How Anna Chapman went from London socialite to a Russian spy who was one of the FBI’s most wanted targets
One of the world's most infamous spies went from a socialite who rubbed shoulders with the rich and powerful in London to getting arrested in New York on charges of spying.
She started out as Anna Kushchenko, daughter of the Russian ambassador to Zimbabwe, who met 37-year-old British DJ Marcus Read in 2001 while he was on holiday in the country.
19 at the time, Anna persuaded him to formally invite her to the UK, he would later tell the Mirror that they had a sexual relationship for six weeks afterwards until she then met Alex Chapman at a party.
Read claims she told him afterwards: "I’m really sorry, but I am obsessed with that guy, he reminds me so much of my father and I can’t get him out of my head."
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They soon parted ways and she ended up with Alex, and very quickly they were married as Anna Kushchenko became Anna Chapman, a British citizen.
One of Alex's friends, Ashley Burchett, told the Channel 4 documentary Spy Next Door: The Anna Chapman Story that 'she started getting involved in more high level kind of circles, social circles'.
Nicholas Camilleri told the documentary that London financiers would go out pretty much every night and 'there were Russians everywhere', which is how he met Anna Chapman.
He said: "I was seated next to her and I found her very charming, very intelligent. Anna was working as a teller at Barclays Bank and she said she wanted something more exciting.
"So I gave her a job as my personal assistant."
Networking and getting lucrative jobs seems rather easy, it sounds like, and it let her get close to Boris Berezovsky, the richest man in Russia who had been forced out of the country by Vladimir Putin.
He'd end up being found dead at his home in 2013 with a ligature mark around his neck, a coroner said it was 'impossible to say' whether it had been a suicide or not.
It's not known when exactly she became a spy for Russia, but Alex said that his wife started to change in 2005, saying she kept meeting 'Russian friends'.
"She was transformed into someone with access to a lot of money, boasting about all the influential people she was meeting," he said.
While she and Alex Chapman split up, divorcing in 2006, her British citizenship allowed her to move to the US in 2009 which is where FBI Special Agent Ed Foley said she became the 'tip of the spear'.
He described how her role was to infiltrate high society and build spy networks that could feed information back to Moscow.
He said: "Anna became very good at the nightclub scene, networking, socializing. There was just a lot of movement.
"We were able to see who she came out with and it seemed like there were multiple boyfriends. She was mission driven and did whatever it took with whomever it took to get whatever she needed to for the betterment of the Russian intelligence service."
Chapman would end up being arrested in New York on charges of spying, with her pleading guilty to conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government, and was returned to Russia in 2010 as part of a prisoner exchange with the US.
Topics: Russia
Joe Harker
