Former Marine Paul Whelan said he was devastated when a Biden administration official told him that WNBA basketball star Brittney Griner was being released from Russian detention after nine months, but that did not happen.
In his first interview with NBC News since returning to the US, Whelan, who had been imprisoned in Russia for more than five years by the time of his release, said “it was devastating.”
When the Homeland Security official told him the news over the phone, he realized that the US 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, the price Russian President Vladimir Putin paid for the famed athlete’s release. Whelan responded, “Okay, what are you going to do now? What’s next?”
Immediately after that phone call, Whelan said he went to the prison control room, surrounded by Russian FSB security service agents listening in, to call his parents and tell them the devastating news. He wanted to reassure them that the US would do everything in its power to get him back.
“That was difficult,” he said. “I hadn’t lost faith 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 US of drug smuggling. Reed had been in a labor camp for almost three years.
During the ordeal, Whelan said he kept his spirits up by singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” every morning for five years, a ritual he still does now that he’s home in Michigan.
Whelan, 54, was freed in August in one of the largest prisoner swaps since the Cold War, an exchange that also produced Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and two other journalists: Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian and British national who has been critical of opposite the Kremlin. , and Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian-American reporter at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Of the four, Whelan was 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 which Secretary of State Antony Blinken called a “sham.”
Born in Canada to British parents and a naturalized U.S. citizen, Whelan was a police officer in Michigan before enlisting in the Marines in 1994. According to David Whelan, his twin brother, he served several times in Iraq.
Whelan said that when agents from the FSB, the Russian intelligence agency once called the KGB, burst into his hotel room in 2018 and arrested him, he thought it was a prank. He soon realized that this was not the case when they took him to the infamous Lefortovo prison and pressured 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 with the lights left on 24 hours a day. “It’s a mild form of torture,” he said.
Whelan said the FSB pressured him to confess five more times, but each time he refused. After being sentenced to 16 years of hard labor, the Russian judge said he would likely be released within two weeks. Whelan said he had no idea it would take years.
Whelan said he was given a “burner phone” through which he kept in touch with a Foreign Office representative and that FSB agents regularly visited him at the labor camp to ensure he was still alive.
He said the guards did not physically abuse him, but they were corrupt and the prisoners had to grease their palms to have tasty food transported to the prison from outside.
“Russian food in general is not great,” Whelan said. “The food in prison is even worse.”
They lived, Whelan said, on tea, bread and watery soup, “the kind of fish only Russians eat.” It was pretty terrible,” he said.
Whelan said what happened to him underlines the need for tough diplomacy with leaders of “rogue states” like Putin.
“Our president, he has to be strong, she has 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 US can get rid of Putin is if he has a “heart attack,” Whelan said.
Asked about Trump’s claim that if re-elected he could release American prisoners from Russia because of his good relationship with Putin, Whelan said: “Any president will have a hard time dealing with a rogue leader like Putin.”
Although 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 he died of natural causes,” Whelan said. “So when the Russians say natural causes, they mean that someone hit the man or committed suicide, just like in Moscow where people fall out of windows.”
When asked if he ever considered taking his own life, Whelan replied: ‘No, no. “I fought too much,” he said. ‘I didn’t want 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 critically ill for two weeks. But the low point for him, psychologically, was when he learned that Flora, his 15-year-old golden retriever at home in Michigan, had died.
“That meant when I got home it would be a different house than when I left,” he said.
Whelan said he realized his ordeal might end in July when two FSB agents came to the labor camp and told him to fill out and sign a pardon application. After contacting his contact at the Foreign Ministry, he said he complied and was taken to a prison in Moscow, where he was placed in solitary confinement for five days.
Then, on August 1, Whelan said he was placed on a plane and, accompanied by an FSB sitter, flown to Turkey. There, waiting on the asphalt, he saw Gershkovich.
“We walked off the plane and onto a bus,” Whelan said.
The FSB orderly soon departed and Whelan said the “friendly faces” of the CIA officers boarding the plane confirmed to him that they were going home to the US.
“I didn’t know we were flying there [Joint Base] Andrews and went 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 dirty.
“You were held the longest, you’re the first to get off the plane,” Whelan told him.
Weak and malnourished, he said as he disembarked. His main thought was, “I don’t want to fall down those stairs.”
He said he was moved when Biden took the flag pin he had been wearing on his lapel and pinned it to his prison clothes. Whelan wore it on his own suit jacket as he sat down with Andrea Mitchell, saying he would “keep it clean and forever.”
When asked how he was adjusting to regular life, Whelan said he has some minor medical and dental issues. He said he believes he is suffering from persistent 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 worried he might not be able to find another job.
“It’s hard at this age,” he said. “Maybe I need to find something new, reinvent myself.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
