During his time in a Russian labor camp, Paul Whelan passed information from fellow prisoners serving on the frontlines in Ukraine to the U.S., Canada, Ireland, and England through secret burner phones, he told CBS “Face the Nation” in his first major interview since he was released from Russian custody in an August prisoner swap.
Whelan said around 450 prisoners from his camp accepted a deal to serve as mercenaries with Russia’s Wagner Group in Ukraine. Then, they passed information back to him through “illegal cellphones,” which Whelan relayed to the four governments, Whelan said in the Sunday interview.
Guards in the prison camps “looked the other way,” Whelan told host Margaret Brennan. “A Russian prison guard gets $300 to $400 a month. You give them a carton of cigarettes and you can do just about anything you want.”
After Brittney Griner, Trevor Reed released, Whelan reached ‘lowest point’
Whelan, a former Marine from Michigan, was freed more than five years after his arrest in Moscow on charges of spying for the U.S. He was released alongside Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter detained in early 2023 on similar charges, and 14 other prisoners in exchange for eight Russians detained in the U.S., Germany, Norway, Slovenia and Poland.
Whelan was caught “red-handed” with a USB drive containing classified information in his room in Moscow’s Metropol Hotel, Russia claimed. But Whelan was framed in a set up orchestrated by Ilya Yatsenko, a close Russian friend who he visited on trips to Russia over the course of a decade, Paul’s brother David Whelan told the Detroit Free Press, part of the USA TODAY Network, in a previous interview.
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David Whelan said Yatsenko passed the drive to his brother, who thought it contained photographs or something else. Instead, agents broke into Paul Whelan’s hotel room and arrested him.
Paul Whelan was convicted in a closed-door trial in 2020 and sentenced to 16 years of imprisonment. He was taken to IK-17, a prison camp in the Republic of Mordovia, an 8-hour drive from Moscow.
There, Whelan was shut off from the outside world, he told CBS. But the ambassadors and consular teams from the four countries that he passed information to visited him regularly, sometimes bringing him mail from home, he said.
Whelan watched other Americans who spent less time in Russian prisons released in prisoner swaps as he remained in captivity. Basketball star Brittney Griner was freed in late 2022, nine months after she was arrested for drug smuggling when two small vape pens and cannabis oil were found in her bag at the Moscow airport.
And Trevor Reed, also a former Marine, was exchanged in April of 2022 for a Russian drug dealer held in a U.S. prison. Reed served nearly three years in a Russian jail after his arrest in August of 2019.
Whelan said in the CBS interview that he was told he would leave together with Reed. Then, he heard on a radio in prison that the swap had already happened, and he wasn’t included.
The news was “devastating,” he said. When Griner was freed months later, and Whelan was left behind, he reached his “lowest point” – U.S. officials told him there were no more Russian prisoners to exchange for his freedom.
Whelan’s release months later was a “feat of diplomacy,” President Biden said at the time. Whelan was greeted by the president and Vice President Harris as he stepped off the plane onto U.S. soil.
Cybele Mayes-Osterman is a breaking news reporter for USA Today. Reach her on email at cmayesosterman@usatoday.com. Follow her on X @CybeleMO.
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