I AM NOT YOUR ENEMY: A Memoir, by Reality Winner
The Espionage Act of 1917 is a terrifying law. Its provisions apply not just to spies, but also to anyone, really, upon whom the government can pin mishandling of classified information. People found violating the act can face lengthy jail sentences and are often presented with little ability to defend themselves given, for instance, the security clearances needed to access the evidence that might exonerate them. As a result, it is perhaps unsurprising that whistle-blowers low on the totem pole are more often locked up than their superiors — the highest-ranking leakers ever successfully prosecuted ranked equivalent to a colonel.
This injustice is taken up by Senior Airman Reality Winner in her memoir, “I Am Not Your Enemy.” In 2017, a little more than a week before the Espionage Act’s centenary and several months into Donald J. Trump’s first presidential term, Winner was arrested for leaking a five-page document to The Intercept, an online news source. (The report, which was classified top secret, revealed how Russia’s military intelligence had successfully hacked voter registration rolls in 2016.) She was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, the harshest federal punishment ever under the act for a leak to the media.
There has been an uptick in Espionage Act prosecutions in the last two decades. Most notably, Winner writes, the law was used against Trump, who stashed 32 separate classified documents, covering topics including the nation’s nuclear weapons capabilities, in unsecured spaces at his palatial Florida golf resort. (He allegedly used them to show off to his guests.) “I was no witch,” Winner writes, “but they sure treated me much more harshly than they did big-time politicians in Washington.” The prosecution against Trump petered out when he won the presidency again last year and the classified documents were returned to him.
It’s not as if Winner’s tale is unknown. She has been covered in numerous magazine articles, a play, at least three films and two books, most notably the excellent “Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs,” by the journalist Kerry Howley. Memoir, however, affords Winner the chance to define herself on her own terms.
The result is not a political screed, but rather a Pilgrim’s Progress through the contemporary United States. A century from now, readers looking to get acquainted with the America of our era could do worse than observe it through Winner, who roves with expressive irreverence through the prefab homes of her childhood, the halls of secret power and the cramped spaces of slummy prison cells.
Winner is not easily defined. A Pokémon-loving convert to Judaism who grew up in small-town Texas believing in the justness of the U.S. military, she joined the war on terror out of a desire to help the peoples of Central Asia. (Her unusual first name — “not a name anyone sane or sober would choose” — was inspired by a T-shirt and chosen by her father, a dealer of prescription pain drugs.) Winner writes that she is a product of a “bizarre and sometimes traumatic” upbringing that included physical assault and a family that was “hanging on to the middle class by our fingertips.” By her midteens she struggled with anxiety and a severe eating disorder.
There is much on animals, workouts and early family drama in “I Am Not Your Enemy.” We get, for example, an almost Homeric catalog of Winner family pets from 1991 to the present. While exhaustive, these details do not feel incidental, particularly given her professed reluctance to discuss a motive for her leak. Such information helps the reader sketch out a moral architecture based especially on her attitude toward the animal world. “Humans have made a pact with dogs and cats in particular by domesticating them, requiring them to depend on us for their survival,” she explains, “and we must hold up our end of the bargain.” It’s not difficult to see how this theory can be turned into a political one: A government must also hold up its end of the bargain when it comes to the humans under its influence.
In Afghanistan, Winner’s notions of fairness and the decency of the military were shattered. As a linguist involved in drone operations, she became increasingly disenchanted as she saw the widespread killings of civilians. “Those deaths began to haunt me,” she writes, “and I was already, shall we say, mentally vulnerable.” When she left the Air Force to work for an N.S.A. contractor in Georgia, she was assigned to humdrum work translating documents about Iranian aerospace programs but still had access to an agency intranet upon which the document she leaked eventually appeared.
The description of Winner’s arrest and interrogation by the F.B.I. in “I Am Not Your Enemy” is perhaps the most remarkable piece of writing in the book. The thought process of someone who has been seized by armed officers is deftly traced: Reading it, I had flashbacks to my own detention, on trumped-up charges of espionage, at the hands of Congolese intelligence agents. “My mind sought any safe harbors where I might be able to exercise control,” she writes, recalling how she spiraled into herself as she tried to bargain away scraps of information and joked with her captors.
Winner’s account of prison, by contrast, lays bare the inequities at the heart of the penal system and makes a compelling case for criminal justice reform. The system Winner describes “is contradictory and bleak at best, and cruel and unusual at worst.” With almost two million Americans imprisoned, she notes, it relies on “profit and commodification of bodies behind bars.”
But this material is also far from dry: Hurtled into a Georgia jail and then shunted into the squalid maw of federal prison, Winner is an empathetic and often funny chronicler of her fellow inmates’ stories even as she charts her “soul and mind rotting like months-old milk.” There’s the wife of a Colombian cartel kingpin who becomes a prison dealer herself, and the transgender drug smuggler with a penchant for rave music and hooking up with his fellow inmates. “Instead of hazing a shy newbie, a dorky white girl who had never even seen a jail and who loved books and languages,” she writes, “they showed her the ropes.”
The publication of “I Am Not Your Enemy” arrives as national security lawyers and other experts are warning that it is only a matter of time until the government uses the Espionage Act even more broadly. It also seems that greater volumes of government information are being classified than ever before. As Winner writes, “Maybe there are too many secrets.”
Even as she poses this thought, Winner, who finished her probation last year, comes to see the trouble over secrets as only one symptom of a decaying social order. In prison, she was kept going not by high-flown ideals, but by her family’s love and tiny acts of kindness shown by people who had little else to offer. “I Am Not Your Enemy” is a book that reveals how the bargains we make with the government — when we cede human generosity to the fearsome specter of state power — are rarely worth it. Try to take back what you’ve given, and there is always a price to pay.
I AM NOT YOUR ENEMY: A Memoir | By Reality Winner | Spiegel & Grau | 321 pp. | $30
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