Anna Chapman, the Russian spy who kept her real name and became a celebrity
When the FBI rounded up ten Russian sleeper agents in June 2010, most turned out to be living under invented identities. Anna Chapman was one of only two using a real name. She ran a property website near Wall Street, and within two weeks she had been swapped on an airport runway in Vienna.
She was born Anna Kushchenko on 23 February 1982, the daughter of a Russian diplomat reported to have been a senior KGB officer and to have served as ambassador in Kenya. In 2001, aged 19, she met a Brighton DJ while he was working in Harare, where her father was then posted, and persuaded him to sponsor her visit to Britain. At a Docklands warehouse party she met Alex Chapman, who worked at Sony, and married him soon afterwards in Moscow, gaining British citizenship. The SVR, Russia's foreign intelligence service, is believed to have recruited her around 2000.
In London she worked for NetJets and Barclays, and after her 2006 divorce she moved in 2009 to an apartment at 20 Exchange Place, one block from Wall Street. Her online profile called her chief executive of PropertyFinder LLC, a site selling real estate abroad. The trap came in a Manhattan coffee shop, where an undercover FBI agent handed her a fake passport to pass on to another spy. After calling her father in Moscow, she turned the passport in to police, but was arrested on 27 June 2010.
She pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government. On the morning of 8 July 2010 she and nine others were exchanged at Vienna International Airport, the biggest spy swap between the two countries since 1986. Britain, learning she hoped to come back, stripped her citizenship under a power that had been used against only about a dozen people.
Back in Moscow she joined a youth council of the ruling party, began hosting a weekly show for REN TV on 21 January 2011, edited a business magazine and walked the runway at Moscow Fashion Week. Joe Biden, asked jokingly on The Tonight Show about her, quipped that sending her back had not been his idea.
Source: Anna Chapman
