Even without the shapely "Stalingrad stunner," the tale of suspected Russian spies leading mundane US suburban lives was bound to make for compelling summer reading. But Anna Chapman, 28, the Russian divorcee who kept the name of her British ex-husband, has become the dream story for tabloids like the Daily News, where she's also been called the "rosy-haired Russki" and the "slinky Manhattan spook."
Newsweek called her the Minx from Moscow. Chapman, who was born Anya Kushchenko, and eight other suspects were in jail after judges in New York, Boston and Arlington, VA, denied requests for bail.
The suspects include four couples who had six children born since they sneaked into the US. A tenth suspect, Vicky Pelaez, 55, a Peruvian journalist who worked for the New York Spanish-language newspaper El Diario La Prensa, was let go on 250,000 dollars bail.
The 11th, Robert Christopher Metsos, suspected as the spy-ring paymaster, was at large after skipping bail in Cyprus. He allegedly once buried money later dug up in Wurtsboro, New York, by one of the couples. Federal prosecutors claim the 11 suspects worked for Russia's SVR, the successor to the Soviet KGB. All are charged with acting as unregistered agents of a foreign government, and nine are also charged with money laundering.
But there have been no espionage charges, meaning state secrets were not at issue. In fact, their assignments had been to gain soft intelligence and access to political and financial leaders in order to take the country's policy pulse and intentions. "What in the world do they think they were going to get out of this, in this day and age?" Richard Stolz, a former head of CIA spy operations, told the New York Times.
What Chapman got out of it was fame as the cunning star of the story. In Russia, she's already been dubbed "agent 90-60-90," a reference to her figure which she showed off in some detail on her Facebook page.
In New York, Chapman developed a Russian-language real estate website and hobnobbed with older men of means, the Daily News reported. She liked designer clothes. Assistant US Attorney Michael Farbiarz said the evidence was "devastating" against Chapman, whom he called a "sophisticated agent of Russia." Chapman also had a sense of humour. When she bought a cell phone, she gave a false address - "99 Fake Street," according to reports on the charging documents. Chapman's British ex-husband Alex told London's Daily Telegraph that her father, Vasily Kuschchenko, had been a KGB agent, working as a Russian diplomat in Zimbabwe, where the couple honeymooned after a whirlwind 5-month courtship.
One mystery surrounding the tale is why the FBI waited nearly a decade to make arrests. Unnamed officials told Newsweek magazine that US investigators strung it along for the "bonanza" of useful material gleaned about the Russians' use of codes and communications.
The FBI acted last week with the arrests because the suspected spies had started to have suspicions of their own - about, for example, the FBI agents who posed as Russian agents, the officials told Newsweek. The US agents wanted to avoid being compromised, officials said.