I had never heard of Katherine Gun until I watched the movie Official Secrets on Netflix last week. Perhaps the fact that she is my age made her story resonate more.

It all happened in 2003. You’ll recall that, at the time, in Malta we were fighting the EU referendum battle (because a certain Joseph Muscat would have none of it) but, over in the US and the UK, George Bush and Tony Blair were beating the drums of war. They needed any excuse to invade and topple Saddam Hussein in Iraq – and would stop at nothing.

Remember how we were all made to believe that Iraq was stashing weapons of mass destruction and how Saddam and al-Qaeda were one and the same? Remember how we all rushed to the supermarkets and emptied the toilet paper shelves because we thought that Saddam would strike back and there’d be World War III?

Well, while we were hoarding loo roll, Gun was working as a linguist at the British government intelligence agency (GCHQ). Because of the sensitivity of her job – which was, essentially, spying to ensure that the British people came to no harm – Gun was bound by the Official Secrets Act not to reveal whatever she witnessed at work. And she dutifully complied, until, that is, she was asked to do something illegal.

While Bush and Blair toured the world trying to convince all and sundry that we should make war not love, Gun and her colleagues at the GCHQ were sent a memo with a top-secret request to spy on phone calls of UN delegates for any information that could be used to blackmail them to vote in favour of the Iraqi war.

Gun, then 27 years old, leaked the memo to The Observer, in the hope that exposing these dirty tricks and lies would stop the British government from taking part in the Iraqi invasion. Chaos ensued when the memo was splashed out on the front pages and she owned up to the leak.

She was promptly arrested and grilled. Her interrogator snarled at her: “Why did you leak this secret information? You work for the British government.”

Her reply, so succinct and so principled, shut his sneering mouth up. “No,” she replied.

“I work for the British people. I do not gather intelligence so the government can lie to the British people.”

She was then charged and taken through hell and back. I’m not going into detail here to avoid spoilers. But, as we know, Britain, duped, still went to war. A pointless war, in which thousands and thousands of young soldiers died.

We won’t get off any grey list until everyone stops protecting this corrupt government- Kristina Chetcuti

However, Gun’s heroic failure is inspiring. It shows that, yes, it is possible, if you are a government employee, to blow the whistle on your own government if its actions are to the detriment of the people.

I watched this movie on Monday. That very next day, Malta’s permanent secretary at the Finance Ministry, Alfred Camilleri, addressed a financial conference and spoke about the FATF’s greylisting of Malta.

This grey list means that Malta is struggling to have foreign banking partners; foreign investors are packing up as we speak; investment will soon dry up; jobs will soon be lost.

But, despite this dark cloud, Camilleri was upbeat and announced that he had a “very ambitious” plan to get our country off this blessed grey list in 18 months.

Well, well. Under any other circumstances, a permanent secretary who utters those words would instil nothing but great relief. But, as it were, this comment was uttered by the very person who was part of the reason for this abysmal grading. So,  rather than relief, I felt queasy. 

Camilleri was not born yesterday. He has been perm sec since 2006. He knows the gravity of being put on the grey list. He knows that it won’t go away by means of a series of positive platitudes in public.

He knows that Malta being formally classified as a country not to be trusted with money, like Panama and Zimbabwe, did not come out of nowhere. He knows it was the direct consequence of having a crook – Joseph Muscat – for a prime minister.

And Camilleri witnessed this smoking gun. He was the finance perm sec when the Labour government started issuing one direct order after the next and he was okay with that. He was there when Konrad Mizzi’s Vitals deal was struck and so on and so forth. 

Above all, he was there when all the Electrogas rotten atrocities were taking place. When bank guarantees were sought and given even though it had all the suspicion of being a money-laundering machine.

Camilleri may argue till he’s blue in the face about what a fuss he made and how all this drove him to the edge – but he was still part of it. He stood there approving deals that stank and never at any point did he publicly flag what was happening. Does he tell that to the members of Ecofin and EUROGROUP and all those committees he sits on?

He knows, as chairman of the National Coordination Committee on Combatting Money Laundering that the chief money launderers in this country are still at large. He knows that unless these people are prosecuted, the FAFT won’t believe our pleas that we’re reforming.

He had his “concerns”, he told the public inquiry a few months ago, but “once it was approved by cabinet, it was approved. That was policy,” he had told the judges.

Well, no Mr Camilleri. You do not work for the government but for the Maltese people. And we won’t get off any grey list until everyone stops protecting this corrupt government.

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