So it gathers any form of communication that is not human intelligence, which is the province of, you know, the CIA or, in Britain, MI6.
Like the NSA, it selectively intercepts communications that occur between Britain and other places. I know there are certain specifics about your work you can't discuss, but tell us what GCHQ does. GCHQ is a very familiar acronym to the British public - as you say, similar to the NSA.
I was a Mandarin-language linguist and translator. I worked for GCHQ, which stands for Government Communications Headquarters, and is the equivalent of the NSA here in the U.S. Tell us what you can about your intelligence work. Joining me today is former British intelligence officer Katharine Gun, who is the central subject of the new film “Official Secrets.” It’s not a documentary - it’s about what you actually did and what happened to you. The transcript that follows has been edited for length and clarity. She was in New York on a sweltering summer afternoon - with her teenage daughter in tow - to talk about director Gavin Hood's mildly fictionalized espionage thriller "Official Secrets," and all the lessons we haven't learned about what governments don't want us to know. I'm not giving away any spoilers by telling you that things didn't quite work out that way. Gun initially hoped she might be able to stop that war and expose the lapdog subservience of Blair's government to American power. under Tony Blair hoped to strong-arm the UN Security Council into authorizing the invasion of Iraq. We'll let Gun herself tell you the story of how she accidentally learned about a nefarious 2003 blackmail scheme, through which the U.S. (She didn't actually tell me that, because she can say very little about the nature of her work, which is normal for former spooks.)Ī comparison to Snowden is relevant because Katharine Gun is also a famous national-security whistleblower, although the secrets she revealed had nothing to do with her work at GCHQ. She was a Mandarin-language scholar who landed for a while at GCHQ, the British government's cognate to the NSA, where she presumably tracked "signals intelligence" going back and forth between the U.K. It's accurate enough to describe Gun as a former British intelligence officer, but that sounds way more glamorous than her actual work.Ī pleasant, highly intelligent woman with a distracted manner and way too much modesty - she told me twice that she thought Edward Snowden was much smarter than she was, which could be disputed - Gun essentially is what she looks like, that being a middle-aged academic.
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While the film struggles to make memos and meetings and editing decisions into cinema - and struggles equally with half-baked, ill-placed attempts at suspense - Official Secrets regularly rediscovers threads of tension and keeps things moving, and Fiennes' late-entry performance helps carry the story ably toward the finale.As Katharine Gun told me during our "Salon Talks" conversation, being played by Keira Knightley in a movie was approximately the last thing she ever thought might happen to her. But fortunately, it sometimes turns into a crackling newspaper movie, with Matthew Goode, Rhys Ifans, and Matt Smith filling out the requisite colorful journalist roles. She must sell a character who's beholden to her better instincts, and suffers to the point that she would put herself and her husband in danger to set things right Knightley does this admirably.ĭirected by Gavin Hood (who doesn't quite reach the highs of his Eye in the Sky), the movie does spend long chunks away from Katharine.
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Official Secrets gets a large portion of its strength from Knightley, whose Katharine is seen early on during her free time shouting at Tony Blair on TV. Wordy, disjointed, and not exactly dynamic or visual, this fact-based political drama nonetheless gets by on sheer righteous anger, painful relevance, and a few stand-up-and-cheer moments.
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