‘I Am Not Your Enemy’

The following is excerpted from I Am Not Your Enemy A Memoir out September from Spiegel Grau It is reprinted with permission of the publisher It began like any other day I woke around a m took Mickey outside for a inadequate minutes and no later than drove to work from my rental house in Augusta Georgia while listening to a podcast about national protection called Intercepted I arrived at work around and several hours later I had a coffee mixed with protein powder It was my usual morning routine But on this day I took fateful attempts to share certain of America s classified national protection secrets with the constituents Why that day Why that document I spent years in a prison cell asking myself that question And the truth is I don t know Everything that has happened because of and since that action the trauma and upheaval and melodrama has merged to make selected of my reasoning mysterious to me A blank spot exists where my precise motivations should be I wish I could say that my actions were grandly deliberate and thoughtfully strategic But my plan wasn t even really a plan My actions were more spontaneous and poorly organized than your average trip to the grocery store That s one of the multiple sad ironies of the regime s portrayal of me as a calculating criminal mastermind intent on doing whatever she could to reveal America s bulk vital information to the Taliban and al-Qaeda If only I had been that careful and farsighted Rather my crime proceeded in disconnected stages I took small actions each one seemingly harmless on its own that added up to something appearing coherent and dramatic and that was irreversible when all the elements were combined like ingredients that only when mixed in exact quantities can produce a bomb Except that my explosion never endangered let alone hurt anyone but myself Not even close Before that day I had not planned to leak a classified description or do anything else out of the ordinary I was working as a contractor for the National Measure Agency the Defense Department s arm tasked with monitoring and processing information for foreign and domestic intelligence purposes The NSA is a behemoth that vacuums email text and phone conversations from around the world Its budget is so big its eavesdropping capabilities so vast that if it were a corporation it would be one of the biggest in the world up there with Apple Microsoft Walmart and Amazon As with those businesses hundreds of millions of Americans come into frequent contact with the NSA Unlike with those companies Americans don t much know about when how and why the NSA is involved in their lives I liked getting to work early and on the morning of May I enjoyed the quiet and solitude Then I opened a news website the top-secret one available to people working in intelligence and detected a bombshell a five-page document listed as the bulk read article on the site about an enormously controversial subject of society interest The document contained newly uncovered details about events that had taken place a year earlier I stared at it stunned that such a thing existed By that point I was jaded but this jolted me out of my seat This will be leaked by Friday I thought It s too damning to stay secret Everything leaks The media then was filled with leaks as though the American ruling body was a broken pipe and information was dripping right to newspapers and journalists Soon then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions would say in a press briefing that in the first six months of this administration the Department of Justice has already received nearly as a great number of criminal referrals involving unauthorized disclosures of classified information as we received in the last three years combined A analysis by the Federation of American Scientists uncovered that the astounding numbers of secrets being published in the press displayed that leaks of classified information are a normal predictable occurrence And the New York Times observed Journalism in the Trump era has featured a staggering number of leaks from sources across the federal regime A July record by the Senate Committee on Homeland Precaution and Governmental Affairs ascertained that a majority of the leaks concerned the Russia probes with a multitude of revealing closely-held information such as intelligence region intercepts FBI interviews and intelligence grand jury subpoenas and even the workings of a secret surveillance court I considered that these leaks were an inevitable response to an undeniable situation American institutions were collapsing I was twenty-five years old and had already spent five years of my life at the NSA in various roles and I angrily wondered why the agency had not delivered any residents response to the Trump administration which had been constantly disparaging us When he wasn t ignoring our work the president denigrated the intelligence locality as being part of the deep state intent on subverting the will of the society Far worse the administration lied daily with impunity and the heads of our institutions responded publicly with only silence Masses life then was surreal Just hours later that day Trump would fire FBI director James Comey who was heading the scrutiny into Russia s interference in the referendum It seemed like an attempt to silence anyone looking into what had happened Trump seemed capable of virtually anything Envisioning him ordering that an NSA description be disappeared was not arduous If it vanished I thought people would wonder whether it had existed at all or if they had just imagined it an example of the Mandela effect a phenomenon in which false memories are shared by large groups of people I decided to print the article so that at least one copy would be preserved even if Trump s henchmen otherwise eliminated it But when I went to print it my nonexistent tech skills proved problematic This was one of the a multitude of means in which I differed from Edward Snowden the NSA employee who had handed over thousands of pages of documents to reporters at the Guardian a news website specializing in national safeguard issues If you see something the publication posted on their web page detailing how to contact them leak something Later Snowden and I were often grouped together but our motivations our methods and the consequences of our actions were very different He planned his leaking months and possibly a year in advance He contacted journalists before he leaked anything to gain their assurances guidance and cooperation He was a tech wizard who used encrypted emails and a code name He was intent on bringing down the out-of-control national prevention state He saved an estimated million documents on a thumb drive By contrast I spontaneously tapped the print button on a five-page document involving intelligence from the previous year without giving the whole thing much thought And like an actor in particular slapstick comedy I promptly realized that I didn t know where in the office the review would be printed out I began a frantic search hoping to hear chosen noises reassuringly indicating that a printer was spitting out the pages There was no legitimate work reason for me to be looking at that document let alone printing it out As boring as my job was I didn t want to lose it If a assurance supervisor grilled me I would not be able to explain the reasons for my actions because even I was unsure of them Despite what the FBI would later claim I am a terrible liar unskilled in the arts of deception My anxiety usually leads me to drop my poker face after which someone takes all my chips Before I was unable to locate the printer I had not been nervous about what I was doing At the time I was emotionally numb mourning my father s fresh death and suffering from general loneliness and spiraling despair about the state of the country and the world Trump had been sworn into office in January and already was wreaking havoc He severely restricted immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries His national guard adviser Michael Flynn stepped down after just twenty-two days when it was revealed that he had lied about his paid lobbying work on behalf of Turkey Trump also was threatening to destroy North Korea And that s just a short list Or perhaps I wasn t nervous solely because I knew that the NSA was filled with other bored introverts who spent much of the time goofing off we weren t going around glancing at one another s computer screens With faux casualness I walked from printer to printer looking for my papers Nope not that one Nope not that one either Jesus I m an idiot After checking three printers I returned to the first one and identified the record lying there I snatched up the pages placed them face down on my desk and reassured myself that the matter had been averted And with that I went on with my day Nobody would know or care that the review was on my desk I left it there when work ended and I departed for the gym That evening I checked the news to see if the description had been leaked if any policymakers were talking about its contents it was I inferred crucial information that could further illuminate the accumulating understanding of the president s ties to Russia Everyone at work had been discussing it saying it would pop up in the news sooner rather than later But no The reader should know that my plea deal prevents me from verifying the review s contents But you can find the entire thing online with a simple Google search and it was later summarized by the New York Times as describ ing two cyberattacks by Russia s military intelligence unit the G R U one in August against a company that sells voter registration-related system and another a minimal days before the vote against local voting process bureaucrats To be honest I don t think I knew what I was going to do with the document before I did it But around p m on the day after I printed it out I folded it in half and placed it in my lunch box Later I took the folded document from my lunch box and slipped it into my pantyhose Normally at the end of my shift getting out of the building through precaution wasn t hard And sure enough that afternoon was no different they let me leave through the door after doing the routine bag checks I walked straight to my car relieved My common sense was strong enough to discourage me from removing the document from my pantyhose in the parking lot Instead I drove to the gym parked took out the pages and wedged them between the seat and the center console I went to exercise and thought more about the guy I was emerging up with than the top-secret document in my car Two days later I bought a white envelope scribbled the Intercept s New York City address on it placed the statement inside and stuck a stamp on it I drove to yoga where I taught a class as a substitute instructor after which I dropped the envelope into a mailbox across the street No return address anywhere no name or any other identifying details What mattered were the contents This is going to be big Maybe help save this country And nobody will ever know it was me Or if they do find out everyone will be grateful Things didn t go exactly as I had hoped Instead of being the society s anonymous good Samaritan I spent more time in prison than any whistleblower in American history Sometimes people like to group me with other individuals who have leaked classified national assurance information Daniel Ellsberg Edward Snowden John Kiriakou Thomas Drake and Chelsea Manning are the best known Often these comparisons are unflattering According to analyst Tom Nichols at the Atlantic All of these cases are bound by the thread of narcissism the product of a protracted epidemic which is on the rise in the United States and around the world Diagnosing people with personality disorders on the basis of their portrayals in the press is a curious thing Actual mental strength professionals refrain from such diagnoses because they understand that any person is far more complicated than a context-free sound bite Unlike Nichols and uncurious keyboard psychologists like him I have spoken with Ellsberg Drake Manning and other whistle-blowers at various points in my post-leak life The leakers I have spoken with have different personality types and come from radically diverse backgrounds There are only two things we have in common The first is that we revealed secrets but we have plenty of company in that The other thing uniting us which is far less common is that we got caught One of the first whistleblowers to step forward in endorsement was Thomas Drake who had been a top official at the NSA and served in the Air Force and Navy Like him I deeply inferred in America s national shield system I never required to destroy it Following my six years in the military I received the Air Force Commendation Medal for provid ing over hours of enemy intelligence exploitation and assist ing in geolocating enemy combatants during airborne sorties air missions Exactly what I did to earn that commendation is something I am unable to reveal for legal reasons I can only quote this NSA-approved Commendation Medal certificate She facilitated intelligence missions time sensitive reports and removing more than enemies from the battlefield Furthermore while deployed to assistance Combatant Commander s requirements Airman Winner was appointed as the lead deployment language analyst producing reports aiding in enemy captures enemies killed in action and identifying high value targets That s a lot of military-speak so I ll translate I helped kill a lot of human beings Hundreds possibly thousands I developed post-traumatic stress disorder doing it As a child and young adult I dreamed of receiving awards for helping people or saving them But that wasn t how it turned out I helped the United States regime kill people I was good at it So good that they gave me an award for it But then I shared particular information with the American people and the U S ruling body felt that was a much worse thing to do than killing scores of people They decided I was an enemy My Pok mon-loving yoga-practicing vegetable-subsisting complex personality got erased To quote my mother s sardonic comment to a reporter about the chasm separating who I really am from the traitor the governing body claimed I was The world s biggest terrorist has a Pikachu bedspread Well put Momface The post I Am Not Your Enemy appeared first on The Texas Observer