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    • Paul Whelan says he passed information about Ukraine to the US from a Russian prison
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    Paul Whelan says he passed information about Ukraine to the US from a Russian prison

    Kathleen William Posted on

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    During his time in a Russian labor camp, Paul Whelan passed information from fellow prisoners serving on the front lines in Ukraine to the United States, Canada, Ireland and England via secret burner phones, he said in his first major interview with CBS' “Face the Nation.” “. since he was released from Russian custody in August as part of a prisoner exchange.

    Whelan said around 450 prisoners from his camp accepted a deal to serve as mercenaries for Russia's Wagner Group in Ukraine. They then passed information back to him about “illegal cell phones,” which Whelan passed on to the four governments, Whelan said in the interview Sunday.

    The 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 it a pack of cigarettes and you can pretty much do whatever you want.”

    After the release of Brittney Griner and Trevor Reed, Whelan hit “rock bottom”

    Whelan, a former Marine from Michigan, was released more than five years after his arrest in Moscow on charges of spying for the United States. He was released along with Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was jailed on similar charges in early 2023, and 14 other prisoners in exchange for eight Russians imprisoned in the United States, Germany, Norway, Slovenia and Poland.

    Russia claimed Whelan was caught “red-handed” with a USB stick containing classified information in his room at Moscow's Metropol Hotel. But Whelan was framed in a production directed by Ilya Yatsenko, a close Russian friend whom 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 statement previous interview.

    More: North Korean shock troops in Ukraine? South Korea summons Russian ambassador over reports.

    David Whelan said Yatsenko gave the CD to his brother, who thought it contained photos or something else. Instead, agents broke into Paul Whelan's hotel room and arrested him.

    Paul Whelan was found guilty in a closed-door trial in 2020 and sentenced to 16 years in prison. He was taken to the IK-17 prison camp in the Republic of Mordovia, an eight-hour drive from Moscow.

    There, Whelan was cut off from the outside world, he told CBS. But the ambassadors and consular teams of the four countries to which he had provided information visited him regularly and sometimes brought him mail from home, he said.

    Whelan watched as other Americans who spent less time in Russian prisons were released in prisoner exchanges while he remained captive. Basketball star Brittney Griner was released in late 2022, nine months after she was arrested on drug smuggling charges when two small vape pens and cannabis oil were found in her bag at Moscow airport.

    And Trevor Reed, also a former Marine, was swapped in April 2022 for a Russian drug dealer being held in a U.S. prison. Reed spent almost three years in a Russian prison after his arrest in August 2019.

    Whelan said in the CBS interview that he was told he would go with Reed. Then he heard on the radio in prison that the swap had already taken place and he wasn't there.

    The news was “devastating,” he said. When Griner was released months later and Whelan was left behind, he reached his “rock bottom” – U.S. officials told him there were no more Russian prisoners he could trade for his freedom.

    Whelan's release months later was a “diplomatic masterstroke,” President Biden said at the time. Whelan was greeted by the President and Vice President Harris as he stepped off the plane onto U.S. soil.

    Cybele Mayes-Osterman is a breaking news reporter for USA Today. You can reach her by email at [email protected]. Follow her on X @CybeleMO.

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    Kathleen William
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