Hill City authors tell of spy's effort to head off war in Iraq

Book signing set for Oct. 18

By Mary Garrigan, Journal staff | Friday, October 17, 2008

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Whether Katharine Gun was a spy with a highly developed conscience or one with an inability to keep a secret is the subject of a Hill City couple's newest book, "The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War: Katharine Gun and the Secret Plot to Sanction the Iraq War."

Marcia and Thomas Mitchell of Hill City tell the story of how the Mandarin translator for an ultra-secret British intelligence agency tried to derail the impending invasion of Iraq. They are also co-authors of a book about the Cold War, "The Spy Who Seduced America."

Three days before Colin Powell's 2003 speech to the United Nations seeking its support of an invasion of Iraq, Gun decided to fight her own battle against what she saw as an illegal U.S. and British spy operation aimed at members of the U.N. Security Council.

Dubbed "the spy who couldn't keep a secret" by her critics, Gun was a 27-year old analyst for Government Communications Headquarters -- commonly referred to as GCHQ -- the British counterpart to America's National Security Agency.

She leaked a top-secret e-mail from a NSA official to the British press in hopes of preventing what she considered to be "the wrong war at the wrong time." That memo asked for British cooperation in listening in on the professional and the private conversations of representatives of the U.N. Security Council in hopes of gathering "anything useful related to the UNSC deliberations/debates/votes."

Americans interested in the run-up to the Iraq War, and the now-discredited intelligence used to justify it, may find they know little of Gun's piece of the pre-war puzzle. The story of that leak, and Gun's subsequent arrest on charges of high crimes against her country, got little coverage in the U.S. media, Marcia Mitchell said.

That changed when, a year later, the government's case against her imploded and all charges were dropped, for reasons that the Mitchells meticulously document in their book. At that time, many U.S. readers wondered why they hadn't heard more about the original covert operation at the U.N., Mitchell said.

Last month, Gun's story drew more coverage in the U.S. during a Washington, D.C., symposium, "A Question of Conscience."

The symposium offered differing perspectives on national security and global ethics, publishing classified information, loyalty and betrayal and the high cost of blowing the whistle.

It featured Martin Bright, an editor at the London Observer, the newspaper that first published the story about illegal spying against Security Council; Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame; Peter Earnest, a career CIA operations officer; Ray McGovern, the founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and a media commentator on intelligence-related issues; and Norman Solomon, a journalist, author and anti-war activist who wrote the forward to the Mitchell book.

Marcia Mitchell, a staunch opponent of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, acknowledges that the book is a biased account of Gun's story. "She's darling," Mitchell said of her subject, with whom she enjoys an ongoing friendship.

If you go

What: Book signing for "The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War."

Who: Authors Marcia and Thomas Mitchell of Hill City

When: 2 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 18

Where: Borders book store, 2130 Haines Ave., Rapid City

Contact Mary Garrigan at 394-8424 or mary.garrigan@rapidcityjournal.com