General Discussion

The obstacles to her brother’s release, as Elizabeth would soon discover, were twofold.

No. 1: Paul Whelan was not a perfect victim. “His case is one of those that doesn’t come across as super clear-cut,” a senior congressional official and Russia policy expert, who requested anonymity in order to be candid, told me. “He’s not this Boy Scout on a goodwill mission to Russia who gets kidnapped.”

Paul enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1994 and was a staff sergeant in the Iraq War from 2003 to 2008. But in January 2008, he received a court-martial conviction on charges “related to larceny,” according to his service records. He was accused of attempting to steal $10,000 from the government while serving in Iraq, and using false credentials on a government computer system to grade his own rank-advancement courses. He ultimately received a bad-conduct discharge.

No. 2: the lingering question of whether this guy actually was a spy. At the time of his arrest, Paul was the global head of security for an international automotive-parts manufacturer. He is a citizen of four different countries—the U.S., the U.K., Ireland, and Canada—and keeps up-to-date passports for each. It didn’t matter that immediately following Paul’s arrest, current and former CIA officers batted down suggestions he was working for them, telling reporters that Paul’s court-martial likely would’ve barred him from ever joining the agency, and that the U.S. was unlikely to send an agent abroad without diplomatic cover. Nor did it matter that the Whelans adamantly denied the accusation, or that just days after Paul’s arrest, his FSB-appointed lawyer seemed to suggest to a reporter that Russians had long been monitoring Paul’s activity and saw him as a potential exchange for Russians currently jailed in the U.S.