Freed American Paul Whelan, in his first interview, opens up about life in a Russian labor camp

Washington — In December 2022, Paul Whelan sits in a factory in a Russian labor camp in Mordovia, more than seven hours east of Moscow, adding buttons and buttonholes to his winter coat.

He was summoned to the prison warden’s office and was hoping that someone from the US government would call to tell him he was finally free, Whelan told “Face the Nation” in his first interview since his release in Complex captive swap in August. However, US officials told him it was a women’s basketball star Brittney Griner is going home. Russia has agreed to release him in exchange for Viktor Bout, a convicted arms dealer nicknamed “Merchant of Death.”

“I asked him point blank, I said, so what else do you have to trade? And he said, ‘Nothing,'” Whelan recalled the phone conversation. “How do you now ask me to come back? And say, ‘Well, we’ll reconvene tomorrow to discuss it.'”

“You know what you’ve done here,” Whelan told the officer. “You don’t have anyone to trade with. They don’t want anyone else. And they say, ‘Yeah, yeah, we know.'”

The Marine veteran is two years into a 16-year prison sentence after Russia arrested him in 2018 on what the US found to be espionage charges. By then, Washington and Moscow had changed Trevor ReedA Marine veteran who has been detained in Russia since 2019, for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot convicted in the US of drug smuggling. Russia has detained Griner in February 2022.

Whelan, determined by the US State Department to be wrongfully detained, expected to be released with Reed, whose health was declining. He said he learned about the exemption from the trade over the radio while he was working at the factory.

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

Whelan was visiting Moscow for a friend’s wedding in December 2018 when he was arrested. In arrest footage released by Russian state media, Whelan was in a hotel bathroom talking to an acquaintance who gave him a flash drive moments before agents from Russia’s intelligence agency, the FSB, detained him. Whelan declined to say more about the acquaintance, but he believes he was the target.

“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 UK, was the global head of security for auto parts supplier BorgWarner. The company let him go for about a year until he was arrested.

“If you can call the actions of the employer un-American, it is un-American,” he said. “What really bothers me is not so much the loss of jobs, but BorgWarner continuing to do business in Russia while I’m being held there. They refuse to cooperate with the US government. They refuse to cooperate with people who try. to help me. … They don’t do anything to support me or my family.”

CBS News reached out to BorgWarner for comment on Whelan’s comments. The company cited an August statement when Whelan was released, in which he claimed his December 2018 trip to Russia was personal, not business. Whelan told CBS News that the company had paid for his visa to enter the country, and that he had been sending work emails and handling work-related calls while he was detained.

Whelan said that after his arrest, FSB agents told him not to do “anything shocking” and that he “doesn’t have to worry” because it was all part of a Russian tactic to get Yaroshenko, Bout and Maria Butina, the Russian agent who had been trying. infiltrated conservative American political circles.

After Butina’s deportation from the US in 2019 following a prison sentence and two prisoner exchanges in 2022, Russia has released all three.

Meanwhile, Whelan’s family grew increasingly concerned about his well-being.

“How do you continue to live, day by day, when you know that your government has failed twice to free you from a foreign prison? I can’t imagine that they have any hope that the government will negotiate their freedom this time,” said his twin brother, David Whelan, wrote in an email to reporters on December 8, 2022.

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

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

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

The labor camp mostly housed prisoners from Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, he said, describing his fellow prisoners as “close family.” He was younger than Whelan, now 54, and helped him figure out how to send messages back and forth over the prison communications network with Reed before his release, he said.

“Knowing that he was there … gave me strength and helped me get through my grief,” Whelan said. “I think knowing that I’m close and doing the same thing helps them as well.”

They also had secret cell phones, Whelan said, that allowed the prisoners to communicate with people from the camps who had been sent to the front lines in Russia’s war against Ukraine.

“They will communicate with us, and the communication from them, I go back to the four governments through illegal cell phones,” he said, explaining that the prison guards were blinded. “A Russian prison guard earns $300, $400 a month. You give him a carton of cigarettes, and you can do whatever you want.”

When Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was there arrested on trumped-up espionage charges in March 2023, Whelan and his family again worried he would be abandoned. His family has continuously pressed the Biden administration for more to be released. Whelan also advocated for his own freedom, calling reporters and, in a separate phone call, expressing his frustration. directly for Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs Roger Carstens.

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

It took months of careful negotiations through diplomatic and intelligence channels for a final deal that would give Whelan and Gershkovich the freedom to live together. 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 aligned with the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and Western countries released eight Russians, including Krasikov. Russian-American radio journalists Alsu Kurmasheva and Vladimir Kara-Murza, US green card holders and Kremlin critics, were released along with Whelan and Gershkovich.

During Mr. Biden’s visit to Berlin on Friday, he thanked the German Chancellor for his help in securing the release of wrongly detained Americans, according to a summary of the White House meeting.

Whelan said he was held in solitary confinement for five days before being released.

He couldn’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,” Whelan said, for the first time in an interview.

“You know, during the war, they guided the Spitfire pilots back,” he said, pointing out how the cliff was an important marker on the return flight path for British fighter planes during the Second World War. “For me, it leads me and Evan and Alsu back to the United States.”

They didn’t know that Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris would be waiting for him on the asphalt when they landed shortly before midnight at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. Wearing the unwashed clothes he brought to Russia in 2018 that were now too big for him, Whelan was the first to step off the plane that had traveled from Ankara, Turkey, where the exchange took place.

“I was told I could go first because I was on hold the longest,” he said. “You see the stairs going down, and the president and vice president appear to be getting on the plane. I was on the plane looking out, I saw all the media, saying, ‘Wow, OK, I have to figure out how to do this quickly.'”

He walked down the eight steps and greeted Mr. Biden. He spoke briefly with the president and vice president before walking over to his sister, Elizabeth Whelan, who had traveled to Washington more than 20 times to push the government to take action. Mr. Biden then took an American flag pin from his suit jacket lapel and pinned it to Whelan’s shirt.

As Whelan waited to go to San Antonio, Texas, for a medical evaluation, the Paris Olympics played on television in the famous living room at Joint Base Andrews.

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

Griner, who won his third consecutive Olympic gold medal in Paris, has supported Whelan’s freedom after his release.

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