A former hostage struggles with the return home

It has been almost a year since 55-year-old former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan was released from a Russian labor camp in one of the largest prisoner exchanges between the U.S. and Russia since the Cold War.

But since returning home, the Michigan native says he still feels trapped.

Only this time it’s in a web of government bureaucracy.

The long-delayed return 

It was last August when a small plane touched down at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. There was a swarm of media – reporters, photographers and television crews training their cameras on the aircraft.

There was a heightened sense of anticipation. The plane held hostages who had been held in Russia finally returning home. Some of the family members in the crowd had waited years for this moment.

A tall, light-haired man was the first to emerge from the plane. Russia detained Paul Whelan in December of 2018 and after years of toiling in a Russian labor camp, Whelan said he was weak from malnourishment. But he steadied himself on the hand railings of the plane’s steps, before descending and snapping-off a crisp salute to the figure waiting for him.

It was then-President Joe Biden who embraced Whelan and talked with him for several minutes. Later, Biden took his American flag lapel pin and handed it to the former U.S. Marine.

Whelan says the warm welcome from America was short-lived.

“What we found is that once you’re home, you’re actually on your own. The attention turns on the next guy that’s still locked-up somewhere abroad,” he said.

The arrest background

Whelan says he was in Russia for a friend’s wedding in late December 2018 when an acquaintance handed him a flash drive he thought held vacation photos.

Moments later, Russian security officers burst into his room, took the drive from Whelan, said it contained “classified information” and accused him of spying.

In claiming that Whelan was an intelligence operative, the Russians noted he had four passports, which they said must have been falsified.

Whelan’s passports were legitimate. He’s a citizen of four countries. His parents hail from England and Ireland, he was born in Canada and his family moved to the U.S. when he was a child.

In June of 2020, a Moscow court sentenced Whelan to 16 years in prison for espionage.

He says Russian officials privately assured him that he was what they called “trade bait” and he’d only be detained “for a couple weeks,” because he was going to be used in a swap for a prisoner Moscow wanted freed.

But a deal never materialized.

Instead Whelan spent five years, seven months and five days in Russian custody, watching, he says, while the U.S. negotiated the release of other Americans captured long after he was. The Biden administration claimed they tried to negotiate Whelan’s release, for example, including him as part of the trade when U.S. basketball star Brittney Griner was freed in exchange for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout in December of 2022. However, White House officials said they were rebuffed by Moscow.

Freed from Russia but challenged at home

After he arrived back in the U.S., the government took a few weeks to check Whelan’s medical and psychological condition, then released him to go home.

Whelan says he was not in great physical shape, had few resources and no longer had medical insurance.

His former employer, BorgWarner, dropped him as its director of global security after the first year he was detained by Russia.

Prisoners at the labor camp could pay for their own surgery if they had the finances to do so. However, Whelan says after he suffered an injury, he had no way to cover the cost of a crucial procedure.

“I had a hernia that needed surgery and then I was unemployed. I didn’t have the means to pay for a private operation,” Whelan said, adding that Russia wouldn’t fund any procedure until the case was dire. “I basically had to wait until I had to have emergency surgery.”

Back home in Michigan, Whelan’s financial situation became increasingly frustrating and complex.

He found that since he had not held a job in the state recently, he did not qualify for unemployment.

“Because the laws were written so specifically, my situation falls outside the cookie cutter. I was working but I was working in a Russian labor camp. And apparently that doesn’t count,” he said.

A member of Congress had to contact Michigan’s secretary of state just for Whelan to get a driver’s license and identification.

And his conviction in Russia for a crime that the U.S. declared bogus still created problems at home.

“When I applied for a renewal of my global entry card, which comes from Customs and Border patrol, I had a hard time with them,” Whelan said. “Because they kept focusing on the fact that, ‘You were arrested and you were imprisoned overseas.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, and look at the pictures of the president meeting me at Joint Base Andrews when I came back.”

Strangest of all, he says, was when he tried to get full Medicaid coverage through the state.

“I had a letter back that said I didn’t qualify because I wasn’t a U.S. citizen. It makes you scratch your head, to be quite honest. How could somebody have sent that to me? But they did. And I said ‘You can just Google my name right now.’ “

No funding for a law designed to help 

It’s not supposed to be that difficult for returning hostages.

The Robert Levinson Hostage Recovery and Hostage-Taking Accountability Act, signed into law in 2020, was created specifically to provide medical and other assistance to them and their families for five years after their release.

But it’s never been funded. Michigan U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens says there’s a bipartisan effort to add that appropriation.

“We need to do that. That’s next phase. Someone like Paul Whelan, five and a half years taken from him, if he was wrongfully imprisoned in the United States he’d arguably get compensation,” said Stevens adding, “Paul Whelan right now is living off of a GoFundMe. And it’s unacceptable. And it’s wrong.”

Stevens says the latest Defense reauthorization bill did include money to strengthen sanctions against countries who take hostages and help families who lobby for a loved one’s release.

Whelan has argued for those changes and taken other steps as well.

He’s worked to press the Social Security Administration to cover retirement payments hostages lost while detained.

He’s talked with various government entities about the need for better communication among agencies dealing with wrongfully detained Americans.

He’s publicly discussed his firsthand experience of dealing with Russian security forces and Moscow’s prison system.

And ironically, for someone falsely accused of being an espionage agent, Whelan has even been a featured guest at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.

Struggling to piece his life back together

These days, Whelan lives with his elderly parents in the small village of Manchester, about 60 miles southwest of Detroit.

The former Marine says he’s contacted several organizations that help veterans.

But he says except for a bit of assistance from a Boston group affiliated with Harvard, the rest have turned him down because his captivity as a hostage was not related to his military service.

Now Whelan says he literally depends on the kindness of strangers in his community.

Auto dealers from the area offered him a leased vehicle.

Private practitioners have provided him with some medical and dental help.

And at places like the cozy Manchester Diner, locals who know Whelan’s situation try to be helpful.

On a recent day, as Whelan scraped the last of his soup from a bowl, the restaurant’s owner, Leslie Kirkland, stopped by with a job tip.

One of her regular customers runs a cyber security company that might fit Whelan’s employment expertise.

“I’ll try to talk to him this weekend, I know he’ll come in for chicken waffles. I can see if he’s got something for you or he can put you in the right direction for something,” she said.

Whelan smiled and thanked her, then glanced at his phone.

There was a message from another former hostage, Mark Swidan, whom China had recently released.

He’s one of several detainees who Whelan says regularly text each other, seeking advice and encouragement.

“It’s a small community but we keep in touch. Sort of like a group of misfit toys. Ha!”

Whelan says he’s also remained in contact with some inmates still incarcerated at the Russian labor camp where he was held.

He says the prisoners use the kind of burner phones like Whelan did when he talked surreptitiously with U.S. government officials.

The phones are technically not allowed at the prison.

But Whelan says they are still easy to obtain with a cigarette slipped to the right guard or warden.

“We practice English. And I have family and friends in other countries that are helping to send over-the-counter medications and things into Russia to go to my friends in the camps. That’s helping keep them healthy.”

As far as his own physical, financial and emotional health is concerned, Whelan says he remembers hearing that returning from a hostage situation is akin to holding your breath underwater, then suddenly rising to the surface and gasping for air.

“The reality is that when you get off the plane, you find that your former life isn’t there,” Whelan said. “The homes that we’ve left are not the homes that we come back to. It’s a process of putting puzzle pieces together yourself.”

Whelan says that’s why he wants to help the government develop new methods to support anyone else who is taken hostage outside the U.S. and gets to return.

Then, he says, maybe his more than half-a-decade in the darkest corners of the Russian prison system will count for something besides just time taken away from him.