The long, lonely road of Chelsea Manning – Irish Examiner

Her disclosure of classified documents in 2010 ushered in the age of leaks. Now, freed from prison, she talks about why she did it - and the isolation that followed.

On a gray morning this spring, Chelsea Manning climbed into the back seat of a black SUV and directed her security guard to drive her to the nearest Starbucks.

A storm was settling over Manhattan, and Manning was prepared for the weather, in chunky black Doc Martens with an umbrella and a form-fitting black dress.

Her legs were bare, her eyes gray blue. She wore little makeup: a spot of eyeliner, a smudge of pink lip gloss.

At Starbucks, she ordered a white chocolate mocha and retreated to a nearby stool. Manning has always been small (she is 5 feet 4 inches tall), but in her last few months at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, she jogged religiously, outside in the prison yard and around the track of the prison gym, and her body had taken on a lithe sharpness, apparent in the definition of her arms and cheekbones.

She looked healthy and fit, if a little uneasy, as people who have served long spells in prison often do.

She had been released only eight days earlier, after serving seven years of a 35-year sentence. Her crime, even in hindsight, was an astonishing one: handing WikiLeaks approximately 250,000 American diplomatic cables and roughly 480,000 Army reports from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Collectively the largest leak of classified records in American history, the disclosures cleared a path for Edward Snowden and elevated the profile of Julian Assange, then little-known outside hacker circles. Without Chelsea Manning, P.J.

Crowley, an assistant secretary of state from 2009 to 2011, told me recently, Julian Assange is just another fringe actor who resents what he sees as American hegemonic hubris.

To an extraordinary extent, Mannings actions, in the words of Denver Nicks, the author of a book on her case, represented the beginning of the information age exploding upon itself, a new era in which leaks were a weapon, data security was of paramount importance and privacy felt illusory.

In January 2017, after being locked up at five different facilities, in conditions a United Nations expert called cruel and inhumane, Manning had received a surprise commutation by President Barack Obama.

Four months later, she was free, trying to adjust to life in a world she helped shape. Finishing her coffee, she fished her iPhone out of her purse and asked her security guard for a lift back to the apartment where she was staying while in Manhattan.

The one-bedroom was furnished sparsely, with a wide glass table and a tan couch, opposite which Manning had set up an Xbox One video game console.

The art was of the anodyne motel variety an old masters-esque tableau, a canvas of a zebra standing in a forest. We were many floors up, suspended in the storm clouds, and through the window I could see the spires of the skyscrapers on the other side of the Hudson River.

Manning, who is 29, tapped an unplugged microwave next to the door and asked me to place my laptop inside: The Faraday cage in the microwave would block radio waves, she explained.

But the unplugged microwave was already full of devices, including two Xbox controllers. You can put it in the kitchen microwave, Manning said; then, intuiting the strangeness of the request, she added with a shrug, You cant be too careful.

She recalled that she last gave an in-person, on-the-record interview to a journalist in 2008, on the occasion of a marriage equality march in New York.

For almost a decade after that, barred by prison officials from communicating directly with the public, she remained silent as her story was told in books, an opera, an off-Broadway play and countless magazine articles, almost all of them written before Manning had come out as transgender.

It wasnt the whole story, she told me, my whole story.

Absent her own voice, a pair of dueling narratives had emerged.

One had Manning, in the words of President Donald Trump, as an ungrateful traitor. The other positioned her as transgender icon and champion of transparency a secular martyr, as Chase Madar, a former attorney and the author of a book on her case, recently put it to me.

But in Mannings presence, both narratives feel like impossible simplifications, not least because Manning herself is clearly still grappling with the meaning of what she did seven years ago. When I asked her to draw lessons from her journey, she grew uneasy. I dont have. ... " she started. Like, Ive been so busy trying to survive for the past seven years that I havent focused on that at all.

But surely, I pressed, she must have some sense of the impact she had on the world. From my perspective, she responded, the worlds shaped me more than anything else. Its a feedback loop.

As far back as Manning can remember, to her earliest days in Crescent, on the far edge of the Oklahoma City metro area, she suffered from a feeling of intense dislocation, something constant and psychic that she struggled to define to herself, much less to her older sister, Casey, or her parents, Brian and Susan.

During one of our interviews, I mentioned that I heard a clinical psychologist compare gender dysphoria to a giant, cosmic toothache. Manning flushed. That was it exactly, she agreed: Morning, evening, breakfast, lunch, dinner, wherever you are. Its everywhere you go.

At the age of 5, Manning recalled, she approached her father, an information technology manager for Hertz, and confessed that she wanted to be a girl, to do girl things. Brian responded with a lengthy and awkward speech on the essential differences in plumbing.

But Manning told me, I didnt understand how that had anything to do with what you wore or how you behaved.

Soon she was sneaking into her sisters bedroom and donning Caseys acid-washed jeans and denim jackets. Seated at the mirror, she would apply lipstick and blush, frantically scrubbing off the makeup at the slightest stirring from downstairs.

I wanted to be like [Casey] and live like her, Manning said.

When she was still in elementary school, she came out as gay to a straight male friend. The friend was understanding; the other kids at school, less so. Manning tried, unsuccessfully, to retract her confession, but the teasing continued. I would come home crying some days, and if my dad was there, hed say: Just quit crying and man up.

Like, go back there and punch that kid in the face,' she said. It was the late 1990s, when the trans movement was very much on the fringes of American society.

The closest I came to knowing anything was from the portrayal of drag queen-style cross-dressing on sensational TV shows like Jerry Springers, Manning told me.

She spent more time inside, on the computers that her father was always bringing home, playing video games and dabbling in basic code.

Her parents had issues of their own. When Manning was about 12, Susan swallowed an entire bottle of Valium. Casey called 911, only to be told that the nearest ambulance was a half-hour away.

Casey loaded her mother into the car; Brian, who Manning says was too drunk to drive, sat shotgun, leaving a terrified Chelsea in the back to make sure her mother kept breathing. She told me the incident was formational.

I grew up very quickly after that, she said. (Brian could not be reached for comment.)

In Susans native Wales, where Manning moved with her in 2001 after her parents split, Chelsea says she took over full control of the household, paying bills and handling much of the shopping.

There was freedom there, too: She could buy her own makeup at the convenience store, wear it for a few hours in public and jam it into a waste bin on her way home.

She passed many evenings on her computer, in LGBT chatrooms. Her worldview shifted. While in Crescent, Manning had imbibed her fathers conservative politics I questioned nothing, she told me.

But at Tasker Milward, a school in the town of Haverfordwest, she studied the civil rights movement, the Red Scare, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. In a term paper for a history class, she expressed skepticism about the rationale for the American invasion of Iraq.

When Manning returned to the United States in 2005 to live with Brian and his new wife in Oklahoma City, she was a changed person, if not a wholly transformed one: She wore eyeliner and grew out her hair and dyed it black.

I thought, Maybe I want to just eradicate this gender thing and be gender neutral, like androgynous, she told me.

"She found a job at an internet startup and, through a matchmaking site, met her first boyfriend, who lived 70 miles away in the town of Duncan. But her stepmother, Manning said, forbade her from setting foot in the kitchen: She felt that I was unclean.

Manning confided to no one what she was increasingly coming to understand: that she wasnt gay, wasnt a cross-dresser. She was a woman.

In the summer of 2006, she and her boyfriend parted ways, and she lit out from Oklahoma for good, all her belongings piled high in the cab of her red Nissan pickup truck.

A spell of itinerancy followed out to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to work at a pizza parlor; up to Chicago to work at Guitar Center; east to the suburbs of Washington to live with her aunt, with whom she enjoyed a connection she never shared with her parents.

She did four sessions with a psychologist, but got no closer to unburdening herself than she had with friends or family members. I was scared, Manning said. I didnt know that life could be better.

Brian Manning had often fondly recounted for Chelsea his days in the military: It had given him structure and grounding, he said.

Manning hadnt been ready to listen then. Now she was. Enlisting might be the thing to man her up, to rid her of the ache. Besides, while her ideas about American foreign policy had become more nuanced, she still considered herself a patriot in the Army, she could use her analytical skills to help her country.

I remember sitting in the summer of 2007 and just every single day turning on the TV and seeing the news from Iraq, she told me. The surge, the surge, the surge. Terrorist attacks. Insurgents. ... I just felt like maybe I could make a difference.

That fall, Manning reported for basic training at Fort Leonard Wood in the Missouri Ozarks; within a few days, she had suffered injuries to her arm. The drill sergeants were acting like I was malingering or something, she said.

But I was like: No, Im not trying to get out of anything. I just really cant feel my right hand.' A soldier who spent time with Manning in Missouri later recalled for The Guardian that Manning was routinely called a faggot. The guy took it from every side. He couldnt please anyone. And he tried. He really did, the soldier said.

The Army, in need of more bodies to fight the insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq, allowed Manning another shot at boot camp. In 2008, she graduated to intelligence school at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, which to her felt like a kind of community college.

There, she was trained to sort what the military terms SigActs, or significant actions the written reports, photos and videos of the confrontations, explosions and firefights that form the mosaic of modern war. Manning told me she fit in well with the intelligence types at Fort Huachuca, who shared her intrinsic geekiness.

There were more like-minded people there, she said, adding, It wasnt Rah, rah, you need to do this. They encouraged us to speak up. They encouraged us to have opinions, to make our own decisions.

At her first official duty station, Fort Drum in upstate New York, Manning was charged in part with helping to build a digital tool that would automatically track and sort SigActs from Afghanistan, where Mannings unit initially expected to be deployed.

For hours a day, she watched spectral night-vision video and read reports from distant battlefields. Already, she was being exposed to the bloodshed that would serve as inspiration for her leaks.

But she was handling the material at a spatial and emotional reserve: She remained, she told me, eager to get to the front lines. I was hungry."

Through a gay dating site, she met a bookish Brandeis student named Tyler Watkins. She started driving to visit Watkins in the Boston area, where she became a regular at Pika, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology co-op, and visited Boston Universitys Builds, a hub of the local hacking community.

At the Pika gatherings, she found friends that approached coding the same way she did: as outlet, pastime and calling. She often stayed up late into the night talking. Yan Zhu, then an undergraduate student at MIT, remembers Manning as obviously intelligent, if nervous.

It was clear to Zhu that Manning was haunted by something. But she never had a chance to find out what: That fall, Mannings unit was deployed to Iraq.

In October 2009, Manning hopped a Black Hawk from Baghdad to Forward Operating Base Hammer, 30 miles east of the city.

In the cabin, strapped into the choppers jump seats, she began putting names to places that had long been digital abstractions.

I had seen imagery for nine or 10 months prior, Manning recalled, I knew the landscape so well from the air that I recognized these neighborhoods, and it woke me up to see people walking around and to see people driving and to see the buildings and the trees below.

Ringed by desert, the low-slung buildings of FOB Hammer baked in the summer and coursed with mud in the fall.

Every night, Manning rose from her bunk at 9 p.m., dressed in standard-issue visual camouflage and grabbed her rifle. After quickly eating dinner for breakfast, she walked to a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, to report for duty.

Mannings SCIF was a glorified plywood box with lousy airflow, situated on a basketball court. She sat at the free-throw line, in a reclining office chair, where she spent her overnight shift facing three laptop computers.

Mannings isolation took on a new form: Hidden away in the darkened SCIF, she would work for eight hours at a stretch, sifting through reports filed securely by American troops in the field, making sense of the raw data for senior-level intelligence officers. She remained sealed off from actual conflict, though she could hear the shudder of car bombs and sometimes ran into soldiers, dazed and dusty, on their way back from a firefight.

At that early juncture, Manning told me, she was too busy to give much thought to the larger import of what she was seeing. Doing my job, you couldnt even really read all the files, she said. You have to skim, get a sense of whats relevant and whats not.

Still, to an extraordinary extent, she had a more comprehensive view of Americas role in Iraq than the infantry in the field did often, literally, a sky-level view and as October ground into November, she found herself increasingly dismayed by a lack of public awareness about what seemed to be a futile, ceaselessly bloody war.

At a certain point, she told me, I stopped seeing records and started seeing people: bloody American soldiers, bullet-ridden Iraqi civilians.

On rare reprieves from the SCIF, Manning accompanied senior officers to meetings with the Iraqi military and the Iraqi federal police, sit-downs that further entrenched her disillusionment.

There would be these tea sessions, where youve got the Iraqi federal police in their blue uniforms, youve got Iraqi Army in, like, the old chocolate-chip camouflage and the Americans in our smeared green digital camouflage, Manning said everyone speaking in different languages, frequently at cross-purposes. Id come in thinking things would be black and white. They werent.

Manning told me she heard the name WikiLeaks for the first time in 2008, at a computer security training course at Fort Huachuca.

By the end of 2009, she had started logging on to internet relay chat conversations devoted to the site. (IRC, a semisecure protocol, was then the preferred method of communication for hackers.)

Initially, she was an observer: She was intrigued by the work that Assange and his team were doing, if not quite ready to endorse their argument for total transparency. She told me that she believed then, and believes now, that there are plenty of things that should be kept secret.

Lets protect sensitive sources. Lets protect troop movements. Lets protect nuclear information. Lets not hide missteps. Lets not hide misguided policies. Lets not hide history. Lets not hide who we are and what we are doing.

She was edging closer to acting but said nothing about the IRC channel to her friends at FOB Hammer, nor about her own personal tumult.

She was now fighting to keep what amounted to two life-altering secrets. She couldnt discuss her identity openly: The dont ask, dont tell policy was still in effect, and it would be years before transgender people were allowed to openly enlist. I binge watched TV shows on the internet, she said.

I was smoking heavily. I was drinking an enormous amount of caffeine. I was going to the dining facility and eating as much as I could. Just any little tiny escape or way to feel like Im not there anymore. Her boyfriend was little help: Manning could feel him slipping away. I was in denial about it, but I had a sense ... that I was being forgotten, she told me.

Manning had a two-week leave coming up. She planned to spend time in Boston, trying to patch things up with Watkins, and in the suburbs of Washington with her aunt.

She dreamed about using the occasion to come out to her family and friends as trans. I kept having this moment in my head, she told me, where I just yell it at the top of my lungs. But she knew, in her heart, that shed never be able to go through with it.

Before leaving FOB Hammer, Manning downloaded, from the governments Combined Information Data Network Exchange, almost every SigActs report from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and burned a compressed version of the data onto CD-RW discs, one of which was labeled Lady Gaga.

She did it in full view of her fellow soldiers. But what she did next violated the most important precepts she was taught at Fort Huachuca, along with the oath of enlistment she swore in 2007: She uploaded the contents of the discs onto the personal laptop she planned to take home to the United States. She had not decided what she would do with the data.

Days later, Manning put on a blond wig and ran in a low crouch from the side door of her aunts house, out of view of the neighbors, and drove to the train station.

She wore a dark coat and, under it, business-casual womanswear she bought at a local department store; she claimed it was for her friend who needed it for a job interview.

In Washington, she went to a Starbucks, ate lunch at a busy restaurant and wandered through the aisles of a bookstore; later, she climbed back on the Metro and rode it aimlessly around.

She took great pleasure in being seen as she knew she was and comfort in how easily she passed rarely did anyone give her a second glance.

Before I deployed, I didnt have the guts, Manning, who was then privately referring to herself as Brianna, told me. But her time in Iraq was changing her. Being exposed to so much death on a daily basis makes you grapple with your own mortality, she went on. She no longer wanted to hide.

The expedition was the high point of a disappointing two-week leave. The Army had bumped up her departure from FOB Hammer, and her family hadnt had time to readjust their schedules: Mannings aunt was on a trip abroad, and her sister had just had her first child it would be tricky to carve out time for Chelsea.

Manning took a train up to see Watkins at his home in Waltham, in Massachusetts, but she couldnt shake the feeling that he didnt really want her there, so she cut her stay short by three days.

At that point, it would have been possible for Manning to return to Iraq with the files unshared her actions had been illegal, if reversible. But Manning told me that being in the United States had prompted an epiphany.

At home, she says, she realized how invisible the wars had become to most civilians, whose awareness of Iraq extended as far as the occasional newspaper article or chyron on cable news. There were two worlds, she said.

The world in America, and the world I was seeing [in Iraq], She went on, I wanted people to see what I was seeing.

A blizzard hit Washington. Mannings aunt still wasnt back from vacation. Alone, Manning transferred parts of the files to a small memory card and prepared an anonymous text file she wanted to accompany the information.

This is possibly one of the more significant documents of our time removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of 21st-century asymmetric warfare, she wrote. Have a good day.

Manning told me her decision to provide the information to WikiLeaks was a practical one.

She originally planned to deliver the data to The New York Times or The Washington Post, and for the last week of her leave, she dodged from public phone to public phone, calling the main office lines for both papers, leaving a message for the public editor at The Times and engaging in a frustrating conversation with a Post writer, who said she would have to know more about the files before her editor would sign off on an article.

A hastily arranged meeting with Politico, where she hoped to introduce herself to the sites security bloggers, was scrapped because of bad weather.

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The long, lonely road of Chelsea Manning - Irish Examiner