Portrayed as a flame-haired, green-eyed femme fatale, a 28-year-old Russian businesswoman has emerged as a tabloid darling in an alleged Cold War-style spy ring uncovered by US authorities.
Sultry Facebook photos of Anna Chapman were plastered on Tuesday on the front page of the New York Daily News following her arrest along with 10 other alleged members of a sophisticated network of US-based Russian sleeper agents.
“Spy ring’s femme fatale,” said the New York Post, before elaborating: “Red hot beauty snared in Russian ‘espionage’ shock.”
FBI agents monitored Chapman on 10 Wednesdays between January and last month as she allegedly carried out elaborate communication rituals with her Russian handler in scenes straight out of a John Le Carre spy novel.
To avoid having to meet, Chapman and the unidentified man — repeatedly observed by the FBI entering Russia’s UN mission in Manhattan — used specially configured laptops to message each other covertly.
On one occasion Chapman sits by the window of a coffee shop, according to the charge sheet. Her handler passes by 10 minutes later in a minivan, close enough to pick up her messages on a private wireless network.
Last week an FBI agent, purporting to be a Russian consulate employee, arranged an undercover face-to-face meeting with Chapman in another coffee shop in downtown Manhattan, saying he had something urgent to give her.
During the meeting, detailed exhaustively in the 37-page criminal complaint, Chapman is asked to give a fake passport to another Russian agent, presumably an undercover FBI operative in on the sting.
Asked if she was ready to carry out this “next step,” Chapman replied: “Shit, of course.”
Chapman appeared in federal court for the first time on Monday in Manhattan. Dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, she spoke for several minutes with a lawyer after being released from her handcuffs.
According to the New York Post and the Russian news Web site www.lifenews.ru, Chapman moved to New York in February from Moscow after a divorce.
In an interview posted on video-sharing site Youtube, Chapman described herself as a start-up specialist, seeking to build a recruitment agency targeting young professionals in Moscow and New York.
In the Youtube video, part of a series titled “Online School for Start-Up,” Chapman says she worked for several years in London in an investment company. In Moscow she set up a property search Web site.
In New York, she had launched a business “Time Venture,” specializing in “technology, Internet, media and leisure activities,” she adds, claiming to develop global strategies for new businesses.
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