Putin’s flame-haired femme fatale spy once named among Russia’s sexiest women

Ravishing redhead Anna Chapman might have resembled a James Bond villain but she was actually a real life spy dispatched by Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin to infiltrate America – before becoming a sultry Maxim magazine covergirl.

The super-glamourous, flame-haired femme fatale from Russia posed as an American in the US to feed information back to her homeland.

And she showed just how she was able to charm her way to hearts of her targets when dressed in Agent Provocateur lingerie on the front cover of a leading men's magazine and named one of Russia's 100 most sexiest women.

These days, Anna is a TV host and celebrity with an army of followers on social media, but she first came to attention when her cover was blown as a Kremlin spy in America.

It certainly sounds like the stuff of TV fiction, but Chapman, from Volgograd, was part of a secretive program tasked with conducting operations inside the United States.

She was born Anna Kushchenko and gained an economics degree from Moscow University before she met her future husband Alex Chapman in London in 2001.

After the couple married Chapman gained a British passport and worked at a bank before moving to New York, but the marriage was not to last and in 2006 the pair divorced.

In 2018 it was reported that Alex had died two years previously with his family not wishing to share the details of his death but insisting it was nothing suspicious.

Chapman’s secretive work in the US was dubbed The Illegals Program by the Department of Justice and its discovery was one of the biggest spy rings found on American soil.

It was alleged that while she was active she attempted to seduce a cabinet member of the Obama administration and came very close to fulfilling her task.

Had it been successful, Chapman could have gained access to highly sensitive inside information.

Colonel Alexander Poteyev is a former senior Russian intelligence officer who was accused of betraying the spy ring.

At a trial in Moscow he was sentenced in absentia to 25 years in prison for high treason and desertion after Chapman testified that only he could have had the information required to arrest the group.

Chapman told the court she was caught when a US agent used a secret code to contact her which only Poteyev and a personal handler would have known.

After being caught by the FBI Chapman and nine other agents were swapped in a prisoner exchange between the United States and Russia and she had her British passport revoked.

The swap saw Russian defector Sergey Skripal being released and he was later poisoned along with his daughter Yulia in Salisbury.

During a trial after her capture, Chapman pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges for communicating information to the Russian Federation without being a registered foreign agent.

Russian president Vladimir Putin once appeared on CNN’s Larry King Live speaking about Chapman’s work in the United States where he said the spy ring never aimed to do any harm.

It was also reported that once Chapman and the other Russian spies returned to their homeland in 2010 they were joined by Putin for an evening which involved a rendition of the Soviet song ‘From Where the Motherland Begins’.

Putin was himself a KGB foreign intelligence officer for 16 years before he became a politician.

These days Chapman boasts large social media followings which she uses to promote her role as host of Chapman’s TV show and to share images of herself modelling.

She has more than half a million followers on Instagram and almost 15 thousand on Twitter, an app she once used to ask US whistleblower Edward Snowden to marry her.

Snowden is a resident in Russia after his leaks of secret documents in 2013 sparked a global surveillance crisis.

Shortly after she was deported from the US to Russia in 2010, men’s magazine Maxim included Chapman in its list of the 100 sexiest Russian women.

The magazine had a cover showing the redhead holding a gun and wearing Agent Provocateur lingerie.

It wrote that Chapman had done more to excite Russian patriotism than the national soccer team.

Source: Read Full Article