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  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.

  CHAPTER 3

  Julian Assange

  Melbourne, Australia

  December 2006

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

  OSCAR WILDE

  The unusual Australian who wrote up his dating profile for the OKCupid website used the name ‘Harry Harrison’. He was 36 years old, 6ft 2ins tall and, said the site’s test, “87% slut.” He began:

  “WARNING: Want a regular, down to earth guy? Keep moving. I am not the droid you are looking for. Save us both while you still can. Passionate, and often pig headed activist intellectual seeks siren for love affair, children and occasional criminal conspiracy. Such a woman should be spirited and playful, of high intelligence, though not necessarily formally educated, have spunk, class & inner strength and be able to think strategically about the world and the people she cares about.

  “I like women from countries that have sustained political turmoil. Western culture seems to forge women that are valueless and inane. OK. Not only women!

  “Although I am pretty intellectually and physically pugnacious I am very protective of women and children.

  “I am DANGER, ACHTUNG, and ??????????????!”

  “Harry” went on to say he was directing a “consuming, dangerous, human rights project which is, as you might expect, male dominated”. He also suffered from “Asian teengirl stalkers”. The question what “could [he] never do without” produced the answer, “I could adapt to anything except the loss of female company and carbon.” The profile warned: “Do not write to me if you are timid. I am too busy. Write to me if you are brave.”

  Harry’s stated activities were extraordinary. He described himself as “variously professionally involved in international journalism/books, documentaries, cryptography, intelligence activities, civil rights, political activism, white collar crime and the internet”. His gallery of photographs showed a man with pale skin, sharp features and wind-blown silver-grey hair. In some he has a half-smile, in others he stares down the barrel of the camera.

  Harry Harrison was a pseudonym, and the person behind the mask was Julian Assange, a computer hacker living in a crowded student house in Melbourne, dreaming up a scheme for an idealistic information insurgency which was eventually to become celebrated – and execrated – worldwide as WikiLeaks. Assange had a striking and, some critics would say, damaged personality. It was on peacock display in this dating profile, but probably rooted deep in his Australian childhood and youth.

  His obsession with computers, and his compulsion to keep moving, both seemed to have origins in his restless early years. So too, perhaps, did the rumblings from others that Assange was somewhere on the autistic spectrum. Assange would himself joke, when asked if he was autistic: “Aren’t all men?” His dry sense of humour made him attractive – perhaps too attractive – to women. And there was his high analytical intelligence. In a different incarnation, Assange could perhaps have been the successful chief executive of a major corporation.

  There were a few demerits OKCupid couldn’t capture. Assange’s social skills sometimes seemed lacking. The way his eyes flickered around the room was curious; one Guardian journalist described it as “toggling”. And occasionally he forgot to wash. Collaborators who fell out with him – there was to be a long list – accused him of imperiousness and a callous disregard for those of whom he disapproved. Certainly, when crossed, Assange could get very angry indeed, his mood changing as if a switch had been flicked. But in one way the OKCupid profile, last modified in 2006, proved in the end to be dizzyingly accurate. Four years later, in 2010, nobody would be left in any doubt that Assange really did mean, DANGER, ACHTUNG!

  Julian was born on 3 July 1971 in Townsville, in the state of Queensland, in Australia’s sub-tropical north. His mother Christine was the daughter of Warren Hawkins, described by colleagues as a rigid and traditionalist academic who became a college principal; the family settled in Australia from 19th-century Scotland. Julian’s biological father is absent from much of the record: at 17, Christine abruptly left home, selling her paintings to buy a motorcycle, a tent and a map. Some 1,500 miles later she arrived in Sydney and joined its counter-culture scene. According to the book Underground, a revealing docu-novel to which Assange contributed, his mother worked as an artist and fell in love with a rebellious young man she met at an anti-Vietnam war demonstration in 1970. He fathered Julian. But the relationship ended and he would apparently play no further role in Assange’s life for many years. They had no contact until after Assange turned 25.

  His father was not forgotten, though. In 2006, at the start of Julian’s remarkable mission to uncover secrets, he registered the wikileaks.org domain name under what is, according to court records, his biological father’s identity – John Shipton. After the birth of her child, Christine moved as a single mother to Magnetic Island, a short ferry ride across the bay from Townsville. Magnetic Island was primitive and bohemian. Its small population included hippies who slept on beaches and in rock caves. The local kids would fish, swim, and play cricket with coconuts. There were koalas, possums, and giant clams. The Great Barrier Reef was nearby, and the islanders were eco-pioneers who grew their own vegetables and helped themselves to what was in the sea – fish, prawns, crabs and crayfish.

  Assange’s mother later recalled, “I rented an island cottage for $12 a week in Picnic Bay … I lived in a bikini, ‘going native’ with my baby and other mums on the island.” She married Brett Assange, an actor and theatre director. The surname apparently derives from Ah Sang, supposedly a 19th-century Chinese settler. Their touring lifestyle was the backdrop to Assange’s early years. His stepfather staged and directed plays, according to Underground, and his mother did the make-up, costumes and set design. She was also a puppeteer.

  In 2010, Assange described his stepfather’s productions as good preparation for WikiLeaks, a mobile organisation that could be rolled out or packed up in a matter of hours – “something that my family did do when they were involved in the theatre and movie business which is go to locations, set it up, bring all your people, get it all together, get ready for the production launch and – bang – you go.”

  The adult Assange became a shape-shifter: frequently changing hairstyles, and dressing up in other people’s clothes. One day he was an English country gentleman; the next an Icelandic fisherman; or an old woman. Even his role at WikiLeaks seemed unclear. Was he a leaker, a publisher, a journalist, or an activist? When the show was over he would move on.

  The Assanges lived for some of the time in an abandoned pineapple farm on Horseshoe Bay. Christine recalled slashing her way to the front door with a machete. She also claimed to have shot a taipan – a deadly snake – in the water tank. Royce Dalliston, who still lives on Magnetic Island, recalls Christine used to swim and paint under the banyan trees. The other boys would steal waste cooking fat from hotels, and smear it on the roof of the jetty’s sheds to go sliding into the bubbling swell whenever the ferry pulled in from Townsville. Dalliston and the bigger boys called Assange a “raspberry” because the “scrawny little blond-haired kid” seemed too scared to go jetty jumping. But Assange told the New Yorker profile writer Raffi Khatchadourian: “I had my own horse. I built my own raft. I went fishing. I was going down mine shafts and tunnels.”

  By 1979 Christine was again living close to her parents in Lismore, in New South Wales, where local farmers and the hippies co-existed in a state of mutual incomprehension. Nimbin – the scene of the Age of Aquarius, a 1973 hippy music festival – was just up the road. She had a long swirly skirt and drove a green Volkswagen Beetle. Local hippies successfully stopped the log
ging of one of the area’s surviving virgin rainforests at Terania. It was the first victory for Australia’s nascent eco-movement. Old footage from the march shows a young woman wearing dungarees trudging along a track, together with a group of bearded activists and guitar-strummers. She looks remarkably like Assange’s mother.

  Christine did not want her son to have a conventional Lismore schooling. Lismore was a traditional place, with women banned in the local club from leaving the carpet area, apart from on dance nights. Jennifer Somerville, whose children went to a small rural primary with Assange, recalls: “She was a little bit alternative, and she didn’t believe in terribly formal education. She apparently decided that it would be best if Julian went to a little country school.”

  His two-year stint there was one of his most sustained periods of education; according to his own account, during his childhood he attended 37 different schools, emerging with no qualifications whatsoever. “Some people are really horrified and say: ‘You poor thing, you went to all these schools.’ But actually during this period I really liked it,” Assange later said. Classmates at the school in the hamlet of Goolmangar remember a quiet but sociable boy. His exceptional intelligence and blond, shoulder-length hair marked him out.

  One former classmate, Nigel Somerville, says there were “always puppets hanging out of his window … His mum was very artistic. I had a kite she’d made for many years. It was very colourful and had big eyes on it with oranges and reds and blues.” He and Julian would talk about crystal radios and experiment by pulling things apart. Amid the laid-back anti-establishment times, there were paranoid moments. In Adelaide, when Assange was four, his mother’s car had been menacingly pulled over, having left a meeting of anti-nuclear protesters. The police officer told her: “You have a child out at two in the morning. I think you should get out of politics, lady.”