WikiLeaks (5 page)

That political sensibility developed further when, at the age of 17 and having left school, he was packed off back to Oklahoma to live with his father. He took up a job in Zoto, a photo-sharing software company.

“He struck me as wise beyond his years,” recalls Manning’s boss at Zoto, Kord Campbell. “This was the Bush era, and nobody in the computer software world liked that president. Brad would go on about his political opinions, which was unusual for a kid.”

Campbell says that his employee “was smart. He learned like nobody’s business.” But the maverick side to Manning was also growing more pronounced. “He was quirky, there was no doubt about it. He was quirky as hell.” On a couple of occasions he remembers Manning falling into what Campbell describes as a “thousand-mile stare”. “He would be silent and wouldn’t talk to me or recognise me.” Four months in, concerned that Manning’s personal issues were affecting his work, Campbell fired him.

After discovering that Bradley was homosexual, Brian Manning threw his son out of the house. Homeless, jobless, Bradley rambled around for a few months, moving from place to place, odd job to odd job. As Jeff Paterson, a member of the steering committee of the Bradley Manning support network, puts it: “He needed a way of proving himself, to go out on his own, to establish himself.”

After a few months of aimlessness the solution came to him: Bradley Manning would follow in his father’s footsteps and volunteer for the US military. He enlisted in October 2007, and was put through specialist training for military intelligence work at Fort Huachuca in Arizona. Upon graduation in August 2008 he was posted to Fort Drum in upstate New York, awaiting dispatch to Iraq, armed with the security clearance that would give him access to those two top-secret databases.

For someone seeking a sense of purpose out of a career in the military, his experience of life in uniform was at times disillusioning. He complained of having been “regularly ignored … except when I had something essential … then it was back to ‘bring me coffee, then sweep the floor’ … I felt like an abused workhorse.” On another occasion, on Facebook, he wrote: “Bradley Manning is not a piece of equipment.”

On top of feeling like a menial, there was Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the unhappy compromise thrashed out by the Clinton administration in 1993 that allowed gay personnel to serve in the military but only if they remained in the closet. Though Manning must have been aware of the restrictions when he enlisted, he quickly became infuriated and distressed by the policy. In an echo of his occasional outbursts at Tasker Milward school, he at times let his frustration show, coming close to flouting the Don’t Tell half of the formula.

The motto he attached to his Facebook profile said it all: “Take me for who I am, or face the consequences.” That devil-may-care approach was on display within weeks of his posting to Fort Drum, when he marched at a rally to protest against the Proposition 8 vote in California which prohibited same-sex marriage.

There has been much discussion since Manning’s arrest about the role that his sexuality played in the events that led up to the massive WikiLeaks disclosures. There have been suggestions that Manning was contemplating a sex change, based on a couple of remarks he made in the course of an online chat with the hacker Adrian Lamo shortly before his arrest. In one comment, Manning tells Lamo that he “wouldn’t mind going to prison for the rest of my life, or being executed … if it wasn’t for the possibility of having pictures of me … plastered all over the world press … as a boy.” In another he complains that his CPU, or central processing unit, “is not made for this motherboard”, an analysis using the language of computers that is seen
by some as the complaint of a man anguished by a brain that he felt did not fit his male frame.

But such speculation is unsubstantiated, and has been countered by those who see it as an implicit attack on the trust-worthiness of gay people in the military. Timothy Webster is one who ridicules any correlation between Manning’s sexuality and his leaking of state secrets. A former special agent with US army counter-intelligence, Webster played an important part in the Manning story. He acted as the go-between connecting Lamo, the hacker whom Manning had confided in, and the military, after Lamo decided to turn informant and shop Manning to the authorities.

Webster, who is himself gay, says, “A small but loud-mouthed sideshow of talking heads have tried to use the Manning case as leverage to impugn homosexuals serving in the military. But the notion that the Manning case has anything to do with his sexuality is categorically absurd. Many thousands of homosexual and bisexual men and women are serving honourably and to suggest that their sexuality renders them any less effective in the defence of our nation is bigoted nonsense.”

But Manning’s sexuality is relevant in at least one important regard. His response to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and his willingness to campaign against it semi-openly, was a presage of what was to come. Many gay people in the military took the view that, while they would quietly work to reform the policy from within, they would never disrespect an order. But Manning was too firm in his convictions – some say too hot-headed – to accommodate himself to a regulation that he believed to be unjust. As Jeff Paterson puts it: “He was willing to face retribution and ridicule within the army to fight something he knew was wrong.”

The other reason Manning’s sexuality may prove pertinent was more incidental – it was through his first serious boyfriend that he became introduced to the world of Boston hackers. The boyfriend
in question was Tyler Watkins, a self-styled classical musician, singer and drag queen. They met in the autumn of 2008 while Manning was still stationed at Fort Drum. They must have made an unlikely couple, the flamboyant and extrovert Watkins and the quietly focused Manning. But judging by his status updates on Facebook, the soldier fell hard for the queen. Bradley Manning “is cuddling in bed tonight”; “is a happy bunny”; “is in the barracks, alone. I miss you Tyler!”

Watkins is a student of neuroscience and psychology at Brandeis University outside Boston. Manning would regularly make the 300-mile journey from Fort Drum to see him, and in so doing became acquainted with Watkins’ wide network of friends from Brandeis, Boston University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the birthplace of computer geekery that has been described as the “Mesopotamia of hacker culture”. For Manning, it was an entrée into a whole new way of thinking that was worlds apart from the small-town conservatism of Crescent or the buttoned-down rigidity of Fort Drum.

Typical of the new attitudes he was exploring was the “hackerspace” attached to Boston University that he visited in January 2010 while he was on leave back in the US and visiting Watkins. Known as Builds, it is a sort of 21st-century techy version of a 1960s artists’ collective. Its members come together to work on a host of projects, from creating a red robot mouse, to designing a computer system that can record the miles run by athletes at a race track, to studying how to crack open door locks (strictly on their own property). It is part computer workshop, part electronics laboratory, part DIY clinic. What unites these multifarious activities is the hacker culture to which everyone subscribes.

David House, a Boston University graduate who set up the hackerspace there, says that hacking is not the shady skull-and-crossbones activity of breaking into computers that it is often assumed to be. Rather, it is a way of looking at the world.

“It’s about understanding the environment in which we operate, taking it apart, and then expanding upon it and recreating it. Central to it is the idea that information should be free, combined with a deep distrust of authority.”

House points to a book,
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
, by Steven Levy, which chronicles the rise of the “hacker ethic” at MIT. “Hackers believe that essential lessons can be learned about … the world from taking things apart, seeing how they work, and using this knowledge to create new and even more interesting things,” Levy writes. “They resent any person, physical barrier, or law that tries to keep them from doing this. All information should be free. If you don’t have access to the information you need to improve things, how can you fix them?”

House remembers meeting Manning when he came to the opening of his hackerspace in January 2010. They had a short conversation in which Manning said nothing out of the ordinary. “He did not strike me as someone who would be accused of working against the US government,” House says.

That was the only occasion House met Manning before the soldier’s arrest. Since then, however, House has struck up an important friendship with him, becoming one of only two people (the other is Manning’s lawyer, David Coombs) who are allowed to visit him at Quantico. In the course of several visits, House has developed a more intimate sense of what makes Manning tick.

“He’s very professorial in his thinking. Talking to him is like having a drink with one of your old college professors. He’s very interested in what underpins power, the underlying systems, in an abstract way. That’s why he fit in so well with Boston hacker culture, which has the same academic line.”

The other quality that has struck House is what he calls Manning’s “high moral integrity. He always draws a firm ethical line. There are certain things that he sees as basic human rights that he believes are inviolable.”

One of those inviolable basics that Manning evidently believed in was the value to democratic society of free information. As he said in his web chats with Lamo, “information should be free. It belongs in the public domain. If it’s out in the open … it should be a public good … I want people to see the truth … regardless of who they are … because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.” A statement that could have been taken straight out of the Boston hackers’ manual.

It was a belief that came powerfully into play when Manning was deliberating about what to do with the vast hoard of state secrets he had been allowed to explore in Iraq. For most soldiers the answer to that conundrum would have been utterly simple: abide by the confidentiality with which you have been entrusted, and get on with your job. But for Manning it was more complicated than that. On the same trip back to Boston in which he visited House’s hackerspace he talked to Tyler Watkins about his dilemma. As Watkins told
Wired.com
: “He wanted to do the right thing. That was something I think he was struggling with.”

In the seven months he spent at the Contingency Operating Station Hammer in Iraq, there was one seminal moment that appears to have ignited Manning’s anger. A dispute had arisen concerning 15 Iraqi detainees held by the national Iraqi police force on the grounds that they had been printing “anti-Iraqi literature”. The police were refusing to work with the US forces over the matter, and Manning’s job was to investigate and find out who the “bad guys” were. He got hold of the leaflet that the detained men were distributing and had it translated into English. He was astonished to find that it was in fact a scholarly critique against the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, that tracked the corruption rife within his cabinet.

“I immediately took that information and
ran
to the officer to explain what was going on,” Manning later explained. “He didn’t
want to hear any of it … He told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the [Iraqi] police in finding MORE detainees.”

Manning noted that, thereafter, “everything started slipping … I saw things differently … I had always questioned the [way] things worked, and investigated to find the truth … but that was a point where I was a part of something, actively involved in something that I was completely against.”

Slowly, surely, Manning began edging his way towards a position that many have denounced as traitorous and abhorrent, and others have praised as courageous and heroic. He was starting to think about mining the secret databases to which he had access, and dumping them spectacularly into the public domain. “It’s important that it gets out … I feel for some bizarre reason,” he said. “It might actually change something.”

But first he needed a conduit, a secure pipe down which he could transmit the information that he had copied on to CDs labelled Lady Gaga. As he contemplated what route to use, his eye was caught by an exercise run by WikiLeaks on Thanksgiving 2009, about a month into his tour of duty in Iraq. Over a 24-hour period, WikiLeaks published a stream of more than 500,000 pager messages that had been intercepted on the day of the September 11 2001 attacks on New York and Washington in the order in which they had been sent. It provided an extraordinary picture of an extraordinary day. Manning was even more impressed, because with his specialist knowledge he knew that WikiLeaks must have somehow obtained the messages anonymously from a National Security Agency database. And that made him feel comfortable that he, too, could come forward to WikiLeaks without fear of being identified.

His search for a vessel through which to unload his mountain of top-secret material had succeeded. Within days of the WikiLeaks 9/11 spectacular, Manning took the first big step. He made contact with a man whom he described as “a crazy white-haired Aussie who can’t seem to stay in one country very long”. The game was on with Julian Assange.

Melbourne, Australia
December 2006

“
Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth
”
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