PALIN MITENK BLOG

By Daniel Bates, David Williams and Michael Seamark

Spy in the capital? Anna Chapman in London


Posing for a series of photos, this is the woman at the centre of the alleged Russian spy network uncovered in the U.S.

In one, Anna Chapman - the name she gave investigators - smiles coyly at the camera wearing a shiny green tracksuit top and black-and-white striped T-shirt as she poses in front of Big Ben.

The 28-year-old redhead apparently lived and worked in London for five years before allegedly becoming part of a spy ring based in the States which sent secrets back to the Kremlin.

The picture is thought to have been taken during her stay in the UK. It is unknown if she was engaged in espionage at that stage.

Miss Chapman is emerging as the femme fatal of the James Bond-style plot which saw ' sleepers' embedded in American cities, some more than a decade ago.


Posing: Miss Chapman pictured in London, left, and an image posted on her Facebook page, right


And she appears every inch the part, using her charm, beauty and high-society connections to move with ease through the circles of power and use other people to find out state secrets.

She is understood to have a masters degree in economics, an expensive flat in the financial district of New York, and runs a successful international online estate agency, a job which would have given her an excuse to make contact with people around the globe.

She is fluent in Russian and English and conversational in German and French.
On her Facebook page are a series of photos which show off her model-like figure.

With 187 friends all over the world, she writes that her motto is: 'If you can imagine it, you can achieve it; if you can dream it, you can become it.'

Last night Russia admitted some of the accused were Russian citizens, but insisted they were not working to harm U.S. interests.

And Miss Chapman's tearful mother Irina, 51, said in Moscow: 'Of course I deny that my daughter is a spy. It's all very shocking to us.'


The flame-haired femme fatale: Anna Chapman, dressed in in brilliant red, at a party in New York in March. She is accused of being a Russian spy


If records are correct then Miss Chapman was born in Soviet times in what is now the Kharkov region of Ukraine and seems to have been raised in Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad, in southern Russia.

She studied at the Economics Department of the University of People's Friendship in Moscow, an institution with longstanding links to the old KGB.

Miss Chapman has strong links to Britain and it is thought she was married to a British citizen. She appears to have been here for up to five years from 2003.

She said she worked at Barclays as what she called 'a slave' in their investment banking division before joining hedge fund Navigator Asset Management Advisers in Mayfair.

She also worked for a luxury flight service NetJets Europe, a company from which the rich and famous buy flying time in executive aircraft.
A former colleague at Navigator said yesterday: 'I always wondered how a Russian would have a last name like Chapman and I thought she may have married a European.'


Accused: L-R, Anna Chapman, Vicky Pelaez, the defendant known as 'Richard Murphy', the defendant known as 'Cynthia Murphy', and the defendant known as 'Juan Lazaro' are seen in Manhattan federal court in New York last night


Barclays has no record of an Anna Chapman working in its investment side at the time she claims to have been there in 2004 and 2005.

It appears that she returned to Russia to work for asset managers before moving to America to further her own estate agency company, which organises rentals and sales around the world.

Miss Chapman had been making a name for herself as a socialite in Manhattan before her arrest. It was a very different picture from that painted in Manhattan's Federal Court, where she was accused of being a 'practised deceiver'.

Miss Chapman was accused of meeting an official from the Russian government and passing secrets to him every Wednesday since January.


Suburban spies? Neighbours point outside the residence of Donald Howard Heathfield and Tracey Lee Ann Foley in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after their arrest


Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Farbiarz told the court that Miss Chapman was an 'extraordinary agent for Russia'.

Those charged alongside her include 'Richard Murphy' and ' Cynthia Murphy', of Montclair, New Jersey, and Vicky Pelaez and a man known as 'Juan Lazaro', of Yonkers, New York state.

Another three - Mikhail Semenko and a couple known as 'Michael Zottoli' and 'Patricia Mills' - appeared in a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, after being arrested in Arlington, Virginia.

Two more - a couple known as 'Donald Howard Heathfield' and 'Tracey Lee Ann Foley' - were arrested in Boston, Massachusetts.

Finally, Christopher Metsos - named as the mastermind of the operation - was arrested yesterday at Cyprus's Larnaca airport as he tried to leave the island for Budapest.


The 'practised deceiver': Above left, Chapman in a photo from her Facebook page wearing her signature red dress. Above right, the accused spy in a racy pose also taken from her Facebook page


Tracey Lee Ann Foley, who was posing as a naturalised U.S. citizen born in Canada, is believed to have been given forged British documents by her Russian handlers.

She used them to travel to and from Moscow with greater ease, the FBI has claimed. The Foreign Office said today it was investigating the claim.

If true, it will undo some of the work that Prime Minister David Cameron did during the recent G8 and G20 summits to improve relations with Russian president Dmitry Medvedev.

The arrests are already likely to cause huge diplomatic embarrassment and chill relations between Mr Medvedv and U.S. President Barack Obama at a time when they had been thawing.

Today Mr Obama refused to answer questions over the arrests.

Meanwhile Russian premier Vladimir Putin - himself a former KGB hardman - said he hoped the case would not damage recent gains made in U.S.-Russia relations.

Miss Foley is believed to be in her 40s and the mother of two teenage sons. Her husband Donald Heathfield is also accused of being a Russian agent.

He was posing as a Canadian citizen, living with Foley in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Harvard University is located. The pair have lived in the U.S. since 1999.

Miss Foley, Mr Heathfield, and their nine co-accused allegedly used invisible ink, short-wave radios, steganography and wi-fi in cafés to pass coded messages back to Russia - including information on nuclear weapons.

Some of them are believed to have been operating for more than a decade.


'Highly trained agent': Chapman has also posted some less racy images of herself on her Facebook page


Miss Chapman is being held without bail after prosecutors called her a 'highly trained agent' and a 'practised deceiver'.

Miss Chapman is believed to have used her high-profile connections to pass American secrets on to a Russian government official every Wednesday since January.

On Saturday, an undercover FBI agent posing as a Russian agent met with Chapman at a restaurant in New York.

The agent was pretending to send the alleged spy on a mission to deliver a fake passport to another female agent, according to court documents.
'Are you ready for this step?' he asked.

'S*** yes,' was her emphatic reply.

She was told that her fellow spy would greet her by asking: 'Haven't we met in California last summer?'

Miss Chapman - who agents believe was operating under her real name - was supposed to reply: 'No, I think it was in the Hamptons.'


Suburban life: The Montclair, New Jersey house where'Richard Murphy' and 'Cynthia Murphy' were arrested by the FBI on Sunday

Once she had handed over the passport, she was to plant a stamp on a wall map to let her handlers know she had succeeded.

But the exchange never took place. The FBI court documents do not explain why.
One of her co-accused, Mikhail Semenko, was similarly set up in Washington by the FBI on the same day.

Unlike Miss Chapman, he did follow through with his delivery.

The FBI also watched Miss Chapman as she sat in a coffee shop in New York and used her lap top to, they claim, communicated with a Russian agent hiding in a mini-van nearby.

And she was once observed going into a Verizon mobile phone shop in Brooklyn to buy a phone using the name 'Irine Kutsov' - giving her address as '99 Fake Street'.

She intended to use the phone for her spying activities, the FBI claimed.
Miss Chapman's lawyer Robert Baum argued that the allegations were exaggerated.

'This is not a case that raises issues of security of the United States,' he said.

The alleged spies have been charged with acting as unregistered agents of a foreign government and with money laundering.

Ten were arrested in the U.S. yesterday and charged in American courts. An 11th man had been on the run - but was arrested by police in Cyprus yesterday morning.

However he was released on bail. Police have not yet explained why.

Among the accused were four couples, including Miss Foley and Mr Heathfield, living quietly in the suburbs of New York and Washington and Boston.
They are believed to have married as part of their cover.

One of the married women, believed to be working under her real name, is Vicky Pelaez, a Peruvian born reporter and editor.

She worked for several years for El Diario/La Prensa, one of the country's best-known Spanish-language newspapers.


source: dailymail