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.”
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.
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.