends and her parents, newly arrived from Taiwan. The family met the enigmatic young man for the first time the night before the wedding.

‘I felt better after meeting him,’ Katharine’s father, Paul Harwood, says. ‘He obviously adores her.’

Weeks after they first started dating, Katharine discovered that Yasar, still learning English, often communicated with customers in the café by winking. It was a way of greeting people. ‘He winked at everyone,’ she laughs.

There was little to laugh about when, two weeks 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 high-stakes political blackmailing.

At the very highest level, it already was known – and had been since April 2002, when Blair and Bush met in Crawford, Texas, and reached an accord for military action – that the rhetoric coming from the White House and Downing Street was only that.[3] The decision to invade Iraq had been made, pushed by George Bush and his neoconservative team. It was now essential to find an excuse, an acceptable rationale for doing so. Twisting the arms of the recalcitrant UNSC representatives in order to win approval for a new resolution could supply a universally acceptable rationale. If regime change came about as a result of invasion based on a WMD threat, well, that would be serendipity within the rules. Thus in some lofty quarters, where the strategy was either known for certain or even ‘twigged’, there was neither shock nor surprise when the Koza message arrived at GCHQ.

‘For four weeks I was nervous, on edge. Every day I frantically searched the papers and watched the news. I figured it would take a few days to appear, but then, day after day, there was nothing. It was difficult trying to live normally, as if nothing had happened. It was a struggle, I mean, going about life that way. Everything was quiet, for those four weeks, and I began to think that perhaps it wasn’t actually of interest to anybody. Perhaps it would never be made public. I suppose I was a little bit relieved. I could go on with my life as before, and everything would be the same.

‘No one would know what I had done.’

The news that Katharine was reading during this period showed an intense ratcheting up of the pitch for war. Three days after she posted her letter to Jane, Colin Powell went before the United Nations – and the world – to explain why war was absolutely necessary, that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction ready to destroy his neighbours and threaten the peace and security of everyone everywhere. Details about the kind and numbers of weapons known to be in Iraq’s possession were supplied. And he was convincing, this highly respected member of the Bush administration. Handsome, charismatic, articulate, respected – no one else in the Bush administration could have done the job so masterfully.

In New York, among the many secret meetings going on with members of the UN Security Council that were of particular interest to Washington were those led by Chile’s Juan Gabriel Valdés and Mexico’s Adolfo Aguilar Zinser. The two were continuing the fight against a resolution definitively authorizing use of military force against Iraq. Both men were highly respected diplomats, and their colleagues were listening to their concerns.

Aguilar Zinser was particularly annoying to the United States during these intense four weeks. A lawyer and former senator, he dissected the Bush–Blair draft resolution line by line. He complained about what he believed to be obvious conflicts with international law. He threatened to ‘throw the book’ at both countries. Colin Powell met with Aguilar Zinser and reportedly shook his finger at him, ‘jokingly’ scolding him for troublemaking.