Above: Bradley aged eight with mother Susan (left) and aunt Sharon.
Susan Manning Urges Son “Never give up hope, son . . . I love you Bradley, I always will.”
Aunt: “‘He just seemed to have a burning sense of wanting to right any injustice from such a young age.”
The Welsh mother of WikiLeaks whistleblower Bradley Manning last night told him to ‘never give up hope’ as he faced up to spending the rest of his life in prison.
Susan Manning says she knows she may never see him again following his conviction last week on spying charges at a US Army court martial hearing.
But in her first interview since Bradley, 25, was arrested for exposing US military secrets more than three years ago, Mrs Manning adds: ‘Never give up hope, son. I know I may never see you again but I know you will be free one day. I pray it is soon. I love you, Bradley and I always will.’
She told how she will never forget a visit he made to her in 2006 when she was being treated for a major stroke in her hometown of Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire
It was also during that visit in 2006 that he told her for the first time that he was gay.
Mrs Manning, stricken by health problems that have left her unable to visit her son in the US since February 2011, could not bring herself to turn on her television or radio to hear a US Army judge convict Bradley. Instead she lay curled up in a ball in her bedroom.
She had closed her curtains and was lying in the dark with a mobile phone at her side so her sister Sharon Staples, 50, who lives four miles from her, could keep in touch.
A Mail on Sunday reporter was at the home of Mrs Staples – who helped care for Bradley when he was a child – when the verdict arrived.
Back in May 2010, when it emerged that a skinny, bespectacled American soldier called Bradley Manning had been arrested for the largest leak of classified secrets in US military history, his family were the only people not shocked by the news.
It was revealed that he had forwarded to WikiLeaks more than 250,000 diplomatic cables, 500,000 Army battlefield logs and videos of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan making disparaging remarks about the men they had just killed.
But his family in Wales had witnessed his obsession with computers from an early age – and noted his growing rage against perceived injustices.
Mrs Staples, the aunt who helped raise Bradley after his parents’ marriage collapsed, says: ‘If anyone was going to get themselves arrested for leaking hundreds of thousands of secret documents and end up in jail for it, it was going to be our Bradley.
‘He just seemed to have a burning sense of wanting to right any injustice from such a young age.
‘He’d had a very tough childhood in many ways and he’d had to grow up too quickly. His childhood was cut short by all the unhappiness he experienced as a boy.’
Susan met Bradley’s American father, Brian, in Haverfordwest in her early 20s. He was stationed at the nearby Cawdor Barracks, where he served for five years as an intelligence analyst with the US Navy.
They were married within a year and, when Brian was posted to California a couple of years later, Susan and their daughter Casey, two, joined him. Nine years later, they had moved to Oklahoma, and Bradley was born.
By now Brian was working as an IT executive for car rental agency Hertz and was often away on month-long business trips. Bradley initially enjoyed a happy, carefree childhood in Oklahoma but when he was 12 his parents’ marriage foundered.
After the split, Brian met another woman, also called Susan, whom he later married. Worse still for Bradley, he felt the two sons of his father’s new bride, both close in age to himself, were his dad’s new priorities. It left him feeling rejected and abandoned.
Susan returned to Pembrokeshire with Bradley in 2001 and enrolled him at Tasker Milward comprehensive in Haverfordwest. But he soon became a target for bullies.
THE APACHE ‘ATROCITY’ THAT TURNED HIM INTO A WHISTLEBLOWER
Bradley decided to release the batch of classified documents to WikiLeaks after watching a video of an US Apache helicopter opening fire on a group of people in Iraq, incorrectly identified by the pilots as armed insurgents, his aunt believes.After a voice on the transmission urges the pilots to ‘light ’em all up’, the individuals on the street are shot by the gunship’s cannon.
A few minutes later, a van whose occupants appear to be picking up a wounded person is fired on too.
Two children were among the casualties.
Mrs Staples believes the world will one day see Bradley’s actions as heroic.
She said: ‘How many people wish the Nazi death camp guards who looked the other way had done what Bradley did?
‘One day, maybe even America will recognize that he did the right thing. He felt compelled to let the world see what he had seen.’
Mrs Staples says: ‘They’d pelt their house with eggs day and night and his home life was just as tough. Susan wasn’t at all well and Bradley bore the brunt of that at a time when he should have been working hard for his upcoming GCSEs.
‘Bradley felt he had to look after her and went from being a grade A pupil to leaving school without any GCSEs to his name.
‘From the age of 12 or so, Bradley was having to be the man of the house and that placed huge responsibility on his shoulders that I don’t think he was ready for.
‘He was very intense about everything and seemed to have a much stronger sense of injustice, of what is right and wrong, than most people.
‘He was forever talking about the wrongs that he felt were being committed by certain US senators – but of course we’d never heard of any of them so couldn’t contribute to the conversation.
So eventually he’d get bored and go off and sit at one of his computers instead. I sensed that the computer was his escape.’
Bradley flew back to the US when he was 16 after his father persuaded a friend to give him a job with his computer firm. But Bradley’s poor people skills soon let him down.
‘He kept telling his boss how to do his job,’ says Mrs Staples. ‘He’d pull him up all the time for mistakes in the way he was programming his computer. After a few weeks, the boss fired Bradley because he thought he was too big for his boots.’
When Bradley was 18, his father again offered to ‘pull strings’ to land him another job – in the US Army. But Bradley took the initiative and signed himself up while visiting another aunt, his father’s lawyer sister Debbie, in Washington DC.
He remained in regular contact by phone and email with his mother and aunt Sharon in Wales, but they found it difficult to match the ‘scrawny little kid in boxers and a blanket’ to the smart young man now dressed in military uniform.
Mrs Staples says all of his family were ‘very proud’ of him being in the army – but that pride turned to horror in May 2010 when Bradley was arrested.
It was Brian who broke the news to the Welsh side of the family. Mrs Staples, by now running a busy cleaning company employing ten staff, says: ‘I was at work when I got a call from him.
‘His voice was very solemn and he said, “Sharon, Bradley has been arrested. He is in big trouble. Can you let Susan know, please?’’
‘He didn’t tell me any more at the time but told me to watch the TV. I turned it on and there was Bradley’s face staring back.
‘For a second, I thought, what the hell is Bradley doing on the telly? Then I sat down and listened to what he was being accused of.
