Volume 51, Number 10 · June 10, 2004
'The Leak Was Me'
By Patrick Radden Keefe
On the afternoon of January 31, 2003, as pressure for war intensified in Washington and London, a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Katharine Gun tucked a memo into her handbag before leaving work as a translator of Mandarin Chinese at Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the United Kingdom's eavesdropping agency, on the outskirts of the Cotswold town of Cheltenham. By removing a classified document from the high-tech complex, Gun was seriously breaching the rules. If the risk she assumed was high, so too, she believed, were the stakes: Katharine Gun's plan, however idealistic or naive, was to prevent the United States and the United Kingdom from going to war in Iraq.
Feature, 3255 words
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