In his first interview, freed American Paul Whelan opens up about life in a Russian labor camp.

washington — In December 2022, Paul Whelan was sitting in a factory in a Russian labor camp in Mordovia, more than seven hours east of Moscow, adding buttons and buttonholes to a winter coat.

He was summoned to the warden’s office and hoped someone in the U.S. government would call him to tell him he had finally secured his freedom, Whelan told ‘Face the Nation’ in his first interview since his release. Complex Prisoner Exchange In August. Instead, U.S. officials told him he was a women’s basketball star. Brittany Griner on her way home. Russia agreed to release her in exchange for arms dealer Viktor Bout, nicknamed ”.merchant of death.”

“I asked him point blank, so what else should I trade? And he said, ‘There’s nothing,’” Whelan recalled of the phone call. “Now how can you bring me back? And he said, ‘Then we’ll get back together tomorrow and discuss the matter.’”

“I see what you did here,” Whelan said. “There’s no one to deal with. They don’t want anyone else. And he said, ‘Yes, yes, we know.'”

The Marine Corps veteran served two years of a 16-year prison sentence after Russia arrested him in 2018 on trumped-up espionage charges. By then, Washington and Moscow had swapped hands. trevor reedKonstantin Yaroshenko, a Marine Corps veteran who has been detained in Russia since 2019 and a Russian pilot convicted in the U.S. of drug smuggling charges. Russia detained Griner in February 2022.

Whelan, whom the U.S. State Department determined was wrongfully detained, had expected to be released along with Reed, whose health had deteriorated. He said he was working in a factory when he heard on the radio that he had been cut out of the industry.

“All I could do was sit back and process what I had just heard in Russian,” he said. “All I could do was keep working.”

Whelan was arrested in December 2018 while visiting Moscow for a friend’s wedding. In a video of the arrest released by Russian state media, Whelan was seen talking to an acquaintance in the bathroom of his hotel room before agents of the Russian intelligence agency FSB detained him, who handed him a flash drive. Whelan declined to say more about the acquaintance, but believes he was targeted.

“I didn’t do anything. I didn’t commit espionage,” he said.

At the time, Whelan, who holds U.S., Canadian, Irish and British citizenship, was head of global security for auto parts supplier BorgWarner. The company fired him about a year after he was detained.

“If you can call what the employer did un-American, then it is un-American,” he said. “What really bothered me was not losing my job, but the fact that BorgWarner was continuing to do business in Russia while I was imprisoned there. They refused to cooperate with the U.S. government. They refused to cooperate with the U.S. government. “They did nothing to help me… to support me and my family.”

CBS News has reached out to BorgWarner for comment on Whelan’s comments. The company, referring to an August statement following Whelan’s release, argued that his trip to Russia in December 2018 was personal and not business-related. Whelan told CBS News the company paid for his entry visa and sent work emails and handled work-related phone calls on the day he was arrested.

Whelan said that shortly after his arrest, FSB officers told him not to do “anything reckless” and that he “don’t have to worry.” This was all part of a Russian ploy to rescue Yaroshenko, Bout, and Russian agent Maria Butina. Infiltrate American conservative politics.

Russia secured the release of all three after Butina was sentenced to prison and expelled from the United States in 2019 following two prisoner exchanges in 2022.

Meanwhile, Whelan’s family became increasingly concerned about his well-being.

“How do you continue to survive day after day, knowing that your government has failed twice to free you from a foreign prison? At this point, I don’t think there can be any hope that the government will negotiate his freedom. ” His twin brother, David Whelan, emailed reporters on December 8, 2022.

As negotiations for his release stalled over the years, Whelan said, “That’s what’s been on my mind.”

For the first two years of his detention, Whelan was imprisoned in Moscow’s infamous Lefortovo prison, where the lights were on 24 hours a day in his cell. At the labor camp, the guards woke him up every two hours every night for four years.

“It was very, very difficult to get out of that sleep pattern,” he said. “It’s still incredibly difficult to get six to eight hours of sleep at a time.”

The labor camp housed prisoners mainly from Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, and described his fellow prisoners as “close family”. They were much younger than Whelan, now 54, and helped him figure out how to send and receive messages through the prison communications network with Reed before his release, he said.

“Knowing he was there gave me strength and helped me get through the ordeal,” Whelan said. “I think it helped him know I was nearby and that helped him too.”

They also said the prisoners had secret cell phones that allowed them to communicate with people in the camp who were deployed to the front lines in the war against Ukraine.

“They communicated with us, and their communications were transmitted to four governments through illegal mobile phones,” he said, explaining that prison guards turned a blind eye. “Russian prison guards get paid $300, $400 a month. Give them a box of cigarettes and they can do whatever they want.”

Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich be arrested In March 2023, trumped-up espionage charges left Whelan and his family again worried that he would be left behind. His family has continued to pressure the Biden administration to do more to secure his release. Whelan also defended his freedom by calling journalists and expressing his frustration in separate phone calls. directly To Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Roger Carstens, the President’s Special Envoy for Hostage Issues.

Karstens said Griner’s conversation with Whelan after his release was “one of the most difficult phone calls” he had ever had.

A final deal granting Whelan and Gershkovich freedom to come together required months of arduous negotiations through diplomatic and intelligence channels. The deal hinged on President Biden convincing German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to release convicted FSB assassin Vadim Krasikov.

On August 1, in one of the largest prisoner exchanges since the end of the Cold War, Russia freed 16 prisoners, including a political prisoner linked to deceased opposition leader Alexei Navalny, while Western countries freed eight Russians, including Krasikov. . Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian-American radio journalist, and Vladimir Kara-Murza, a U.S. green card holder and Kremlin critic, were released along with Whelan and Gershkovich.

During his visit to Berlin on Friday, President Biden thanked the German chancellor for helping secure the release of wrongfully detained Americans, according to a White House meeting summary.

Whelan said he had been held in solitary confinement for five days before his release.

He didn’t believe he was on his way home until a small CIA plane carrying him and other freed prisoners crossed the English Channel. “I didn’t expect to see the White Cliffs of Dover, but I did,” said Whelan, who shed tears for the first time in the interview.

“You know, they guided Spitfire pilots back during the war,” he said, noting that the cliffs were a prominent marker on the return flight paths of British fighter planes during World War II. “For me, it was what brought me, Evan, and Alsu back to the United States.”

He had no idea that Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris would end up like this. waiting for him on the tarmac It was just before midnight when we landed at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland. He was the first to get off the plane from Ankara, Turkey, where the exchange took place, wearing the unwashed clothes he brought to Russia in 2018 and his now-too-large Whelan.

“I was told I could go first because I had been held the longest,” he said. “You see the stairs coming down. The president and the vice president are looking up at the plane. They’re inside the plane looking out and they’re all looking at the media and they’re like, ‘Wow, okay, I’ve got to figure it out. Figure out how to do this really quickly.’ ”

He came down eight steps and paid his respects to Biden. After speaking briefly with the President and Vice President, he approached his sister, Elizabeth Whelan. traveled to washington More than 20 times we put pressure on the government to take action. Mr. Biden later removed an American flag pin from the lapel of his suit jacket and pinned it to Whelan’s shirt.

While Whelan waited to be flown to San Antonio, Texas, for a medical evaluation, the Paris Olympics were televised in the famous visitor’s lounge at Joint Base Andrews.

“And I looked and said, ‘Hey, it’s Britney. Britney’s on TV,'” Whelan said.

Griner, who won three consecutive Olympic gold medals in Paris, has advocated for Whelan’s freedom since his release.

“It was one of those amazing moments,” he said.