RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Truthhelm
be told, cinephiles worldwide are increasingly drawn to entertaining fiction movies that reveal insider information and provide credible analysis about the real-life people and events that impact our lives.
Of course, nonfiction documentaries are popular, too. But truth-based narratives are trending.
OFFICIAL SECRETS, a British film helmed by South African director Gavin Hood, exemplifies the truthy trend. The film reveals the story of Katherine Gun (played by Kiera Knightly), a righteous London-based sworn-to-secrecy British spy who blew the whistle on Prime Minister Tony Blair and his government for complicity in supporting the unjustified military action against Iraq in 2003.
Initiated and orchestrated by the U.S., the attack was justified by the U.S. government assertion that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, allegedly the man who’d orchestrated the tragic 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Towers, was amassing weapons of mass destruction for use in future terrorist attacks.
In the end, the joint occupying forces from the U.S., Britain, Australia, and Poland found no weapons of mass destruction. Thousands of lives were lost. The entire operation was a scandalous entangled boondoggle that people around the world are still trying to understand.
Katherine Gun tried to prevent the war. She was a mid-level employee at GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), the British surveillance agency that was charged with monitoring phone calls and internet activity to pick up preemptive information about possible terrorist attacks and other threats of disruption.
One day, she unexpectedly received a memo from the U.S. National Security Agency asking GCHQ to surveil UN Security Council members in order to uncover secrets that could be used to get them to sanction the attack on Iraq. In effect, the NSA was instructing the British government agency to blackmail UN Security Council personnel.
Gun was understandably outraged by the NSA memo, which set fire to the frustration she was already experiencing as she watched daily telly newscasts that fed a steady diet of misinformation – lies – to the public.
She – and the rest of the intelligence community – knew that there was no evidence to support the U.S. allegation that Saddam Hussein was amassing weapons of mass destruction, nor the associated assertion that the Iraqi dictator was the political presence behind the 9/11 tragedy.
As an aside that indicates trending movie viewer interest in the subject of how the Iraq War came to pass, you may recall the accolades for last year’s multi-award-winning VICE, Adam McKaye’s enlightening fictionalized Dick Cheney biopic which so entertainingly exposes the former U.S. “Vice” President’s pivotal role in fomenting the George W. Bush administration’s egregious instigation of the Iraq War.
In that film, an entire cast of characters – including American intelligence officers, diplomats and, even, Colin Powell — say emphatically and repeatedly that Iraq is the wrong retaliatory target.
But, Cheney, motivated by reasons revealed in VICE, slyly pushes Bush into attack mode and initiates the illegal military action that resulted in the loss of tens of thousands of human lives, many of them American and British, and even more of them innocent noncombatant Iraqi civilians.
If you haven’t yet seen VICE, do so. It’s one of the best films of the decade, and it’s a mind-blowing prelude to OFFICIAL SECRETS. In fact, OFFICIAL SECRETS would make for a great double bill with VICE.
Along with Doug Liman’s FAIR GAME (2010), Paul Greengrass’ GREEN ZONE (2010) and other entertaining political intrigues and actioners, OFFICIAL SECRETS and VICE are like free-standing chapters in the essential cinema anthology of narrative films that illuminate disturbing details about the world’s post-9/11 political upheaval and its ongoing aftermath.
The evil that was done is still on everyone’s mind, impacting daily life. All of these narrative features are revelatory if not always cathartic.
Back to OFFICIAL SECRETS and secret agent Katherine Gun. As British involvement in military action against Saddam Hussein and Iraq inched closer to a fait accompli, Gun felt compelled to let the British people know what she knew so they could make an informed decision about whether to send their boys off to war in Iraq or not.
She followed her gut and decided to leak the memo to Martin Bright, an acclaimed journalist who worked for The Observer newspaper. She did so anonymously. But leaking the incriminating and incendiary classified memo put her at personal risk. It was an indisputable violation of Britain’s Official Secrets Act of 1989 – and an act of treason.
The Observer’s publication of the memo in full generated a media frenzy, which precipitated a full-on GCHQ internal investigation to find out the source of the leak.
Eventually, Gun identified herself as the whistleblower in order to prevent prosecution of any of her fellow workers at GCHQ. When her identity became known, the media frenzy settled on Gun. The normalcy of her life was over. She was arrested, charged with treason, and put on trial. Her case was a cause celebre.
But, you say, you’ve never before heard of Katherine Gun? That’s perhaps because news coverage of the case was quickly squelched by government agencies on both sides of the Atlantic — after they’d successfully called into question the authenticity of the published NSA memo.
Actually, Gavin Hood, who is known for other political thrillers such as EYE IN THE SKY, effectively uses some archival news footage and documents in the film, which helps to capture and portray the ambient tensions of a society and system of government that are grappling with core questions about ethics and accountability.
Ultimately, the outcome of Katherine Gun’s case turns on whether sending British soldiers to their possible death in an illegal war meets the standard for evocation of the Official Secrets Act’s exclusionary “immediate danger” clause – a clause that would evaporate charges of treason for Katherine Gun, who, as a person of conscience, had stated consistently and emphatically that her loyalty and first concerns are for the British people, rather than for the British government.
The dramatic social debate that was rampant in the streets and urgent in the courts is gripping on film – as is getting to know Katherine Gun and her determination to do the right thing. The Gun denouement is already known – or you can look it up.
Katherine does not go to jail. But the reason she’s spared is a quite a surprise – one that in fact entails another government secret and manipulation. To find out precisely what that is, see the film.
OFFICIAL SECRETS opens in theaters in the U.S. on August 30th, with a subsequent roll out to theaters worldwide. Known as SEGREDOS OFICIAIS, it arrives in Brazilian theaters on October 31st.