By Ian Drury
UK DailyMail

It is the largest security leak in history - and has rocked the intelligence world to the core.

But perhaps the most extraordinary element of the WikiLeaks breach is how the data was smuggled out of a U.S. army base on CDs - and finally downloaded onto a memory stick.

The prime suspect is U.S. soldier Bradley Manning, a ‘hot-headed loner’ who grew up in Britain and is currently in solitary confinement awaiting trial over the WikiLeaks disclosures.

By the 23-year-old's own account, it appears to have been staggeringly easy for him to make off with reams of highly classified data.

The downloads were carried out while Manning was working at the U.S. 10th Mountain Division in Iraq.

'I would come in with music on a CD-RW labelled with something like Lady Gaga... erase the music... then write a compressed split file,' he wrote in an online chat.

'No one suspected a thing. (I) listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga's Telephone while "exfiltrating" possibly the largest data spillage in America history.

'Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public.

'Everywhere there's a U.S. post, there's a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed. Worldwide anarchy in CSV format. It's beautiful and horrifying.

'Information should be free. It belongs in the public domain.'

He claimed he had 'unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day seven days a week for eight plus months.'

Manning was chatting to a man called Adrian Lamo. His correspondent eventually turned him in to the authorities in what he described as 'an act of conscience'.

But by then it was too late. The solider had allegedly uploaded the files to WikiLeaks who began the long process of making them public.

The website chooses to stagger the information in order to secure maximum 'political impact.'

The first information to be released was a classified video showing a U.S. helicopter gunship attack in Baghdad in July 2007 which killed two journalists and a civilian. The footage was dubbed 'Collateral Murder'.

Next came a huge tranche of field reports on Iraq and Afghanistan. This included details of U.S. personnel killing civilians and prisoners being handed over for torture.

One former classmater, Jenna Morris, a 23-year-old sales manager, said: 'He was a quiet lad and he'd had a tough upbringing.

'He had a tough time when he came back here with his mum because moving to another country after a break-up was hard. He was quite a loner and he didn’t really have a lot of friends. He had quite a bit of trouble at school and was picked on.'

He returned to America after dropping out of school, moving in with his father and getting a job as a £4.14-an-hour greeter at an pizza restaurant. He later joined the U.S. Army.

Deployed to Iraq, he posted a series of downbeat musings on the Facebook website.

On January 12, he wrote: 'Bradley Manning didn't want this fight. Too much to lose, too fast.'

In an apparent swipe at the U.S. Army, he also wrote: 'Bradley Manning is not a piece of equipment.'


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