226 • GUN, KATHARINE
hunting with the Old Berkeley nearBletchley Park, had been unor-
thodox. His original intention had been to travel to Berlin to sell oil
but this plan was shelved after the abduction ofSigismund Bestand
Richard Stevenson the Dutch frontier in November 1939. Accord-
ing to Gulbenkian’s slightly extravagant account of the incident, the
SIS officers had gone to the border to meet an English agent who had
been on a mission to Germany. ‘‘A Dutch Customs official who tried
to protest was shot dead and the Germans carried off, back into Ger-
many, a very important agent.’’ In reality, of course, there was no
agent involved, but both Best and Stevens were seized.
Gulbenkian’s first mission was to fly to Lisbon to be briefed by
Darling. Then he traveled via Barcelona to Perpignan, France, where
he made contact with a P15 agent who was later to convey dozens of
evaders across the French frontier. The Armenian billionaire was to
make a further journey to Perpignan to confirm the financial reward
for P15’s agent, a garage proprietor.
In his memoirs, which were published seven years before his death
in January 1972, Gulbenkian describes his role as an SIS agent, but
is discreet in identifying his SIS case officer only as ‘‘Didi’’—which
to the cognoscenti only was recognizable as Donald Darling’s ini-
tials.GUN, KATHARINE.A 29-year-old Mandarin linguist employed by
GCHQin Cheltenham, Katherine Gun was arrested in February
2003 and charged eight months later with having leaked a confiden-
tial memo from Frank Kozo, a senior U.S.National Security Agency
(NSA) official, seeking to monitor the communications of UN Secur-
ity Council delegates in the run-up to the war in Iraq. Gun, who was
married to a Muslim, was arrested when it was reported that the NSA
had been conducting a secret surveillance operation, bugging UN
delegates’ home and office telephones and emails. The NSA told
GCHQ that the particular targets of an eavesdropping ‘‘surge’’ were
the delegates from Angola, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Chile, Guinea, and
Pakistan—the six crucial ‘‘swing votes’’ on the Security Council.
Gun was charged under Section 1 of the 1989Official Secrets Act,
which makes it an offense to disclose security and intelligence infor-
mation without authorization.
Gun said she would plead not guilty and indicated her intention to