I am not your enemy A memoir

Winner, who was convicted of leaking classified documents about Russian interference in the 2016 election, fleshes out her life beyond that scandal in this intriguing autobiography. She starts with the juicy stuff: in May 2017, Winner stumbled across a "bombshell" intelligence report while contracting for the NSA and feared the Trump administration would bury it. As a safeguard, she illegally printed a copy, smuggled it out of the building in her pantyhose, and sent it to the Intercept, who published it. The result for Winner was an unprecedented five-year sentence for espionage. After justifying her actions by citing "the widespread fear of the demise of American democracy," Winner delves into her early life, including her Texas upbringing with a mentally ill father who believed he was Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. Elsewhere, she covers her military career, her incarceration, and her choice, as an adult, to convert to Judaism. While Winner offers little new information that might sway her detractors, open-minded readers will be grateful for the opportunity to glimpse the inner world of a widely recognized but little-known figure. It's a worthwhile self-portrait. Agent: Michael Signorelli, Aevitas Creative Management. (Sept.)

Whistleblower/leaker (depending on your POV) Winner writes of a fateful decision that earned her years in jail and prison. "The world's biggest terrorist has a Pikachu bedspread." So a reporter learned from former National Security Agency analyst Winner's mother. In this matter-of-fact narrative, Winner, who "helped the United States government kill people," opens on May 9, 2017, when she downloaded and printed a five-page document of Russian cyberattacks on U.S. election officials and a company that makes software for voter registration. Why she did so, she allows, was a subject she pondered often as she served out a five-year prison term, part of a sentence that was the longest incarceration for any single-incident leaker. (By contrast, Edward Snowden leaked 1.5 million pages.) Winner's crime was to send those printed pages to an online site that specialized in national security matters. As she writes, astonishingly, a staffer described the pages to a source who in turn notified the FBI; meanwhile, the staffer also called the NSA and sent photographs of the printed pages, violating "standard Reporting 101 protocols for journalists who need to confirm the authenticity of leaked documents." Traced to her by virtue of a printer code, the document occasioned her arrest and conviction under the terms of the Espionage Act of 1917, meant as a legal tool against German secret agents during World War I. After 15 months in jail, a plea bargain earned her a spot in federal prison, "a vacation, filled with activities and amenities," compared to where she'd been. Winner writes candidly about the hellish nature of incarceration in America, from constant violence to boredom and the challenge of contending with conflicting and arbitrary rules, with her fellow prisoners more often than not less dangerous than the staff: "these weirdos, outcasts, and criminals loved me, and I loved them back." A sobering but evenhanded account of punishment meted out for leaking classified information. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.