Former Marine Paul Whelan said he was shocked when a Biden administration official told him WNBA basketball star Brittney Griner after nine months he was released from Russian prison and he did not leave.
“It was devastating,” said Whelan, who was imprisoned in Russia for more than five years before his release, in his first interview with NBC News since returning to the United States.
When a Homeland Security official broke the news to him over the phone, he understood that the United States had abandoned its negotiating position. The official told him that in order to free Griner, the United States exchanged Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, who was tried by Russian President Vladimir Putin, for the release of the famous athlete. Whelan replied, “Well, well, what are you going to do next? What will happen next?’
Immediately after that phone call, Whelan said, he went down to the prison’s control room, surrounded by officers from Russia’s FSB security agency, to call his parents and deliver the terrible news. He wanted to assure them that the US would leave no stone unturned to get him back.
“It was tough,” he said. “I didn’t lose faith that they would bring me back, but I wasn’t sure when they would.”
Whelan was left behind again after Trevor Reed, another former Marine, was released in April 2022 in a prisoner swap for Russian pilot Konstantin Yaroshenko, who was convicted of drug smuggling in the United States. Reed had served in a labor camp for nearly three years.
During the trial, Whelan said he kept his spirits up by singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” every morning for five years, a ritual he still has at his home in Michigan.
Whelan, 54, was released in August one of the largest prisoner exchanges Since the Cold War, a Wall Street Journal reporter has also circulated an exchange Evan Gershkovich and two more journalists: Vladimir Kara-MurzaA dual Russian British citizen who has criticized the Kremlin and Alsu KurmashevaRussian-American correspondent for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Of the four, Whelan was kept for the longest time by the Russians. He was arrested in 2018 after attending a wedding in Moscow and charged with espionage, a charge he has vehemently and repeatedly denied and which Secretary of State Antony Blinken called a “coup”.
Whelan, who was born in Canada to British parents and a naturalized US citizen, was a police officer in Michigan before joining the Marines in 1994. According to his twin brother, David Whelan, he served multiple tours in Iraq.
Whelan said he thought it was a joke when agents from the FSB, the Russian intelligence agency once known as the KGB, entered his hotel room and arrested him in 2018. He soon realized that this was not the case when he took her to the notorious Lefortovo prison and began pressuring her to confess to a crime she did not commit.
“They said, ‘If you admit it, we can handle it,'” Whelan said. “It was a hoax.”
When he refused, Whelan said, he was placed in a cell with the lights on around the clock. “This is a mild form of torture,” he said.
Whelan said the FSB pressured him to confess five more times and each time he refused. After he was sentenced to 16 years of forced labor, a Russian court judge said he would be released in two weeks. Whelan said he had no idea it would last for years.
Whelan said he got a “burner phone” on which he contacted a State Department representative, and that FSB agents regularly visited him at the labor camp to make sure he was alive.
He said that the guards did not physically harass him, but that they were corrupt and had to grease the palms of the prisoners to transport delicious food from the outside to the prison.
“Russian food, in general, is not great,” Whelan said. “Prison food is even worse.”
Whelan lived on tea, bread, watery soup, “the kind of fish only Russians eat. It was pretty terrible,” he said.
Whelan said what happened to him underscores the need for tough diplomacy with leaders of “rogue nations” like Putin.
“Our president, he’s got to be strong, he’s got to be strong,” Whelan, 54, said in the final weeks of the presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
Whelan said that the only way for the United States to get rid of Putin is for him to “have a heart attack.”
He asked about it Trump’s claim Whelan said that if he is re-elected, he may release US prisoners from Russia because of his good relationship with Putin.
While they had to be cut off from the world, Whelan said he and his fellow inmates quickly knew when the Russian opposition leader was there. Alexei Navalny is dead in prison earlier this year.
“We were told he died of natural causes,” Whelan said. “So when the Russians say natural causes, either someone beat the guy or committed suicide, like people falling out of windows in Moscow.”
When asked if he ever thought about taking his own life, Whelan said, “No, no. I was struggling too much,” he said. “I would not give them the satisfaction of committing suicide. I tried to stick to them every day.”
Whelan said at one point he came down with what he thought was Covid and was terminally ill for two weeks. But the lowest point for him psychologically was when he learned that Flora, a 15-year-old golden retriever, had died at his home in Michigan.
“It meant that when I came home it would be a different house than when I left,” she said.
Whelan said he realized his ordeal might be over in July when two FSB agents showed up at the labor camp and told him to fill out and sign a pardon application. After contacting the State Department, he said he complied and was taken to a Moscow prison, where he spent five days in solitary confinement.
Later, on August 1, Whelan said he was put on a plane and flown to Turkey, accompanied by an FSB “supervisor.” He waited there on the asphalt and saw Gershkovic.
“We got off the plane and got on the bus,” Whelan said.
The FSB controller left soon after, and Whelan said the “friendly faces” of CIA agents boarding confirmed for him that they were going home to the US.
“I didn’t know we were flying [Joint Base] I was going to see Andrews and the president,” said Whelan, who said he had not showered or shaved in two weeks and suddenly felt faint because his clothes were dirty.
“You’ve been held up the longest, get off the plane first,” Whelan said.
Weak and malnourished, he said his main thought as he disembarked was “I don’t want to go down those steps.”
He said he was moved when Biden took a flag pin from his lapel and pinned it to his prison uniform. Whelan wore it over his suit jacket when he sat down with Andrea Mitchell and said he would “keep it clean and keep it forever”.
When asked how he was adjusting to regular life, Whelan said he had some minor medical and dental issues to deal with. She said she thought she was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder for a long time. While people have helped him get back on his feet, especially in his hometown of Manchester, Michigan, he said he’s worried he won’t be able to find another job.
“It’s hard at this age,” he said. “Maybe I should find something new, reinvent myself.”