Freed American Paul Whelan, in first interview, opens up about life in Russian concentration camp

Washington – In December 2022, Paul Whelan was sitting in a factory in a Russian labor camp in Mordovia, more than 7 hours east of Moscow, adding buttons and holes to winter coats.

He was called to the prison office and was hoping that someone from the US government would call him to tell him that they finally got his freedom, Whelan told “Face the Nation” in his first interview since his release. complex prisoner exchange in August. Instead, the American official told him it was a women’s basketball star Brittney Griner who was going home. Russia had agreed to release him in exchange for Viktor Bout, a convicted arms dealer nicknamed “The Merchant of Death.”

“I asked him point blank, I said, so what else do you have to trade? He said, ‘Nothing,'” Whelan recalls the phone conversation. “Now how are you going to bring me back? He then said, “Well, we will meet again tomorrow to discuss that.”

“You see what you did here,” Whelan told the officer. “You don’t have anyone to sell to. They don’t want anyone else. He said, ‘Yes, yes, we are aware.’

The Marine veteran was two years into his 16-year prison sentence after Russia arrested him in 2018 on charges the US found to be espionage. By then, Washington and Moscow had changed Trevor Reeda marine veteran who had been imprisoned in Russia since 2019, working for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot convicted of drug trafficking in the US. Russia had arrested Griner in February 2022.

Whelan, who the U.S. State Department ruled was wrongfully arrested, had been waiting to be released with Reed, who was in poor health. He said he learned about his exclusion from the industry on the radio while working in a factory.

“All I can do is just sit and try to process what I just heard in Russian,” he said. “All I could do was keep working.”

Whelan was visiting Moscow for a friend’s wedding in December 2018 when he was arrested. In photos of his arrest released by Russian state media, Whelan is in his hotel bathroom talking to an acquaintance who gives him a flash drive before Russian intelligence agencies, the FSB, take him into custody. Whelan declined to say more about the person he knows, but believes he was targeted.

“I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do espionage,” he said.

At the time, Whelan, who has citizenship in the US, Canada, Ireland and the United Kingdom, was the global head of safety at auto parts supplier BorgWarner. The company suspended him for a year in detention.

“If you can call the actions of an employer un-American, that was un-American,” he said. “What worried me the most, was not so much losing my job, but BorgWarner continuing to do business in Russia while I was imprisoned there. They refused to cooperate with the US government. They refused to cooperate with the people who were trying to help me … they did nothing to support me or my family.”

CBS News has reached out to BorgWarner for comment on Whelan’s comments. The company referred to its August statement when Whelan was released, in which it said his December 2018 trip to Russia was personal, not business-related. Whelan told CBS News that the company paid for his entry visa, and that he was sending work emails and making work-related calls the day he was arrested.

Whelan said that shortly after his arrest, the FSB told him not to do “anything rash” and “not to worry” because this was all part of a Russian ploy to find Yaroshenko, Bout and Maria Butina, a Russian agent who wanted to infiltrate hard-line American political circles.

After Butina’s deportation from the US in 2019 following his prison sentence and the exchange of two prisoners in 2022, Russia secured the release of all three.

By then, Whelan’s family had grown increasingly concerned for his well-being.

“How do you go on living, day after day, knowing that your government has twice failed to release you from a foreign prison? I don’t think you have any hope that the government will negotiate for your freedom at this time.” his twin brother, David Whelan, wrote an email to reporters on December 8, 2022.

As negotiations for his release stalled over the years, Whelan said it “plays on my mind.”

For the first two years of Whelan’s imprisonment he was held in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo Prison, where the lights were kept on 24 hours a day in his cell. In the refugee camp, the guards woke him up every two hours every night for four years.

“Getting out of that sleep mode was very difficult,” he said. “It’s still very difficult to sleep for six or eight hours at a time.”

The refugee camp housed mostly prisoners from Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, describing his fellow prisoners as a “united family.” They were much younger than Whelan, now 54, and helped him figure out how to send messages back and forth over the prison social network with Reed before his release, he said.

“Knowing that he was there … gave me strength and helped me through my difficulties,” Whelan said. “I think knowing that I’m close to doing the same helped him.”

They also had secret cell phones, Whelan said, which helped the prisoners communicate with those in their camp who were sent to the front in the Russian-Ukrainian war.

“They were communicating with us, and their communication, I was going back to the four governments with illegal cell phones,” he said, explaining that the prison guards ignored them. “A Russian prison guard gets $300, $400 a month. You give him a box of cigarettes, and he can do whatever you want.”

When Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was you are arrested on false espionage charges in March 2023, Whelan and his family again worried that he would stay. His family has been pressing the Biden administration to do more to secure his release. Whelan also defended his freedom, making separate phone calls to reporters, expressing his frustration. directly to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the President’s Special Envoy for Abduction Affairs Roger Carstens.

Carstens said his conversation with Whelan after Griner’s release was “one of the hardest calls” he’s ever had.

It took months of sensitive negotiations through diplomatic and intelligence channels to finalize an agreement that would give both Whelan and Gershkovich freedom to meet. The deal is contingent on President Biden persuading German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to release convicted FSB killer Vadim Krasikov.

On August 1, in one of the largest prisoner exchanges since the end of the Cold War, Russia released 16 prisoners, including political prisoners associated with the dead opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and the West released eight Russians, including Krasikov. Russian-American radio journalist Alsu Kurmasheva and Vladimir Kara-Murza, a US green card holder and Kremlin critic, were released along with Whelan and Gershkovich.

When Mr. Biden, who visited Berlin on Friday, thanked the German chancellor for his help in securing the release of wrongfully imprisoned Americans, according to a White House summary of their meeting.

Whelan said he was held in solitary confinement for five days before his release.

He didn’t believe he was on his way home, until the small CIA plane carrying him and the other released prisoners flew over the English Channel. “I didn’t expect to see the White Cliffs of Dover, but I did,” said Whelan, crying for the first time in an interview.

“You know, during the war, they directed the Spitfire pilots back,” he said, referring to how the cliffs were a prominent marker on the way back for British fighter jets during World War II. “For me, it was directing me and Evan and Alsou back to the United States.”

He did not know that Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will attend waiting for him on the tarmac when they arrived just before midnight at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. Wearing the unwashed clothes he brought to Russia in 2018 that were still too big for him, Whelan was the first to step off the plane from Ankara, Turkey, where the exchange took place.

“I was told that I could go first because I was detained for a long time,” he said. “You see the stairs coming down, and the president and the vice president are looking up at the plane. I’m on the plane looking out, looking at all the media, they’re saying, ‘Wow, OK, I need to figure out how to do this as quickly as possible.’

He went down eight steps and greeted Mr. Biden. He spoke briefly to the president and vice president before moving on to his sister, Elizabeth Whelan, who had it he went to Washington more than 20 times to force the government to take action. Mr. Biden later removed an American flag pin from his suit jacket label and pinned it to Whelan’s shirt.

While Whelan was waiting to fly to San Antonio, Texas, for a medical, the Paris Olympics were being televised in the visitor lounge at Joint Base Andrews.

“And as I looked over, I said, ‘Hey, look, Brittney. Brittney’s on TV,'” Whelan said.

Griner, who won a third consecutive Olympic gold medal in Paris, had advocated for Whelan’s freedom after his release.

“It was one of those amazing moments,” he said.