In 2010, a young US army intelligence officer leaked secrets about military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Released in 2017, the 34-year-old tells Andrew Billen her story.
As a blizzard blew on a February afternoon in 2010, a 22-year-old US army intelligence officer on leave from Iraq sat down in the café of a Barnes & Noble store in Rockville, Maryland, and opened her laptop. Over the following hours, Bradley Manning wrestled with the shop’s stuttering wi-fi to upload stashes of military files to WikiLeaks, the whistleblowing site set up by Julian Assange. By the time she was done, half an hour before the bookshop closed at 10pm, she had released nearly half a million reports of enemy engagements, explosions and body counts – effectively every single incident report the army had ever filed about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The data had been smuggled out of Baghdad on a memory card in her camera. On her return, she made WikiLeaks other offerings, including videos of apparently gratuitous killings during a US helicopter attack on Baghdad and of a strike on an Afghan village that killed perhaps 147 civilians. Her hope, hoped against hope perhaps, was that by airing these disasters, the consoling, half-accepted narratives of America’s wars of liberation would skew towards her perception of things, which was that they were a chaotic, self-inflaming and unwinnable attempt to establish American regional hegemony by fear.
Instead, most verifiably, her torrential leak changed Manning’s life. The Pentagon and President Obama saw in their young, unhappy, perhaps misguided but undoubtedly brave recruit another enemy. Arrested that May, she was confined for 49 days to a cage she believed better suited to a large animal. There followed incarceration in a marine base in Quantico, Virginia, where, a United Nations investigation later ruled, her treatment violated her human right not to be tortured. In 2011, she was transferred to Fort Leavenworth military prison in Kansas, her home for the next six years. At her court martial in 2012, Manning was convicted of espionage and theft (although exonerated of abetting the enemy) and sentenced to 35 years in jail. Twice in 2016 she tried to take her own life, the second time while in solitary confinement – a punishment, as she saw it, for surviving her first attempt.
Bradley Manning is now Chelsea Manning. I won’t be using what in trans jargon is her “deadname” again. For continuity’s sake and out of respect, I’ll also keep to feminine pronouns even though much of her story happened before her transition from male to female. This was one liberation the US army did successfully facilitate.
She was released in 2017 when Barack Obama, conceding the punishment had been disproportionate, used presidential clemency to commute her sentence and release her. But during those seven years in jail, had she not wished she had never stepped into the bookshop?
“That’s not how I saw it,” the 34-year-old says. “I thought for sure that my life was never going to take off in general. I had been homeless. I had been working two jobs to try to make ends meet and feeling like I had no direction. That’s what drove me into the military. I’ve always had this sense of futility that nothing will ever go right, that I’ll never be successful, that nothing will ever work and that bad things are just always going to happen to me. That’s how I feel.”
I hear that and I feel very sad, I say.
“I mean, you should. I think that my life could have been better if a few things had been different.”
By a few things, she must mean her parents. Her father is a violent former navy man about the same height as her (5ft 2in) with extreme notions of masculinity. Her Welsh mother was an alcoholic. Manning grew up with them amid the bleak, paranoid atmosphere of Oklahoma (although she spent some time as a teenager with her mother in Haverfordwest, Wales, after her parents’ divorce). Her history – family estrangement, homelessness, low-paid jobs, dropping out of college, relationships formed mainly online, gender confusion – was, she thinks, merely “an extreme version of what many people in my generation went through”. Yet how hard her life must have been for her to believe the US military might offer respite.
Her backstory lies at odds with the petite and elegant young woman I am sitting with in a photographer’s studio in east London, where a long international tour to promote her brilliantly told new book, README.txt, is winding down. She wears her hair long, undoubtedly a reaction to the crew cuts enforced in jail. She is, as I cautiously tell her, rather beautiful, which must make her transitioning a little easier. “I’m physically fit and try to take care of my skin with some pretty basic methods,” she replies.
She began transitional hormone therapy in prison but received what is confusingly known as “bottom surgery” in 2018. I say that one hears horror stories about genital surgery. “No, I don’t think it was a horror story. It was pretty straightforward. I had a good doctor. I had one of the better surgeons in the US, Dr Bowers, take care of me. I don’t really talk about it much but, yeah, it was pretty straightforward.”
Four days before our encounter, I have watched her interviewed at a How To Academy event in central London. She is on a stage that bears a “Free Assange, No Extradition” poster beneath it, but she refuses to discuss Assange for legal reasons. Of Edward Snowden, the counterintelligence consultant who released classified National Security Agency documents about global surveillance programmes, she says she is supportive but the timing of his revelations on day three of her trial was “difficult”.
I write in my notes that over the 75 minutes of her appearance she rarely smiles or laughs. When an audience member says, “We are so happy to have you here,” she snaps, “Can we get to the question?” There is almost as little shrift given to a questioner who suggests she joined the army with identity issues but addressed them by tackling instead America’s. She replies that saying the US is going through an identity crisis puts it “mildly”. Manning has always been adamant that exposing national secrets was not her convoluted way of coming out. So when I say that today I intend to separate our interview into sections on trans and transparency, she says “fantastic” without sarcasm.
She is more relaxed this morning in any case. On Thursday she had newly flown in from Paris, where she had lost her wallet. A free weekend in London has worked wonders. Although she still speaks at parade-ground or prison-yard volume, her answers are conversational.
The army had diagnosed her with mild Asperger’s syndrome. Does she think she is neurotypical?
“I don’t think I’m as neuro-atypical as I’ve been portrayed.”
Ours seems to be a typical conversation.
“Exactly. I met the diagnosis for Asperger’s briefly, but I’ve been tested since. I’m not on the spectrum. I went through this psychological exam while I was in solitary confinement and they just refused to acknowledge it was a factor in my condition.”
What was a factor?
“The fact that I had been held in solitary confinement. I had been in solitary for eight months. I had all these problems and no one seemed to acknowledge or take that into account. There are things that now as a civilian, outside prison and outside the military, I’m able to get treatment for. It’s like, no, you had this traumatic experience you went through.
“The two diagnoses that I’ve been able to address now are complex PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] and, obviously, gender dysphoria, which I spent the subsequent years after the court martial addressing finally. And so my life is just so much better now and so much more functional.”
Although the army had to be persuaded of the gender dysphoria?
“Yes, but shockingly I think I was more successful getting treatment for that than getting acknowledgement of the fact that I had complex PTSD. Why is that? I think there’s a hesitancy for the military to acknowledge the fact that its training itself is a PTSD factor: it is essentially putting people under conditions that give them traumatic amounts of stress.”
And surely, I say, there would have been something wrong if she had not been sent slightly crazy by what she had seen in her job. The intelligence she analysed was not just numerical data but video footage, written reports, and testimony from enemy prisoners and informers. Taken together, they convinced her that America’s tactics were blindly or deliberately creating a “feedback loop” of actions, counter-reactions and counter-counter-reactions.
A particular incident hit her hard and personally. In December 2009, a night raid to capture a target she had been tracking for weeks went badly wrong because the soldiers used two-year-old information rather than the data she had newly updated. In consequence, they stormed the wrong address in east Baghdad, killing a dozen presumably innocent people while the intended target disappeared. To her superiors it was a “dry haul”, a “mission fail”. To her it was a trail of unnecessary deaths that might have been avoided had she not gone on dinner break at the crucial moment.
Was that when she realised the job was doing her head in?
“No, I felt my head being done in every single day. It was chaos. It was drinking from a fire hose.”
A few weeks later, on New Year’s Eve, she decided to act. Her downloaded Iraq and Afghanistan war logs were transferred to a storage card. Thirty six days later she was in Barnes & Noble. She sent her “README.txt” file with a cover note to WikiLeaks explaining it revealed “the true nature of 21st-century asymmetric warfare” but adding that the files had been “sanitised of any source-identifying information”. Her view remains that the data cost no American lives, and her eventual prosecutors singularly failed to prove otherwise. The damage to the reputation of the United States was another matter.
What was her state of mind as she uploaded the intelligence? Angry? Vengeful?
“You know, this is probably the most confusing part of it, but I viewed what I was doing as almost an extension of my job. Going above and beyond is a known thing in the military; go push the extra bit you haven’t been asked to. I viewed it, in a twisted way, as that. In my mind I was justifying it as the way to end the blockage. We just didn’t know why we were there at that point. We were like, what are we doing? What are we accomplishing? We’re not bringing democracy to Iraq. If anything, we’re just propping up potentially a bizarro theocratic dictatorship.”
And that was not being reported properly by the press?
“Or, it wasn’t newsworthy any more. It was less sexy. And I found that frustrating. Was that a driver? I mean, maybe. I think that my bigger driver was this discrepancy between what I saw and I was engaging with and then what I would hear from people when I went home.”
And did it shift the narrative?
“I don’t know. I’ve been told that it did. It seems that evidently it did.”
The US withdrawal from Iraq was just about completed by the end of 2011. The Afghanistan conflict dragged on for another decade. But if the pull-outs were accelerated even by a month by her intervention, that must be a vindication?
“But my goal wasn’t to end the war. I never saw myself as an antiwar activist. People have certainly projected that onto me but I definitely was under the impression that domestic American discourse was lacking in the context, the contextualisation and the granularity of what the f*** was happening.”
Did she assume she would be found out and punished?
“I mean, yes and no. I think I knew it would be found out. At the very least, forensics could get you down to my office.
“But the consequences? Nobody had ever gone to prison for this before. I was the first, and there were no examples of a person being confined in solitary confinement for a year.”
The isolation was brutal. In the cage she did not know what she had been charged with, had no access to a lawyer, no access to the news. Of all her later punishments in prison – sleep deprivation, verbal abuse, fights – her spells of solitary confinement were what she feared and hated most. Her greatest consolation was mail from wellwishers. She received 270,000 letters in custody.
She is not sure why the army treated her so viciously, but her guess is that the idea of leaking secrets online was new and the government wished to strangle it at birth. If it was looking to break her, it succeeded.
“Oh yes. Sure. I did break. My mind was not on release or anything like that. I was just like, ‘How do I survive this?’ "
Nevertheless at Fort Leavenworth, Manning, who describes herself as an extrovert, gradually regained her ability to socialise. Preparing for the court martial with her lawyers provided another route back to civilisation. Some of the legal conversations were about her gender dysphoria, which, after the annihilation of her sex drive during training and the trauma of Iraq, had once again become a pressing issue. She announced she was trans in 2013 and, following legal petitions, in 2015 she became the first person in a US military prison to receive feminising hormone therapy.
She is extraordinarily well read. I ask whether she has any theories about why people are gender dysphoric.
“I don’t. Some people are. Some people aren’t. I don’t think it should be as medically controlled as it is. That’s my view. I’m a little sceptical of the notion that it needs to be as pathologised as it is, but that’s just my opinion. I’ve gotten what I need.
“People often ask me, ‘What’s it like being a trans person? What’s is like being a woman-presenting trans person in your thirties and being out of prison?’ And I’m like, ‘It’s like being an upper-middle-class white woman and being treated that way.’ I mean, I obviously still take hormones and that’s a part of my routine, but it almost never comes up in my day-to-day life, when I’m walking down the street or going to the store. I deal with being Chelsea Manning a lot more.”
I ask in reference to the UK debate whether adolescents who say they are trans should be given hormone suppressants. “I haven’t done much research into them. I don’t know what the risks are.” As ever, Manning is data driven. “But I would have liked at least to have been able to consider them. As a teenager I would have absolutely been able to understand and navigate that.”
Two years after being released from prison in 2017, while recovering from her gender reassignment surgery, she was held in contempt of court for refusing to testify before a grand jury into the 2010 leaks. For one more year she was jailed, at least this time in a civilian woman’s prison, but again she suffered a period of effective solitary confinement. I can understand why she still sees the world through bars.
“I’m somebody who has spent enough time in prison, in jail, that it feels like home almost. One of the things that I struggle with is that I view things through the lens of my own experience in prison.”
Does this interview feel like an interrogation?
“No, this doesn’t feel like that. What I mean is the incredible amount of police presence in the US major cities, the number of surveillance cameras, the amount of paperwork that’s generated with respect to your performance and on your credit or your bank accounts. The US is a very carceral country.”
I assume prison is also a microcosm of the toxic masculinity she had first experienced from her father?
“Yeah, definitely. I mean, I still have a kind of ‘bro’ mentality to stuff, especially video gaming. But my father was very harsh with me, very intense. I wanted him to love me and to respect me. I wanted to feel unconditional love but I felt it was very conditional and dependent on what I did. I spent so many years trying to earn his love and it just was never going to work out. He was quite abusive with me. I didn’t know it because it was all I knew. Eventually he got caught by the state because the school found out that he had been beating me to a point where I had major bruises.”
But he wasn’t prosecuted.
“He wasn’t prosecuted because I essentially lied for him.”
He was, however, delighted when Manning graduated from military academy in 2007. He drove 400 miles from Oklahoma to Missouri for the ceremony. But she has no relationship with him now.
“The last that I heard from my father was in 2011 while I was in jail. I did hear through my sister and my aunt about him, but they’re no longer in contact with him as far as I’m aware.
Did he write to her in prison?
“No. Well, he asked me for money once and I was like, ‘I don’t have money. I’m in jail. I’ve got years of legal debts to take care of.’ "
Her mother died two years ago, from alcoholism. “Not unexpectedly. She had survived two major strokes before. So she passed away at, I think, the age of 61.”
Manning’s belief that bad things are always going to happen has translated into fears for America in general. Secrecy, she thinks, is no longer the real battle, but verification is. Everything is online, but far from everything is true. She feels less inclined these days to engage with social media or share information and would prefer to give a lecture than compose a post that goes viral. She intends to write another book. The question is on what.
“By the time I get it published,” she says, “I think the US will be going through a much more violent and unstable period than it’s even going through now.”
She foresees an epoch similar to that endured by Italy in the Seventies and Eighties, when terror attacks became the norm. “It’ll be in places like Oregon and parts of Appalachia where it will become incredibly dangerous. I think Texas is liable to some sort of domestic civil unrest that will involve violence.” These prophecies would be less worrying were they not from a former intelligence officer whose reading of the data in Iraq seems to have been correct.
She lives in Brooklyn in a neighbourhood peopled by musicians, writers and artists but keeps a place in Maryland where her father’s sister, to whom she is close, lives. She would be uncomfortable visiting Oklahoma. For a living, she owns a small private security consultancy that assesses risks for private clients and provides security, physical and digital.
She does not currently have a partner but does not seem unduly worried about that. “I’m in my mid-thirties. I feel young. I also feel the dating scene is getting older. One of the problems I’m having as a public figure dating is that there’s often an interest in who I’m dating. I have no interest in having my private life, which is quite emotionally involved and very intense and kind of difficult to navigate, viewed under the microscope of the press.”
How much of a celebrity is she now. Is she on CNN regularly? Does she go to red-carpet events?
“It happens. I’m a bit controversial. Sometimes I’m not the centrepiece. I’m definitely a socialite. I definitely socialise in these spaces. I’m not necessarily red carpet or an A-list celebrity, but I might be at the after-party.”
So does she feel the love now?
“I do. I feel the love, especially in New York. It feels like I finally found my home.”
And that terrible feeling that nothing good will happen to her, what of that?
“I feel less of that now,” she says. “I feel much more grounded in the past few years. People ask me why the book stops at 2017, at the commutation of my sentence. It’s because that’s where my life really begins.”
README.txt: A Memoir by Chelsea Manning is published by Bodley Head is on sale now.
Written by: Andrew Billen
© The Times of London