DETROIT _ Defiance runs like a string through the last year of Paul Whelan's life, tugging at him to remain impervious to the degradation of life in a Russian prison, giving him voice at court hearings, where he decries his more than yearlong incarceration.
It has moored the 49-year-old Michigan man, helping him to remain insistent in his dealings with Russian authorities that he is innocent, a political prisoner held for an unknown ulterior motive.
The Russian Foreign Ministry alleges Whelan is a spy who was caught "red-handed" in an act of espionage when he was arrested Dec. 28, 2018, at his hotel in Moscow. The Federal Security Service (FSB) says its agents found a USB drive containing classified information in Whelan's room at the Metropol Hotel.
Whelan, who worked as head of global security for Auburn Hills-based BorgWarner, an auto supplier, until his position was eliminated last month, insists that he was set up, and that he was simply a tourist in Russia in December 2018. He was there, he says, to attend the wedding of a friend, a fellow former Marine.
"Russia says it caught James Bond on a spy mission. In reality, they abducted Mr. Bean on holiday," Whelan told reporters during a detention hearing at Moscow City Court in October.
In the days leading up to his arrest in Russia, he led tours of Moscow historical sites for the wedding party of his friend, said his twin brother, David Whelan.
And he shared Christmas dinner at a steakhouse in Moscow with Ilya Yatsenko, a Russian man he'd met a decade earlier during one of his trips to the country.
Over about a half-dozen visits to Russia since 2006, Whelan got to know Yatsenko _ or so he thought _ even visiting Yatsenko's parents and siblings in the town of Sergiev Posad, about 50 miles northeast of Moscow, David Whelan said.
It was Yatsenko who gave Whelan key evidence in Russia's case against him: a USB drive containing government secrets, David Whelan alleges.
"Paul expected there to be photographs on it and something else was put on that drive in order to entrap him," he said.
The Detroit Free Press tried to contact Yatsenko, calling three phone numbers culled from Paul Whelan's contacts by his family. All three phone lines were out of service or disconnected. The Free Press also emailed an address believed to be Yatsenko's, but never received a reply.
Ever since his brother's arrest, David Whelan has tried to bat down conspiracy theories and disinformation about what Paul Whelan was really doing in Russia.
"There was an expectation _ certainly developed by the media _ that, well, if Paul's been charged with espionage, there must be something there," David Whelan said. "And not realizing that the Russians charge people with espionage all the time, and there's nothing there.
"And so the conspiracy theories are just, I mean, they're just crazy. ... He really did just go for a wedding. He was supposed to go to the wedding in September. The wedding party had visa issues. And so they went in December.
"It couldn't be a more normal activity. ... Only in hindsight do people say ... 'he must have been a CIA operative. He must have been a ... ' you know, all these other things. He was really just a tourist and I think we'll eventually be able to confirm that."
Meanwhile, his brother waits it out in a Russian jail, which is taking a hefty toll.
In the days immediately after Whelan's arrest, he said he was denied such basic things as toilet paper and soap in the prison.
His family set up an account through the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, and now a State Department employee uses money from that account to buy necessities and delivers them along with fresh produce and other supplies to the notorious, 19th-century Lefortovo Prison in Moscow.
Whelan has reported that the guards at the prison have threatened, abused and harassed him. He hasn't been able to make a single phone call in more than a year of imprisonment. His mail is censored, and visits from his lawyers and embassy representatives are extremely limited.
"This is typical prisoner of war isolation technique," Whelan told journalists at a court hearing in May, according to The Associated Press. "They're trying to run me down so that I will talk to them."
But his brother said the tactic isn't working.
"The Russian media reported that Paul was defiant," David Whelan said. "Our family is glad that that is how his continued fight against injustice is perceived by the Russian government. Ongoing attempts to get Paul to plead guilty and outlandish stories ... only show how desperate the FSB is becoming in the face of this defiance."
FAMILY FINDS STRENGTH IN RESISTANCE
A similar kind of strength has run through the entire Whelan family these last 12 months.
Paul Whelan's older sister, Elizabeth, stood in solitary protest outside the Russian Embassy in Washington in November, holding a sign that said "#FreePaulWhelan" in Cyrillic.
Near Toronto, David Whelan bought Christmas presents for Paul, insistent that his twin would have gifts, even if he wasn't home in Michigan to open them this year.
In Manchester, near Ann Arbor, his parents, Rosemary and Edward Whelan, make a daily ritual of writing to him. And they hold out hope that their son will come home. They don't know when, but they remain insistent that it will happen.
"I write every day and send cards," Whelan's mother said. "His Valentine and 50th birthday cards, for March 5, have all been mailed in good time. Mail from Paul seems to come at two monthly intervals in large bundles."
His trial is likely to come this spring, said his English-speaking attorney, Olga Karlova, in an email to the Free Press. She said she and Vladimir Zherebenkov, the lead defense attorney on the case, are spending more time this month with Whelan, reviewing the evidence the Russian government plans to present at his trial.
"We are planning to do it more intensively, from morning till evening with a break for lunch," she said. The timing of Whelan's trial will depend on how quickly they can translate the evidence and prosecution's documents into English, and strategize his defense.
"We want to do it very thoroughly," she wrote. "We do not want to miss any details. ... If everything is as we plan, the core hearings could be in March."
At their meetings, Karlova said Whelan is "in a good mood, joked very much."
He hasn't lost his sense of humor, or his wanderlust, she said, explaining that they talk a lot about traveling the world.
That's despite struggles with his health.
Whelan has lost weight in the last year and has an inguinal hernia, which means tissue is protruding through a weak spot in the abdominal muscle wall.
His brother said Whelan was scheduled to have the hernia surgically repaired in early 2019, after his trip to Russia. But since he was arrested, that didn't happen.
"You can go for years without it being a problem," David Whelan said. "Except when it becomes a problem, it becomes an emergency. If it becomes strangulated ... then he's in the position where he needs medical care right away."
An ambulance was called to the Moscow courtroom in August, where Whelan had appeared for a detention hearing.
"He was moving to another cell and they force(d) him to lift his own items and take it with him," Karlova told the Free Press in an email message on the day of the incident. "These items were heavy enough to make his hernia worse. We have submitted an appeal, which was supported by Paul, to make an operation on his hernia."
The judge stopped the court proceedings so Whelan could be evaluated, Karlova said, but he has opted not to have surgery until American doctors are allowed to review his situation and make a recommendation.
That his incarceration has dragged on so long, his health is failing, and little action has been taken on the part of the U.S. government to bring Whelan home is a sore spot for his family.
"We have an overriding frustration with the approach that has been taken so far, which is the American government as a whole _ the State Department and administration, in particular _ is ... going to let the Russian judicial process play out and take this to trial, as if Paul actually could possibly be a spy, and therefore needed to be on trial," Elizabeth Whelan said.
"And I think that this is ridiculous. ... Russia has a legal system but not a judicial system. Everybody knows that once you get on this conveyor belt, that the end result before you're popped off at the other end is 100% chance of conviction and sentencing."
REPORTS FROM MOSCOW OFFER HOPE, CAUSE FOR CONCERN
While Whelan's family has been bolstered by seeing his insolence in video clips and media reports of his court hearings, Russian authorities have expressed frustration.
"He's threatening the penitentiary officers and he makes all kinds of arrogant accusations," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said at a news conference in Washington in December. "For example, he is saying that he will put a drill to the head of the officer."
The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs later posted to its Facebook page an image of an office hole punch that resembles a drill and is used to bind documents. It alleges Whelan threatened to use it against prison guards.
Soon after, Rebecca Ross, a spokeswoman at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, changed her Twitter profile picture to a series of three triple-hole punches in red, white and blue.
The Whelan family watched the live-streamed video of the news conference and were stunned by Lavrov's claims.
"It starts to press your incredulity. You can't believe a foreign government is making weird sorts of allegations like that," David Whelan said. "So, I mean, on the one hand it's disappointing that it was so crazy, and on the other hand, we're glad that their perception appears to be of Paul that he is being very defiant because we want him to be defiant as far as he can be.
"I think if you're in that sort of situation, where you're clearly being deprived of your rights, the rule of law isn't being followed even within that country, but certainly not the rule of law as understood by Americans or Westerners, then I think one of the only things you have is the ability to be strong internally. And I think that's how it's playing out. What they see as defiance is his inner strength trying to avoid having to confess, to avoid having to plead guilty to charges he knows are false."
Whelan was denied Thanksgiving dinner when Julie Fisher, then-charge d'affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, tried to bring him a special meal.
And at his latest detention hearing on Christmas Eve, Whelan was not allowed to speak to the news media. Still, he held up a sign that said, "No espionage. No evidence. No red hands," Ross tweeted.
During an interview in mid-December inside his office in Toronto, David Whelan said it's seeing that kind of resistance from his brother that gives him hope.
"There's a feeling amongst my family, and not just my family in North America, but our family extended across Europe, that we're not going to let the Russians change how our family works," David Whelan said. "If Paul can be defiant in Lefortovo, then we can be defiant from wherever we're located."
Whether that means standing outside an embassy in protest, writing letters and lobbying Congress and the White House to take action, or an act as simple as buying a Christmas gift.
"We know that people are having conversations that we aren't privy to at the State Department, at ... the National Security Council level, at the embassies," David Whelan said. "We know that those conversations are happening.
"So, we will continue to think of Paul and pay his bills and buy him presents and think of him and send letters to him in the same way that we always have. Because you never know when that day is going to come that he does come back.
"Hopefully, he will come back while my parents are alive. Hopefully, he'll come back while Flora, the dog, is still running around happy. But he will eventually come back."
If Whelan is convicted of espionage, he could be sentenced to up to 20 years in a Russian prison.
His brother said the family will have to make some hard choices in the year ahead about whether to let go of his Novi apartment and move his belongings to storage, especially now that BorgWarner has eliminated his job.
"He will come back to no job, no apartment, no income, you know? No health care. Everything will just be sort of completely shattered for him," David Whelan said. "So we're going to try and just nurse as much of that as we can to make it last as long as possible because it would be terrible to come back and also be bankrupt, and ... to essentially have not been able to pay any of your bills and have just every part of your life destroyed."
