The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War. Thomas Mitchell M.

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ