WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

Bradley Manning

Contingency Operating Station Hammer,

40 miles east of Baghdad, Iraq

November 2009

“I should have left my phone at home”

LADY GAGA

After the punishing heat of summer, Iraq in November is pleasantly warm. But for the men and women stationed at Camp Hammer, in the middle of the Mada’in Qada desert, the air was forever thick with dust and dirt kicked up by convoys of lorries that supplied the capital – a constant reminder that they were very far from home. One of those was Specialist Bradley Manning, who’d been sent to Iraq with the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division a few weeks earlier. About to turn 22, he was the antithesis of the battle-hardened US soldier beloved of Hollywood. Blue-eyed, blond-haired, with a round face and boyish smile, he stood just five feet and two inches tall and weighed 105 pounds.

But he hadn’t been sent to Iraq because of his bulk. He was there for his gift at manipulating computers. In the role of intelligence analyst Manning found himself spending long days in the base’s computer room poring over top-secret information. For such a young and relatively inexperienced soldier, it was extremely sensitive work. Yet from his first day at Hammer, he was puzzled by the lax security. The door was bolted with a five-digit cipher lock, but all you had to do was knock on it and you’d be let in. His fellow intelligence workers seemed to have grown bored and disenchanted from the relentless grind of 14-hour days, seven days a week. They just sat at their workstations, watching music videos or footage of car chases. “People stopped caring after three weeks,” Manning observed.

After a few months Manning had grown scathing about the culture of the base. “Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis … a perfect storm,” he would later write. He approached the National Security Agency officer in charge of protecting information systems and asked him whether he could find any suspicious uploads from local networks. The officer shrugged and said, “It’s not a priority.”

It was a culture, as Manning later described it, that “fed opportunities”. For Manning, those opportunities presented themselves in the form of two dedicated military laptops which he was given, each with privileged access to US state secrets. The first laptop was connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet), used by the department of defence and the state department to securely share information. The second gave him entry to the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS), which acts as a global funnel for top-secret dispatches.

That such a low-level serviceman could have had apparently unrestricted access to this vast source of confidential material should surely have raised eyebrows. That he could do so with virtually no supervision or safeguards inside the base was all the more astounding. He would spend hours drilling down into top-secret documents and videos, wearing earphones and lip-synching to Lady Gaga. The more he read, the more alarmed and disturbed he became, shocked by what he saw as the official duplicity and corruption of his own country. There were videos that showed the aerial killing from a helicopter gunship of unarmed civilians in Iraq, there were chronicles of civilian deaths and “friendly fire” disasters in Afghanistan. And there was a mammoth trove of diplomatic cables disclosing secrets from all around the world, from the Vatican to Pakistan. He started to become overwhelmed by the scale of the scandal and intrigue he was discovering. “There’s so much,” he would later write. “It affects everybody on earth. Everywhere there’s a US post there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed. It’s beautiful, and horrifying.”

From there it was but a short step to thinking that he could do something about it. “If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day, seven days a week for eight-plus months, what would you do?” he asked. What he did, it is alleged, was to take the rewritable CD which carried his Lady Gaga music and erase it, then copy onto the disc other, far more dangerous, digital material. He was about to embark on a journey that would lead to the largest leak of military and diplomatic secrets in US history.

Crescent, Oklahoma, is flat and off the beaten track, just like the Mada’in Qada desert. But there the likeness ends. A small town in the middle of a rural bread basket, 35 miles to the north of Oklahoma City, its skyline is dominated by a large white grain stack. “This is a tight-knit, very conservative community,” says Rick McCombs, the recently retired principal of Crescent high school.

Born on 17 December 1987, Bradley Manning spent the first 13 years of his life in Crescent, benefiting from its small-town intimacy, suffering from the narrow-mindedness that went with it. He lived outside town in a two-storey house with his American father, Brian, his Welsh mother, Susan, and his elder sister, Casey. His parents had met when Brian was serving in the US navy and stationed at the Cawdor Barracks in south-west Wales.

From a young age, Bradley displayed the dual qualities that would set him apart from others and set him on a path that would lead, tragically for him, to a locked cell in Quantico marine base, Virginia. He possessed a lively inquiring mind and a tendency to question the prevailing attitude. McCombs recalls that Bradley not only played a mean saxophone in the school band but also appeared in the school quiz team alongside much older children. “He was very, very smart. He was also very opinionated – but only up to a point. He never got in trouble. Not once was Bradley disciplined for any reason.”

Manning had an early passion for computer games, playing Super Mario Bros with a neighbour. He was also fiercely independent of spirit. He was one of very few inhabitants of Crescent who openly professed doubts about religion – not an easy position for a child to take in a devoutly Christian town with no fewer than 15 churches. He used to refuse to do homework that related to the Bible and remained silent during the reference to God in the Pledge of Allegiance. Crescent, Manning once quipped, had “more pews than people”.

From his father, who spent five years in the navy working on computer systems, Bradley inherited two important qualities: a fascination for the latest technology, and a fervent patriotism and belief in service that would stay with him despite the harrowing treatment he was to experience later at the hands of the military police. In one of the few statements he has been allowed to make since his arrest in May 2010, Manning put out a message on Christmas Eve 2010 in which he asked his supporters to take the time “to remember those who are separated from their loved ones at this time due to deployment and important missions”. He even spared a thought for his jailers at Quantico Confinement Facility “who will be spending their Christmas without their family”.

His father was by all accounts a strict parent. Neighbours reported that Brian’s severity contributed to Bradley growing introverted and withdrawn. Such introversion deepened with puberty and Bradley’s dawning realisation that he was gay. Aged 13, he confided his sexuality to a couple of his closest friends at Crescent school.

The entry to teenage years was a tumultuous time. In 2001, just as Manning was beginning to come to grips with his homosexuality, his father returned home one day and announced he was leaving his mother and the family home. Within months, Manning’s life in Crescent had been uprooted, his friendships torn asunder, and his life transplanted 4,000 miles to Haverfordwest in south-west Wales, where his mother decided to return following the bitter break-up.

In Wales Manning had to acclimatise to his new secondary school, Tasker Milward, which, with about 1,200 pupils, was the size of his old home town. And he was its only American student.

“He was prone to being bullied for being a little bit different. People used to impersonate him, his accent and mannerisms,” remembers Tom Dyer, a friend of Manning’s at Tasker Milward. “He wasn’t the biggest kid, or the most sporty, and they would make fun of him. At times he would rise to the provocation and lash out.”

Perhaps as a means of reviving his self-esteem, he grew increasingly passionate about computers and geekery. He spent every lunchtime at the school computer club, where he built his own website.

“He was always doing something, always going somewhere, always with an action plan,” says Dyer. “He would get exasperated if things went wrong, his mind always racing. That made him come across as a little bit quirky and hyperactive.”

Dyer also notes that by the age of 15 Manning had begun to formulate a clear political outlook that, irrespective of his enduring patriotism, was increasingly critical of US foreign policy. When the invasion of Iraq happened in March 2003 they would have long conversations about it. “He would speak out and say it was all about oil and that George Bush had no right going in there.”

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.