Manning’s Mom: “He Will Always Be My Innocent Superman”

Above: Bradley aged eight with mother Susan (left) and aunt Sharon.

Susan Manning Urges Son “Never give up hope, son . . . I love you Bradley, I always will.”

Aunt: “‘He just seemed to have a burning sense of wanting to right any injustice from such a young age.”

The Welsh mother of WikiLeaks whistleblower Bradley Manning last night told him to ‘never give up hope’ as he faced up to spending the rest of his life in prison.

Susan Manning says she knows she may never see him again following his conviction last week on spying charges at a US Army court martial hearing.

But in her first interview since Bradley, 25, was arrested for exposing US military secrets more than three years ago, Mrs Manning adds: ‘Never give up hope, son. I know I may never see you again but I know you will be free one day. I pray it is soon. I love you, Bradley and I always will.’

She told how she will never forget a visit he made to her in 2006 when she was being treated for a major stroke in her hometown of Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire

It was also during that visit in 2006 that he told her for the first time that he was gay.

Mrs Manning, stricken by health problems that have left her unable to visit her son in the US since February 2011, could not bring herself to turn on her television or radio to hear a US Army judge convict Bradley. Instead she lay curled up in a ball in her bedroom.

She had closed her curtains and was lying in the dark with a mobile phone at her side so her sister Sharon Staples, 50, who lives four miles from her, could keep in touch.

A Mail on Sunday reporter was at the home of Mrs Staples – who helped care for Bradley when he was a child – when the verdict arrived.

Back in May 2010, when it emerged that a skinny, bespectacled American soldier called Bradley Manning had been arrested for the largest leak of classified secrets in US military history, his family were the only people not shocked by the news.

It was revealed that he had forwarded to WikiLeaks more than 250,000 diplomatic cables, 500,000 Army battlefield logs and videos of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan making disparaging remarks about the men they had just killed.

But his family in Wales had witnessed his obsession with computers from an early age – and noted his growing rage against perceived injustices.

Mrs Staples, the aunt who helped raise Bradley after his parents’ marriage collapsed, says: ‘If anyone was going to get themselves arrested for leaking hundreds of thousands of secret documents and end up in jail for it, it was going to be our Bradley.

‘He just seemed to have a burning sense of wanting to right any injustice from such a young age.

‘He’d had a very tough childhood in many ways and he’d had to grow up too quickly. His childhood was cut short by all the unhappiness he experienced as a boy.’

Susan met Bradley’s American father, Brian, in Haverfordwest in her early 20s. He was stationed at the nearby Cawdor Barracks, where he served for five years as an intelligence analyst with the US Navy.

They were married within a year and, when Brian was posted to California a couple of years later, Susan and their daughter Casey, two, joined him. Nine years later, they had moved to Oklahoma, and Bradley was born.

By now Brian was working as an IT executive for car rental agency Hertz and was often away on month-long business trips. Bradley initially enjoyed a happy, carefree childhood in Oklahoma but when he was 12 his parents’ marriage foundered.

After the split, Brian met another woman, also called Susan, whom he later married. Worse still for Bradley, he felt the two sons of his father’s new bride, both close in age to himself, were his dad’s new priorities. It left him feeling rejected and abandoned.

Susan returned to Pembrokeshire with Bradley in 2001 and enrolled him at Tasker Milward comprehensive in Haverfordwest. But he soon became a target for bullies.