by Tom Rogan
It won't be that simple.
Whelan, an American who also holds British, Canadian, and Irish citizenship, was arrested by Russia's FSB domestic security service at a Moscow hotel in December 2018. He was convicted of having received FSB intelligence material on a USB stick. The court's intended implication: that Whelan was a CIA nonofficial cover officer or agent using his supposed business and leisure trips to Russia to collect intelligence. NOC officers or agents collect intelligence without the protection of diplomatic cover, leaving themselves vulnerable to imprisonment or execution if their activities are detected. Except that it is not at all clear that Whelan is or ever was a spy.
Previously convicted at a military court martial of theft-related activities and dishonorably discharged from the Marine Corps, Whelan would be viewed by the CIA as untrustworthy and unreliable, someone far more likely to embarrass the agency or to be used by the Russians. Certainly, any NOC would not use an almost certainly bugged Moscow hotel room to engage in a USB stick exchange with an FSB officer.
What of the possibility that Whelan was working for one of the other countries of which he has citizenship? It is highly unlikely. The Irish do not conduct foreign intelligence activities of this nature, and the British Secret Intelligence Service and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service would not have used Whelan for the same reasons the CIA probably would not have used him.
So, what's going on here?
Well, behind the scenes, there is a shared Western intelligence consensus that Whelan is an unfortunate soul who fell prey to Russian intelligence games. One former intelligence officer with extensive Russia-related intelligence operations told me that this was a "classic FSB provocation operation. Whelan was set up to create a foreign spectacle and advance the Kremlin's domestic narrative that Western spies are everywhere. ... Whelan is a strange guy who went online wanting to meet Russians he perceived as similar to himself, with military backgrounds. That was very unwise, raising red flags for the FSB. He walked into an FSB trap."
Maria Snegovaya, a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, echoes this assessment. "It's a typical FSB/KGB strategy, unfortunately," she tells me, "in which they capture innocent people as prisoners and then use them as assets to exchange for some favors from the West (be it a preferred policy or prisoner swap for Russian spies)."
But if Whelan is simply what the Russians would call a "useful idiot," why did he receive such a long sentence?
One reason is that the FSB is not actually very good at catching Western agents. Whelan offers them a way to distract from these failures by presenting a pretense of effective counterintelligence work. This takes on added value in the context of some recent and some catastrophic Russian intelligence failures.
That said, the long sentence also shows the Russians intend to use Whelan as a chip for a spy swap. They'll plan to trade Whelan the next time the FBI rolls up one of their own spy cells on U.S. soil.
Beyond that possibility, there has been speculation that Russia might try to use Whelan to free Konstantin Yaroshenko and Dmitry Makarenko, two Russians currently detained by the United States. Some have also suggested that Whelan could be swapped for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout. That's not going to happen — the U.S. would only trade Bout for an actual American spy. On that point, Washington will be highly reluctant to trade Whelan and thus suggest to Moscow that it can succeed in using nonspies as trades for actual spies.
In short, Whelan's situation is sad but ultimately reflective only of Russia's penchant for intelligence operations that are at once theatrical and adversarial.
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