Espionage

Paul Whelan, American Accused of Spying by Russia, Thrown in Moscow’s Most Infamous Dungeon

Lefortovo Prison is one of the oldest, most notorious jails in this city. During the Great Purge in the 1930s, Josef Stalin’s NKVD agents tortured inmates there to prepare them for the kind of show trials Arthur Koestler wrote about in his famous novel Darkness at Noon. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Gulag Archipelago, spent some very grim time at Lefortovo.

Given its past, one might think Lefortovo is an historical relic like Alcatraz in the United States, but it is still in use. And independent prison observers tell The Daily Beast that a retired U.S. Marine named Paul Whelan is being held there on charges of espionage.

“Lefortovo has not seen an American accused of espionage for ages,” according to Zoya Svetova, a senior independent observer of prison conditions with the Public Monitoring Commission of Moscow, a non-government organization.

If the treatment Whelan receives follows tradition for foreigners accused of spying, he will be kept in a single cell for the first 10 days of his time behind the bars. At Lefortovo they call this “quarantine time”; all prisoners accused of espionage get stripped of their clothes and belongings, dressed in identical blue robes and locked in tiny single cells without any television or radio.