GCHQ mother : My girl is not a traitor !!

The mother of Katharine Gun, the GCHQ translator facing trial for leaking
details of an Anglo-American operation to spy on the United Nations on the
eve of war with Iraq, last night called on the British government to reform
its secrecy laws and said the case against her daughter should never have
come to court.

In an impassioned plea just days before Gun's first appearance at the Old
Bailey, Jan Harwood said she was deeply proud of what her daughter - a
Mandarin translator at the Government's top secret surveillance centre - had
done to reveal wrongdoing on the part of the US and British governments.

Speaking publicly for the first time from her home in the Taiwanese city of
Taichung, Harwood told The Observer that her daughter was a woman of
principle, who felt it was her duty to do all she could to stop the war in
Iraq.

'It would be good if some permanent long-term good came of her actions,' she
said. would like to think it would lead some people to clean up their act.
It's ridiculous for a whistleblower to be treated in the same way as an
obvious traitor - they are not the same at all.' She hoped reports that the
Government was planning to drop the case were true, but would not raise her
hopes until a decision had been announced at Wednesday's court hearing.

Whitehall sources told The Observer that intense discussions over the issue
of dropping the case had taken place at the office of Attorney General Lord
Goldsmith during last week, but a final decision would not be made until
Wednesday.

It is likely that Gun's defence would demand the disclosure of the Attorney
General's full advice on the legality of the war, which was presented to the
Prime Minister just before the outbreak of the conflict.

On 2 March 2003 The Observer published details of a leaked memo from the US
National Security Agency requesting GCHQ help in an intelligence 'surge'
they were mounting on the missions of six security council members whose
votes were needed to authorise war in Iraq. When the story first broke Harwo
od had no idea that her daughter was implicated. 'My husband read that
article, totally outraged - so much so that when our son came round later on
the Sunday, he drew his attention to it and both of them spent the next few
days expecting a furore.'

Later in the week, the Harwoods received a phone call from Katharine, saying
that she had been in police custody overnight and had been questioned by the
Metropolitan Police about Official Secrets Act offences. 'She called to tell
us that she was in trouble. But she couldn't tell us exactly the nature of
the trouble. We failed to make the connection.'

A week later GCHQ confirmed they had arrested a young woman in connection
with the leak and they finally made the link. 'We were quite sure that
whatever it was she'd done she'd done for good reason. She's idealistic and
not a bad person in any way at all. Whatever trouble she was in, we were
behind her.'

Katharine (Gun is her married name) grew up in Taiwan and later went to
boarding school in England to study for her A-levels. She studied Mandarin
at St Mary's College, Durham University. Her father Paul Harwood, also
studied Chinese at Durham University, which is renowned for its East Asian
Studies department.

The Harwoods met at the university and moved with their threeyear- old
daughter to Taiwan in the 1970s to help improve Paul Harwood's Chinese, and
remained there. Both parents now work in education in Taichung, a city in
the centre of Taiwan island.

Katharine Gun is bilingual, which made her an invaluable asset to GCHQ. Her
specific expertise suggests that the British and American intelligence
services were also spying on China, one of the permanent members of the
United Nations Security Council.

Martin Bright, home affairs editor
The Observer newspaper, London, UK - Sunday February 22, 2004