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THE 9/11 ATTACKS AND THE IRAQ WAR 521
oping a collective outlook that is often called 'groupthink'. Chirac
put it rather well, asserting that the intelligence agencies had
tended to 'intoxicate each other'.37
The leaked message to GCHQ reverberated for a long time.
One of the challenges that had faced the Observer, before
publishing it, had been verifying it as genuine. The world's top
experts on sigint were certain that it was the real thing. James
Bamford noted that words such as 'surge' and 'product lines'
were NSA 'lingo', while Matthew Aid revealed that the purported
author, Frank Koza, was indeed a senior operational manager
at NSA.38 They did not have to wait long for confirmation. A
few days after the story was published, Katharine Gun, a twentyeight-year-old
Mandarin linguist at GCHQ, walked into the
Cheltenham headquarters and told her supervisor, 'The leaker
is me.' This was a surprise for GCHQ managers, who had never
had a serious 'whistle blower' . SIS had struggled to silence its
own whistleblower, Richard Tomlinson, in the 1990s, even
arranging a dream job for him with a Formula One racing team
in the hope of keeping him quiet. MIS had pursued another
whistleblower, the eccentric David Shayler, through the courts,
and had tried to prevent its own former Director GeneraL Stella
Rimington, from publishing her memoirs. However, Cheltenham
somehow never quite thought it would happen to them. 39
Katharine Gun's decision to expose the NSA message was taken
on the spur of the moment. On Friday, 31 January 2003 she had
gone to work at GCHQ as usual. At about 10 o'clock she opened
her emails. 'I could not believe what was on the screen,' she
said. 'My thoughts were racing, really bizarre thoughts for me. I
had never intended to do anything like that ... ' In other words,
she had not been looking for material to leak, but now she felt
she was privy to the 'most secret workings of top government'.
Moreover, it struck her that this document - if leaked - might
well be used to impede military action against Iraq. Gun's critics
have since denounced her for naIvety, asserting that someone
working for GCHQ should have understood that sigint agencies
monitor everyone, including friends and neutrals, even the United