1.



BARNES & NOBLE, ROCKVILLE, MARYLAND FEBRUARY 8, 2010

The free internet at Barnes & Noble is … not fast. Especially if you’re on an encrypted network, pinging nodes all over the world to mask your real location and ensure anonymity. But it was what I had to work with. I needed to upload almost half a million incident reports and significant activity logs (SIGACTs) I’d brought with me on a memory card from Baghdad. This was every single incident report the United States Army ever filed about Iraq or Afghanistan, every instance where a soldier thought there was something important enough to log and report. These were descriptions of enemy engagements with hostile forces or explosives that detonated. They contained body counts, and coordinates, and businesslike summaries of confusing, violent encounters. They were a pointillist picture of wars that wouldn’t end.

The upload meter bar slowly filled up. With a blizzard hitting the mid-Atlantic states, power outages, and the ticket I had for a flight scheduled to take off in twelve hours, this was my only option.

I had brought the documents back to America in my camera, as files on an SD memory card. Navy customs personnel didn’t blink an eye. To get the data out, I’d first burned the files onto DVD-RWs, labeled with titles like Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Manning’s Mix. No one cared enough to notice. I later transferred the files to the memory card, then shattered the discs with my boots on the gravel outside the trailers and tossed the shards in our burn barrel, along with the rest of the trash.

Sitting at a chair in the bookstore café, I drank a triple grande mocha and zoned out, listening to electronic music—Massive Attack, Prodigy—to wait out the uploads. There were seven chunks of data I needed to get out, and each one took between thirty minutes and an hour. The internet connection timed out so often that I had to restart several times. I began to worry that I wouldn’t be able to get the whole thing out before the Barnes & Noble closed at 10:00 p.m. If that happens, I thought, I’m done. This is over. It just isn’t meant to be. I was going to throw the memory card in a trash can and never try again.

But the Wi-Fi finally did its job. At nine thirty, the final file was uploaded. It wasn’t a moment of celebration, though; I was dead tired and needed to leave for the airport at four thirty in the morning to start the several-days-long journey back to Iraq. I left the Barnes & Noble. My bags were in my rental car, so I just slept in the back seat, in the freezing cold, in the parking lot, then dropped off the car and took the Metro out to Reagan National in the strange, empty predawn hours.

I wasn’t thinking about what might happen to me. I was just trying to survive every day. Compartmentalizing is something I was good at. I was grappling with my gender identity and working inside an army that didn’t officially allow people like me to serve openly.

When I landed in northern Virginia at the end of January 2010, I was both physically and psychologically exhausted. I was excited for this short leave, for a break from Iraq and from work—and to see Dylan (not his real name), my boyfriend at the time, who was a college student in Boston. When I went to see him, I’d been overseas for less than four months. But he was caught up in the social life of college, and was emotionally distant from me during the few days I spent there. He didn’t want to talk about anything that involved the two of us in the future. I worried our relationship was ending. I went back to my aunt’s house in Maryland.

I took the D.C. Metro out to Virginia, to Tysons Corner Center. I’d been there plenty of times before—that’s what you do in the suburbs, go to the mall. This time, though, I snapped a photograph of myself in the car on the way, wearing a blond wig. It was the photo that would later, to my chagrin, be broadcast all over the world. I wandered around the mall, shopping: I went to Burlington Coat Factory for a purple coat. At Sephora, I bought makeup. I wanted to buy a business casual outfit, so I tried on clothes at Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s, telling the salesperson that I was shopping for my girlfriend, who was about my size. I ate fast food for lunch, and then I went home and put on my new clothes and the long blond wig. I spent the rest of the day wandering around to coffee shops and bookstores, dressed as a woman. I took pleasure in the freedom, the escape, the ability to wear the clothes I wanted, to present myself in the manner I wanted.

For me, at least, being trans is less about being a woman trapped in a man’s body than about the innate incoherence between the person I felt myself to be and the one the world wanted me to be. In the weeks before my leave, I had imagined what it would be like to walk around with long hair instead of my buzz cut, wearing something femme instead of my standard-issue uniform. I’d watch YouTube videos of trans women documenting their transition alongside my usual web- browsing circuit: video games, alternate histories, and science videos.

But I didn’t just want to unburden myself of the restrictions of a judgmental world. There was something else even more urgent on my mind, and it’s why I sat down with my computer at the Barnes & Noble. There were critical revelations about the government, and the complex nature of war, in those files.

Uploading those files wasn’t my first choice. I first tried to reach more traditional publications. It had been a frustrating ordeal. I didn’t trust the telephone, nor did I want to email anything; I could be surveilled. Even pay phones weren’t really safe. I went into chain stores—Starbucks, mostly—and asked to borrow their landline because supposedly my cell was lost or my car had broken down. I called switchboards at The Washington Post and The New York Times, trying to get transferred to a reporter who would understand what I was offering them. I reached one at the Post, and we talked briefly. I left a message with my Skype number at the Times, but I never heard back. I said only that I worked in Defense. I tried to get them to understand. What I have is everything about two wars, I said over the phone. This is what asymmetric warfare looks like, uncut; this is the whole thing. I wanted this information published in a widely read outlet that could defend itself.

But I wasn’t getting anywhere. The reporter I reached didn’t understand the sensitivity of what I wanted to expose, that I could only give them the information digitally, and that I didn’t have enough time to establish a meaningful line of secure communications. They also didn’t understand end-to-end encryption—this was before Signal, an easily accessible, fully encrypted text messaging app, was commonly used by the news media—and more than that, they didn’t seem to understand the magnitude of what I was offering them. (It probably didn’t help that I was being so vague.)

After striking out with the Times and the Post, I returned to my aunt’s house. It started to seem possible that after all that risk, I wouldn’t be able to connect with a reporter before I had to go back to Iraq. But there was one last publication I wanted to try, Politico. I planned to drive to its headquarters in northern Virginia and try to just walk in, get a meeting, and hand over the data in person.

Then the blizzard started: Snowmageddon, as Twitter and the local news called it. Washington—not a town that was prepared for winter weather—was quickly covered in two feet of snow, and my aunt’s house lost power. It was as if I’d lost two more days of my leave. I was completely snowed in. The internet went out. I couldn’t wait for service to be restored. I was about to go back to Iraq. And if I didn’t do what I wanted to do before I left, I’d never be able to do it.

On the last morning of my leave, I woke up and dug myself out of the house using only my gloved hands because I couldn’t find a shovel in the house. I walked two hours into Rockville, where I rented a car with a ride-sharing service, Zipcar—but that car was stuck in a giant mound of snow. I spent two more hours digging it out, again using only my hands. I finally got the car loose enough to drive it out of the snowdrift and began searching for a business that was open despite the storm—a place with internet access. Driving all the way to Politico’s offices in northern Virginia would be virtually impossible. Even driving nearby was hard with the road conditions. But there was one last option.

In 2008, during intelligence training, our instructor—a Marine Corps veteran turned contractor—had told us about WikiLeaks, a website devoted to radical transparency, and then instructed us not to visit it. (The instructor later denied doing this.)

While I shared WikiLeaks’ claims of a commitment to transparency, I thought that for the purposes of what I wanted to do, it was too limited a platform. Most people back then had never heard of it. I worried that information from such a site wouldn’t be taken seriously. But I hadn’t gotten anywhere with journalists in traditional media and I felt it was the only option I had—the whole point of exposing this information was to get Americans to actually pay attention to what we were doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. I posted to one of the chat rooms I was in. I told them that I had information that needed to be shared with the world, about the true costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In reply, someone in the chat posted a link to WikiLeaks’ online submission form.

This website was the publication of last resort. But with half a day left on my leave, it was now or never. I felt totally alone, but I was optimistic that society would benefit—if only the information could get the attention it deserved.

I tried a couple of Starbucks stores in the area, but had no luck. Finally—at around 2:00 p.m.—I drove by a Barnes & Noble that I knew offered free Wi-Fi. I sat down, pulled out my laptop, and opened an anonymizing browser.

Everyone now knows—because of what happened to me—that the government will attempt to destroy you fully, charge you with everything under the sun, for bringing to light the truth about its own actions. (“Nuts and sluts” is the term for how the government often tries to portray leakers—as being crazy, drunk, or sexually off in some way.)

What I was trying to do had never been done before, and therefore the consequences were unknown. Daniel Ellsberg, who had disclosed the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, avoided prison because of illegal evidence-gathering by the Nixon White House (which had ordered a break-in of his psychiatrist’s office, in search of information that might discredit Ellsberg). Nobody had gone to prison for this sort of thing; I hadn’t heard of Ellsberg at the time but I was very aware of Thomas Drake, an NSA whistleblower who had been prosecuted under the Espionage Act. He’d faced charges that carried a thirty-five-year jail sentence, but shortly before trial he’d cut a plea that left him with only probation and community service.

I certainly weighed the potential consequences. If I was caught, I would be detained, but I figured at most I was going to be discharged or lose my security clearance. I cared about my work, and it was frightening to imagine losing my job—I had been homeless before enlisting— but I figured if I were court-martialed, it would only damage the government’s own credibility. I never really reckoned with the notion of a life spent in prison, or worse.

* * *

The four months I had spent in Iraq had changed the way I understood the world and these wars. Every night, I woke up in the desert at 10:00 p.m. I walked from my tiny trailer to the office, a Saddam Hussein–era basketball court the military had converted into an intelligence operations center. I used three different computers, two of which contained classified information, reading email updates and watching video feeds of what was happening in east Baghdad.

Monitoring reporting was like drinking from a fire hose: the military used at least a dozen different intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets, each giving the analysts a different view of the city, of the people and places we were watching. My job was to analyze, with emotional detachment, what impact military decisions and personnel movements were having on this giant, bloody “war on terror.” But the daily reality of my job was more like life in a trauma ward.

I’d spent hours learning every aspect of the lives of the Iraqis who were dying all around us: what time they got up in the morning, their relationship status, their appetites for food and alcohol and sex, whether they were engaged in political activities, every single person they interacted with electronically. I watched each bit of their lives. Sometimes, I knew more about them than they probably knew about themselves. And I’d realized that we—the occupying military force—didn’t actually give a fuck about them. I couldn’t talk about my work with anyone outside my unit. Nor about this conflict that looked nothing like the one I’d read about back home or watched on the TV broadcast news before I enlisted.

The idea that the information I had access to held real power began to flash into my brain more often. I’d try to ignore it, and it would come back. People had begun to pretend that the seven years of conflict had been worth it, all the lost American lives and the still-uncounted lost lives of Iraqis and Afghanis. The establishment had moved on. There was the recession to deal with. People at home were losing everything. The health care debate was on the news every night.

And yet we were still fucking there. Still dying. In every scenario I gamed out, we’d be there for many more years. Even if we tried to draw down troops, every flare-up—and there would be flare-ups—would require a return to a large troop presence, and more death. The whole system was set up so the general public would never really understand that.

I was constantly confronted with two different realities—the one I was looking at, and the one Americans at home believed. So much of the information they received was distorted or incomplete. The irreconcilable differences became an all-consuming frustration for me.

* * *

It is not possible to work in intelligence and not to imagine disclosing the many secrets you bear. I can’t pinpoint exactly the first time the idea crossed my mind. Maybe it was when I was exposed to actual classified information, right after basic training in 2008, when I was first learning to be an intel analyst. It’s as if there’s a line you’ve crossed, a partition you’ve opened, this knowledge that you can’t un-know, and it gives you power over the government—but it also gives the government power over you. You’re trained and tested and vigorously inculcated with the notion that you can’t tell anyone anything about what you do, ever. This begins to control how you think about everything, how you act in the world. But the power of prohibition is fragile, especially once the lines seem arbitrary.

Or maybe the first germ of the idea was planted when I was stationed at Fort Drum, in upstate New York, before I’d ever set foot in Iraq. I was transporting a cache of classified hard drives in a large box in the summer heat, and I began to worry about what would happen if I screwed up and left the box unattended. If someone picked up a stray classified hard drive and accessed it, what would happen? For me personally, of course, I knew there would be consequences. A serious investigation, negligence charges, maybe a demotion. Perhaps even discharge.

But what would be the ripple effects if the actual information got out? Would anything really happen if these obscure memoranda and rambling reports were made public? I knew the official version of why they had to be kept secret—we were trained to see classification as life-and-death—but I struggled to think of the real-world consequences, whether anything actually harmful would happen. More and more, I began to question the rationale for keeping so much information classified. Why were we keeping so many secrets? There seemed to be no consistent internal logic to classification decisions.

Just how arbitrary the lines were didn’t become fully clear to me until six weeks after I’d arrived in Iraq. Our press office had asked me to create a historical report, a huge assessment: an analysis, complete with detailed examples, of all the significant actions that had occurred in Iraq during the previous two months.

Seven hours later, I gave it to a major and a lieutenant colonel, in a classified courier box. The public affairs officers went through it fast and liked what they saw. In a single swoop, they removed the classified stamps. I asked them what they were doing.

They were sending it to the Iraqi press. I was shocked. The intelligence report that I had produced for internal purposes only was now a public affairs assessment. Casualty numbers, incidents, details, all of it.

We’d had a successful couple of months, compared with the status quo, and the public affairs office wanted that known. The report would make the military look good. There was no sensitive information, they’d decided, nothing that would cause global consequences—but then why was it labeled as classified in the first place?

I asked a press affairs officer why he took off the classification markings and how he could do it so quickly. His reply—an honest, succinct one—has lingered in my mind: the classification system exists wholly in the interest of the U.S. government, so if it’s in the interest of public affairs to declassify something, we will. In other words, he seemed to say, the classification system doesn’t exist to keep secrets safe, it exists to control the media. I realized that not only did I not think this stuff needed to be secret, neither did the higher-ups, at least not when it suited them. In that instant, I began to consider whether the public deserved to have the same information that I did. If we were briefing journalists on the full picture when it suited us, why not all of the time? This was, after all, historical information.

That month, I began the process of downloading reports of all the significant activities (SIGACTs) from Iraq and Afghanistan—an expanded version of what our public affairs office had been willing to release. They contained, in their aggregate force, something closer to the truth of what those two wars really looked like.



2.



CENTRAL OKLAHOMA 1987

Images of central Oklahoma sit in my memory like beautiful, dusty snapshots. There is an endless golden glow reflecting from the landscape, over the sunburned-brown grass and rusty-red clay soil and even on the modest house I grew up in, with its black-and-white exterior and its little hobby farm out back: hogs, horses, a cow, chickens, staple crops.

We lived on five acres in a small gully just off Oklahoma State Highway 74. The area was mostly scrub and mud, but we had a little pond and trees on the outskirts of a shrinking former boomtown called Crescent. My father drove his red-brown Nissan pickup truck the forty-five minutes to Oklahoma City and back every day so he could live in the country while making a city salary. Crescent had been settled in the first Oklahoma land rush, stolen from the Indigenous people who lived along the Cimarron River. Decades before I was born, the railroad company built a long berm near our house to lay tracks on. It was the only thing that broke up the plain, and when you stood on top of it, you could see corn and wheat fields, scattered oil derricks, and the tidy railroad tracks headed straight into town. There were about a thousand people in Crescent, and everyone knew everything about everyone—a blessing or a curse, depending on who you were.

My family had no real roots in the plains. They’d come there for my father’s job—electronic data processing for the Hertz Corporation—in the eighties, a few years before I was born. Brian Edward Manning, my father, grew up in a working-class Irish American family in the western suburbs of Chicago, and bounced around in his late adolescence. He left home at seventeen and tried college in the Florida Panhandle for a short time before dropping out. School wasn’t for him, but partying was. Back in Chicago, instead of waiting to be drafted into the army toward the end of the Vietnam War, he and my uncle Michael both decided to enlist in the navy—after a particularly boozy weekend, as he tells it. He always credited the navy with giving him structure, a path in life.

My father made the military sound glamorous. The U.S. Navy stationed him in the United Kingdom as an analyst at a Royal Air Force base a few minutes’ drive east of St. Davids, in Pembrokeshire, Wales. He rose to petty officer third class and worked with classified intercepts, monitoring a network of undersea microphones between Iceland and the UK, on the lookout for Soviet (and sometimes NATO) nuclear submarines. He told me that he’d worked with classified documents and worn a Royal Navy uniform to blend in and confuse spies—it sounded like a spy movie or Tom Clancy novel to me, growing up in the quiet, empty plains of Oklahoma.


Copyright © 2022 by Chelsea Manning