Over the years, Whelan, a Marine Corps veteran, has held himself out to friends and family as a world traveler, accustomed to working closely with FBI agents and American embassy personnel. And he was deeply interested in Russia and its people. He spent considerable time and energy developing a network of contacts there. For the past decade, he has had a profile on the social media platform VKontakte, Russia’s equivalent of Facebook, which is unusual for a non-Russian. Whelan has cultivated connections there that blossomed into offline relationships, some of his Russian friends said.
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In a 2013 deposition, stemming from a case in which Whelan wasn’t a party, he said that he had been a sheriff’s deputy in Washtenaw County and a police officer for the city of Chelsea.
But a representative for the Washtenaw County sheriff said the agency had no record of Whelan’s employment. And Chelsea police records show that he worked as a part-time police officer, as well as a dispatcher, a crossing guard, and a parking officer, also in a part-time capacity, from 1990 to 1996.
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“I did not remain in touch with him after the deployment, but I do have 15 years of experience doing intelligence,” said T.J. Sjostrom, who served as a noncommissioned intelligence officer in the Marines and was in Whelan’s unit when it deployed to Iraq in 2006. “No intelligence agency would take someone with his record to be a spy.”
In January 2008, Whelan was convicted in a special court-martial for attempted larceny, three specifications of dereliction of duty, making a false official statement, wrongfully using another person’s Social Security number and 10 specifications of making and uttering checks without sufficient funds in his account, according to military court documents.
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