Correspondence in captivity: Letters and phone calls from Paul Whelan reveal Russian tactics toward American detainee

(CNN) — It was June 2021 when my phone first rang with a call from a Russian number.

I was working from home, seated at my dining room table in the middle of the afternoon, and suspected it was spam.

Instead, it was Paul Whelan.

That phone call was the first of a dozen I would receive from the detained American as he spent more than five years in Russian detention before his release in July as part of a historic prisoner swap. I also received four handwritten letters.

When I began to cover Whelan’s case in December 2018, I never expected to be able to speak with him in real-time about his experiences.

I have covered many wrongful detainee cases, but this has been the only one in which a prisoner was able to reach out directly to the media.

I was never the one to call Whelan, a former Marine. His calls – which began after he was sentenced and moved to a remote prison camp in Mordovia, Russia – were never scheduled. Instead, my phone would ring with a number from Russia. They often seemed strategically timed with milestones or major developments that could impact his case.

There was an understanding that I was recording the calls for broadcast – and that the Russians were likely listening.

In some of the calls, Whelan would share a prewritten message before I asked him questions. Others were question-and-answer sessions about his thoughts on recent news and what life was like there. They ranged from six minutes to up to half an hour.

“I wanted to make sure that my story was being told, and I wanted to make sure that people weren’t forgetting,” Whelan, now 54, reflected in a November interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, about three and a half months after his release. “I didn’t want it to be put on the back burner and have other affairs of state take over people’s interests.”

“It was quite important, especially, to speak my own language, to speak to people that understood what was happening. I didn’t have to explain it,” he added.

On several occasions, I asked Whelan why he thought the Russians let him call journalists, including me. When CNN sat down with Whelan in November, we asked him again.

“I think we might give them a lot of credit to say that they were listening and paying attention,” Whelan said, noting the prisoners got away “with all sorts of things” in the labor camp. Whelan had a burner phone, he said in an interview for “AC360.”

The Russians also “might have wanted the attention,” he posited. “They might have wanted me to call the media, to call the governments, to move the process along.”

The calls and letters described the conditions of his imprisonment, his outlook on the efforts to bring him home, and his mindset as more than 2,000 days ticked by.

They offered me – and our viewers and readers – an extraordinary look at the plight of an American detained during one of the most turbulent times in the US-Russia relationship since the Cold War.

I first started covering Whelan’s story in December 2018, when he was arrested in Moscow on charges of espionage.

As a journalist covering the State Department, looking into reports of Americans detained abroad is part of my remit. But beyond that, I have carved out a niche for covering the stories of wrongfully detained Americans.

As I reported on Whelan’s case, I got to know his sister, Elizabeth. She, along with her brothers David and Andrew, had formed a sort of enterprise to advocate for Paul, “trying to hold the strings of (his) life together,” as she told me in February 2020.

Whelan, who was declared wrongfully detained by the US State Department, was sentenced to 16 years in prison in June 2020 and sent to a prison camp in Mordovia, some eight hours from Moscow.

Elizabeth Whelan told me that her brother enjoyed writing letters – to lawmakers, to officials, to journalists – to pass the time, and asked whether I would be willing to share my address. She also asked whether it would be OK to pass along my phone number, as Paul Whelan had indicated he would like to speak with journalists by phone. Besides me, Whelan spoke with a number of other journalists during his detention.

That first call in June 2021 came ahead of President Joe Biden’s highly anticipated meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva later that month. At that time, Russia was holding two Americans whom the State Department considered wrongfully detained – Whelan and Trevor Reed.

In November, Whelan revealed that I was “one of the early reporters that (he) spoke to quite clandestinely.” In those early calls with reporters, he said he used a burner phone and sometimes called from a closet or small room, with prisoner friends keeping watch so the Russians wouldn’t find out.

‘Greetings from the Boneyard’

In June 2021, I was surprised to receive the call. I put it on speaker and began recording, asking Whelan how he was feeling and his thoughts on the upcoming high-stakes meeting. He described having bursitis and a persistent “kennel cough” from a lack of medical care and working in a clothing factory he called a “sweatshop.”

I asked him what his message was for the US president – “decisive action is needed. Immediately,” he said.

“This is not an issue of Russia against me; it’s an issue of Russia against the United States, and the United States needs to answer this hostage diplomacy situation and resolve it as quickly as possible,” he said ahead of the meeting between Biden and Putin.

After the call, to ensure I wasn’t getting pranked, I shared part of the recording with Elizabeth Whelan to verify it was indeed her brother’s voice. She did – and we broadcast his message to the world.

I received four letters in total, dated June, July, August and November 2021. They arrived to our office mailbox, postmarked from Russia, months after the dates they were written – and it appears that a number of letters never arrived at all. The ones I received did not appear to have been censored or tampered with. The longest letter was four pages long; the shortest, one page. They were written in neat script on notepad paper.

The letters described the bleak existence in his prison camp, which Paul Whelan called “Camp Lostinthewoods.”

“My cell has rotten wooden floors and black mold on the walls. Mice and cockroaches keep me entertained,” he wrote in a July 2021 letter, which he said he penned from solitary confinement.

“For the past 30 days, I have only been allowed one call home and one call to a consulate. I should be allowed one call home per day, and unrestricted access to my consulates. Russia tries to block access,” he wrote.

In a late June 2021 letter, dated a few weeks after our initial call, Whelan said he had been sent to the prison camp’s hospital, which he called “the Boneyard.”

“I have been here for 14 days without any medical care being provided,” he wrote. “There has been no exam, no vital signs recorded, no diagnosis, no medication, and no treatment. Nothing happening!”

He painted a grim picture of the hospital facilities, describing “old metal prison beds and thin mattresses, with one sheet and one blanket, not to forget one pillow and pillow case.”

“There are old broken cabinets next to our beds for personal effects. There are no chairs anywhere here at all,” he wrote. “An old train car without wheels doubles as a library. A horse brings our meals on a cart from the kitchen to each building.”

‘A risk I am willing to take’

As the months and then years passed, I kept in contact with Elizabeth Whelan, emailing her to check in and grabbing coffee or breakfast during her trips to Washington. David Whelan would send periodic updates to journalists with developments of note in his brother’s case. But I never got any further letters from Paul Whelan, and I did not receive another call until December 2022.

In that time, a number of events influential to his case happened. In February 2022, Russian detained another American – WNBA superstar Brittney Griner. Her arrest added another complication to US efforts to bring the Americans home.

About two months later, Reed was released from Russian prison in a swap for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian smuggler convicted of conspiring to import cocaine. Whelan and Griner were not included in that exchange. The Whelan family received little notice of the news, they told me at the time. Whelan found out from Russian television and “was very upset” to not have learned about it from the US government, his sister said at the time.

Whelan himself, in a statement to his parents and shared with CNN, questioned why he was left behind.

“While I am pleased Trevor is home with his family, I have been held on a fictitious charge of espionage for 40 months,” Whelan said at the time. “The world knows this charge was fabricated. Why hasn’t more been done to secure my release?”

Then, in the early hours of December 8, 2022, we began to report the news that the US had secured the release of Griner in another prisoner swap, this time for convicted arms dealer Viktor Bout. Whelan was left out of the exchange once again.

A few hours later, as my colleague and I were busy reporting from the State Department on the details of Griner’s release, my phone rang with a call from a Russian number.

This time when I answered, it was someone saying they were from the US Embassy in Moscow. They said they had Paul Whelan on the line. I rushed to set up my other phone to record the call.

I asked Whelan what was going through his head, and he told me that while he was happy that Reed and Griner had returned home, he was “greatly disappointed that more has not been done to secure (his) release.”

Whelan seemed deeply disappointed. During the nearly 30-minute call, he told me he was surprised not to be included in the swap “because I was led to believe that things were moving in the right direction, and that the governments were negotiating and that something would happen fairly soon.”

US officials said Russia refused to include Whelan in the deal.

“The choice was bringing Brittney Griner home right now, or bringing no one home right now,” one senior administration official said at the time.

Whelan said he knew the Russians “always considered me to be at a higher level than other criminals of my sort.” He also expressed concern that he would not make it out of Russia at all.

“To be quite honest, in these conditions, who knows how I’ll come back or if I’ll come back,” he said.

About 12 minutes into the call, Whelan said he would have to call me back. When he hung up, my colleague and I looked at each other astonished.

“Holy sh*t,” she said. As I was on the phone with Whelan, I had relayed to our team what was happening, and colleagues jumped into action to get sound from the interview ready for television. It was obvious that this was newsworthy and important. CNN was able to report his reaction within an hour of the phone call ending.

When the Russian number called back, I quickly moved into an empty neighboring office to record the call with no background noise.

Whelan told me he wanted to speak with the US president to convey what life was like in prison – “so unlike our world that it’s very difficult for people to understand.”

Asked his message to Biden, Whelan said, “My bags are packed. I’m ready to go home. I just need an airplane to come and get me.”

That call was the first correspondence since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Whelan described prisoners at his camp being recruited by a “private military company” to join the Russian war in Ukraine. He said there was a period when they were not allowed to make calls “so people couldn’t call their families and say they were going to join this military mercenary unit and for their families to then tell them not to.”

There were Russians in the camp, but Whelan said most of the prisoners were from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

“For the most part, the prisoners respected me and I respected them. We got along great,” he reflected in the recent November interview.

At the time, Whelan said he did not think he would face repercussions for speaking with me or for having the conversation aired on CNN.

“If it is a risk, then it’s a risk I am willing to take because I think the message needs to get out,” he added.

Conditions in Russian camp deteriorate

The next time Whelan called me was more than five months later. He would end up calling numerous times that year, especially toward the end of 2023.

The May 2023 call was about two months after the arrest of another American in Russia: Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. Whelan told me that he felt “the wheels are turning” toward his release, but he expressed concern he would be left behind again. He also said he saw echoes of his own case in Gershkovich’s.

The next call came in October 2023. He described the conditions of the camp having deteriorated throughout his three years of detention.

He said the prison shop no longer carried fresh fruit or vegetables and “canned goods have been discontinued.”

“The food that we’re provided is watered down. It’s onions, potatoes, cabbage,” Whelan described. “The soups that we have every day are just water … soggy macaroni, stale bread, things like that.”

Whelan had spoken with Secretary of State Antony Blinken that August. He told the top US diplomat “point blank that leaving me here the first time painted a target on my back and leaving me here the second time basically signed a death warrant,” he said, adding that “unless they got me back, it could be quite challenging in the future, especially with my age and the sort of work we have to do from a health and safety point of view.”

“I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t being forgotten” amid other geopolitical issues, Whelan said.

The secretary of state “told me that he’s working quite diligently and his team is working quite diligently to find a resolution to this situation,” Whelan recounted, and described Blinken as “a person who obviously cares and he cares deeply about the situation.”

As he had in his past calls, Whelan again expressed a desire to speak with Biden directly to plead his case.

Meanwhile, my colleagues and I were gathering information about US efforts to bring Whelan home – scouring the globe for potential Russian spies to be used in a prisoner swap. The complexities of the eventual deal would not come to light until Whelan, Gershkovich and more than a dozen others were on their way out of Russia in August 2024.

Whelan called again at the end of November to recount being hit in the face by another prisoner. He believed he had been singled out because he is American and due to the US’ support for Israel amid the war in Gaza. He sustained a minor bruise, but expressed concerns that the “cowardly attack” could have been much worse.

A ‘disintegrating’ experience

He called me again two weeks later with a prepared statement, saying he was afraid for his safety after the assault and that he was being targeted by an official at the camp. When he spoke to prison officials about his concerns, Whelan said, they told him he could go to solitary confinement 24 hours a day.

On that call, we also spoke about the upcoming fifth anniversary of his detention in Russia. Whelan expressed concern that he would not see his elderly parents again. His beloved dog, Flora, had already died while he was in detention.

“Relatives have passed away. Friends have moved on. I’m very concerned that I won’t get home to see my parents,” he said.

He also told me that as he tried to keep his spirits up, the experience was “disintegrating.”

“I start the day with, you know, singing the national anthem for my four countries, and, you know, things get progressively worse from there,” said Whelan, who holds US, British, Irish and Canadian citizenship. “But, you know, there are people I speak to, I make calls home, I write letters, I read books, but it’s extremely difficult being innocent and in prison and waiting for people to help you.”

On December 28, 2023 – the fifth anniversary of his detention – Whelan called again. He seemed very down. He read a statement marking the grim milestone. I asked whether there was anything he was doing to try to dampen the blow of the painful anniversary.

“It’s difficult because most of the people in the camp realize that today is the five-year anniversary. And so they’ve been asking me questions about what the government is doing or not doing,” he told me.

“I have photographs of my dog and my family, friends – I took those out. I was looking at them and that, you know, is sometimes bittersweet. It’s a typical day here in the slave labor factory,” he said.

The next time Whelan called was in March 2024, after the death of Russian dissident Alexey Navalny in a remote Russian prison colony. I asked him his reaction. “Extremely troubling,” he said, expressing concern that “if they can get to him, they can get to me.”

He called again in early May, and then in late June, to mark 2,000 days in Russian detention. He called it “just an incredible amount of time.”

The last time we spoke before his release was on July 19 – the day Gershkovich’s trial had quickly wrapped up and the journalist was sentenced to 16 years in prison on espionage charges.

Whelan told me he felt “sympathetic and empathetic” for Gershkovich – and he sounded much more hopeful than he had in the past.

“We think that could be a good sign that the Russians want to actually now start negotiations with the US for his release as well as mine,” he told me.

Two weeks later, the US and Russia, with the involvement of half a dozen other countries, completed a historic prisoner swap. Gershkovich and Whelan were heading home.

CNN’s Alex Leeds Matthews and Dan Dzula contributed to this report.

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