Saving Gary McKinnon (9 page)

Wilson is an artist and a musician and has a great sense of humour. He always tries to keep everyone happy and has helped to pull Gary from the abyss in the darkest of moments.

I remember thinking that what was happening to Gary was the worst thing ever, and then our neighbours called at our house and told us that their fifteen-year-old son had had an accident when he was jumping on a trampoline. Three friends had fallen on him, and because of the way they had all fallen, he was permanently paralysed.

I felt so sad for this family, whose lives were changed forever. The couple were going to have to employ a full-time nurse, which they could ill afford, but that wasn’t the point. Their son
was paralysed! The hopes that he and his parents had had for his future were gone in an instant, because of a freak accident that had occurred totally out of the blue. There was nothing I or anyone could say to lessen their pain.

‘What would we choose, I wonder, if the choice was your son facing extradition and a possible sixty-year sentence but with a tiny glimmer of hope, or your son being safe in his own country but being permanently paralysed?’

‘Where’s the choice?’ he answered.

‘Where’s the choice,’ I agreed.

As we stood at the door to say goodbye, I watched them walk away slowly, shoulders bent, reflecting the weight of their hearts.

M
y heart was heavy too. Who knew what lay ahead for us? No alleged hacker had ever been extradited for computer misuse and the first person was not going to be Gary, it just couldn’t be.

I received numerous emails about Gary every day. I’d even got some from classical musicians and cryptologists asking if it was right that Gary had cracked the ‘Dorabella cipher’. I discovered that this was an encrypted letter written by Edward Elgar to Dorabella Penny in 1897. It seems that Penny never deciphered it and its meaning remains unknown.

I didn’t know where the rumour had come from that Gary had cracked this code. I was asked to ask Gary whether, even if he hadn’t cracked Elgar’s code, he would take the time to try. They seemed to have no idea of what Gary was going through.

The Dorabella cipher, consisting of eighty-seven characters spread over three lines, appears to be made up from twenty-four symbols, each symbol consisting of one, two or three approximate semicircles oriented in one of eight directions (the orientation of several characters is ambiguous). A small dot appears after the fifth character on the third line.

I think just about everyone believed that Gary would not go anywhere in the end and, somewhere inside, I believed that too but I knew I had to keep fighting. We were desperately hoping that Barack Obama would win the American election as we believed that he would be a more compassionate President and might drop the extradition request.

When we switched the TV on to find that Barack Obama had indeed won the presidential election we were overjoyed. This was a true landmark in American history. Barack Obama would be the first ever black President of America and he could change the world for the better if he wanted to. I hoped he had the courage to do just that.

Melanie Riley, who had done the PR for the NatWest Three and who also ran the Friends Extradited campaign group, was committed to seeing the introduction of ‘forum’ in extradition cases, to allow people who were in the UK when the alleged crime took place to be tried here instead of being extradited.

In my very first contact with Melanie I argued with her about a demonstration she had organised, a protest by businessmen in support of the NatWest Three, who were fighting extradition to the US. I didn’t know Melanie then but I sent out emails to Gary’s supporters asking them to come along to the demo, as I felt that by joining forces we’d be better able to fight the extradition treaty. Melanie contacted me in panic mode, asking me to tell Gary’s supporters not to attend as the demo was for businessmen only.

I wasn’t happy about this but as I got to know Melanie, I understood more about her methods and realised she was caring and compassionate and was working extremely hard on trying to achieve forum.

I had been doing interviews for various newspapers and had got to know a lot of the journalists. The media would generally
contact me at home, via Karen, or via the Free Gary website, which was run by the amazing Mark.

Melanie Riley rang me in January 2009 and asked me if I would do an in-depth interview with Lucy Bannerman of
The Times
. I met Lucy, a young Scottish woman, in the Cock & Dragon pub at Cockfosters. She was easy to talk to and there was a photographer with her who took lots of pictures. It’s hard to smile or to look serious to order, so it never really feels or looks natural, but that was the least of my worries.

After the interview was published it got a huge reaction. Lucy Bannerman rang me to say that ITV had seen the story and wanted me to do a TV interview. That made me nervous but Lucy said, ‘You’re articulate and it could help Gary, so it’s worth doing.’

I had no idea of how I’d come across on TV but knew that I couldn’t let Gary down and had to do my best to put his case across well.

In the meantime Melanie approached us about arranging a press conference on 15 January 2009 at Gary’s barrister’s chambers in Doughty Street. I had reservations, especially about whether Gary would be able to cope with it, but we eventually agreed.

Karen Todner and Ben Cooper from Gary’s legal team, Gary’s MP David Burrowes, Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, Mark Lever from the National Autistic Society, James Welch from Liberty, Nadine Stavonina, Gary and I were on the panel. The press conference was packed with journalists from all over the world plus all the British newspapers and TV stations.

Melanie was right. It was well worth doing as it raised the profile of Gary’s case and the extradition treaty even further.

I had emailed all the journalists I’d had contact with and when Alex Thomson from Channel 4 walked in an hour early because
of a mix-up in times, he said, ‘You sent me an email asking me to come to a press conference.’

‘Yes,’ I said embarrassedly, as I had to explain to Alex that it wasn’t due to start until an hour later. This extremely tall, charismatic man with the warm, open smile wasn’t at all annoyed and waited patiently. I’ve since discovered that he has a son with autism and I’ve been amazed at just how many people I’ve met from the media who have an autistic child.

It was much harder to speak off my own bat to an audience of seasoned journalists than to answer questions in an interview. My leg was shaking, but Gary was as articulate as always. However, when asked by one of the journalists how he felt, Gary said, ‘I might appear calm on the outside but inside the fires of hell are burning.’

Gary had said that he couldn’t look into his own eyes in the mirror when he was shaving, that he felt as though he was walking through a world that was about to end, and that there was a veil between him and the world he was living in. The psychiatrist told me that these were all dangerous signs.

The press conference was well organised and an old friend of Gary’s named John Tayler who worked in PR was helping Melanie and paid for a buffet out of his own pocket. We especially appreciated his thoughtfulness in including the vegetarian food.

At the end of the press conference there were lots of interviews with journalists from all over the world. Everyone hung around afterwards chatting and eating and drinking and it was a good atmosphere with lots of positivity. Melanie was so right about the wisdom of doing a press conference – it had been an undoubted success.

The judicial review of the decision to extradite Gary took place on Tuesday 20 January 2009, the same day that George Bush officially handed over the presidency to Barack Obama, which I hoped was a good omen. Gary’s lawyers had fought against fierce government opposition to get this date.

It seems that the QC acting for the Treasury solicitors argued against any sort of judicial review, and had apparently been demanding that if there was a ‘JR’ it should take place on 2 December.

Mark, who set up and ran the Free Gary website, reported that more public money was then wasted on legal fees, and the already overburdened court system slowed down, by a hearing in front of a judge to try to overturn Karen’s rejection of the 2 December date. I’ve always wondered why the prosecution were so fixated on this specific date and I felt pleased that they failed – their desperation worried me. We were up against some very experienced prosecutors and every move they made was purposeful and with the intention of winning.

ITV rang me to ask me to do a TV interview on 21 January 2009. It was with Fern Britton and Phillip Schofield on ITV’s
This Morning
show. They sent a car for me and Wilson came too, although he preferred to keep a low profile and didn’t want to be interviewed.

I was nervous. Even when Wilson and I played gigs in music venues I never spoke between the songs, but I knew that I had to do this and do it well.

The people who worked in the green room were nice and everyone tries to put you at your ease. They have lots of tea and croissants and fruit, in case anyone hasn’t had time for breakfast. They took me in to have my makeup done but I told the makeup artist that I didn’t really want any added, so she kept it to a bare minimum.

I couldn’t believe that I wasn’t nervous while talking on TV, but it was because I was so busy fighting Gary’s corner that I didn’t think about myself at all. I knew all about the extradition treaty and how it wasn’t supposed to be able to be used retrospectively, yet it was. When the interview was over I felt I had done OK.

Fern Britton and Phillip Schofield interviewed media lawyer Mark Stephens at the same time as interviewing me. I thought that Mark Stephens had been brought in to give the US point of view but I was amazed at how well he put Gary’s case across.

Mark was saying that instead of the US concentrating on catching the likes of al-Qaeda they were instead wasting time and money in pursuing Gary McKinnon for years on end, which in his opinion was a ridiculous waste of resources.

You tend to find that one interview leads to another. Russia Today asked me to go into their London studio to do an interview with Moscow on 22 January, and they sent a car to collect us.

On the way there the car took detour after detour. Wilson had fallen asleep and I was feeling panicky and was trying to wake him up quietly, as I was worried about where the driver was taking us.

At one point we ended up almost back at the same place the car had been driving along half an hour before. I started becoming convinced that they were going to kidnap us and hold us hostage to try to get hold of Gary to use him in some way. I was sweating and scared and wanted out of the car, but it was driving too fast.

Then we got a phone call telling us that we were being taken to the TV studio for an in-depth interview as it was too late for the live link to Moscow. The car drove into a back yard that looked like the kind of place on TV where people are murdered
or kidnapped, and we were transferred into another car. I could hear my heart thumping loudly in my ears.

Suddenly the car stopped and we were taken through a door into a reception area. I was wondering if it was a Russian MI5-type building, but it turned out to be the building for RT TV and the relief was overwhelming. I also felt silly for letting my imagination run riot, but because the US were going to such lengths to pursue Gary, I thought that the Russians might also want him for some reason and might be kidnapping us to get to Gary.

Fear can make you irrational and paranoid.

I’ve also since discovered that some of the drivers sent by the TV studios either don’t know their way around London very well or take illogical detours.

It turned out to be a good week for us. On 23 January, Justice Maurice Kay ruled that the diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome was unequivocal and that, combined with other medical evidence, a judicial review against the Home Secretary’s decision to extradite was justified.

This was a massive relief: it not only gave us more time to fight, it also made us feel more optimistic about a good outcome.

I started crying in court and Karen started crying too, and Ronke Phillips from ITV
London Tonight
news said, ‘Why are you both crying? Have you lost?’

Through tears of relief I said, ‘No, we’ve won a judicial review.’

Karen and I were laughing and crying and Ronke was beaming as we headed out of the court to do TV interviews.

We lived for days like this. No matter how bad things got or how hopeless they looked, something always came up at the last minute to keep us going.

On 26 January Boris Johnson wrote an article in the
Telegraph
in support of Gary. It was written with typical Boris humour and
made me laugh out loud, but Boris is clearly more intelligent than many people realise as he was one of the few to understand exactly what Gary had done and how he had done it.

Boris wrote: