This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies, Infateri Gross. Our guest today, Chelsea Manning, is likely

somebody you've heard of, regarded as a hero by many and a traitor by others. In 2010, while

working as an Army Intelligence Analyst in Iraq, she provided hundreds of thousands of military

and diplomatic records to WikiLeaks, and what's regarded as the largest leak of classified records

in history. After she was convicted in a military court march in 2013, she declared her gender

identity as a woman and began to transition. Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison,

but was released after seven years when President Obama commuted her sentence. She was later

imprisoned again on a civil contempt charge for refusing to testify in a grand jury investigation

of WikiLeaks, but was released in 2020. Manning has written a new memoir about her difficult childhood,

her long struggle with gender dysphoria, her entry into the Army, and the events that landed

her in prison. She writes that when she joined the Army, she wanted to go to Iraq and was committed

to the Army's mission, but she became disillusioned with what she saw in regards her decision to leak

classified documents as a matter of principle. Chelsea Manning now describes herself as a

transparency activist and politician. She ran for U.S. Senate in Maryland in 2018. She works as a

security consultant and expert in data science and machine learning. Her new book is ReadMe.txt,

a memoir. Chelsea Manning, welcome to Fresh Air. Hey, how's it going?

Doing well. You know, a lot of people who don't live highly publicized lives become famous suddenly,

and you became famous while you were in prison and had no control or even knowledge of the publicity

around you. I mean, you were characterized by other people, many of whom had agendas. And we'll

talk about this later, but I wonder if that's why you wanted to tell your own story in this book.

You've got that right, you know, throughout my life, especially over the last decade or so,

of kind of lost control of how I'm presented to the world. So I really came to want to write my

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