Paul Whelan

Paul Nicholas Whelan (born March 5, 1970) is a Canadian-born former United States Marine with U.S., British, Irish, and Canadian citizenship.

Whelan was born on March 5, 1970, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, to British parents with Irish heritage.

He took courses at Northern Michigan University from fall 1988 to fall 1990 without earning a degree.

The Chelsea Police, however, said he worked in lesser roles and as a part-time officer from 1990 to 1996, while the Washtenaw County sheriff reported no record of his employment.

He enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve in 1994.

A former colleague said he was a patrol officer from 1998 to 2000 in the Keego Harbor police department.

He was an IT manager for the Kelly Services staffing company from 2001 to 2003, and then 2008 to 2010.

He took military leave from Kelly Services to serve with the Marine Corps Reserve from 2003 to 2008, including service in Iraq.

He held the rank of staff sergeant with Marine Air Control Group 38 working as an administrative clerk and administrative chief, and he was part of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Whelan traveled to Russia several times from 2006 and maintained an intermittent presence on a Russian-language social media website, VKontakte (VK), where he had approximately 70 contacts.

He has studied Russian but communicated online using Google Translate.

After a court-martial conviction in January 2008 on multiple counts "related to larceny", he was sentenced to 60 days restriction, reduction to pay grade E-4, and a bad conduct discharge.

The specific charges against him included "attempted larceny, three specifications of dereliction of duty, making a false official statement, wrongfully using another's social security number, and ten specifications of making and uttering checks without having sufficient funds in his account for payment."

When arrested in Russia, Whelan was director of global security and investigations for BorgWarner, an international automotive parts manufacturer based in Michigan.

His work with Kelly Services and BorgWarner gave Whelan contacts with the U.S. intelligence community, federal agents and foreign embassies.

From 2010 to 2016 Whelan was Kelly Services' senior manager of global security and operations.

According to a deposition Whelan gave in 2013, he was in law enforcement from 1988 to 2000 as a police officer in Chelsea, Michigan, and a sheriff's deputy in Washtenaw County.

He said in a deposition in 2013 that he holds a bachelor's degree in criminal justice and an MBA degree.

He was arrested in Russia on December 28, 2018, and accused of spying.

On December 28, 2018, Whelan was arrested in the Moscow area by Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), which later confirmed his arrest.

Whelan's twin brother David said Whelan arrived in Moscow on December 22 to attend the wedding of a former fellow Marine at the Hotel Metropol Moscow and to assist the groom's family members on their first visit to Russia, a country he had visited many times.

He said his brother planned to return to Michigan on January 6, 2019, via Saint Petersburg.

David said his brother entered Russia using his U.S. passport and had not been in contact with his family.

The BBC cited family members of Whelan, who said Whelan previously bragged about knowing an agent of the FSB, and was privy to an unusual cache of personal details about his friend, including which intelligence training school he attended (biographical information typically reserved for a very close circle).

Whelan said the man was one of his oldest friends in Russia and that he had visited this man's house the winter before his arrest.

Whelan also said he loaned his friend 80,000 Russian rubles ($1,147; £930), and claimed it was for the wedding.

The FSB later said that the payment was for intelligence.

According to Whelan, his long-time friend framed him by appearing unexpectedly in the hotel, followed by authorities, who later arrested him.

According to attorneys for Whelan, they could not provide the name of Whelan's Russian friend due to Russian secrecy rules, but Whelan's family identified the person as Ilya Yatsenko, whom the Russian newspaper Kommersant described as a major in the FSB's Department "K", which monitors Russian economic crimes.

One Russian-language source, MBK News, an outlet run by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, gives a very different account from the BBC and from Whelan's family.

This source claims Whelan had "$80,000" in cash—as opposed to 80,000 rubles, worth about a thousand US dollars—"temporarily confiscated" during a customs inspection at Domodedovo Airport.

There does not appear to be any source other than this single Russian-language one claiming Whelan had $80,000 as opposed to 80,000 rubles (and may be due to a confusion of currencies).

According to Whelan's brother David, this report in MBK is a defamatory lie.

In an interview with the Ann Arbor Observer, David described MBK as a "horribly unreliable Russian news source" which falsely reported the 80,000 rubles as dollars.

He stated: "Paul had gotten some money out to pay for the wedding caterer, since the groom, Paul's Marine friend, had not realized he'd have to pay cash for the restaurant."

David Whelan said he has repeatedly "corrected the Wikipedia page, only to see the error [...] restored."

According to David, such "repetition without verification or corroboration" is another "grotesque aspect of all this. Paul is unable to respond to these misstatements—lies?—and by the time he is freed, they will be widely accepted by people who care less for the truth than they do for 'winning' online, whether in a social media brawl or by creating clicks on their media platform. Paul Will never be able to undo the damage."

Whelan was formally charged on January 3, 2019.

According to the Russian news agency Rosbalt, Whelan was apprehended in his hotel room at the Metropol Hotel while concluding a long outing with a Russian citizen, who handed him a USB drive containing "a list of all the employees at a classified security agency".

On June 15, 2020, he received a 16-year prison sentence.