The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War

by Marcia Mitchell

  Katharine was notified of the board’s decision on 13 June. It was exactly what she expected; she was officially out of work, officially off the payroll. She would appeal, for the purpose of exhausting the last option open to her, knowing that her appeal would be denied. She was complying with Liberty’s advice to take this final step with her former employer.

  It was clear that money problems for the Gun household were about to increase significantly. Even with Liberty defending her pro bono, there were growing personal expenses associated with her case, including trips to London. Yasar’s café job paid a living wage, but nothing more. Katharine needed work, but seeking any kind of regular employment at the moment was unrealistic. Potential employers would ask questions she could not answer.

  A possible solution to the money problem arrived in Katharine’s letterbox while her mother was still visiting. The two decided that what was offered might just do the trick, given that it was a business opportunity – essentially an independent operation without troublesome personnel applications and job interviews.

  ‘I got a little printed card, obviously from someone who was leafleting the area, and it was about a job opportunity. It was a source of income for people who were fed up with a nine-to-five work style, or who had been made redundant,’ Katharine says. ‘It turned out that it was for a network marketing opportunity for a company that is very well established in the United States, and also growing around the world. It’s a company that bases all of its products on aloe vera.’

  With her mother, Katharine explored, and even launched, the direct-marketing venture that would soon fail. The business model is a good one, she believes, but came to realize that it works only for someone with the ability to develop a good marketing base, someone with abundant friends and the personal contacts this sort of enterprise demands. At the time, she had neither. Although her professional experience with the direct-sales company was short-lived, Katharine and her husband remain close to the woman who put the little card in her letterbox and started her in business.

  ‘She’s been very supportive of us and of my case,’ Katharine says.

  The business opportunity failed, but it brought Katharine the satisfaction of doing something. It gave her a ‘feeling of purpose, and it was good to be involved with something. I remember going up to the talks at the headquarters, based in a really lovely manor house in its own grounds. Everybody was pleasant, so helpful.’

  What Katharine missed most about the failed enterprise was not the time spent at the manor house, or the peaceful drive there, but the mental space occupied by the business. It was now vacant, like an empty store with its front windows papered over. It was necessary to fill that space or the image would change, the papered windows replaced by bars.

  Katharine was trying to earn money and to find a niche, even a temporary one, where she could experience a sense of belonging. She missed GCHQ, something far more than merely a place of work. It was a way of life that came with built-in friendships and shared lifestyles. Although it was a jealous master, dictating how one should think and feel and demanding one’s blind obedience, it was also comforting in many ways, a protective parent. One belonged to GCHQ; one was not just employed by it.

  Loneliness was like a recurring illness. There were times when Katharine was able to stand being alone, could deal with the emptiness in her life. She tried to think of things to keep her busy, to avoid the sickening fear and worry. Her mother returned to the family home in Durham to prepare for summer guests, and Katharine missed her sorely. Whenever possible, she made the train trip to Durham, where she was surrounded by family.

  Troubling news about the misuse of intelligence to support military action against Iraq continued to surface, news Katharine followed closely. Tony Blair was emphatic: Intelligence had not been manipulated for political purposes. In the United States, two Senate committees launched inquiries into possible abuse of intelligence. Frank Koza was only one player revealed in this high-stakes game of intelligence manipulation. There would be many to follow.

  As an observer of the unfolding scene, and with the possibility of her own public exposure, Katharine was in a place of reflection. What had she done and at what cost to herself and her family? If she could go back to the morning she printed out Koza’s message, would she behave differently, perhaps delete the NSA invitation to conspiracy? Absolutely not. Her answer was the same then as it is now.

  ‘I would do it again. I would do it all over again!’

  An appeal of the disciplinary board’s decision was filed on Katharine’s behalf on 26 June. On 11 July, the appeal was heard and on 18 July, it was denied. The board’s decision to deny was affirmed in a detailed letter from GCHQ’s new director, David Pepper. Meticulously, the Pepper letter reviews each of three grounds for appeal. The bottom line: Katharine’s failure to participate in the original hearing was insufficient reason to bypass this required step in the dismissal process; there were no irregularities in the way the board carried out its role; and, last, it was not wrong for GCHQ to dismiss Katharine in light of her statement of guilt.

  It was finally over. Relief was mixed with sadness.

  ‘But then, things changed. I went down to a café where I used to go every day, on my way into town. There were a couple of postgrad students who lived above the coffee shop and used the shop almost as their own living room. I would bump into them now and again. I didn’t tell them the truth about me. At this time, I still wasn’t telling anybody outside my immediate family and intimate circle of friends about what had happened. I was so hoping that they wouldn’t charge me and that nobody would ever know! I was telling the white lie, saying I was studying another language, that what I was doing was classified, and I couldn’t tell them any more than that. As far as I could tell, my story seemed to go down very easily with most people, although, after a while, I think it started to look a bit fishy. I don’t know what people really thought at the time, whether they suspected that I was the person who had been suspended from GCHQ. No one ever said.

  ‘But anyway, I had a chat with these postgrad students about the possibility of actually leaving GCHQ to go back to school. They gave me a prospectus, a magazine specifically for graduates and postgraduates. In it I saw an advert for a course at the University of Birmingham, in the study of global ethics. It just really intrigued me. The concept of global ethics was refreshing, something I would find very interesting.

  ‘I decided to apply for the course.

  ‘My parents were very supportive. My husband, on the other hand, wasn’t quite sure what it was about, and I found it hard to try to explain the concept of global ethics in English, not knowing how to say it in Turkish. I remember looking it up in our Turkish–English dictionary but still couldn’t make it really clear. I’m not sure he really understood what I was on about! And I think he was also thinking from a more practical point of view and didn’t really see how it would be all that useful. It was also pretty expensive, for British standards, and it would mean commuting to the department for my classes, also an expense. In the end, he agreed because it seemed like something I really wanted to do.

  ‘I would start my work for a master’s degree in global ethics in September!’

  By now, Katharine’s father had arrived from Taiwan for his annual United Kingdom visit, joining her mother at the family home in Durham. Together, they travelled down to Cheltenham to stay with Katharine and Yasar. She drove them around the summery green Cotswolds and took them to pubs in the countryside. There was, during these weeks, a sense of peace she had not known for some time. There were enjoyable things to do, and the days were filled. Katharine and her father had time together, a blessing for both. The visit was all too short.

  ‘When I was sitting at home on my own, when nothing particular was happening, when I had no one to spend time with, no one to talk to, it was hard. But there were times when I seemed to be quite happy being on my own, and I coped well with the solitude. That may come from my being an on
ly child until I was six.

  ‘After the summer holiday, I began to travel up to Birmingham for two days a week for the start of my master’s degree. I remember the first day we got together, when we had to introduce ourselves to each other. It was not a very large group – there were only about ten or eleven of us sitting around in a circle in this cool, breezy classroom introducing ourselves to each other. When it came to me, I was very nervous talking about myself.

  ‘By this stage I didn’t feel like I was the same person as before. The person I was had been submerged by this huge amount of pressure and uncertainty. So I felt “nervy” around people, even though I don’t think I gave off that impression. Inside, however, I felt cautious and suspicious all the time.

  ‘In my introduction, I told the other students that I used to work at GCHQ. I really can’t remember if I told them that I’d been sacked or that I left voluntarily. I certainly didn’t tell them about the leak or that I was responsible for it. I just kind of joked that later on in the year I might be arrested and put in prison. I said it deliberately and in a joking manner, just to kind of ease the tension, because I felt that what I was saying was a bit confusing, a bit awkward. I’m not sure I made sense.

  ‘As it happened, joking about being arrested and put in prison kind of prepared the students for what did happen. Suddenly the woman they knew sitting in their classrooms was everywhere in the news. That’s when they learned the truth.

  ‘It had been so enjoyable, the first three-quarters of the term. I liked the subject, and have always liked being in an environment that is both sociable and mentally stimulating. I liked the people and am still in contact with some of them. Good people. Maybe that’s what drew them to the subject matter of the global ethics course.’

  Suddenly, with one day’s warning, it was all over – Birmingham, Katharine’s tantalizing dream, her fervent hope for the future.

  The eight-month limbo period ended with a bang. A bombshell, according to the media.

  CHAPTER 10: The Third-Culture Kid

  When I was expecting Katharine, I was so hoping for a girl! We have a strong mother-daughter tradition in my family, and both my mother and grandmother died before Katharine was born. I wanted a daughter!

  The tradition, the relationship, was important to me.

  – Jan Harwood, to the authors, June 2005

  THE LITTLE GIRL, a preschooler, sat on the floor with playmates, her surroundings warm and welcoming and wonderfully Chinese in both decor and spirit – immaculate, pleasing to the eye, vaguely and exotically scented. The child was happy, content, except for the obvious mistake God had made in her life. Her hair was blonde, her skin far too pale for her liking, and her eyes disturbingly round – that is, compared to those of the children around her.

  She was not Chinese, and she desperately wanted to be. Not that she wished for different parents or would insist that they, too, be Chinese. The problem was solely with her. Her friends were Chinese, and she, bright-eyed and curious, by now was speaking and understanding their native tongue. Their lifestyle was as familiar as that in her own home, another lovely, well-appointed house with an ornately tiled roof and charming, tree-lined inner courtyard.

  Grown-up Katharine Gun, expert in Mandarin, clearly remembers wanting to be Chinese when she was a child. Although there were Western children in her life, she identified more with her native friends. She was, and still is, infinitely comfortable with the people and their culture. More comfortable, as it would turn out when she went to England for boarding school, than with those in the land of her birth.

  To know the grown-up Katharine, the woman who now has a place in history, is to know the lifestyle of the child who wanted to be Chinese and the shy teenager who went halfway around the world to attend a strange and intimidating boarding school. It is necessary to know the Katharine who became a teacher in Japan and who, ultimately, entered the cloak-and-dagger world of the British secret service.

  ‘Taiwan was an ideal place to bring up young children,’ Paul Harwood says of the historic and exceptionally beautiful university campus where Katharine spent most of her childhood and where her parents still live. ‘Had we been living off campus, in the holey-moley of a Taiwanese situation, we probably could not have endured it. Especially with small children. But I have to say we were not living in the real world – the real Taiwanese world – because there we were on this marvellous campus.

  ‘At the time we arrived there, I suppose the Taiwan economic miracle had begun, but it was only in the initial stages. Life was simpler and safer. Very few people had cars at that time – perhaps two or three people on the campus, and it was quite a big campus. Children walking or riding bicycles could use the streets without worry. Other dangers one might imagine threatening young children running free in the neighbourhood simply did not exist. There were no concerns about kidnapping or strangers with abuse in mind.’

  At a far younger age than most Western children, Katharine was allowed freedom to visit friends and explore the neighbourhood. ‘When she was in first grade,’ Jan Harwood remembers, ‘Katharine could cycle to school safely. Sometimes we wouldn’t see her for hours on end, but we knew she would be in a friend’s home or in the gardens.’

  Katharine and her younger brother, Mike, were a key factor in the Harwoods’ decision to remain in Taiwan after an initial two-year commitment to teach at Tunghai University. Katharine was three years old when her father, teaching French in his native Britain, decided to pack up wife and toddler and pursue the dream that had been his for so long.

  For Paul, it was a matter of education – his, not that of his students – that led the family to Taiwan. ‘I think it was mostly that I felt my whole education and my entire teaching experience had been within the Western European sphere.’

  This is not what the younger Paul had in mind when he was first thinking about university studies. ‘When I was applying for university, I had thoughts of doing an Oriental language.’ No one but Paul seemed to think this was an especially good idea, and, he says, ‘I hadn’t at the time the courage to insist and go for it.’

  A keen interest in Oriental studies remained with Paul, always somewhere in the back of his mind and surfacing now and again as serious temptation. After six years of teaching in England – mainly French language and literature, along with some German courses – Paul had had enough of not doing what he really wanted to do. ‘I thought, my God, I cannot go on doing this for another thirty years!’ The answer was a change in direction, a return to university and an escape from the ‘European sphere’.

  Escape meant Paul was limited to Durham, home of a school of Oriental studies. To go elsewhere would have been financially impossible, and Durham was a respectable choice. ‘Had there been a course in Sanskrit I might well have opted for that, but there was not. There was a course in Indian civilization but no language.’ The Chinese course offered exactly what Paul wanted. Plus, ‘even at that point I had a certain interest in the East from a spiritual point of view. And so that’s what I did, and that led to us being in Taiwan.’

  When the Harwoods moved to Taiwan in the seventies, it was still a very agrarian culture. Katharine remembers the main road from the hilltop campus as ‘kind of a wide dirt track, and there were bamboo fields and sugar-cane crops and rice paddies all the way down to the city’. Even as a small child peering from the window of a bus wobbling its way into town, Katharine found the landscape both lovely and fascinating.

  For Katharine’s mother, teaching at the university proved to be interesting and satisfying. Especially so, because the administration was quite willing to schedule the teaching couple’s classes so that one parent was home at all times. It was an ideal arrangement, one that ‘couldn’t be beaten’, Jan says. ‘I never needed daycare for the children, with Paul teaching in the afternoons and me teaching in the mornings.’ Jan and Paul were involved in university activities, and their young daughter was involved and totally happy with her Chinese playmates. Social
activities for the Harwood family included going out once a week for a special evening meal. There were some adjustments, but nothing serious except, perhaps, giving up coffee, an unaffordable luxury. ‘The cost of a jar of instant coffee was ridiculous!’ Jan complains.

  For Paul, a significant advantage at this time was the ability to be both student and teacher. He began studies in the Chinese Literature Department, his plan to acquire the background and qualifications necessary to teach the subject in Great Britain at some point in the future.

  ‘And so, I started my studies and did three semesters in the graduate programme. I got about half the credits towards a master’s degree. But then, at that point, our son Mike was born. I was teaching at Tunghai and commuting to take a class in Taipei. But then in December of that first semester of the second year, Mike was born prematurely. Jan was taken into a neighbouring town, to a Christian hospital there.

  ‘The birth was actually arrested by administering a drug, and so for a couple of weeks, which were absolutely crucial, his birth was delayed.’ It was a difficult period, with Jan in the hospital, Paul dividing his time among the hospital, teaching, and studying, and Katharine in the care of friends and neighbours. In the end, Paul chose to focus on his family and teaching and put aside the master’s degree programme.

  If her parents were exhausted during this time, Katharine was not. She was active, busy with school, busy with her friends. Too, there was a charming little brother worthy of her attention. She felt very grown up at six. And quite independent.

  Katharine began school life at the Tunghai University kindergarten, initially established for the children of the university’s professors. She did well and then moved into a distinctly more difficult academic life – five years of tough primary school in the Chinese system. Each year in this highly competitive environment was increasingly difficult. What Jan and Paul eventually discovered was that Taiwanese parents put their children into special schools during the summer, where they study all of the material to be covered in class the coming semester. After five years, it was just too much of a struggle, too demanding, even for the daughter of a pair of teachers. To her credit, a determined Katharine kept up with her classmates and survived in the foreign system longer, her father believes, than any other Western child. Her brother lasted one year, fitting the norm for foreign students.