Manning’s supervisor describes brawl, suspicions he was a spy

FT. MEADE, Md. — Long before he was unmasked as the biggest leaker of classified intelligence secrets in U.S. history, his boss inside a small, plywood structure near Baghdad suspected that Army Pfc. Bradley Manning might be a spy. And her suspicions and his odd behavior finally culminated late one night in a flash of angry tempers and fisticuffs.

The clues, former Army specialist Jihrleah Showman testified in his court-martial Friday, were everywhere — a combination of odd behavior, nervousness and stealth. Manning worked long hours, stayed late and kept to himself inside their offices at the Army’s Forward Operating Base Hammer in Iraq. He inadvertently left his camera lying around. He sometimes slept in a ball in the corner. He smoked heavily, and when it came to hot coffee, he “had excessive caffeine consumption,” Showman recalled.

At one point, Manning complained that someone was eavesdropping on his conversations and “he indicated he was very paranoid,” she said. Once, she said, she pointed to the U.S. flag on her Army uniform, and he responded that “the flag meant nothing to him and that he did not believe himself to have allegiance to this country or its people.” He told her he joined the Army to earn money for college and to learn more about computers.

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Showman said she told her supervisors that Manning was a “possible spy.”

According to Showman, that led to a clash in the middle of the night in the office, where she and Manning finally faced off. She had been awakened and told to report to the unit to investigate why Manning was still at work. He was upset and had filed a formal complaint against her for describing him with an anti-gay epithet because he could not do many push-ups.

She says they shouted, the table tumbled and he hit her in the face. On the ground, she wrestled him into submission. “He should never have messed with me,” said Showman, a former football player. “Back then I had 15-inch biceps.”

Manning sat quietly in the courtroom, listening to her testimony. It was part of the government’s final rebuttal case as his court-martial on charges of passing classified defense information heads to closing arguments Thursday. If convicted of all charges, Manning, 25, could spend the rest of his life in prison.

Other final witnesses, who knew Manning and Showman, testified for the defense on rebuttal and said they never heard Manning say anything disloyal about the United States. Had he done so, they said, he would have been immediately removed from the unit or, at the very least, stripped of his classified clearance status. None of that happened to Manning until after he was arrested in May 2010.

Paul David Adkins, a former Army master sergeant in the unit, said such odd behavior “would be significant because the soldier would pose a security risk as well as being unsuitable to serve in a combat zone.”

Adkins added that he did not remember Showman ever telling him about problems with Manning or any concerns that Manning was disloyal to the U.S. or might be a spy.

“I don’t recall. I don’t remember,” he said, explaining that he was diagnosed with memory loss after suffering a fall in Iraq. “It may have been I was involved in other things.”

But prosecutors showed him a June 2011 memo he wrote discussing Showman’s concerns. It stated that Showman reminded him that he once had “reservations about deploying Pfc. Manning” to Iraq and about “Pfc. Manning’s disloyal statements prior to deployment.”

The defense then showed Adkins a copy of a December 2009 memo he wrote discussing behavioral issues for soldiers dealing with combat stress. The report did not discuss any comments about Manning being disloyal or unfit for service.

Adkins also testified that he did not know of any derogatory performance reports or formal complaints against Manning before he was charged with passing more than 700,000 U.S. classified military war logs, suspected terrorism detainee assessments, State Department diplomatic cables and other classified material to the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks.

Manning has not testified, but he has left open the matter of whether he would take the stand during a penalty phase, which begins July 31. Because he previously pleaded guilty to 10 lesser offenses of mishandling classified data, he already faces up to 20 years in prison.

richard.serrano@latimes.com