'I was woken up every two hours': Paul Whelan tells of horrors he experienced in Russian prison
Paul Whelan, a Marine veteran, was sentenced by a Russian court to 16 years in prison and served two years in a penal colony in Mordovia. Whelan was arrested in 2018 on espionage charges that the United States considered trumped up. Released on August 1, the American citizen gave his first interview to the Face the Nation program. The most interesting moments of the interview are written about CBS News и CNN.
Photo: Andrey Lukovskii | Dreamstime.com
In December 2022, Paul Whelan sat in a factory in a Russian labor camp in Mordovia, sewing buttons and buttonholes onto winter coats.
He was summoned to the warden’s office. He hoped someone from the U.S. government would call to tell him they had finally secured his release. Instead, the U.S. official told him, it was women’s basketball star Brittney Griner who was going home. Russia had agreed to release her in exchange for Viktor Bout, a convicted arms dealer known as the Merchant of Death.
On the subject: Russia and the United States conducted a large-scale prisoner exchange: Ilya Yashin, Evan Gershkovich, Paul Whelan and others were released
"There is no one to exchange"
"I asked him point blank, 'Who else have you got to swap?' And he said, 'Nobody,'" Whelan recalls of the phone call. "'How are you going to get me back now?' I asked. And he said, 'Well, we'll meet again tomorrow to discuss it.'"
The Marine veteran was serving a 16-year prison sentence after Russia arrested him in 2018 on espionage charges the U.S. deemed trumped up. By then, Washington and Moscow had swapped Trevor Reed, a Marine veteran who had been held in Russia since 2019, for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot convicted of drug smuggling in the U.S.
Whelan, who the State Department has determined to be illegally detained, was awaiting release along with Reed, whose health was deteriorating. He said he learned of his exclusion from the swap over the radio while working at a factory.
“I sat there trying to process what I had just heard in Russian,” he recalled. “All I could do was just keep working.”
The company abandoned its employee to his fate
Whelan was in Moscow for a friend’s wedding in December 2018, where he was arrested. Footage of his arrest released by Russian state media shows Whelan in the bathroom of his hotel room, talking to an acquaintance who hands him a flash drive minutes before he was detained by FSB agents. Whelan declined to say more about the acquaintance, but believes he was wrongly targeted.
"I did nothing. I did not commit espionage," he assured.
At the time, Whelan, who holds U.S., Canadian, Irish and British citizenship, was the head of security at auto parts supplier BorgWarner. The company fired him about a year after his arrest.
“If you can call the employer’s actions un-American, they were un-American,” he said. “What really bothered me was not the loss of my job, but the fact that BorgWarner continued to do business in Russia while I was incarcerated there. They refused to cooperate with the U.S. government. They refused to cooperate with the people who were trying to help me. … They did nothing to support me or my family.”
CBS News reached out to BorgWarner for comment on Whelan’s comments. The company referred to its August statement, when Whelan was released, that claimed his December 2018 trip to Russia was personal, not business-related. Whelan, for his part, said the company paid for his visa to enter the country and that he was sending work emails and taking work phone calls on the day of his arrest.
He said that shortly after his arrest, FSB agents told him not to do “anything rash” and that he “shouldn’t worry” because it was all part of Russia’s plan to swap Yaroshenko, Bout and Maria Butina, a Russian agent who had been trying to infiltrate conservative American political circles.
Russia secured the release of all three by the end of 2022.
Negotiations have been at a standstill for several years
Meanwhile, Whelan's family became increasingly concerned about his well-being.
"How can you continue to live day after day knowing that your government has twice failed to free you from a foreign prison? I cannot imagine that he retains any hope that the government will negotiate for his release," his twin brother David Whelan wrote in an email to reporters on December 8, 2022.
With release negotiations stalled for years, Whelan said it really drove him crazy.
He spent the first two years of his imprisonment in Moscow's notorious Lefortovo prison, where the light in his cell was kept on 24 hours a day. At the labor camp, guards woke him up every two hours every night for four years.
“Today, I still find it difficult to sleep for six to eight hours straight,” he admitted.
"We kept in touch with Reed through other inmates."
The Mordovian labor camp housed mostly prisoners from Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, Whelan said, describing his cellmates as a “close-knit family.” They were much younger than Whelan, now 54, and helped him figure out how to send messages to his fellow inmate Reed over the prison’s communications network before he was released.
"Having him there gave me strength and helped me through the trials," Whelan said. "I think knowing about me helped him, too."
Give a security guard a pack of cigarettes and he'll turn a blind eye to everything.
The prisoners had secret mobile phones that allowed them to communicate with fellow inmates from their camp who had enlisted in the war against Ukraine and were sent to the front lines.
Whelan said prison guards turned a blind eye: "A Russian guard gets $300-$400 a month. You give him a carton of cigarettes and he can do pretty much whatever he wants."
Whelan says he passed on information he received from fellow prisoners fighting in Ukraine to Western officials.
"The prisoners from the camp who went to the front line had communications. And they communicated with us. And I passed their messages to four governments," Whelan said, referring to the United States, Britain, Canada and Ireland - the four countries of which he is a citizen.
450 prisoners recruited for war with Ukraine
Whelan said 450 prisoners from his camp, mostly young Tajiks, Uzbeks, Turkmens and Kyrgyz, went to fight in Ukraine as recruited mercenaries. The Wagner Group alone recruited tens of thousands of prisoners from prisons across Russia.
“There were 450 people who left my camp,” Whelan said. “I knew them all. Some of them are dead, some of them have no arms or legs. They all have post-traumatic stress. They’ve been through traumatic experiences. They’ve been used on the front lines, walking through minefields. They’ve been used as cannon fodder. They’ve been sent out to meet patrols to try to draw enemy fire. That’s what Russia is doing to these people. And they’re all young. Putin is destroying the younger generation.”
The German Chancellor helped achieve the exchange
When Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkowitz was arrested on trumped-up espionage charges in March 2023, Whelan and his family worried again that he would be forgotten. His family has been pressing the Biden administration to do something about his release. Whelan himself has called reporters to express his disappointment in Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the president’s hostage envoy, Roger Carstens.
Carstens said his conversation with Whelan after Brittany Greiner's release was "one of the most difficult phone calls" he's ever had.
It took months of painstaking negotiations through diplomatic and intelligence channels to reach a final agreement that would free both Whelan and Gershkovich. The deal depended on President Biden convincing German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to release convicted FSB assassin Vadim Krasikov.
On August 1, in one of the largest prisoner swaps since the end of the Cold War, Russia released 16 prisoners, including political prisoners linked to the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny, while Western countries released eight Russians, including Krasikov. Russian-American radio journalist Alsu Kurmasheva and opposition politician and journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza were released along with Whelan and Gershkovich.
During Biden's visit to Berlin on October 18, he personally thanked the German chancellor for helping to free the illegally detained Americans.
"I didn't expect to see the White Cliffs of Dover"
Whelan said he was held in solitary confinement for five days before his release. He did not believe he was going home until the small CIA plane carrying him and the other freed men flew over the English Channel.
"I didn't expect to see the White Cliffs of Dover, but I saw them," he admitted, tears streaming down his face.
“You know, during the war they were the wayfinding marker for Spitfire pilots,” he explained, referring to the rocks being a prominent marker on the return route of British fighters during World War II. “For me, Evan and Alsu, it was the wayfinding marker for the way home to the United States.”
Paul Whelan didn’t know Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris would be waiting for him on the tarmac when they landed just before midnight at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. Dressed in the unwashed clothes he brought to Russia in 2018 and now too big for him, Whelan was the first to step off the plane from Ankara, where the exchange took place.
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"It was an unforgettable moment"
"They told me I could go first because they had held me the longest," he said. "Imagine, you see the ramp coming down and the president and vice president are standing at the bottom."
Whelan walked down a short ramp and saluted President Biden. He spoke briefly with the president and vice president, then walked over to his sister, Elizabeth Whelan, who has come to Washington more than 20 times to push the government to act. Biden later removed an American flag pin from his lapel and pinned it to Whelan’s shirt.
While Whelan waited to travel to San Antonio, Texas, for a medical, the Paris Olympics were broadcast on television in the VIP lounge at Joint Base Andrews.
"Then I saw Brittney Griner on TV," Whelan said.
Griner won her third consecutive Olympic gold medal at the Olympics. Since her release, she has spoken publicly about her experiences, expressing support for other Americans detained in Russia and focusing on the fate of Paul Whelan. Her story has drawn attention to the plight of U.S. citizens imprisoned in Russian prisons.
"It was an amazing, unforgettable moment!" concluded Paul Whelan.
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