'Mussolini: Son of the Century' is a flashy take on how dictatorships happen

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. My guest, Reality Winner, had recently gotten out of the Air Force as a decorated cryptolinguist, and had become a National Security Agency contractor, when she leaked a classified document. At the time in 2017, the nation was divided over whether Russia had interfered in the election and if that had helped Trump get elected. The document Winner leaked revealed that Russia had launched two cyberattacks before the election - one against a company that sells software related to voter registration, and another against 122 local election officials. Winner sent it to The Intercept, a journalism site specializing in reporting leaks. The reporters who were assigned the story mishandled it. In the process of fact checking the document, it was sent to the FBI, which sent it to the NSA, which easily identified she was the source. She was tried under the Espionage Act of 1917 and received the longest sentence anyone had previously received for leaking classified information to a media outlet.

She accepted a plea deal, lowering her sentence of 10 years to five. After serving the time, she was released in 2021. Her story has been told in a film in which she was portrayed by Sydney Sweeney, a documentary, and a play in which actors reenacted the transcript of the FBI interrogating her in her home. "This American Life" had a reenactment of that transcript. Now she's telling her story in a memoir titled, "I Am Not Your Enemy."

Reality Winner, welcome to FRESH AIR. I know that there's things that you can't talk about because, you know, legally, you are not allowed to talk about it. So let's clarify what you don't talk about so that I fully understand it and so our listeners fully understand it.

REALITY WINNER: So as of right now, I am under a lasting NSA NDA, or non-disclosure agreement, to never talk about anything that could be related to classified information from my Air Force career as a linguist. And then moving forward, anything that I had done as an NSA contractor and furthermore, anything within the four corners of the document that I leaked.

GROSS: So if I say something that I've read in a newspaper report, I can say that even though you can't?

WINNER: Correct. And I cannot - to use the phrase - confirm or deny or agree with anything that you say.

GROSS: OK, very good. So let me fill in a couple of details. I mentioned that you were - that you left the Air Force as a commended cryptolinguist. You were a translator. So I'm going to read excerpts of the commendation. Your medal was for providing over 1,900 hours of enemy intelligence exploitation and assisting in geolocating 120 enemy combatants during 734 air missions. The citation also says, (reading) she facilitated 816 intelligence missions, 3,236 time-sensitive reports and removing more than 100 enemies from the battlefield. Furthermore, while deployed to support combatant commanders requirements, Airman Winner was appointed the lead deployment language analyst, producing 2,500 reports, aiding in 650 enemy captures, 600 enemies killed in action and identifying 900 high-value targets.

And what you were doing, you were sitting in a room in the U.S., listening in on secretly-made recordings of people who were believed to be Taliban or other terrorists and translating what you were listening to.

WINNER: That's correct. And that's about as much as we could go into for the memoir.

GROSS: You do write in the memoir - so I think I could probably repeat this - that what the citation translated to you and why has that made you feel bad about all the work that you'd done, that you helped kill a lot of human beings. You didn't feel good about that.

WINNER: I did not. I think that as my career progressed and as we learned more about what was being done under the original AUMF issued after 9/11, that a lot of this was not done in the name of national security for the United States or for everyday Americans.

GROSS: You write in your book that most of the people who you helped kill by identifying what they said were not really combatants, but they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Are you sure that that's true?

WINNER: I have no independent ways of confirming that, but in hindsight, that's definitely how it feels. I could reference a documentary by Sonia Kennebeck called "National Bird," where drone operators are talking about the lasting guilt that they have from being part of these programs and then coming back to the United States and realizing that, once again, we were not necessarily preventing the next 9/11, which is what we had signed up to do.

GROSS: Even though the work was done remotely in an office in the U.S. - you weren't in Afghanistan - you still got PTSD. Could you talk a little bit about what set it off, or what sets it off now, if you still have it? Though, you probably have more prison PTSD than military PTSD at this point.

WINNER: Definitely. I think that one of the ways that my time doing the work as a cryptologic language analyst shows is that I get very restless when I'm listening to things. So, like, if I'm in the car and just flipping through radio stations, I kind of just go one at a time at a time, and I'm just listening to one word here, one word there, one word here. And I could do that for hours, really. There's something really cathartic about it.

GROSS: I mean, being able to...

WINNER: Yeah.

GROSS: ...Stop listening 'cause you had to listen so intently for so many hours a day?

WINNER: Exactly. And just trying to, like, figure out a conversation from a word and a half before moving on to the next one. So I'll flip through commercials, like radio show commercials, and try to figure out this one's selling cars, air conditioning, cellphones, as quickly as possible. And I kind of do it very mindlessly until I have a passenger going, like, what the heck are you doing?

GROSS: So you can't say this, but I'll repeat it based on news sources, that what was leaked - what you leaked when you were a contractor at the National Security Agency was from a document that everyone reads on a kind of news site at the NSA. And it was a document about the Russians launching a cyberattack against a company that sells software related to voter registration and another attack against 122 local election officials. Do you know - and I don't know if you can answer this or not, so if you're legally not allowed to answer this, please don't. Do you know if the company that was hacked or the election officials who were hacked were ever informed about the attack until reading about the document that you leaked?

WINNER: I know for a fact that they were not informed until I was already in that county jail.

GROSS: Can I ask you how that made you feel about the fact that they were informed about being hacked through the risk that you took?

WINNER: I was very naive back then in thinking that more Americans would see that I had acted in the interest of the country and, kind of like a TV show or a movie, if you do the right thing, you'll be vindicated in the end.

GROSS: And does that count as vindication for you?

WINNER: I think vindication at that time would have been walking out of that jail, and that certainly didn't happen.

GROSS: Right. Can you speculate about why the document was so secretive at a time when Americans were arguing with each other about whether Russians did or attempted to hack the election? And if they did, then what effect did it have on the election? Or is that out of your realm of legally sanctioned speech right now?

WINNER: So I know within the National Security Agency, it was not secretive at all - everybody had seen it - and that within the culture of 2017, from the moment that Donald Trump had been inaugurated for the first time, there was a leak almost every Friday. You know, it was what was going to pop off over the weekend. And I can tell you that everybody in the office in the department that I was working in, we had seen that document and just said, yep, we're going to see that on Friday night. And we didn't.

However, I think what made my action unique was incredibly terrible timing in that that particular couple of weeks in which I had sent the document and in which the NSA and FBI were looking to confirm my identity, Comey and Trump were both saying that they were going to nail the next leaker to the wall, that they wanted their head. And then I just happened to be the very next name popping up. I was that person. I can't say anything about the subject material of the document, but I do know that one of my attorneys said that the hardest thing we were going to have to do is defending the fact that I embarrassed the government.

GROSS: So after you decided to leak the document, you mailed it to The Intercept, the journalism site known for publishing leaks. It was a five-page document. You put it in a white envelope. You hand addressed it, stamped it, put it in a mailbox. And how did you assume it would be handled by The Intercept compared to how it was handled?

WINNER: I think my first mistake was that I figured when The Intercept opened the envelope and started to read it, they would think it was important, which they did not. They had zero intention of publishing it until my arrest. And then the second thing was that...

GROSS: Well, I'm going to stop for a second. They didn't think it was important?

WINNER: No. Glenn Greenwald specifically said they were not going to publish that document. It was only relevant once Matthew Cole's friend at the NSA said that I had been arrested and that the Southern District of Georgia would give a press conference confirming my arrest and my arraignment.

GROSS: OK. So continue the story about how it was handled, as opposed to how you thought it would be handled.

WINNER: Yeah, so what I had assumed was they would receive it, immediately assume that this was something that was important, that it answered very important questions that the country was having, that it would be protected, that something as so low tech as a physical document then entering the digital space - that the scan would be manipulated, that they would just give an oral reading of it on a podcast. And that it would make the headlines in a way that I knew that the people at The Intercept, being former intelligence analysts or veterans themselves - it would be sort of redacted on its own and protected. And instead, like I said, it was put into a secured environment. However, once Matthew Cole got ahold of it, he violated The Intercept's...

GROSS: He was the reporter who was assigned the story, but he wasn't very experienced in this kind of secret leaked document.

WINNER: He was not. And I think that once he got his hands on the document, he was more interested in figuring out who had given them the document so, right off the bat, gave scans of the document to his friend at the NSA. They were on a first-name basis. He was not journalistically trying to make sure that the document was authentic. He just wanted to know if they had seen it. Was it real? Where do you think it came from? And that was when his friend asked, like, where did you get this from? And Matthew Cole had actually sent him a photograph of the envelope itself with the Georgia postage stamp on it.

GROSS: And then more evidence was, the printer that you used at the NSA had markings on it that were on the pages that were photographed and sent to the contact at the NSA.

WINNER: Exactly. They knew it had been printed 'cause there was a very visible crease in the center of the document, which pretty much, I guess, any other journalist would have known, like, let's disguise that a bit better. But then also, yes, the printer itself did have some sort of digital watermark that identified the exact printer it had come out of.

GROSS: Two FBI agents came to your home with a search warrant.

WINNER: Eleven.

GROSS: Oh, 11, but just two interrogated you.

WINNER: Yes.

GROSS: OK. So they came to your door with a search warrant. How did they introduce themselves or describe the purpose of their visit?

WINNER: So agent Garrick and agent Taylor came in and parked directly behind me when I was coming back with groceries. They did introduce themselves. They briefly waved the warrant and showed me their badges and said they were looking for classified documents.

GROSS: And how did you interpret that?

WINNER: Internally, I was breathing a small sigh of relief because I did not, at the time, possess any classified documents, either in physical or digital form. So I thought, I think they know what I had done, but they're going to search my house, and then I can figure it out from here.

GROSS: We have to take a short break here, so let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is Reality Winner. Her new memoir is titled "I Am Not Your Enemy." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF ROBBEN FORD AND BILL EVANS' "CATCH A RIDE")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Reality Winner. Her new memoir is titled, "I Am Not Your Enemy." She was convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917 for leaking a document in 2017 that revealed Russia had launched cyberattacks against the American election system. At the time, she was an NSA contractor who had served in the Air Force and was a decorated cryptolinguist.

You were arrested, charged and convicted under the 1917 Espionage Act, and that act was signed by Congress after U.S. entered World War I. The act criminalized the publication or distribution of information that could harm or hinder U.S. armed forces, as well as of false reports or false statements intended to promote America's enemies, and it empowered the postmaster general to seize mail that it judged to fall within these categories. Now, the law was written before documents were categorized and classified as, like, secret or top secret. The law only refers to national defense information, which is a very imprecise kind of categorization. So after you learned that you were being charged under the Espionage Act, you didn't think the document that you leaked fell under the categories that the act describes. Why not?

WINNER: So the legal definition of national defense information is what I call intentionally vague and menacing and, certainly after 9/11, could be used to describe a piece of toilet paper. It was so wide and broad in its use that by the time I was charged under 793(e) of the Espionage Act, they did not have to necessarily justify or go into great detail as to why that particular document was national defense information. I certainly think it'd be more understandable if it was, like, national security. But defense does imply troop movements, you know, submarine locations, which was something that my legal team definitely tried to place emphasis on in our criminal defense of my conduct in trying to say, is the prosecution adequately defining this document under national defense information?

I do know that when I was talking to agent Garrick in the, quote-unquote, "interrogation," that I did say I was worried about sources and methods being compromised. But the problem with that particular statute under which I was charged, it is not the government's burden of proof to actually show a judge or a jury that I even jeopardized national security and that actual tangible, recordable harm was done to sources and methods. And that was really what we were hanging on to as far as, like, a defense.

We had filed 41 subpoenas trying to get more information about what was going on in the NSA operations around the time of the leak to really try to make them show their hands - that I didn't jeopardize anything. And if no damage is done, how exactly is this a release of national defense information? Of course, all of those subpoenas, except for one, were shot down. And to this day, I think with the exception of the 31 or 33 counts that President Trump was charged under, there really haven't been many indictments that go far out of their way to provide a waterproof or watertight legal definition of what national defense information is in regards to classified information.

GROSS: You mentioned Trump. Trump was charged with 31 counts under the Espionage Act, but special prosecutor Jack Smith dropped the case after Trump was reelected, citing Department of Justice policy not to prosecute a standing president. You thought that the document you leaked was also out of date. What made you think that?

WINNER: What made me think that is that prior to the inauguration of Donald Trump, the Obama administration had given out some intelligence notices that were unclassified that had said as much. They just - they were discreetly published, and they weren't sexy enough to catch anybody's eye. But that also, if I leaked what I leaked in May for a presidential election that happened in November, it's kind of weird to think that the systems that I allegedly compromised were still in use. It just felt like, you know, it's been eight months. This is probably obsolete. Like, how could it actually cause any damage at this point?

GROSS: Well, we have to take another break here. So let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is Reality Winner, and her new memoir is called "I Am Not Your Enemy." We'll be back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF AARON PARKS' "SMALL PLANET")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Reality Winner. Her new memoir is titled "I Am Not Your Enemy." She was convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917 for leaking a document in 2017 that revealed Russia had launched cyberattacks against the American election system. At the time, she was an NSA contractor who had served in the Air Force and was a decorated crypto linguist.

Can you describe the conditions at the county jail that you were sent to before you were sent to a federal prison?

WINNER: The conditions of that county jail in Lincoln County, Georgia, were abhorrent. To say that I had been sheltered and privileged and naive before that, I did not ever imagine that conditions like that would be considered normal or even good for any American in custody. And I was assured several times over that I was being treated the best and that that was the most comfortable county jail in the area. I was given this plastic mat with this crumpled plastic wool falling out of it. It was held together with, like, duct tape. That was my mat. And all of the bedsheets looked like they were, like, handmade by somebody who didn't know how to sew, just like pieces of brown fabric with an elastic edge. Nothing fit the mats.

The cell was one room for the women. We only had one cell block for every type of woman that was going to be sent to this county jail. It was the smallest cell block in the entire jail. You walked in, there was, like, a phone booth area. It had two locked doors in it in case they needed to further restrict access to the phone. There was one sink, a picnic table that was covered in rust in the center of the room, a toilet that was about 3 feet away from that picnic table that we were supposed to sit and eat at, and a shower directly by the toilet with a black mold-crusted shower curtain over it.

There was something so dystopian about it. We were actually allowed to construct a laundry line kind of separating the shower from the rest of the cell block. And we had hung, like, bedsheets over it so you could actually stand in front of the shower and change without your clothes touching the mold of the shower. Likewise, the toilet had a brown bedsheet draped over it so that you didn't have to eat at the table and make eye contact with somebody using the toilet. And then just on the other side of the room where all the bunks kind of pressed against the wall, I mean, just the filth. We were given cleaning supplies in the morning and night, but there was just no way to clean that.

GROSS: How many women were in the cell?

WINNER: At the time I was arrested, there was one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. There were seven other women in there with me. It could fluctuate. I think the best we ever got it down to was four. And then the worst would be, like, a party weekend where a lot of people got brought in. And we would go up to, like, 13 people.

GROSS: So you were transferred to federal prison in Carswell, Texas. It had a relatively good reputation. It had a gym. What were the conditions like there?

WINNER: My first week there, I felt like I was at Harvard. I couldn't believe how big the compound was. It was two buildings and a very small rec center with a concrete track. But I had been...

GROSS: So that's what I described as the gym?

WINNER: Yes, yes. And my sensory deprivation of 15, 16 months only existing in one room, I just remember walking around Carswell and thinking, I'm going to get lost here every single day. It's just so big.

GROSS: So the COVID lockdown happened while you were in federal prison in Carswell, Texas. And that was really bad news for you and the other inmates. In addition to the fact that you got COVID twice, the prison was under a lockdown, so you couldn't do the things that were your salvation while you were in prison. Can you briefly describe all the things that you couldn't do and the things that you were confined to?

WINNER: We were confined to our cells, which did not have restrooms. So we had to ask 24/7, seven days a week to go use the restroom from another adult. We were no longer allowed to go outside, and our movements were controlled around the unit. We couldn't just shower when we wanted to shower or go use the phones. As they eased up, we were still not allowed outside of the unit. And to pick on me in particular, they made all exercise not allowed for everybody.

GROSS: And so as an exercise teacher, and as somebody who compulsively exercised, like, there goes your life.

WINNER: When I was no longer allowed to exercise, that was where the self-destructiveness started.

GROSS: So you said the only thing that kept you from taking your life was knowing that your mother was sacrificing so much of her life to help you and to be there for you. But still, you were in a very self-destructive frame of mind. When you had COVID, did you get medical help? I mean, where did you stay? Was there an isolation unit? Did you stay in your cell?

WINNER: I was one of the last people in the unit to show COVID symptoms. We were the isolation unit. However, it could always get worse. If you were in that unit and you confessed to having COVID or you said you were sick, they would pull you out and put you in an even worse position, where you were - I heard horror stories. Ten women in one room sleeping on the floor. They would kick the food at them to avoid interacting with them. The nurses didn't have any type of COVID treatments for them, so they were just giving them psych pills and pain pills to keep them quiet all day. There was no medical interventions for COVID in that federal prison for anybody.

GROSS: Did a lot of women die?

WINNER: We had some of the highest - I mean, we were a medical prison, but we had some of the highest mortality rates. And we had the very first COVID death of any federal inmate. Andrea Circle Bear passed away from COVID in April 2020.

GROSS: And then it sounds like you were punished, like, all the women in the prison were punished after George Floyd was murdered, and there were protests about the police around the country. And you think that the prison guards treated the prisoners as if they were responsible or they were participating in these anti-police protests. What are some of the things that happened that you felt were punitive?

WINNER: So about a week after George Floyd was murdered in front of the whole world, they announced a lockdown. We did not understand at first because we were not rioting, and it wasn't for a couple days that we understood that every federal prison in the country was put on lockdown. And again, we could not understand why. If the people in the uniforms were the murderers and we were not rioting, why were we being punished? I found out by listening to NPR about a week later that all Bureau of Prisons' riot taskforce agents were sent out onto the streets to control civilian riotings, and that had pushed the Bureau of Prisons into a critical manning situation. And so we had to go on lockdown as a result.

GROSS: Your frame of mind had gotten so bad. You were so depressed and so angry that at some point, you started taking prescription pills to get high. A lot of people had these pills in prison. You were able to get them, and you became addicted to them, but you managed to get off of them before you were released. So initially, they made you feel better, but then they made you feel worse.

WINNER: When I started using drugs, I was in a state of mind where I was getting increasingly disruptive. I was trying to start riots on the daily, screaming at officers. And the people around me were like, yo, Winner, like, you need to take something. And a friend of mine shared what we had called bumble bees (ph), and that had progressed to taking something called K2, which was a synthetic THC that was sprayed on paper and snuck in or mailed in. And the scary thing happened was when I was able to do that but balance it with working out secretly. But once I was actually able to work out and have access to fresh food again, once most of the lockdowns were over, I was able to return to my old self. Also, a lot of the drug busts were getting very close to my source for the drugs. And so I kind of had, like, a moment of getting scared straight.

GROSS: Well, we have to take another break here. So let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is Reality Winner. Her new memoir is titled "I Am Not Your Enemy." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF SOLANGE SONG, "WEARY")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Reality Winner. Her new memoir is called "I Am Not Your Enemy." She was convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917 for leaking a document in 2017 that revealed Russia had launched cyberattacks against the American election system. At the time, she was an NSA contractor who had served in the Air Force and was a decorated Air Force cryptolinguist.

So once you got out and you got home, you were released to your parents' custody initially, right?

WINNER: I was still in prison custody, but I was authorized to stay at my parents' address.

GROSS: And you're write that you were afraid to sleep alone at night. You were afraid to go out alone at night. That surprised me, only because you seem like such a brave person and such an outspoken person and such a strong person. I mean, you could probably take out any assaulter, (laughter) you know? So why do you think you were afraid to, like, sleep alone at night or, you know, be outside alone at night?

WINNER: For the first time in four years, I had actually seen what a dark room looked like.

GROSS: Oh, they don't turn off the lights at night?

WINNER: Never, no. So I didn't know what darkness was or even being outside - where we live, it's very rural - to be outside where it wasn't well lit. I had never been alone in a room before except - with the exception of solitary confinement, but that wasn't really alone. So I was just so terrified all the time. Every - I could not feel at ease in any way, shape or form. I never expected that would be something that I would feel.

GROSS: Feeling not free once you were kind of freed? Not completely freed, but kind of?

WINNER: Yeah, nobody tells you that once you get out of prison, life just gets harder.

GROSS: You write that you took out a lot of your anger on your mother, which also surprised me because your mother had given you so much, and you credit her with saving your life and enabling you to survive the years of incarceration. Why do you think you were angry at your mother and taking out your anger at her? And what kinds of things would set you off?

WINNER: A very large part of my anger at my mother was feeling like my relationship to Carlos (ph), who was someone that I could be my prison self with, was going to be jeopardized. And then another thing that...

GROSS: He was your boyfriend who you then briefly married.

WINNER: Right. Yes, Carlos was that mistake. I felt like the one thing that was giving me joy was threatened by her. I just thought that she didn't want him there. I mean, I knew she didn't want him there. The biggest point of contention between my mother and I was the status of my notoriety and the fact that she had been out for four years doing interviews about me, and that her response was important and that she felt obligated to tell her Twitter following updates about me while the halfway house was saying, if your presence is detected on social media, or if we feel like you're communicating on social media in any way or that we feel like you're in danger, we will take you back into custody. And my mother had wanted to tweet that I was home. And I said that they would take me back into custody if people knew I was at that home address. And she said that she wanted to be truthful to her following. And I just felt so offended. Like, the only reason why you had that following was to support me. And I'm sitting right here in front of you, and you care more about them than me. And she would say things like, well, my reaction matters, and I want to express myself. And I said, this isn't another [expletive] interview. Nobody's asking you, Billie Winner-Davis, Reality's mother, how you feel right now. I'm having a meltdown, you know? I felt like while I was at my most vulnerable, she was still processing things through being interviewed about me instead of being my mom. And, you know, our relationship is still on the mend.

GROSS: Did she end up doing social media about you being home?

WINNER: She waited a week, but only after I got an attorney involved.

GROSS: So were you in jeopardy because of that at any point?

WINNER: No. But the halfway house did threaten at every possible opportunity that if they felt like I was doing interviews or that I was making public statements, that I would be taken back into custody.

GROSS: So we're running out of time, and there's so much more I want to ask you about. So let me briefly ask you, what was being famous and being all over the media like when you were in prison in terms of how other prisoners treated you and how the guards and the wardens treated you?

WINNER: Traumatic. I still have a very physical response. I don't watch or read about myself because of the double layer of seeing myself on TV, but then also having to face accusations or misunderstandings by the people around me. People literally thought I was in the Russian military at times.

GROSS: Wow. But you got a lot of mail from people who really supported you and from people who wished you horrible things and called you horrible things. Was there any reassurance in getting all the positive mail?

WINNER: The positive mail kept me going. I also had a network where I could just ask for any book I wanted, and it would show up. So in addition to getting every single book I heard you talk about on FRESH AIR for four years.

GROSS: Oh, really?

WINNER: (Laughter) I was basically the library for everybody in the unit. They would give me their requests, and people's books would show up for them.

GROSS: That's fantastic that you were able to get books. And thank you for letting me know I played a small - that our show played some part in that. And what are you doing now? I know that you're teaching CrossFit, right?

WINNER: Yes, I'm a Level 2 CrossFit coach. And I'm currently going to Texas A&M University Kingsville in the veterinary technology program.

GROSS: And as a convicted felon, are you allowed to be licensed?

WINNER: I am not. We did have to send attorneys for permission to at least take the state licensing test so that I could help my school out with, like, passing rates. But I will never be a licensed vet tech.

GROSS: I know you've had a lot of pets in your time. Do you have a lot of pets now?

WINNER: We just got up to eight dogs.

GROSS: That's a lot.

WINNER: Four of them are fosters, I'm working on getting them shipped out and to their forever homes.

GROSS: OK.

WINNER: But I have my four dogs and three cats.

GROSS: Are you still living with your parents?

WINNER: I am living in my parents' home. And my parents have had the opportunity to move to North Carolina to be closer to my sister and their grandbaby.

GROSS: Well, good luck to you. And I hope having studied, you know, studying being a vet tech helps you with all your animals. I'm sure it will. Thank you very much for coming to FRESH AIR. I really appreciate it.

WINNER: Thank you so much for having me. It's been an honor.

GROSS: Reality Winner's new memoir is called "I Am Not Your Enemy." This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF TOMMASO AND RAVA QUARTET'S, "L'AVVENTURA")

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. "Mussolini: Son Of The Century," is a new eight-part TV series that chronicles the ferocious rise of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Directed by Joe Wright, who made his name with the Keira Knightley "Pride & Prejudice" film, this series is rolling out one episode per week on the streaming service MUBI. Our critic-at-large John Powers has seen the first four episodes. He says that while the show is a bit too eager to make Mussolini entertaining, the story it tells couldn't be any more timely.

JOHN POWERS, BYLINE: We live in an era dominated by populist strongmen. Some elected, some crookedly elected, some who just seized power. Skeptical of liberal democracy, this breed of leader celebrates national pride, restless activity, old-school masculinity and, of course, themselves. The man who set the template for all this was Benito Mussolini, the creator of fascism who became Italy's prime minister in 1922, a full 12 years before Hitler took over Germany, and ruled until 1943. His rise is the subject of "Mussolini: Son Of The Century," a darkly bouncy historical drama on the streaming service MUBI.

Based on a teeming 800-page novel by Antonio Scurati, this eight-part series follows Mussolini from his founding of the Fasci Italiani movement until he assumes dictatorial powers in 1925. Shot in Italian by the British filmmaker Joe Wright, who made the mythologizing Churchill film "Darkest Hour," "Son Of The Century" may leave you reeling from all its present-day resonances. When we first meet Mussolini, superbly played by Luca Marinelli, he's the charismatic 35-year-old editor of a populist newspaper. I'm like an animal, he boasts, I can smell the times ahead.

A one-time socialist, he's now a right-wing rabble-rouser whose early acolytes are disaffected World War I vets and an assortment of thugs who just like beating people up. They become his notorious Blackshirts. Although sometimes laughable, Il Duce, as he was known, is a master of political theater.

We watch him play on resentments against the ruling elite and use his thugs to intimidate and murder the political opposition. He deliberately stokes chaos, fear and hatred so he can offer fascism as the cure. Along the way, he lies, sells out his allies and changes policies on a dime if it helps him. His tactic is to feed the public imagination by always doing something. Our only doctrine, he says, is action.

He's no more idealistic in his private life. Bored senseless by domesticity, he ignores his wife, Rachele, and his kids, but he does have time for his mistress, Margherita Sarfatti, a cultured Jewish socialite who dubs him my savage. Rightly so. When Il Duce needs an emotional pick-me-up, he simply pushes some young woman against a door and has his way with her. Fascism isn't big on foreplay.

Mussolini's ascent is such an epic story that one wonders - what's the best way to tell it? In his painstakingly researched historical novel, Scurati employs a panoramic style that hopscotches between documents, news articles and scads of major characters, not just Mussolini. When he does take us inside Il Duce's thoughts and feelings, Scurati is careful not to make him larger than life. His Mussolini is only part of a bigger picture. Scurati shows the foolishness of the ruling elite, which makes the classic mistake of asking the fox into the henhouse and thinking they can control it. He tracks the ineptitude of the Italian left, which outnumbered the fascists by millions, but dithered, bickered and froze in history's headlights.

In contrast, the TV series, perhaps by necessity, has simplified everything radically. It has little time to explore questions of social class, Mussolini's political enemies or even complex events. And perhaps seduced by Mussolini's potential as a vivid TV character, Wright doesn't keep Scurati's cautious distance. Instead, his Il Duce talks to us directly like "Richard III," or more accurately, like Kevin Spacey's Frank Underwood in "House of Cards," which is to say like a roguish pop culture villain, not a murderous dictator. We see things from his point of view. Mussolini prized emotion over reason, and the series unfolds as if it were his fever dream. Not a little vainglorious himself, Wright keeps trying to wow us with his style and his audacity, even tossing in an embarrassingly explicit swipe at Donald Trump along the way.

Now, to be fair, Wright's flashy approach does suit Mussolini's flashy character. And there's no denying that "Son Of The Century" pulls you along and gets you thinking about how dictatorships happen. It's helped by Marinelli's magnetic, shape-shifting performance. He gives us not only the absurd, chin-jutting bully we know from old newsreels, but the sometimes charming politician who was canny enough to get millions of people to believe in him - for a while, anyway. Mussolini did, of course, wind up with his corpse being hanged upside down from the roof of a gas station in Milan. But that didn't happen until 1945, 20 years after the events we've been watching. In "Son Of The Century," the bad guy wins, and I can imagine Il Duce really enjoying this series.

GROSS: John Powers reviewed the new series "Mussolini: Son Of The Century." It's streaming on MUBI. If you'd like to catch up on FRESH AIR interviews you missed, like this week's with bluegrass guitarist and singer Billy Strings or Rob Reiner, who directed the new sequel to his film, "This Is Spinal Tap," or Richard Hasen about new threats to voting rights, check out our podcast. You'll find lots of FRESH AIR interviews. And to find out what's happening behind the scenes of our show and get our producers' recommendations for what to watch, read and listen to, subscribe to our free newsletter at whyy.org/freshair.

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GROSS: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our engineer today is Adam Staniszewski. Our managing producer is Sam Briger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Susan Nyakundi and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson. Thea Chaloner directed today's show. Our co-host is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.

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