(*14*)Fogel’s charmed life has turned darkish on the age of 60. He by no means sought notoriety. But he and his household slowly have come to the conclusion that telling the world his identify may very well be his salvation.
(*14*)For the previous 11 months, Fogel has languished in Russian detention facilities following his August 2021 arrest for attempting to enter the nation with about half an oz of medical marijuana he’d been prescribed in the United States for power ache after quite a few accidents and surgical procedures. First he endlessly awaited trial, typically in crowded, smoke-choked cells. More just lately, he has been serving the primary weeks of an incomprehensible 14-year sentence handed down by a Russian decide in June.
(*14*)Fogel’s plight parallels a comparable case that has performed large on news web sites, led cable newscasts and prompted White House pronouncements: the trial of WNBA basketball star Brittney Griner, who additionally was arrested for trying to enter Russia with a small amount of medical marijuana. On Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken introduced that the United States has made a “substantial proposal” to Russia to safe the discharge of Griner and one other jailed American, Paul Whelan, who is serving a 16-year Russian sentence on spy expenses he has denied.
(*14*)Marc Fogel’s spouse, Jane Fogel, mentioned in an interview after the news broke that she’s nonetheless hoping her husband may be included in a swap. But these hopes are fading, she mentioned, talking publicly for the primary time about her husband’s case.
(*14*)“There’s a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that Marc will be left behind,” Jane Fogel mentioned Wednesday after the announcement in regards to the doable swap together with Griner and Whelan. “It’s terrifying. I would hope that President Biden and especially first lady Jill Biden, who is an educator, realize the importance of including Marc in addition to Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan.”
(*14*)In suburban Pittsburgh, Jane Fogel has been watching the Griner case spool out and puzzled whether or not her husband has been forgotten. Griner’s spouse, Cherelle, acquired a name from the president. The Fogels have been stalled on the mid-functionary degree of the U.S. State Department. Speculation about a doable prisoner swap earlier than Blinken’s announcement on Wednesday had earlier trickled into his Russian jail cell, compounding his anxiousness.
(*14*)“That hurt,” Marc Fogel wrote in a letter dwelling referencing the prisoner-exchange reviews. “Teachers are at least as important as bballers.”
(*14*)In an e-mail reply to an inquiry from The Washington Post, a State Department official mentioned the company is conscious of Fogel’s case however didn’t present any additional information, citing privateness causes. The official didn’t reply to interview requests.
(*14*)After Biden’s name with Griner’s spouse, the White House issued a abstract of the dialog saying he informed her the U.S. authorities was working exhausting to safe the discharge of Griner and one other American and Whelan. Biden added that his administration is pushing for the discharge of “other” U.S. nationals imprisoned in Russia and different international locations. Marc Fogel’s identify didn’t seem.
(*14*)“It seems like the government is working really hard for Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan,” Jane Fogel, 60, mentioned in an interview final week at her dwelling, surrounded by mementos of the household’s world-wandering. “We want them to work for us, too.”
(*14*)Jane Fogel was fast to level out that she’s hopeful Griner and Whelan may even be launched. Griner herself has issued a assertion pleading for the discharge of different Americans. It’s exhausting to flee the dread that her husband’s case won’t ever change into a precedence. That she might by no means see him once more. At occasions, she mentioned, tearfully, she seems like a “widow.”
Encouraging college students to ‘live life’
(*14*)Marc Fogel was at all times the fortunate one. No matter the difficult scenario, he appeared to land on his toes, like a cat, his buddies would say.
(*14*)Personable, athletic, a little foolish generally, the Pittsburgh-area native with that large radiant smile, the sq. jaw, the thick head of wavy hair, might chat up anybody. Things had been perpetually falling into place for him. A madcap thought to hitchhike from Prince George’s County, the place he was educating at a public center college, to see the 1994 Major League Baseball All-Star Game in Pittsburgh led to a likelihood encounter along with his future spouse, Jane, a highschool good friend he’d seen solely often since they graduated a decade-and-a-half earlier.
(*14*)Marc Fogel had a variety of wanderlust that was irresistible. Lying on a seaside in Thailand one New Year’s Eve in the mid-Nineteen Nineties, he and Jane got here up with a plan — they’d get married, have youngsters and train overseas. Jane informed her mom that she’d be again in eight months. It turned out to be 27 years.
(*14*)They went to locations that evoked worry and clean stares amongst their family and friends. And they gushed about them. The nation home surrounded by flowers the place they lived exterior Medellín, Colombia; the house on the seaside in Oman the place their eldest son discovered to snorkel. An exception was Caracas, Venezuela, the place a neighbor was murdered and a pupil’s father was severely injured in a taking pictures. Their actions turned so restricted as a result of of security considerations that their sons, Sam and Ethan, staged what they jokingly name “a coup” to get the household to maneuver.
(*14*)Former college students keep in mind Marc as an upbeat presence in their lives, who was at all times saying, “‘It’s a great day to be alive!’ He encouraged the students to also live life, not just ponder it,” mentioned Jukka Haapakoski, a pupil of Marc’s in Kuala Lumpur in the Nineteen Nineties who is now CEO of a Finnish group that advocates on behalf of unemployed individuals.
(*14*)In 2012, after leaving Caracas, the Fogels landed jobs on the Anglo-American School in Moscow, a prestigious $34,000-a-year, pre-Okay-12 establishment that had been established by the U.S., Canadian and British embassies. Their salaries had been far past something they may make educating in the United States. They had an residence on a vibrant Moscow avenue. They liked the place. They bopped round Europe visiting buddies on college breaks.
(*14*)They mingled with the embassy crowd and taught their children. Michael McFaul, a Stanford University professor who was U.S. ambassador to Russia for half of the Fogels’ tenure in Moscow, mentioned his son was captivated by Marc’s infectious educating type.
(*14*)“Mr. Fogel, as he called him, made him excited about these issues in a way that he’d never been before, despite having met [President] Barack Obama and all kinds of fancy people,” McFaul mentioned.
(*14*)In the previous few years, as tensions between the United States and Russia grew, it turned tougher for the Fogels to steer household and buddies that they had been in some variety of schoolteacher paradise.
(*14*)“I would say, ‘What are you doing there? Putin is a monster,’” Marc’s sister, Elise Hyland, mentioned. Her brother at all times responded by saying Russians are “lovely people,” and that “you have to understand their culture to understand what’s happening now,” Hyland recalled.
(*14*)Marc was cautious to keep away from any impression that he was taking political positions, mentioned his good friend and fellow trainer, Steve Coffey. Sometimes they might change lunch plans simply to keep away from neighborhoods the place demonstrations is perhaps taking place.
(*14*)All the whereas, Marc’s physique was falling aside. He’d had surgical procedures on his again and shoulder, and a knee alternative. The ache was endless. He walked with a pronounced limp. Coffey remembers his good friend’s signature farewell after a lengthy day: “All right, buddy, I’m going to go hit the bath.”
(*14*)Marc was adamant about not taking opioids. In 2021, a physician really helpful he strive medical marijuana. It not solely helped with the ache — he preferred it in the identical approach another person would possibly like a glass of wine or a beer.
(*14*)While dwelling in Pennsylvania for the summer season break in 2021, Marc and Jane needed to determine whether or not they’d return to Russia. Jane was hesitant to return, however her husband talked her into it. Just yet one more 12 months. Then he would retire, they usually might stay in their comfortable Oakmont home with the massive oak tree out again and the bay window overlooking the garden. They might host barbecues. They might make new buddies in their neighborhood.
(*14*)After three many years overseas, a “normal” life, as she put it, sounded “exotic.”
‘I’m actually in hassle’
(*14*)On Aug. 14, 2021, the Fogels landed at Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow after the lengthy flight from New York on the Russian airline Aeroflot. When they deplaned, Jane seen they had been in a completely different terminal than normal with extra safety, a change from the lax surroundings they’d encountered in earlier years. She stopped on the restroom and her husband went forward to the safety checkpoint.
(*14*)When she caught up with him, she might inform one thing was flawed. His breath had quickened a lot that his masks was inflating and deflating like a balloon.
(*14*)“Jane,” he mentioned, “I’m really in trouble.”
(*14*)He’d packed 14 vape cartridges of medical marijuana into his suitcase, stuffing some in his sneakers, and positioned some hashish buds in a contact lens case, his spouse mentioned. Jane mentioned she had no thought he’d carried out it. But why take such a danger?
(*14*)“It’s pretty simple,” his son Ethan mentioned of his father’s plan to carry medical marijuana into Russia. “He thought he could get away with it.”
(*14*)Still, this fortunate man, this man who at all times appeared to have issues go his approach, assumed this could be a scenario that wouldn’t find yourself so badly. Maybe he’d simply get deported. Maybe he’d pay a wonderful or get a mild punishment of some kind. Maybe.
(*14*)Instead, the Russians charged him with drug possession and intent to promote marijuana to his college students.
(*14*)While ready for his trial, Fogel saved a diary, pouring out his vacillating feelings, from optimism to despair and again once more. On the primary pages of a pocket book with a blue cowl, he scrawled 53 issues that gave him hope or made him completely satisfied or that he seemed ahead to when — if — he gained his freedom.
(*14*)Number 1: “Jane is receiving 1,000s of supportive letters.”
(*14*)Number 8: “Another person got out after paying a fine.”
(*14*)Number 53: “I found a Frank Zappa picture in a Russian magazine.”
(*14*)He writes in regards to the confusion and upheaval of being transferred time and again among the many community of infamous pretrial detention facilities. In one, he encounters a “guardian angel” whose brother sends them containers of meals; he invents a cornhole-style sport utilizing “gruel bowls” and dried apricots. In one other, he has to kneel to get nasty meals handed by way of a small window in his cell, and he’s not allowed exterior for days.
(*14*)At one level he refers to his pocket book as his “dark journal.” He suspects the Russians are attempting to “break” him, using a methodology of creating distress, “tried & true & right now I feel it in my bones, my soul, it teems throughout my body.” He senses a “lack of empathy from these heartless bastards.”
(*14*)He chastises himself for ruining his life and that of his household. He desires of scary bears. He wonders whether or not he’ll ever see his 93-year-old mom once more. When he seems to be at his face in a mirror he thinks his “crying has carved new lines.”
(*14*)Marc Fogel didn’t deny attempting to carry medical marijuana into Russia. What he requested for was leniency.
(*14*)He promised the decide in his case that if he had been launched, he’d act virtually like a tourism promoter, extolling the delights of Moscow and the love he had for its residents — the identical issues he’d been telling his household and buddies in the United States for years, based on Irina Pigman, a Russian-born enterprise government whose husband is from the United States.
(*14*)Fogel thought he had a likelihood.
(*14*)U.S.-Russia relations had been strained then, as they’re now, by U.S. help for Ukraine after the Russian invasion in February 2022.
(*14*)Russian prosecutors had painted him as a “large-scale” drug seller intent on promoting medication to his college students and falsely labeled him an worker of the U.S. Embassy, assertions that had been repeated in some Western media accounts.
(*14*)At The Post’s request, Jane Fogel supplied documentation — payroll statements from two completely different years and an worker verification letter dated the month earlier than his arrest — that exhibits her husband was employed by the Anglo-American School of Moscow. Additionally, McFaul, the previous U.S. ambassador to Russia who befriended the Fogels in Moscow, mentioned in an interview that Fogel was not an embassy worker or an American diplomat.
(*14*)Jane Fogel additionally supplied The Post with copies of her visas, which she mentioned are the identical sort as these her husband acquired. At the time of his arrest, the college the place they taught had sponsored their visa functions they usually acquired a sort of visa sometimes granted to professionals designated as “highly qualified specialists.”
(*14*)In earlier years, they’d acquired visas sponsored by the U.S. Embassy that labeled them “technical employees,” a time period of artwork that allowed them to work in Russia on the invitation of the embassy and afforded them sure diplomatic protections, though they weren’t employed by the U.S. authorities. The embassy was concerned as a result of the college had been chartered by the American, British and Canadian embassies however overseen by a separate college board. The change in the Fogels’ visa standing passed off in 2021 when the college transitioned to being a nonprofit establishment.
(*14*)On the June day that Fogel was sentenced, Pigman watched the previous trainer’s face change because the Russian decide learn a prolonged assertion culminating in a 14-year sentence.
(*14*)“It was like he grew old all of a sudden,” Pigman mentioned in a phone interview from her dwelling in Moscow. “He was stunned.”
(*14*)Three weeks later, Griner — the WNBA star who was detained in Russia on drug expenses in February — pleaded responsible. She’s awaiting sentencing. The household of Whelan, the ex-Marine serving a lengthy sentence on spying expenses, has been crucial of the eye given to Griner’s case by Biden. His sister mentioned on CNN that she wished her brother was receiving comparable therapy. Several days later Biden referred to as her.
(*14*)Jane Fogel remained quiet. She was following the steering of U.S. officers and casual advisers who mentioned public feedback might make issues worse for her husband. The tactic didn’t appear to be working, and he or she’s change into more and more impatient.
(*14*)She has grown pissed off that she has not acquired extra information from the State Department on her journeys to Washington to debate her husband’s case. The officers are well mannered and empathetic, however they inform her virtually nothing, she mentioned. One of probably the most nettlesome and baffling dilemmas she’s confronted is that the State Department has not declared her husband “wrongfully detained,” a designation granted to Whelan and Griner that will shift the dealing with of his case to the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs, which negotiates releases.
(*14*)Richard Burt, a former U.S. ambassador to Germany who is now a powerhouse Washington lobbyist, is one of these urgent for the designation. Burt has informed her that she’s solely made it to the sixth flooring on the State Department, however that they should get her to the seventh flooring the place Blinken, the secretary of state, and the opposite highest rating U.S. diplomats have places of work.
(*14*)Burt and McFaul have quietly been nudging the U.S. authorities on behalf of the Fogels. McFaul says his conversations by way of personal channels with U.S. officers have led him to consider Marc Fogel is “definitely on their radar. It’s not just the other two Americans.”
(*14*)Fogel is planning to attraction his conviction, however it’s extremely unlikely that imprisoned Americans can win launch by going by way of the Russian courtroom system. (The Fogels draw some hope from the doable precedent of a case involving Audrey Lorber, an American teenager whose was launched from jail in 2019, one month after being caught bringing marijuana into Russia.)
(*14*)McFaul has come to the conclusion that the “only viable option” for Griner, Whelan and Fogel is a prisoner trade. In April, retired U.S. Marine Trevor Reed, who had been sentenced to 9 years in jail, was exchanged for a Russian pilot who had been in a U.S. jail since 2010.
(*14*)At dwelling, Jane Fogel listens to speak of a prisoner swap and fights the urge to get her hopes too excessive.
(*14*)One current night, McFaul despatched her a clip of him discussing prisoner swaps throughout a cable news phase. Fogel pulled it up on her cellphone on the dinner desk.
(*14*)Unprompted, McFaul talked about his “friend” who’d taught in Russia and was now serving 14 years in a Russian jail. There was a pause. She leaned ahead and heard the anchor say what she’d been longing to listen to.
(*14*)Her mouth curled into a large smile and he or she set free a little yip of delight: “They said his name!”
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