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 Neighbours reported that Brian’s severity contributed to Bradley growing introverted and withdrawn.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
