WASHINGTON — In December 2022, Paul Whelan was adding buttons and buttonholes to his winter coats at a factory in a Russian forced labor camp in Mordovia, more than seven hours east of Moscow.
Mr. Whelan was summoned to the warden’s office, expecting someone from the U.S. government to call him and tell him he had finally secured his freedom, he said in his first interview since his release. He told The Nation. complex prisoner exchange In August. Instead, U.S. officials told him it was a women’s basketball star. Brittney Greiner was returning home.. Russia had agreed to release her in exchange for Viktor Bout, a convicted arms dealer nicknamed “.”merchant of death. ”
“I asked him straight up, so what else do we need to trade? I said, ‘Nothing,'” Whelan said by phone. I remembered the conversation we had. “How are you going to get me back? And he said, ‘Well, we’re going to get together again tomorrow and talk about it.’
“You know what you did here,” Whelan reportedly told authorities. “There’s no one to do business with. They don’t want anyone else. And he said, ‘Yes, yes, I know.’
Two years have passed since the Marine Corps veteran was sentenced to 16 years in prison after being arrested by Russia in 2018 on trumped-up charges of espionage by the United States. By then, Washington and Moscow had switched places. trevor reeda retired Marine who had been detained in Russia since 2019 on suspicion of Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot convicted of drug smuggling in the United States. Russia had detained Greiner in February 2022.
Mr. Whelan, who the U.S. State Department ruled was unlawfully detained, had expected to be released along with Mr. Reed, whose health has deteriorated. He said he learned over the radio that he had been excluded from the deal while working at the factory.
“All I could do was sit and try to understand what I had just heard in Russian,” he says. “All I could do was keep working.”
Whelan was in Moscow for a friend’s wedding in December 2018 when he was arrested. Arrest footage released by Russian state media shows Whelan talking with an acquaintance in the bathroom of his hotel room, who hands him a flash drive just before agents of the Russian intelligence agency, the FSB, take him into custody. Ta. Whelan would not give details about the acquaintance, but believes he was targeted.
“I wasn’t doing anything. I wasn’t spying,” he said.
Mr. Whelan, a citizen of the United States, Canada, Ireland and the United Kingdom, was at the time global head of security for auto parts supplier BorgWarner. The company fired him about a year after being detained.
“If you can call the employer’s conduct un-American, it was un-American,” he said. “What really bothered me was not the loss of my job, but the fact that BorgWarner continued to operate in Russia while I was a prisoner of war there. They refused to cooperate with the U.S. government. They did nothing to help me or my family.”
CBS News has reached out to BorgWarner for comment on Whelan’s remarks. The company pointed to Whelan’s August statement upon his release, in which he claimed his December 2018 trip to Russia was personal and not business-related. Whelan told CBS News that his company paid for his immigration visa and that he was sending work emails and fielding work-related calls on the day of his arrest.
Mr Whelan said that immediately after his arrest, FSB officers told him not to do anything rash and told him there was no need to worry. Because this was all part of Russia’s plot to capture Mr. Yaroshenko, Mr. Bout, and Russian official Maria Butina. Infiltrating conservative American politics.
Russia had secured the release of all three after Butina was sentenced to prison in 2019 and expelled from the United States, and two prisoner exchanges were held in 2022.
Meanwhile, Whelan’s family became increasingly concerned about his safety.
“How do you continue to live every day when you know that the government has twice failed to free you from a foreign prison? If he has any hope that the government will negotiate your freedom at this point? I can’t imagine that,” his twin brother, David Whelan, wrote in an email to reporters on Dec. 8, 2022.
“That bothered me,” Whelan said, as negotiations for his release stalled for years.
For the first two years of Whelan’s detention, he was held in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison, where the lights in his cell were kept on 24 hours a day. For four years in a labor camp, guards woke him up every two hours every night.
“It was very difficult to break out of that sleep pattern,” he says. “It’s still very difficult to sleep six or eight hours at a time.”
He said the labor camp mainly houses prisoners from Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, and described his fellow prisoners as a “close-knit family”. They say they were much younger than Whelan, who is now 54, and helped him figure out how to exchange messages with Reed through the prison’s communications network before his release.
“Knowing he was there… gave me strength and helped me get through the ordeal,” Whelan said. “I think it helped him too, knowing I was around and doing the same thing.”
Whelan said the prisoners also had secret cellphones that allowed them to communicate with prisoners in camps sent to the front lines of Russia’s war against Ukraine.
“They were communicating with us and I was relaying their communications to four governments through my illegal cell phone,” he said, explaining that the guards turned a blind eye. “Prison officers in Russia are paid $300 or $400 a month. You give them a carton of cigarettes and they can do whatever they want.”
When Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was around arrested When Whelan was indicted on trumped-up spying charges in March 2023, he and his family feared they would be left alone again. His family consistently pressed the Biden administration to do more to secure his release. Whelan also asserted his freedom, calling journalists and expressing his dissatisfaction in separate calls. directly Addressed to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs Roger Carstens.
Carstens said Greiner’s conversation with Whelan after his release was “one of the toughest calls” he had ever received.
It took months of painstaking negotiations through diplomatic and intelligence channels to reach a final agreement that gave freedom to both Mr. Whelan and Mr. Gershkovic. The deal depended on President Biden convincing German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to release convicted FSB assassin Vadim Krasikov.
On August 1, in the largest prisoner exchange since the end of the Cold War, Russia released 16 prisoners, including political prisoners aligned with late opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and Western countries released 16 prisoners, including Krasikov. Eight people were released. Russian-American radio journalist Ars Kurmasheva and American green card holder and Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza were released along with Whelan and Gershkovych.
During a visit to Berlin on Friday, Biden thanked the German chancellor for his cooperation in securing the release of unjustly detained Americans, according to a White House summary of the meeting.
Whelan said he was held in solitary confinement for five days before being released.
He did not believe he was on his way home until a small CIA plane carrying him and other freed detainees flew over the English Channel. “I wasn’t expecting to see the White Cliffs of Dover, but I did,” Whelan said, tearing up for the first time in an interview.
“You know, during the war they brought Spitfire pilots home,” he said, referring to how the cliffs were a prominent marker on the return flight paths of British fighter jets during World War II. . “For me, it was what brought me and Evan and Ars back to the United States.”
He didn’t know this would happen to Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. waiting for him on the tarmac when they landed at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, shortly before midnight. Whelan was wearing unwashed clothes he brought to Russia in 2018, but were now too big to be the first to disembark from the plane from Ankara, Turkey, where the exchange took place.
“Since I had been detained the longest, I was told I could go first,” he said. “The stairs come down and I see the president and vice president looking up at the plane. I look out on the plane and look at all the media and say, ‘Wow, I get it, I think. We have to figure out a way to do this really quickly.”
He descended eight steps and saluted Biden. After speaking briefly with the president and vice president, he walked to his sister, Elizabeth Whelan. traveled to washington He has called on the government to take action more than 20 times. Mr. Biden then removed an American flag pin from the lapel of his suit jacket and pinned it to Mr. Whelan’s shirt.
While Whelan waited to fly to San Antonio, Texas, for a medical evaluation, the Paris Olympics was being shown on a TV in the guest lounge at Joint Base Andrews.
“And as I was watching, I said, ‘Hey, look, it’s Britney. Britney is on TV,'” Whelan said.
Griner, who won three consecutive gold medals at the Paris Olympics, advocated for Whelan’s freedom after his release.
“That was one of those great moments,” he said.