The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War

by Marcia Mitchell

  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. I
t 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.

  The uncooperative and obstructionist behaviour of both Valdés and Aguilar Zinser led to repeated efforts to get the diplomats replaced in their roles at the United Nations. But the anti-war heads of state in both Chile and Mexico were refusing to capitulate during this crucial period of negotiation. In Mexico, President Vincente Fox was clearly gaining prestige for refusing to respond to American pressure. Said one Mexican diplomat at the time, ‘The Americans don’t understand. The more they ask for his [Aguilar Zinser’s] resignation, the more they are hammering him into his seat.’[4] Later, the two UN diplomats would reap unfortunate rewards for their efforts, as both Chile and Mexico – bruised by White House cold shouldering – would finally give in to US demands.

  Independent journalist Yvonne Ridley was sending news reports from Afghanistan following the US/UK invasion when she was captured by the Taliban, treated unexpectedly well, and eventually released. The capture and release brought Ridley a measure of fame she had not enjoyed before her unplanned adventure. At the time Jane’s message reached her, the journalist was travelling the United Kingdom on a lecture tour. Her subject was more than Afghanistan; it was her conversion.

  During captivity, Yvonne became interested in Islam. Upon her return to England, she made the decision to convert. She also became, in the process, a strong anti-war protester. Yvonne was colourful, certainly controversial, and she had worked for several British newspapers.

  Yvonne explained, ‘I was handed the document in the upstairs of Patisserie Valerie in Old Compton Street, Soho, by a woman I only knew as Isobel [Katharine’s ‘Jane’] … a name I had given her when we first met at an anti-war meeting in Bristol the previous year. When I looked at the document, I was almost shaking with excitement but tried to remain calm and impassive – as an investigative journalist should – but my stomach was doing turns. Judging from previous intelligence documents I’d encountered, I felt this was the real thing because it looked so ordinary. No red stamp in thirty-point shouting TOP SECRET. It was far more subtle than that. Its real significance was hidden in the rubrics or lettering and numbers which, when translated by an intelligence contact later, revealed the document to be highly classified.[5]

  ‘It was the real thing. I called a former colleague of mine on the Daily Mirror. I was crestfallen when, after being badgered by me daily, he said that no one in the newsroom had been able to authenticate it and therefore it could not be used. However, journalist Chris Hughes did return it to me by a high-speed bike through Canary Wharf back to my home in Soho.’

  Next, Yvonne did the obvious. She called Martin Bright, the London Observer’s home affairs editor. His title seems misleading, as he is an expert in international affairs, human rights, and Islamic issues – in concerns that seem outside the realm of ‘home affairs’. Yvonne and Martin were old friends, and over the years, the two journalists had developed a trusting professional relationship. Among the newspapers for which Yvonne once worked was the Observer.

  She says: ‘It might sound pretty naïve, but I really thought this could affect the decision to go to war. If the Observer could authenticate the document it would, I imagined, cause a furore across the world through the pages of the media. The news would jolt the United Nations into acting, and the British government might just pull back from the abyss. If all of that happened, I felt the United States would not go into Iraq on its own, that this would have a domino effect, with publication of the story in the Observer the start.

  ‘The reason I did not write the story myself was that I had become well known as an anti-war speaker and was one of the founders of the Stop the War movement. I felt if my name were attached to the story, it might have diluted its strength, and so I did something I never thought I would do – I gave up a scoop and the exclusive byline tag for the greater good.’ They met at a café in Central London, not far from the Soho flat Yvonne shared with her young daughter, who was with her this day. A number of media colleagues have been critical of Yvonne for leaving her daughter at home while she adventured in Afghanistan, but Martin takes exception to this criticism. He admires Yvonne as a colleague and as a mother. She is not only a reliable journalist, but also a good, decent person.

  ‘Yvonne handed me a scrap of paper, with this memo typewritten on it,’ Martin says.[6] ‘There were no markings on it at all, no evidence of who sent it or who it had been sent to. My immediate reaction was, “what use is this to anybody? You could have typed this out.”’

  ‘No, no. Really, honestly, it’s for real,’ Yvonne insisted. ‘You need to check it out yourself.’ She said she did not know the source of the message, and Martin believed her. If Yvonne’s anti-war, Islamic stance crossed Martin’s mind it did so quickly and did nothing to shake his trust in the woman beside him.

  Yvonne had written on the back of the paper some identifying marks from the memo’s header. They included Frank Koza’s name and organization.

  Back at the Observer, a vetting process began. It was vital to prove Frank Koza and his message were real. Quiet contacts made with intelligence sources led to some amazing responses, the first being that the memo was a likely forgery. There were cautions expressed about the infamous Hitler Diaries, all forgeries. One had to be careful. Most interesting was word from one source within the intelligence community that a renegade operation within MI6 was leaking the message to discredit the government. The idea seemed to have legs.

  ‘We became, at t
he time, convinced that there were elements within the intelligence service that were so unhappy with the war that they would do this,’ Bright says. ‘We thought renegade elements against the war had managed to receive this leak through contacts at GCHQ and thought, “One way of stopping this war is to get this out.”’ Eventually, the journalists believed differently, but for a time, the argument held and the newspaper team moved ahead carefully.

  ‘When you’re dealing with areas of intelligence, you are constantly in a strange world,’ Bright says, a world in which manipulation of the media by sources is always possible. By now, Observer colleagues Ed Vulliamy in New York and Peter Beaumont, also in London, joined Martin. Both, Martin says, ‘are older and more experienced’.

  Ed, from New York, made the call to Frank Koza at the NSA in Maryland. To his amazement, a switchboard operator responded to his request for Koza’s office and immediately put him through to a receptionist. According to Bright, the conversation went like this:

  ‘Frank Koza’s office.’

  ‘May I speak to Frank Koza, please.’

  ‘Who may I say is calling?’

  ‘Ed Vulliamy of the Observer newspaper in London.’ Pause.

  ‘Who do you want to speak to?’ the receptionist asked.

  ‘Frank Koza.’

  ‘Sorry, I’ve never heard of him.’

  The Observer team now believed they were on solid ground. Ed was asked to check around with various insider sources and learned that the style and content of the message seemed consistent with authentic communications of this nature. They decided, after three weeks of investigation, that the memo was not a forgery, that there was no way it ‘could have been set up’.

  One final concern was the possibility of legal action against the newspaper.