Washington D.C – CNN, December 23, 2024
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 August 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.
