The name Katharine Gun enjoyed brief celebrity in America in 2003 when she passed top-secret material to the media that detailed the George W. Bush administration's dissembling prior to the occupation of Iraq.
Gun, who grew up in Taiwan, was working as a translator of Mandarin for GCHQ, the British equivalent of our National Security Agency.
Her hope was to derail plans for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The straw that broke the camel's back was a classified NSA email she read that asked for her agency's help in bugging the UN offices of six nations. The goal of this operation was to influence those countries' votes on approval of the coming invasion.
Gun was fired and in 2003 was charged with violating Britain's Official Secrets Act. The case was dropped, however, presumably to avoid embarrassment over Britain's docile agreement with the Bush administration's war plans.
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