Please note: this book was written and published prior to Manning’s identification as Chelsea.

Beginning in early 2010, Chelsea Manning leaked an astounding amount of classified information to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks: classified combat videos as well as tens of thousands of documents from the war in Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands from Iraq, and hundreds of thousands more from embassies around the globe. Almost all of WikiLeaks’s headline-making releases of information have come from one source, and one source only: Chelsea Manning.

Manning’s story is one of global significance, yet she remains an enigma. Now, for the first time, the full truth is told about a woman who, at the age of only twenty-two, changed the world.

Though the overarching narrative in media reports on Manning explain her leaks as motivated by the basest, most self-serving intentions, Private paints a far more nuanced, textured portrait of a woman haunted by demons and driven by hope, forced into an ethically fraught situation by a dysfunctional military bureaucracy. Relying on numerous conversations with those who know Manning best, this book displays how Manning’s precocious intellect provided fertile ground for her sense of her own intellectual and moral superiority. It relates how a bright kid from middle America signed on to serve her country and found herself serving a cause far more sinister. And it explains what it takes for a person to betray her orders and fellow troops-and her own future-in order to fulfill what she sees as a higher purpose.

Manning’s court-martial may be the military trial of the decade, if not the century. This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the woman behind it all.