By the middle of the summer, 3½ years had passed since Russian intelligence agents, working for the country’s latest iteration of its notorious KGB, stormed into American Paul Whelan’s Moscow hotel room, pinned him to the floor and accused him of spying, for which the Russian judicial system eventually sentenced him to 16 years in a Mordovian gulag. Still, his story was little told. And when it was, I found after checking a database of 8,000-plus news sources including periodicals, websites and blogs, his and his family’s pleas for help were heard without much resound, rarely generating more than 100 reports per month. That despite desperate public protests such as the one outside the White House in May.