Former Marine Paul Whelan said he was devastated when a Biden administration official told him WNBA basketball star Brittney Griner was being released from Russian detention after nine months and he was not.
In his first interview with NBC News since returning to the U.S., Whelan, who had been imprisoned in Russia for more than five years by the time of his release, said “it was devastating.”
As the Homeland Security official told him the news over the phone, he realized the U.S. had given up its negotiating position. The official told him that to free Griner, the U.S. had traded convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s price for releasing the celebrity athlete. Whelan responded, “OK, well, what are you going to do next? What’s next?”
Immediately after that phone call, Whelan said he went down to the prison control room, surrounded by officers from Russia’s FSB security agency who were listening in, to call his parents and tell them the devastating news. He wanted to reassure them the U.S. would leave no stone unturned to get him back.
“That was difficult,” he said. “I had not lost confidence that they would get me back, but I wasn’t sure when they would get me back.”
Whelan was left behind again when another former Marine, Trevor Reed, was released in April 2022 in a prisoner swap for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot convicted in the U.S. for drug smuggling. Reed had served nearly three years in a labor camp.
During the ordeal, Whelan said he kept his spirits up by singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” every morning for five long years, a ritual he still does now that he is home in Michigan.
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Whelan, 54, was released in August in one of the biggest prisoner swaps since the Cold War, an exchange that also sprung Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and two other journalists: Vladimir Kara-Murza, a dual Russian British national critical of the Kremlin, and Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian American reporter with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Of the four, Whelan had been held the longest by the Russians. He was arrested in 2018 after attending a wedding in Moscow and convicted of espionage, a charge he has steadfastly and repeatedly denied and that Secretary of State Antony Blinken called a “sham."
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Born in Canada to British parents and a naturalized U.S. citizen, Whelan was a police officer in Michigan before he enlisted in the Marines in 1994. He wound up serving multiple tours in Iraq, according to David Whelan, his twin brother.
Whelan said that when agents from the FSB, the Russian intelligence agency that was once called the KGB, burst into his hotel room in 2018 and arrested him, he thought it was a joke. He soon realized it wasn’t when they transported him to the infamous Lefortovo prison and began pressing him to confess to a crime he did not commit.
“They said, ‘If you confess we can get this over with,’” Whelan said. “It was a sham.”
When he refused, Whelan said he was placed in a cell where the lights were left on around the clock. “It’s a mild form of torture,” he said.
Whelan said the FSB pressed him to confess five more times and each time he refused. After he was sentenced to 16 years of forced labor, the Russian trial judge said he would probably be released in two weeks. Whelan said he had no inkling that it would stretch on for years.
Whelan said he obtained a “burner phone” that he used to stay in touch with a State Department representative and that FSB agents regularly visited him at the labor camp to make sure he was alive.
He said the guards didn’t physically abuse him but that they were corrupt and the prisoners had to grease their palms to have palatable food shipped into the prison from outside.
“Russian food, in general, is not great,” Whelan said. “The prison food is even worse.”
They subsisted, Whelan said, on tea, bread, watery soup, “the kind of fish only Russians eat. It was pretty horrible,” he said.
Whelan said what happened to him underscores the need for tough diplomacy with leaders of “rogue nations” like Putin.
“Our president, he needs to be strong, she needs to be strong,” Whelan, 54, said as the presidential election between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump was in its final weeks.
The only way the U.S. will be rid of Putin is if he suffers “a heart attack,” Whelan said.
Asked about Trump’s claim that if re-elected he would be able to get U.S. prisoners released from Russia because of his good relationship with Putin, Whelan replied, “Any president will have a hard time dealing with a rogue leader like Putin.”
While they were supposed to be isolated from the world, Whelan said he and his fellow inmates quickly found out when Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died in prison earlier this year.
“We were told that he had died of natural causes,” Whelan said. “So when the Russians say natural causes, they mean either somebody whacked the guy or he committed suicide, just like in Moscow when people fall out of windows.”
When asked if he ever thought of ending his own life, Whelan said, “No, no. I was fighting too much,” he said. “I wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction of me committing suicide. Every day I tried to stick it to them.”
Whelan said at one point he came down with what he thinks was Covid and was deathly ill for two weeks. But the lowest point for him, psychologically, was when he learned that Flora, his 15-year-old golden retriever back home in Michigan, had died.
“That meant when I got home it would be a different home from when I left,” he said.
Whelan said he realized that his ordeal might be coming to an end in July when two FSB agents showed up at the labor camp and told him to fill out and sign a request for a pardon. After checking with his State Department contact, he said he complied and was taken to a Moscow prison, where he was placed in solitary confinement for five days.
Then, on Aug. 1, Whelan said he was placed on a plane and, accompanied by an FSB “minder,” flown to Turkey. There, waiting on the tarmac, he saw Gershkovich.
“We walked off the plane and got on a bus,” Whelan said.
The FSB minder soon left and Whelan said the “friendly faces” of CIA agents climbing aboard was confirmation for him that they were going home to the U.S.
“I didn’t realize we were flying to [Joint Base] Andrews and were going to see the president,” said Whelan, who added that he suddenly felt self-conscious because he had not showered or shaved in two weeks and his clothes were filthy.
“You were held the longest, you get off the plane first,” Whelan said he was told.
Weak and malnourished, he said as he disembarked his primary thought was, “I don’t want to fall down those steps.”
He said he was touched when Biden took the flag pin he’d worn on his lapel and pinned it on his prison clothes. Whelan was wearing it on his own suit jacket when he sat down with Andrea Mitchell and said he’ll “keep it clean and keep it forever.”
Asked how he was readjusting to regular life, Whelan said he has some minor medical and dental issues to deal with. He said he thinks he’s suffering from lingering post-traumatic stress disorder. And while people, especially in his hometown of Manchester, Michigan, have helped him get back on his feet, he said he’s worried he might not be able to find another job.
“At this age, it’s difficult,” he said. “I might have to find something new, reinvent myself.”
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