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Chelsea Manning: The Analyst Who Leaked a War

Abstract

In 2010, a 22-year-old US Army intelligence analyst stationed outside Baghdad copied roughly three-quarters of a million classified documents onto rewritable CDs labeled as Lady Gaga albums and passed them to WikiLeaks. The disclosures, the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs, a quarter-million diplomatic cables, and the “Collateral Murder” video of a US helicopter killing civilians, constituted the largest leak of classified material in American history to that point and made Chelsea Manning the most consequential whistleblower of the digital age until Edward Snowden. She was turned in by a fellow hacker, Adrian Lamo, convicted at court-martial, and sentenced to 35 years, the harshest sentence ever handed down for a leak to the press. She came out as a transgender woman the day after sentencing, fought for medical treatment from inside a military prison, had her sentence commuted by President Obama in 2017, and was jailed again in 2019 for refusing to testify against Assange. Her case forced the questions that still define the era: what a soldier owes when she sees a crime, and what a state may do to the person who tells.

The Analyst in Iraq

Chelsea Manning was born on December 17, 1987, in Oklahoma City. She enlisted in the US Army in 2007 and, after training as an intelligence analyst, deployed in October 2009 to Forward Operating Base Hammer, east of Baghdad. The posting gave her a desk and a clearance: routine access to SIPRNet and JWICS, the Defense Department’s secret and top-secret networks. From that ordinary vantage (one of millions of personnel with comparable access after the post-9/11 push to “share” intelligence widely) she could read the daily ground-level record of two wars.

What she read disturbed her: incident reports she felt documented indifference to civilian deaths, detainee abuse, and a gap between the public account of the wars and the classified one. Isolated, struggling with her gender identity in the institutionally hostile environment of the military, and increasingly convinced the public had a right to the material, she decided to act.

The Largest Leak in US History

Across the first months of 2010, Manning downloaded and transmitted to WikiLeaks an unprecedented volume of classified material:

  • roughly 400,000 documents from the Iraq War (the “Iraq War Logs,” 391,832 field reports as published);
  • about 91,000 documents from the Afghanistan War (the “Afghan War Logs,” 91,731 as published);
  • 251,287 US State Department diplomatic cables (“Cablegate”);
  • and the “Collateral Murder” gun-camera video of a 2007 Apache strike in Baghdad that killed civilians and two Reuters journalists.

WikiLeaks began publishing in February 2010 and continued through the year, releasing the war logs and cables in coordination with major newspapers worldwide. The disclosures reset the global conversation about the wars, about diplomatic candor, and about the security of a classification system in which a single junior analyst could exfiltrate a superpower’s secret correspondence onto a music CD.

How a Junior Analyst Got So Much

Manning’s leak was a direct consequence of a post-9/11 policy choice. The intelligence failures before the 2001 attacks were blamed partly on agencies hoarding information in “stovepipes,” so the government dramatically widened access to classified networks to encourage sharing. The unintended result was that hundreds of thousands of people could reach material far beyond their immediate need, and removable media controls on those networks were weak. Manning exploited no software vulnerability and cracked no password; she simply copied files she was authorized to view. The leak was a failure of insider-threat policy, not of technology.

Betrayed by a Hacker

Wracked by what she had done and with no one to confide in, Manning reached out in May 2010 to Adrian Lamo, a well-known hacker she contacted because she assumed he would understand. Over a series of instant-message chats she described the leak in detail. Lamo (citing, by his account, fear that the disclosures endangered lives) reported her to the Army and the FBI and turned over the logs. Manning was arrested on May 27, 2010. Lamo’s decision made him one of the most reviled figures in hacker culture for the rest of his life, a betrayal examined in his own article; for Manning it meant three years of pretrial confinement, including a stretch at the Quantico Marine brig under conditions the UN special rapporteur on torture later condemned as cruel and degrading.

Court-Martial and the 35-Year Sentence

Manning’s court-martial concluded in 2013. In July she was convicted on 17 charges, including multiple counts under the Espionage Act, but (crucially) acquitted of “aiding the enemy,” the gravest charge, which carried a potential death penalty and which prosecutors had pursued on the theory that publishing to the internet constituted giving intelligence to al-Qaeda. On August 21, 2013, she was sentenced to 35 years in military prison, by a wide margin the longest sentence ever imposed in the United States for leaking information to the press.

The day after sentencing, Manning publicly came out as a transgender woman, announcing the name Chelsea and asking to be referred to with feminine pronouns. Her subsequent fight to obtain hormone therapy and other medical care from inside the all-male military prison at Fort Leavenworth became a landmark struggle over the rights of incarcerated transgender people, won only after litigation. During her imprisonment she attempted suicide twice and was punished with solitary confinement for it.

Commutation, and the Grand Jury

In one of his final acts as president, Barack Obama commuted Manning’s sentence on January 17, 2017, and she was released on May 17, 2017, having served about seven years. The commutation was fiercely contested, critics called it a reward for espionage; supporters called it the correction of a grotesquely disproportionate sentence.

Her freedom was not the end. In 2019, a federal grand jury investigating Julian Assange subpoenaed Manning to testify about her contacts with WikiLeaks. She refused (arguing she had already answered everything at her court-martial and objecting to the secrecy of the grand jury process) and was jailed for contempt for much of 2019 into 2020, accumulating $256,000 in court-imposed fines. She was released in March 2020, a day after a second suicide attempt, when the grand jury’s term expired.

Impact: The Whistleblower Template

Manning established the template that Edward Snowden would follow three years later, and the contrast between them is instructive. Manning leaked openly into the prosecutorial machinery of her own country and was crushed by it; Snowden, having watched what happened to her, fled before publishing and never returned. Together their cases defined the modern whistleblower’s dilemma: in an age when one insider with a clearance and a thumb drive can move a state’s secrets in an afternoon, the technical act is trivial and the legal consequences are total. Manning’s prosecution under the Espionage Act (a 1917 statute that allows no public-interest defense) set the precedent the government later turned on Assange himself. She is on this page on the principle of impact, not endorsement: she changed what citizens knew about two wars and what the state would do to the person who told them, and the questions she forced open remain open.

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