Classmates teased Wikileaks Manning for being geek,gay

He spent part of his childhood with his father in Oklahoma,where classmates made fun of him for being a geek.

He spent part of his childhood with his father in Oklahoma,where classmates made fun of him for being a geek. He spent another part with his mother in a remote corner of Wales,where classmates made fun of him for being gay.

Then he joined the Army in 2007,where,friends said,his social life was defined by the need to conceal his sexuality under dont ask,dont tell and he wasted brainpower fetching coffee for officers.

But it was around two years ago,when Pfc Bradley Manning,now 22,came here to visit a man he had fallen in love with,that he finally seemed to have found a place where he fit in,part of a social circle that included politically motivated computer hackers and his boyfriend,Tyler Watkins,a self-described drag queen.

His friends wonder if his desperation for acceptance or delusions of grandeur may have led him to disclose the largest trove of government secrets since the Pentagon Papers.

I would always try to make clear to Brad that he had a promising future ahead of him, said Daniel J Clark,one of those Cambridge friends. But when youre young and youre in his situation,its hard to tell yourself things are going to get better. Private Manning worked as an intelligence analyst and was based east of Baghdad. He is suspected of disclosing more than 150,000 diplomatic cables,more than 90,000 intelligence reports on the war in Afghanistan. Most of the information was given to WikiLeaks.org. Private Manning is being held in solitary confinement at Quantico,Virginia,under suicide watch.

Interviews with people who knew him in Oklahoma,along with e-mail exchanges between him and Adrian Lamo,the computer hacker who turned him in,offer some insights into Private Mannings early years. Ive been isolated so long, Private Manning wrote in May to Lamo. His father,Brian Manning,a soldier spent a lot of time away,neighbours recalled. His mother,Susan Manning,struggled to cope with the culture shock of having moved to the US from Wales.

One neighbour,Jacqueline Radford,recalled that when students at Mannings elementary school went on field trips,she sent food or money to make sure he ate something. At school,Manning was different from most of his peers. He preferred hacking computer games to playing them.