Deception (24 page)

 

flame-haired
007
-worthy beauty who flitted from high-profile parties to top secret meetings around Manhattan [with] a fancy Financial District apartment and a Victoria's Secret body.
¹²

 

She seems to have come on to the spycatchers' radar quite late in the story. The FBI says that on ‘approximately ten Wednesdays' in the first half of
2010
, Ms Chapman used a laptop to exchange clandestine messages with a Russian government official.
^ai
On one occasion the official drove a minivan past the coffee shop, long enough for Ms Chapman to send a burst transmission from her laptop to a computer in his car. On another, she was inside a bookshop while the official was passing near by. On a third occasion, the official appears to have noticed that he was under surveillance and aborted the mission. The same official had already been spotted carrying out a brush-pass with one of the other illegals in
2004
: it is likely that he led the FBI to Ms Chapman, not vice versa.

In the curious sting operation that followed, an FBI undercover agent posing as an intelligence officer  based at the Russian consolate made contact with Ms Chapman, saying that he urgently needed to meet her. As with Semenko, he used a series of passphrases to establish his credentials, claiming to be called ‘Ilya Fabrichnikov' – a code name that she had previously been given from her controllers in Moscow. She was willing to discuss the technical problems she was having with her computer and hand it over to be repaired; she also agreed to a second meeting at which she would be given a passport in a false name which she was to pass on to another female illegal. On
26
June, a Saturday, the FBI man called Ms Chapman again, saying that he needed to meet with her that day. She phoned back and asked if the meeting could be postponed until the next morning but then changed her mind and agreed to meet that afternoon. She seems to have made little attempt to check his bona fides, and discussed both her technical problems and her Wednesday electronic hook-ups. Mr ‘Fabrichnikov' (evidently a native Russian-speaker, although the pair spoke English later in the conversation) then asked her if she would be willing to pass on the document, saying: ‘There is a person here who is just like you . . . but unlike you she is not here under her real name . . . we have to give her new documents . . . are you ready for this next step?' Ms Chapman replied: ‘Shit, of course.' She received the false passport, a description of its intended recipient and instructions about how to recognise her. Ms Chapman was to ask: ‘Excuse me, but haven't we met in California last summer?' The other party would reply: ‘No, I think it was the Hamptons.' Ms Chapman handed over her faulty computer.
¹³

This was all oddly hurried behaviour by the FBI. It strongly suggests that the American officials had to force the pace, probably because their source in Moscow had bolted, and would soon be missed. Ms Chapman belatedly had second thoughts about the meeting. She hurried to a pharmacy and then to a mobile phone shop where she bought a cell-phone and two international calling cards. She took only limited anti-surveillance measures, not the through ones that would be expected from a well-trained intelligence officer who realises that the hunt is on. She phoned her father in Moscow, to be told that a senior SVR officer dealing with the illegals had disappeared. That was oddly sloppy tradecraft. So was giving palpably fake identity details on the customer agreement, where she described herself as ‘Irine Kutsov' of ‘
99
Fake St'. A cardinal principle of undercover work is to tell no unnecessary falsehoods and shun any indulgence in humour. A simple ‘Jane Smith' and an unremarkable but illegible scribble for the address would have been more consistent with the professionalism normally expected of one of the oldest and savviest spy services in the world. Evidently alarmed, the next day she went to a police station in Manhattan and handed in the passport – apparently claiming that she had been given it in error. When FBI officials arrived they arrested her.

But whom had they caught? Anna Vasilyevna Kushchenko was born on ‘Defender of the Fatherland Day',
23
February
1982
. Her grandfather was a Cossack, her father in the KGB and her favourite children's story was a bombastic Soviet fable called ‘The Tale of the Military Secret'.
¹⁴
She enjoyed acting it out, making her grandmother play the role of the hateful ‘bourgeois', who tortures a little boy to make him confess the ‘hidden secret' of the Red Army (which is, of course, the inspirational power of communism). By the time she was ten that world had collapsed, and with it the prison-like constraints it imposed on its inmates. Ms Chapman's generation had the world in front of them. One childhood friend, Elena Slesarenko, went on to win an Olympic gold medal in
2004
. Another classmate is said to have ended up in Japan as a successful model. Ms Chapman's interests turned abroad too. At the age of sixteen, as the film
Titanic
came out in Russia, she penned a drawing of its star Leonardo DiCaprio so popular with her classmates that she and her sister earned pocket money selling photocopies.

When Ms Chapman was thirteen her father Vasily was posted back to Africa, while she stayed behind in Volgograd with her grandparents. Her grandfather was ill and the young teenager learned a toughness and self-reliance that would later stand her in good stead. In a chaotic and poverty-stricken country, she yearned for the comfort and glamour of life in the West. A song that epitomises those years – enough for Mr Medvedev to be caught on video clumsily dancing to it over two decades later – is the
1990
‘American Boy' by the girl-band
Kombinatsiya
.
¹⁵
When Ms Chapman told a school friend, Valeriya Apanasenko, ‘I'll find myself a husband in England, I'll go there and live there,' she was at least unconsciously reflecting its stilted and saccharine English lyrics, which bemoan the lot of a ‘simple Russian girl', who has never been abroad and is waiting for her ‘foreign prince' to whisk her away to a world of luxury.

Her first stop was Ramneki, a smart Moscow suburb, where she lived before a stint with her family in Zimbabwe. She was not a star pupil: her mother Irina, a former teacher, describes her as having ‘solid Bs'. None the less, perhaps thanks to her father's professional connections, she was able to study at the University of People's Friendship in Moscow, a shabby but trendy establishment known since Soviet days for its lively social scene and large numbers of students from developing countries. But this was just a staging post. Aged
19
, she met the
21
-year-old Alex Chapman at a rave in London's Docklands in the summer of
2001
. The English boy came to Moscow while she finished her studies. In March
2002
they married in a civil ceremony. Ms Chapman told a friend that she had married her husband in order to obtain a British passport (it was later cancelled by the authorities). That is in itself not a sign of an intelligence connection: Ms Chapman would not be the first Russian woman to marry a gullible foreigner in the hope of acquiring his nationality and name. The couple lived in the unglamorous inner-London district of Stoke Newington.
¹⁶
According to her own account of her life, Ms Chapman worked at a hedge fund, Navigator Asset Management. People recall that she partied hard, often in the company of rich nightclubbers. Her boss, Nicholas Camilleri, described her later as a ‘green, wet behind the ears' type of girl.
¹⁷
She then moved briefly to a junior job at NetJets, a company that provides executive jet services to wealthy customers. Ms Chapman claims that she was:

 

• Primarily involved in selling private jets to companies and individuals in Russia

• Conducting research on East European markets, keeping updated on territory social events and business news, participated and helped organise NetJets European marketing events

• High-end client interaction, targeting Senior Executives and key decision makers within multi-national global organisations and wealthy individuals

• Cold-calling prospects based on research obtained from industry sources

• Developing proposals and formulating documentation in line with client requirements

• Working to timescales as set by the client, with a sales cycle of between one week and one year, depending on the complexity of sale

• Post-sales relations to ensure smooth running of processes, involving customer service problem-solving

 

For a three-month stint in a junior position, some might think that was on the effusive side. If Ms Chapman was even on the books of the SVR at this point, her main role was probably acquiring cover, with a view to some serious spying later on. But the people who use executive jets are often of interest to intelligence services; bugging their conversations, for example, would require placing and removing a recording device on an aircraft. It might also be useful simply to know who was travelling with whom, and where. The same applies to her next job, as an adviser in the small business division of a branch of Barclays Bank in Ealing, west London. Ms Chapman's LinkedIn profile refers caustically to her post as ‘slave' – and also places it in the more glamorous-sounding investment banking division of Barclays Capital.

But slaves can be good spies. Understanding how the rules work inside an organisation helps those wanting to bend or break them. Even a junior bank employee may be able, for example, to make credit checks. That would be handy for the SVR's N-line department (which establishes identities for illegals). It needs to see if its work is accumulating the right degree of solidity. It could also help evade or manipulate ‘know your customer' requirements: useful for anyone needing to establish a bank account in a hurry. A lowly employee may also have access to customers' account details, meaning that such a person could see if potential targets for recruitment had money worries. (If Barclays has kept logs of Ms Chapman's activities, spycatchers may find them rewarding subjects of enquiry.) A glaring instance of resume padding came in a Russian television interview where Ms Chapman claimed to have worked for the billionaire Warren Buffett (who indeed owns Netjets but was hardly her boss).
¹⁸
In fact, her experience of the overlap between spycraft and finance was of a different, less prestigious and more troubling kind.

Despite her unremarkable professional career, Ms Chapman was fast ascending the London social ladder. Her marriage came under increasing strain and the couple parted in
2005
. Mr Chapman says that following the split his ex-wife slept with a series of wealthy older men. Another Russian woman, Lena Savitskaya, who claims to have shared a flat with Ms Chapman for two years, says that her friend moved in the same circles as, among others, the fugitive Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky. A picture from those days shows the young women partying with two junior members of the European aristocracy: the heir to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and a minor member of the former Russian imperial house of Romanov.
¹⁹
She also hung out in London nightclubs patronised by members of the British royal family, befriended the managers and seemed to show eagerness to get to know their best-known clients personally, leading some British tabloids to wonder if her real mission had been to bed a prince. That seems unlikely: intimate friends of the royal family are subject to intense if discreet background checks to exclude any security risk. Any such scrutiny would have exposed not only Ms Chapman's family connections with Russian officialdom but also some curious business activities that she was already involved with at this time.

Her presumed acquaintance with Mr Berezovsky is a more plausible sign of real intelligence activity. In the eyes of the Russian authorities, the tycoon is the epitome of the influence-peddling and sleaze that characterised the presidency of Boris Yeltsin. Mr Berezovsky was a friend of the former Russian president's daughter, and at one point had an office in the anteroom of the then-prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin. Mr Berezovsky was closely associated with Mr Putin in the early years of his rule, brokering deals and easing the transition between the old and new regimes. Some even wondered if the tongue-tied ex-spook from St Petersburg, who initially seemed so ill at ease in the limelight, would end up the puppet of the wily master manipulator. Mr Berezovsky lost out, fleeing the country in
2001
.
^aj
He maintains a caustic commentary on the corruption and incompetence of the Putin regime, and conducts bewildering political and business manoeuvres in the countries of the former Soviet Union. In June
2007
British police arrested and deported a contract killer only minutes away from Mr Berezovsky's office. ‘I was informed by Scotland Yard that my life was in danger and they recommended that I leave the country,' the tycoon told a journalist at the time.
²⁰
Friendship with Mr Berezovsky would provide insights into his movements, routines and security procedures – just the sort of information that an assassin would need. Mr Berezovsky declined to comment. But the most startling aspect of Ms Chapman's life in London has nothing to do with her glitzy friends; the clues to it lie in the dry documents of London's Companies House.