Just minutes before President Trump escaped an assassin’s bullet at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa., he held a brief backstage meeting with a 95-year-old local woman whose son, Marc Fogel , had spent three years in a Russian jail.
Linking arms with Trump, Malphine Fogel recounted her son’s ordeal, how she was struggling to get the Biden administration to prioritize his case and her fears for his health. Flashing a thumbs-up before a camera, Trump promised to “get him out,” then invited her onto the VIP section of the stage to watch him speak.
She was only feet away from the rostrum when shots rang out, with a single bullet grazing Trump’s ear. The candidate was tackled and a congressman shielded Fogel from incoming fire.
On Tuesday, the high school history teacher who ultimately spent 1,277 days in Russian custody flew back to the U.S. with special envoy Steve Witkoff and met with President Trump at the White House. “I feel like the luckiest man on earth right now,” Fogel said. “I will forever be indebted to President Trump, to Steve over there.”
Fogel’s arrest—for flying into Moscow with medically prescribed marijuana—became a fraught test of Washington’s efforts to determine which Americans jailed overseas are worthy of rescue. The 63-year-old, who worked at the elite Anglo-American School in Moscow, was one in a string of Americans arrested as Vladimir Putin turned to invade Ukraine. At first Russia seemed to view him as a catch of considerable value: His past students included the adolescent children of William Burns , Biden’s Central Intelligence Agency director; and Michael McFaul , ambassador to Moscow during the Obama administration. He was given 14 years, one of the longest drug sentences in Russia’s post-Soviet history.
U.S. President Donald Trump holds an event to welcome back released American schoolteacher Marc Fogel, who had been held in Russia since 2021, at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 11, 2025. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
And yet the arrest of “Mr. Fogel,” as his students called him, failed to break through with the U.S. public and was soon eclipsed. Six months into his detention, the same Russian customs unit at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport arrested WNBA star Brittney Griner and charged her with possession of marijuana products, under the same statute in the Russian criminal code.
The Biden administration quickly designated Griner “wrongfully detained” and within 10 months of her arrest exchanged her for convicted arms trafficker Viktor Bout. Fogel had knowingly flown in with 17 grams of marijuana, 24 times the trace amounts found on Griner, who said she had simply forgotten to remove two vape cartridges from her luggage.
Fogel then watched from a succession of prison cells and a hard labor camp as other Americans—including former Marines Paul Whelan and Trevor Reed and Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich —were listed as wrongfully detained by the State Department and traded for Russian prisoners in U.S. and European jails.
“It’s just so unfair, it’s too much to take,” he said in a tearful phone call on speaker phone with his family in the hours after the Aug. 1 prisoner exchange that freed Gershkovich and Whelan.
Along the way, his mother and two sisters led a campaign to free him, shuttling to Washington to score time with the lawmakers they hoped could pressure the White House. In her ranch-style home in Butler, the nonagenarian welcomed local news reporters, and after years of failing to get her son designated as wrongfully detained, sued the State Department.
But that lawsuit made it harder for State Department officials to communicate with the family and explain the efforts they were making. Right up until the Biden administration’s final days, its senior officials said they were pushing for Fogel’s release, on humanitarian grounds—a follow-up to the Aug. 1 swap. In December, Biden’s State Department officially declared Fogel wrongfully detained.
“We’re constantly trying different arrangements, different offers to see what we can do,” then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the Journal shortly after the August exchange. “We don’t take a minute off to get others home, including Marc.”
On the surface, the Fogel case was straightforward. A teacher flying into Russia for his last school year before retirement committed the crime of carrying the medical marijuana he used to dull his back pain. But the operation to detain him, a Journal review found, was more complicated, an extensively coordinated trial run for future arrests, planned by the Kremlin as it snuffed out one of the last institutions beyond its control—an American embassy school—according to legal documents, interviews with U.S. officials and Fogel himself.
Russian security services were surveilling the campus for a pretext to discredit and ultimately close what had become the school of choice for the post-Soviet elite, beyond the reach of Putin’s tightening rules over the classroom. And in Fogel’s suitcase, they found one.
An ‘especially important case’
The operation began with a confidential memo to the customs desk at Moscow’s largest airport, outlining an “especially important case” for Russia’s security services.
High above the North Atlantic, Marc Fogel was returning to Russia for the 2021 school year, his last before retirement. The children of ambassadors and oligarchs had cycled through his classroom at the elite school on Moscow’s edge for nearly a decade. An enthusiastic softball coach who strummed guitar on the team bus, he tossed tennis balls to students while hosting lively discussions on the revolutions of the 20th century. He kept a unicycle in his class. But years of chronic back pain—which he treated with prescription marijuana—had become so acute that he could no longer sit while teaching. Aching in his economy seat, he paced the aisle as the overnight flight barreled through the dark.
At Sheremetyevo airport, customs agents pulled passenger lists for incoming flights and found the names of Fogel and his wife, Jane. An informant knew the teacher would be flying in with prescription marijuana—and also knew he was no longer enjoying the protection of a diplomatic visa that had just expired. Officers in camouflage fatigues were waiting by a baggage belt, as Fogel, in a Hawaiian shirt, walked off the plane. Security-camera footage captured the teacher’s last moments of freedom, as an agent pulled him aside to search the suitcase where he had packed his marijuana in vape cartridges.
When his wife caught up to him in the security line she could tell from his heavy breathing that something was wrong. “Jane, I’m really in trouble,” he said.
The arrest of the aging history teacher from suburban Pittsburgh would barely register in international news, preoccupied with the Taliban takeover of Kabul that month. Swiftly after the arrest, Moscow floated trading Fogel for Russians held in the U.S. But in Washington, the educator, who admitted carrying the medically prescribed marijuana, remained obscure, blowing through his retirement savings trying to secure legal help.
A former ambassador, senators and congressmen all stepped in to champion his case. Last year, 12 Democratic and Republican members of Congress sponsored the Marc Fogel Act, which would require the State Department to give Congress a justification for its decisions for which Americans it designates as “wrongfully detained.”
Gilded campus
The sprawling campus that Fogel arrived at in 2013 was a glimmering slice of America in a country turning against the West. Tuition from some of Russia’s richest parents had funded a new Olympic-size swimming pool, tennis courts and a theater that accommodated a thousand students.
Outside, a hidden infrastructure rose in tandem: Newly installed cameras erected by Russian security services faced into the walled compound, while plainclothes agents rotated shifts in a nearby car park, noting which vehicles were coming in and out. Local staff, administrators knew, were under state pressure to keep watch over the foreign employees and students
Putin had just won a new term in the presidency, overcoming mass protests he believed were masterminded by the State Department. At the U.S. Embassy, diplomats reported a rise in instances of harassment by Russian security services. Embassy vehicles had their tires slashed, diplomats reported that their apartments had been broken into and furniture conspicuously moved and in one case a family dog died mysteriously. Ambassador Michael McFaul was followed almost everywhere he went.
His teenage son meanwhile was taking history with the new presence on campus, “Mr. Fogel,” who would spend break times in the hallway, lending an ear to students he called on by nicknames he’d coined for them. As a coach, he cheered for both teams at softball games. In the classroom, he taught while perched on a red yoga ball. He lined the windowsills with lilacs that he plucked as Moscow’s winter thawed and spring flowers bloomed. His wife, Jane Fogel became close friends with McFaul’s wife.
For years, the Putin government had complained bitterly about the Anglo-American School, protesting that any institution teaching Russian nationals, on Russian soil, should be registered under their education ministry and subject to Russian curriculum rules. The school had been founded for the children of British, Canadian and American diplomats under Joseph Stalin . The Soviet collapse made its classrooms the favored choice for a new Russian elite who wanted their kids to receive an American education.
“There was an assumption that they would never shut down a school because all these oligarchs sent their kids there,” said Eric Rubin, who served as deputy chief of mission in America’s Moscow embassy. “It’s become clear they don’t care about these oligarchs.”
Teachers came in on diplomatic visas, as staff for the U.S., British or Canadian Embassies. But in Fogel’s second year, when Russia seized Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, the Canadian government spoke out strongly against the annexation, and the Kremlin began slashing the number of diplomatic visas Canada could secure. Soon after, Russia began slow-walking British visas, leaving the school struggling to hire foreign staff.
When the Obama administration sanctioned four Russian individuals and five Russian entities for what it said was interference in the 2016 election, CNN reported Russia was planning to close the school in response. After incoming national security adviser Mike Flynn called the Kremlin before President Trump’s first inauguration to say his administration would take a different approach to Russia, Putin held off, and publicly invited the school’s pupils to visit the Christmas tree in Red Square.
Fogel, meanwhile, was falling in love with Russia and its tumultuous history. In 2017, he led his students in a centennial celebration of the February Revolution that toppled the Czar and ushered in a brief and ultimately doomed attempt at a democratic Russian Republic. He encouraged Russian students to share their parents’ and grandparents’ memories from the Communist era—both the nostalgia for the Soviet Union’s sense of common purpose, alongside the feeling of menace and stagnation others recalled. His back pain worsening, he and his wife decided to teach one last year—then retire in America.
For his last year, he would have to enter on an ordinary visa. To survive, the school had re-registered itself under the Ministry of Education. Over summer 2021, a group of men removed the LGBTQ+ section of the library, and other books deemed in violation of the government’s patriotic education.
Byzantine bureaucracies
Malphine Fogel was on her neighbor’s porch when her two daughters told her Marc had been arrested.
The family called McFaul, who tried to rally senior officials in the Obama administration. “I talked to whoever I could, the State Department, the White House, these are people I knew, to raise awareness,” he said.
Early on, the State Department discouraged the family from speaking out. The Fogel case presented a quandary. A new law, the Levinson Act, required the State Department to “review the cases of United States nationals detained abroad to determine if there is credible information that they are being detained unlawfully or wrongfully”—and if so, work toward their freedom. Fogel admitted carrying marijuana—illegal under Russian law. Yet his 14-year sentence, draconian by Russian standards, fit the feverishly anti-American mood sweeping the country.
The case had a clear political dimension: After the arrest, Russia’s security services searched the school followed by state TV, which alleged the corridors were a haven for an enormous and transnational, child-targeting drug ring with a veteran history teacher and his 17 grams of prescription marijuana at its core.
In Moscow, Fogel’s defense attorney, who had represented Russia’s Orthodox Church in its case against the punk protest band Pussy Riot, seemed less interested in beating the charges than in gauging whether the case was getting political attention in America, Fogel family members said. The Fogels, initially flummoxed by his questions, ultimately concluded he was hoping to orchestrate a prisoner swap. After six months, they found a new lawyer, who visited the Foreign Ministry to discuss the case.
There, Russian officials floated an offer—if America would trade Fogel for Russians in U.S. jails, they wouldn’t object.
But then, a more famous drug case at the same Moscow airport terminal would finally make Russia’s hostage diplomacy front-page news. When news reached Fogel in prison that basketball star Griner had been exchanged for Bout on an airstrip in the United Arab Emirates, he was broken. His mother was offended: “Marc and our family are not being given the same rights as Brittney and her family,” she said. “We have to make him as well known as Brittney Griner even though he’s not a basketball player.”
‘Did you forget Marc Fogel?’
Soon after, Griner appeared in front of a mural in Washington, D.C., featuring other Americans deemed wrongfully detained in Russia, Iran and China.
Fogel was absent, so some of his former students and local artists painted their own portraits, displayed around Malphine’s home. Another made a documentary, “Did You Forget Marc Fogel?”
At the State Department, McFaul was still asking why his case hadn’t been designated as wrongfully detained: “I’ve never gotten a clear answer,” he said. The family sent pleas directly to Jill Biden—a fellow educator—via a university president who’d known her, but they went unanswered. Jane Fogel spoke with national security adviser Jake Sullivan , who pledged to call for her husband’s “humanitarian release.” Russia was unmoved by the request. Months slipped into years.
In his prison camp, Fogel was struggling amid the monotony and the guilt for what his family was facing. Days were spent growing radishes, walking in the prison yard and reading the only English books in the prison library—Dr. Zhivago, Moby Dick and Anna Karenina—over and over again. For months, he had taught cellmates English, a favor they repaid with letting him call home on the prepaid cellphones they’d smuggled.
His back problems were worsening and he was regularly in the infirmary. Over the course of his jail time, prison medics, who didn’t speak English, would give him hundreds of injections and pills, which he couldn’t identify, and which didn’t help.
One of the few letters he managed to send home had a tinge of despair. “Teachers are at least as important as b-ballers,” he wrote.
Write to Drew Hinshaw at drew.hinshaw@wsj.com and Joe Parkinson at joe.parkinson@wsj.com
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