The following is excerpted from I Am Not Your Enemy: A Memoir, out September 16 from Spiegel & Grau. It is reprinted with permission of the publisher, © 2025.
It began like any other day. I woke around 4:30 a.m., took Mickey outside for a few minutes, and, no later than 5:30, drove to work from my rental house in Augusta, Georgia, while listening to a podcast about national security called Intercepted. I arrived at work around 6:00, 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 steps to share some of America’s classified national security secrets with the public.
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 some 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 many sad ironies of the government’s portrayal of me as a calculating criminal mastermind, intent on doing whatever she could to reveal America’s most 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 report or do anything else out of the ordinary. I was working as a contractor for the National Security 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 9, 2017, I enjoyed the quiet and solitude. Then I opened a news website, the top-secret one available to people working in intelligence, and found a bombshell: a five-page document, listed as the most read “article” on the site, about an enormously controversial subject of public 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 government 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 many criminal referrals involving unauthorized disclosures of classified information as we received in the last three years combined.” A study by the Federation of American Scientists found that the astounding numbers of secrets being published in the press showed 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 government.”
A July 2017 report by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs found that a majority of the leaks “concerned the Russia probes, with many revealing closely-held information such as intelligence community intercepts, FBI interviews and intelligence, grand jury subpoenas, and even the workings of a secret surveillance court.
I believed that these leaks were an inevitable response to an undeniable crisis: 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 public response to the Trump administration, which had been constantly disparaging us. When he wasn’t ignoring our work, the president denigrated the intelligence community as being part of “the deep state” intent on subverting the will of the public. Far worse, the administration lied daily with impunity, and the heads of our institutions responded publicly with only silence. Public life then was surreal. Just hours later that day, Trump would fire FBI director James Comey, who was heading the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. 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 report be disappeared was not difficult.
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 many ways 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 security 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 security state. He saved an estimated 1.5 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 some slapstick comedy, I immediately realized that I didn’t know where in the office the report would be printed out. I began a frantic search, hoping to hear some 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 security 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 recent 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 security 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 simply 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 found the report lying there.I snatched up the pages, placed them face down on my desk, and reassured myself that the problem had been averted.
And with that, I went on with my day. Nobody would know or care that the report 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 report had been leaked, if any policymakers were talking about its contents—it was, I believed, 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 report’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 software and another, a few days before the election, against 122 local election officials.”
To be honest, I don’t think I knew what I was going to do with the document before I did it. But around 2:00 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 security 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 breaking 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 report inside, and stuck a stamp on it. I drove to yoga, where I taught a class as a substitute teacher, 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 public’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 security 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 health 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 support was Thomas Drake, who had been a top official at the NSA and served in the Air Force and Navy. Like him, I deeply believed in America’s national security system; I never wanted to destroy it. Following my six years in the military, I received the Air Force Commendation Medal for “provid[ing] over 1,900 hours of enemy intelligence exploitation and assist[ing] in geolocating 120 enemy combatants during 734 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 816 intelligence missions, 3,236 time sensitive reports, and removing more than 100 enemies from the battlefield. Furthermore, while deployed to support Combatant Commander’s requirements, Airman Winner was appointed as the lead deployment language analyst, producing 2,500 reports, aiding in 650 enemy captures, 600 enemies killed in action and identifying 900 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 government kill people. I was good at it. So good that they gave me an award for it. But then I shared some information with the American people, and the U.S. government felt that was a much worse thing to do than killing scores of people. They decided I was an enemy.
My Pokémon-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 government claimed I was: “The world’s biggest terrorist has a Pikachu bedspread.” Well put, Momface.
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