My brilliant predecessor had left to make documentaries for Channel 4. It was intense, collegiate and fun, and I felt privileged to be part of the team – but also out of my depth. Dusty reporters would fly in from assignments in far-flung places, handing over a bundle of disorganised receipts for obscure items: four camels, for instance, “replacements for a herd accidentally hit and killed on a road by driver”. I was entrusted with an A4 contacts book – a ringbinder of phone and satellite phone numbers and emails for correspondents all over the globe. My colleagues were impressive: charismatic raconteurs, supremely well-read and worldly wise. The neighbouring Coach & Horses pub was our unofficial canteen. Everyone was constantly available on their BlackBerry – the height of tech at the time. Our working week ran from Tuesday to Saturday, with knocking-off times getting progressively later (9, 10, 11pm) as Sunday approached. Nicole Mowbray in 2004: ‘I felt privileged to be part of the team – but also out of my depth.’ Photograph: Catherine Shaw/The Observer What I offered in keenness must have made up for my lack of experience because, after two interviews, I took a call and was told: “You’ve got the job… if you want it?” Of course I did. At university I devoured the works of George Orwell – himself a former Observer journalist – Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn and Graham Greene, before devoting a year of my degree to the impact of reporting on the Vietnam war. As a teenager, my heroes had been foreign correspondents Kate Adie, Michael Buerk and John Simpson. State-schooled in Sussex and with no newspaper contacts, I had a thirst for foreign news. Aged 24 and having held only junior positions at women’s magazines, I applied for the role of foreign desk assistant in late 2002. It was an interesting time for a young journalist with no newspaper experience to be joining the foreign desk of the Observer.
Britain’s “special relationship” with the US grew ever closer, thanks to the manoeuvrings of the then prime minister, Tony Blair. In 2001 came the terrorist attacks of 9/11, propelling al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden into the public consciousness. Three years earlier, George W Bush narrowly won the 2000 US presidential election after a recount in Florida and a debacle involving hanging chads. The feverishness of those days extends to geopolitics. An incredible heatwave sweeps Europe, too, with the mercury hitting 38.5C in Brogdale, Kent. Cool young things wear absurdly small clothing – low-slung jeans nicknamed “bumsters”, for obvious reasons thongs crop tops and, most ill-advisedly, “shrugs”, unflattering miniature cardigans.
The airwaves are filled with Beyoncé’s Crazy In Love, Justin Timberlake’s Cry Me A River and Hey Ya! by OutKast. And, although I was just a bit-player in the story, the film dramatises a monumental mess-up on my behalf – the biggest mistake of my career. I was working at the Observer at the time. The film dramatises a monumental mess-up on my behalf – the biggest mistake of my career The memo, which outraged Gun, ordered staff to increase surveillance operations “particularly directed at… UN Security Council members (minus US and GBR, of course)” to provide real-time intelligence for Bush officials on voting intentions. It intended to bug the phones and emails of six United Nations delegates, from Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Mexico, Guinea and Pakistan – nations that could determine whether the UN approved the invasion of Iraq. In 2003, she leaked a top-secret memo to the Observer about an illegal spying operation ordered by the US National Security Agency. Fluent in Mandarin, the 28-year-old Gun was employed as a translator at GCHQ in Cheltenham. “That story” concerns British whistleblower Katharine Gun, played by Keira Knightley in a film that premiered at Sundance festival in January.
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