Anna Vasilyevna Chapman

Anna Vasil'yevna Chapman (Russian: А́нна Васи́льевна Ча́пман; born Anna Vasil'yevna Kushchyenko Russian: А́нна Васи́льевна Кущенко; 23 February 1982) is a Russian national, who while living in New York, United States was arrested along with nine others on 27 June 2010, on suspicion of working for the Illegals Program spy ring under the Russian Federation's external intelligence agency, the SVR (Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki). Chapman pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government without notifying the U.S. Attorney General, and was deported back to Russia on 8 July 2010, as part of a prisoner swap.

Chapman was born Anna Vasil'yevna Kushchyenko in Volgograd, and her father was employed in the Russian embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. According to Chapman's British ex-husband, her father, Vasily Kushchenko, was also a senior KGB official, although this is unsubstantiated. Chapman earned a Masters degrees in economics with first class honours from Moscow University.

Chapman moved to London in 2000 or 2001, working at NetJets, Barclays Bank and allegedly at a few other companies for brief periods.

She met Alex Chapman at a London Docklands rave party in 2001 and they married shortly thereafter in Moscow; as a result she gained dual Russian-British citizenship, and a British passport. After Anna was arrested in New York, Alex engaged media publicist Max Clifford, and sold his story to The Daily Telegraph newspaper.

She took up residence at 20 Exchange Place, one block from Wall Street in Manhattan. Alex has stated that Anna told him the enterprise was continually in the red for the first couple of years, and then suddenly in 2009, she had as many as 50 employees and a successful business. Her LinkedIn social networking site profile identified her as CEO of PropertyFinder LLC, a website selling real estate internationally.

Late December 2010 Chapman was appointed to the public council of Young Guard of United Russia. According to the organization she "will be engaged in educating young people".
On 21 January 2011, Chapman began hosting a weekly TV show in Russia called Secrets of the World for REN TV.

In June 2011, Anna became editor of Venture Business News magazine, according to Bloomberg News.

Chapman is one of only two of the Illegals Program Russians arrested in June 2010 who did not use an assumed name.

Officials claimed Chapman worked with a network of others, until an undercover FBI agent attempted to draw her into a trap at a Manhattan coffee shop. The FBI agent offered Chapman a fake passport at Starbucks, with the instructions to forward it to another spy. He asked, "are you ready for this step?", to which Chapman unequivocally replied, "Of course." She accepted the passport. However, after making a series of phone calls to her father, Vasily Kushchenko, in Moscow, Chapman ended up heeding her father's advice and handed the passport in at a local police station, but was arrested shortly after.

After being formally charged, Chapman and nine other detainees became part of a spy swap deal between the US and Russia, the biggest of its kind since 1986. The 10 Russian agents returned to Russia via a chartered jet that landed at Vienna International Airport, where the swap occurred on the morning of 8 July. The Russian jet returned to Moscow's Domodedovo airport, where after landing the 10 spies were kept away from local and international press.

On the basis of materials from http://en.wikipedia.org/