I Am Not Your Enemy by Reality Winner

Author:Reality Winner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Published: 2025-06-21T00:00:00+00:00

Reading this exchange now, I can see clearly that the FBI was not interested in what drove me to leak the document, or in my state of mind. They were more concerned with building a robust criminal case against me. But I didn’t get that at the time. I really thought they just wanted to understand where I was coming from, and to confirm that my efforts had not been extensive or designed to hurt the United States. Like I said, I can be naive.

“You don’t seem the type to do this,” Garrick went on. “I believe it. I want to believe it.” He really had the disappointed-dad shtick down. He knew what would most resonate with me emotionally and get me to confide in him. I hate letting people down, especially those concerned with my well-being.

“I’m not,” I protested. “You know, I want to go out with our special forces. That’s why I got out of the air force. I mean, that’s why I’m here in Augusta. I wanted my clearance back so I could get a deployment, and it was just at a time when I wasn’t applying for deployments. I had, you know, seven, eight months left of a job that didn’t mean anything to me because it’s Iran, and I’m a Pashto linguist. Like, what am I doing translating Farsi? I felt really hopeless, and seeing that information that had been contested back and forth, back and forth in the public domain for so long, trying to figure out, like, with everything else that keeps getting released and keeps getting leaked—why isn’t this getting—why isn’t this out there?”

And that was that. Garrick and Taylor seemed satisfied that I had leaked a document only the one time. That I had felt compelled just to inform the public about something it should have been informed about. And that I hadn’t wanted to wound the United States or aid our enemies.

“Do you have any questions for me?” Garrick asked.

“This sounds really bad. Am I going to jail tonight?” I asked.

“I don’t know the answer to that yet,” he said.

The thing was, I actually wanted to hear that I was going to jail. Not going to jail was terrifying to me—I had just confessed to a crime. There is a procedure when someone does that. If these armed FBI men weren’t going to read me my rights and put me in jail, what were they going to do? In jail, at least, I would retain my constitutional rights. American jails and prisons are brutal places, as I would soon discover firsthand. But they are not like the military base where Guantánamo Bay is located or the CIA’s black sites. I recalled again how the United States Army’s Criminal Investigation Command had arrested Chelsea Manning and taken her to a military camp in Kuwait before even charging her with a crime. They kept her in a steel cage, where her only human contact was with the guards who brought her meals. She attempted suicide within weeks.

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