Анна Чапман (Anna Chapman) в журнале Playboy USA january 2011
Второй вечер подряд в моем журнале гостят "легендарные" личности. Вслед за Викторией Боня, открывшейся для украинского Playboy, Анна Чапман - главная шпионка современности, также в Playboy, но в американском. Американцам удалось раздобыть фотографии Анны из частной коллекции: голая Анна Чапман в ванной, в том же "костюме" в кресле с бокалом вина... фотографии сделаны ее бойфрендом, когда Анна жила в Лондоне.
Если вы подумали, что для Playboy главное фотографии, то в этом случае похоже все не так - ведь всего несколько непрофессиональных снимков тут сопровождает несколько страниц текста, эксклюзивная (по заявлению авторов) история Анны Чапман - женщины, из секретного русского агента, ставшей величайшей звездой мировых таблоидов.
Текст большой, и переводить его я не решился, слишком много времени это стоило бы мне, но если у кого есть желание, вот вам текст на английском:
THE SPY WHO LOVED ME
WHEN THE FBI BUSTED ANNA CHAPMAN IN NEW YORK, SHE WENT FROM SECRET RUSSIAN AGENT TO THE BIGGEST TABLOID STORY IN THE WORLD. AND YET THE TRUTH REMAINS ELUSIVE. WITH EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEWS AND PICTURES TAKEN BY AN EX-BOYFRIEND, WE TAKE YOU DEEP INSIDE THE SECRET WORLD OF THE ULTIMATE MODERN-DAY FEMME FATALE
BY JOHN H. RICHARDSON
Don't look at the pictures yet. Cover them with a hand, avert your eyes, fold the magazine over-because you're facing a philosophical conundrum and even a moral choice, perhaps a definitional decision about the meaning of life. So read the story first, consider the meaning of secrecy and the elusive truth it conceals, and then decide-and God preserve your mortal soul.
She was arrested on a summer Sunday evening in June, and by Tuesday Anna Chapman was the biggest story in the world: RED HOT BEAUTY SNARED IN RUSSIAN 'ESPIONAGE' SHOCK, screamed the New York Post. "A plot straight out of a James Bond flick," the New York Daily News wrote. To ABC she was the "SoHo Spy," even though she actually lived in the Wall Street area. In the Los Angeles Times, the headline was sultry redhead sensationalizes spy story. And those were sober next to the lurid stories that spread like a strain of gonorrhea from London's Fleet Street to every tabloid in the known universe:
She came from Russia with love...a stunning femme fatale with a license to thrill...double-o heaven.... Sexy Svetlanas, they are glamorous, devious and will do anything-anything-for their country...
What the press was presenting and the truth were likely as far apart as Russia was from the USA. The public was led to believe that this beautiful woman - 28 years old and living the high life in Manhattan nightclubs that wouldn't let most people past their velvet ropes, at that moment trapped in a cell downtown for 23 hours of the day and facing a potential sentence of five years-would trade the secret place between her long lovely legs for the secrets in your encrypted government files. That's right, Jack. She'd fuck for it.
***
Obviously, I have issues with this story, so let me lay my cards on the table. My father was a high-ranking CIA officer. I grew up watching people's eyes light up when I told them what the old man did, and I learned in my bones the connections between espionage and voyeurism, the sexual charge of the "undercover" life and its cloak of lies. And the weird thing, I realized in time, is the powerful spiritual need that drives this fascination. That's why God has secret names you aren't supposed to say out loud or even spell with all their letters. It's why priests used to love the sonorous obscurity of the Latin mass, which increased their parishioners' awe and submission through the brilliant manipulative recipe known as "miracle, mystery and authority"-because the authority depends on the mystery. So we all have this Gollum-like hunger for the precious magic secret that will make everything clear, mixing sex and God and truth and lies into a tangle we can never quite unravel.
This is why I became a journalist, and it's the reason I watched the Chapman story unfold with growing nausea. When it came out that her father was (or might have been) a KGB agent, it hit me:
It could have been me.
When I was about 17, I asked my old man if I should follow in his footsteps and apply for a job in the CIA. "Absolutely not," he said. In his experience the spy's life was not a happy one, and I was not suited for it due to congenital recklessness and some alarmingly early experiments with hallucinogens.
Was that why she was in prison and I wasn't? Because her father loved global dominance more than his own child?
Then I began looking a little more closely, and another possibility emerged-what if the whole Anna Chapman story was all just bullshit?
***
The surveillance started early in 2010. On January 20, FBI agents staked out a Starbucks on 47th Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, training hidden cameras on the beautiful young woman who sat near the window. Ten minutes later they saw a minivan pass by the Starbucks window.
Bingo.
The van was linked to a man who would become known as Russian Government Official #1. As it passed, the FBI guys activated a device that detects wireless networks and became convinced that a signal was jumping between the van and the young woman's laptop. The van's driver and the young woman never spoke, but their computers did.
After that, the G-men spent five months tracking her. On a Wednesday in the middle of March, they saw her go to a Barnes & Noble on Greenwich and Warren streets. She took out her laptop and powered it up. Shortly after, Russian Government Official #1 walked by the bookstore with a briefcase in his hand.
Again the signal jumped between them.
On April 7, 2010, another Wednesday, they tracked Russian Government Official #1 from the moment he left his office in midtown Manhattan. This time, though, the Russian suddenly stopped and turned around. An FBI agent performing the surveillance later noted, "It appeared that Russian Government Official # 1 noticed the presence of the surveillance team and returned to his office."
They had better luck two Wednesdays later. And again two weeks later. And a month after that. And the following week.
Finally, the FBI was ready to mount a sting. At 11 a.m. on June 26, an agent called Anna Chapman, saying in Russian that he worked at the Russian consulate and that they had to meet in person right away so he could give her something.
She called him an hour and a half later. Today was tough, she said. She was in Connecticut with a friend. How about tomorrow?
If necessary, the FBI man said. They agreed to meet the next morning.
Half an hour later, she called again. She'd be there.
They met at a downtown coffee shop late in the afternoon. They began conversing in Russian, but the FBI agent suggested that they switch to English so as not to draw attention. "Tell me," he asked, "how is everything? How are you doing?"
"Everything is cool apart from connection," she answered. But she was already suspicious. "I just need to get some more information about you before I can talk."
"I work in the same department as you, but I work here in the consulate."
Chapman's response-if there was one- does not appear in the FBI's report.
"My name is Roman," die man said. "My name is Roman. I work in the consulate."
Again the FBI report doesn't note any response, but the FBI man kept slinging the con: "There is a situation that I need your help with tomorrow...."
A third time, no response was recorded in the report.
"I know you are going back to Moscow in two weeks," he continued in a blatant effort to establish his bona fides. Even in the report, he sounds nervous. "So, ah, when you go back they will sit down with you and talk officially about your work, your performance. Ah, but, for now I just wanted to see how you are doing, how everything is going, and then I have a task for you to do tomorrow."
A fourth time, no response is recorded in the report.
"This is not like the Wednesdays widi the notebooks," the FBI man continued. "This is different. It is the next step. You are ready for die next step? Okay?"
"Okay," she said.
He told her there was a person who was "just like you," except that this person, also a woman, was using a false name and needed a new passport. He handed her a forged passport. So the job was simple- just meet her tomorrow at 11 a.m. and hand over the passport. "Understand?"
"Okay," Anna said.
"This is what I mean by the next step, because this is not laptop to laptop, this is person to person. Are you ready for this step?"
"Shit, of course."
***
Looks pretty bad for Anna Chapman, doesn't it? Secret meetings, undercover Wi-Fi, handling a forged passport. It got worse. The FBI man told her to arrive at a different location with a magazine in her hand and wait for the woman to approach her. "She will tell you, 'Excuse me, but haven't we met in California last summer?' And you will say to her, 'No, I think it was the Hamptons.'"
"The Hamptons?"
"The Hamptons, and that is it."
Next, she was to return to the coffee shop and glue a postage stamp to a city map on display. "Then I will check it and I will know that everything is okay," said the undercover agent.
He asked her to repeat the instructions, which she did very well: "Okay, tomorrow at 11, I am going to be sitting at one of the benches, she is going to ask me if she saw me in California. I am going to say 'No, it was in the Hamptons.' I will take the documents, tell her to sign. I will hold the journal, this is how she will recognize me, and I go back and put the stamp."
But something was bothering her. "You're positive no one is watching?" she asked.
"You know how long it took me to get here? Three hours. So here I am comfortable."
The FBI agent believed that Chapman understood this to mean he took three hours to travel the handful of blocks between his office and the coffee shop because he was using circuitous "surveillance detection routes" to shake off anyone who might be following him.
He finished with one last attempt to reassure her. "Your colleagues back in Moscow, they know you are doing a good job, and they will tell you this when diey see you. So keep it up."
***
But here's the thing-she didn't buy it. Maybe he asked too many questions. Maybe he didn't act Russian enough. Maybe she wondered why she had to physically hand die passport over when it would have been safer just to hide it under a rock.
An hour following the meeting, Chapman was surveilled weaving in and out of stores in Brooklyn - first a CVS, then a Verizon store, then a Rite Aid, then back to the Verizon store, all of which struck the FBI as excellent evidence of circuitous surveillance detection routes. When she left the Verizon store and threw a shopping bag in the trash, they dug out the bag and found some international calling cards, a cell phone charger and a cell phone customer agreement in the name of "Irine Kutsov" of "99 Fake Street."
The FBI man could draw only one conclusion: "I believe that her use of a false name and address in die customer agreement form, as well as her dirowing of die cell phone charger, suggest that Chapman was seeking to use the Motorola cell phone only temporarily so as to avoid detection of her conversations."
Whom did she call?
Had to be Moscow, investigators reasoned.
And what did Moscow tell her?
Well, that was obvious-just look at her behavior the next morning. Ai 11 a.m. sharp an FBI team was waiting for her to show up with the passport and make the drop. By noon they knew they had blown it. The sharpest minds in American counter-intelligence had been outsmarted by a 28-year-old party girl.
Anna Chapman had disappeared.
***
Chapman had arrived in the U.S. about six months earlier and seems to have spent most of her time penetrating the world of Manhattan nightclubs and middle-aged horndogs from New Jersey. But the FBI insisted she was part of something called the "illegals program"-which included 10 other Russian spies that the FBI was also tracking in the U.S. for many years. These spies used false names and high-tech spy stuff such as "steganography," a method of inserting coded messages into seemingly ordinary images. The FBI had even found images on public websites that, when decoded, really did read like something from John le Carre:
"You were sent to USA for long-term service trip. Your education, bank accounts, car, house, etc.-all these serve one goal: fulfill your main mission, i.e., to search and develop ties in policy-making circles and send intels to C."
But now Chapman was on the loose. The day she failed to show up for the sting, federal agents up and down the Eastern seaboard rushed to arrest the sleepers, a startling development that could have had a serious impact on U.S. relations with Russia at a time when the two superpowers were wrestling with such knotty issues as sanctions against Iran. But only the boring old New York Times actually covered the story like a serious geopolitical scandal; to everyone else, it was Chapman and 10 other suspects.
And oh, what fun it was! Bloggers posted pics of her, passed on lurid stories and sniffed out her profiles on Linked In and Facebook, which had more than 90 pictures that looked like...well, ordinary tourist photos. Her love of nightclubs struck many as deeply suspicious. At London hot spots such as Annabel's and Boujis she allegedly struck up an acquaintance with a billionaire named Vincent Tchenguiz and may also have met Sir Philip Green, owner of some of the U.K.'s largest retailers. This soon became evidence that she "mingled with the cream of British society." Which led to even more ominous speculations. "Stunning redhead Anna" was fixated with princes William and Harry and attempted to scheme her way into their social circle, according to the Minor.
Her friends had a lot to say too, though few of them gave their names and many contradicted one another. She was "flirtatious" and "sexually aggressive" and had "an IQ of 162" but was also just "ordinary," quite frankly. A male model named Dennis Hirdt said she was "an expert at using her femininity to get information."
On her Facebook account, one status update seemed particularly suspicious:
"When you speak the truth, you don't have to remember it."
***
In the midst of all this, the investigative reporters went to work and discovered that Chapman's "cover story" was...well, true. She did get married to a shaggy-haired British student named Alex Chapman at 20, did get a job at Barclays Bank, did land a job as an assistant to a hedge-fund executive named Nicholas Camilleri.
Digging deeper, they discovered that Chapman was the daughter of a Russian diplomat. They confirmed the economics degree she earned at the Peoples' Friendship University in Moscow. From such evidence they concluded her family had "groomed her for the good life"-a splendid motive for a woman who "had a courtesan's expertise in bed."
The most devastating account came from her ex-husband, Alex Chapman, who told his story to The Daily Telegraph. "When I saw that she had been arrested on suspicion of spying," he said, "it didn't come as much of a surprise, to be honest."
In his telling to various news oudets, their story started as a beautiful romance. They locked eyes at a rave in London, she was the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen, they talked all night and he married her within six months. They lived together in London and all was bliss until she began having secretive meetings with people she referred to as "her Russian friends."
Suddenly she began to change. Although she had never cared much for Americans, often making fun of their accents while watching TV, she seemed to develop an overnight obsession with moving to America. Also, she became greedy. She started bragging about meeting influential people. She confessed that her "scary" father had actually been a senior member of the KGB. And she would do anything for her daddy.
Finally she divorced Alex Chapman and went to America, where she dated rich older men and seemed to come into possession of lots of cash with her real estate website-evidence, the ex-husband said, that "at some point, someone had pumped a lot of money into it."
So yeah, she was probably a spy. "It made sense because of all her erratic behavior, all these high-society people she was going on about. When I told my mother, she said, 'I knew it!'"
A few days after the Telegraph interview, Alex Chapman gave a strikingly different interview to the endlessly sordid News of the World: "The sex was great, and she had this incredible body.... We also experimented with sex toys.... I found her Russian accent such a turn-on...."
Now that's the stuff! Nipple clamps! The mile high club! A Persian prince with a Lamborghini! A mysterious dude named Sergei who-wait for it-had a U.S. green card.
Not only that, but she "loved James Bond movies."
In journalism this is called a "second-day lead," the soft stuff diat comes after the hard news. But this time, it was all anyone wanted to hear.
***
In the intelligence world, HUMINThasall the glamour. That's "human intelligence"- as opposed to significantly less glamorous SIGINT, or signals intelligence, which includes everything from eye-in-the-sky satellites to code breaking. But the least romantic of all intelligence is OSINT, which is open-source intelligence that comes from excitement-free activities such as reading local newspapers. The punch line is that more useful knowledge probably comes from OSINT than all the others put together. For example:
(a) When the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989, we learned that teenagers who smuggled blue jeans and Velvet Underground LPs across the Iron Curtain knew more about the internal strength of the Soviet Union than all the geniuses of MIS and the CIA.
(b) When my father was spying on North Vietnam, he was acutely aware from the beginning (though his superiors were never convinced) that a glance at the map told more than all the Viet Cong tortured in the prisons of Saigon could tell. All you had to do was look at that endless and indefensible border with Cambodia to know-that South Vietnam was doomed. Not only was the truth lying on the surface, but our obsession with secrecy actually turned the glaringly obvious into a secret.
Why do we keep doing this? Because the magic of espionage is based in the thrill of betrayal. In Winston Churchill's famous phrase, espionage is the "bodyguard of lies" that secures our dull safety, and spies are the Nietzschean supermen empowered to cross our borders and break our laws-the body in the bodyguard. No wonder their actual bodies become the locus of our fascination. And that's why virtually everyone associated with the Chapman case chose to ignore the odd OSINT details that should have made them stop and reconsider.
In London, lor example, Chapman was hanging out with millionaires and appar-endy proceeding nicely in her penetration of the royal family. So why would a real spy give all that up to run a real estate website?
And what about her father, who got promoted from story to story until he became a part of Vladimir Putin's inner circle? If he was such a formidable Russian spy, why was he posted to backwaters like Kenya?
And what about the skepticism of the handful of real friends Chapman had, the ones who were not bitter ex-husbands or greed heads selling their stories to tabloids? "She was just an ordinary girl," said Camilleri, the hedge-fund tycoon who hired her as his assistant. "She's simply not some Mata Hari." said Alex Chapman's father. "She can't be. She's just an ordinary girl. It just doesn't add up."
And what about all the "evidence" dredged up by the tabloids? Was she really going out to fancy nightclubs to penetrate "the cream of British society," or was she like a billion other young women who like to go out to flirt and dance? Did she really use her looks to get noticed by future high-level targets, or was she perhaps not the only hot-looking girl in the history of the world to thrust herself into the company of rich men? Did she really have "a courtesan's expertise in bed," or was she just an ordinary young human who liked to screw?
***
"I'm always happy to reminisce about Miss Chapman," Robert Baum told me when I asked for his side of the story. A stocky, gray-haired former prosecutor, he has been a defense attorney for more than 30 years. He took Chapman's case on a random assignment from the court. But as he researched it, Baum was struck by all the details everyone else overlooked.
"Her factual charge was very different from most of the other sleepers'. She never used a false name; she was here only a short time; she was here legally with a visa and applied to get it extended; she was never seen meeting face-to-face with any agent of the Russian government; she never received any money from anyone. In addition, she had a legitimate business, which I checked out."
But in the news, her real estate business was valued at $2 million. Where did she get the money?
Actually, Baum said, that number was her own estimation. "She felt it was worth that amount because it had established business with set customers."
In other words, this hardened Mata Hari was actually so naive, she provided one of the more damning pieces of evidence herself.
"But the key thing about Miss Chapman's case," Baum continued, "was this: She was asked to meet with someone who was said to be from the Russian consulate, and she met with him, and he asked her to do something illegal, which was to deliver a false passport to another agent. And rather than do that, within 24 hours she walked into a police station and said, 'Someone gave me this.' I'd try the case on that fact alone."
Baum sounded genuinely fond of her. She was smart, he said, well-educated, seemed to be open and honest. And she was very sensitive. "She definitely was not tough. She was upset and confused and concerned about the charges just like anybody else-what could happen to me, what are the consequences? She was concerned about her family, how they were going to take it, and asked me to contact some of her friends to make sure they were okay."
Baum sets up a hypothetical scenario: Suppose officials from the Russian consulate called and asked her to keep track of her observations of New York. How could she refuse? This may not make sense to an American, but a Russian in a foreign country may not feel so blase about blowing off the people who controlled her passport, especially so soon after another Russian expatriate was killed in London by an exotic poison widely attributed to agents ol the Russian intelligence service. According to Baum, when she got to the meeting and saw the man was someone she'd never seen before, she thought he was actually some Russian mobster who was trying to put the aim on her. She was afraid to disagree with anything he said.
So what about all that fancy spy stuff, the laptops with the Wi-Fi link? "We argued that had nothing to do with Russian secrets or spying," Baum says. "In court, I said, 'I challenge the government to say exactly what was in those communications that affected national security. They could not and did not.'"
So why did she plead guilty? I mean, come on-isn't that the ultimate revelation, the end point of all Bond movies?
Here Baum was on awkward terrain. "I can tell you I know Miss Chapman pleaded guilty, and I'm not saying she lied. But she was held in a cell for 23 hours a day with no TV and no newspaper. Her only visitor was me, and I saw her through a glass partition. The thought of having that continue for six months to a year while she was awaiting trial was unbearable."
Every evening for the 11 days she was held, Baum went to see her and spent hours talking about the case and the possibilities and then just chatting about life. She was "surprised and shocked" by the media's obsession with her and especially by the snapshots sold by her ex-husband.
For Baum, the final exculpatory detail came after Chapman left that meeting with the FBI man. Yes, she did make phone calls to Moscow, but they were calls for help. "She spoke to her father, and her father told her to go to the police."
Which she did, the next day. She walked into a random New York precinct house and turned in the illegal passport.
The biggest hole in the prosecution's argument was that she made the call to Moscow because she knew she had been caught, Baum said. "If she knew she had been caught, she flees the country. She doesn't go back to Connecticut for the night and then come back to New York in die morning and go straight to the police station."
No reporter bothered to write this, which left Baum furious. Then we traded her back to the Russians as part of the biggest spy swap since the Cold War. Even the vice president of the United States couldn't resist a saucy quip: "Let me make it clear, it wasn't my idea to send her back."
With that it was over, the mystery tied up with a ribbon. Chapman turned down the TV offers in favor of a bank job in Moscow. And no one bothered to ask why the prosecution based its case on edited tapes, so we never got a chance to hear her actual voice and judge for ourselves whether she was eager and cold or just a terrified young woman trapped in a role we wrote for her.
***
And so we arrive at these pictures. They were provided to pi.wbov by one of Chapman's ex-boyfriends, a cheerful young fellow who said he wished to remain nameless because he was afraid Chapman's father might come after him. "You can say we met in Africa," he told me. "I was playing in a club called the Matrix, and she was just hanging around. In the end, we just caught eyes."
She was just 19, but she was already mysterious, he said. She was unpredictable. She was hungry for new experiences. They shared a kiss in Africa, then she came to visit him in England. She loved to go out clubbing, loved to flirt, loved the high life and didn't seem to care a damn about politics. She never said no to anything.
Selling the photos? The ex-boyfriend feels a little bad about that.
About the spying, he's not sure what to believe. Maybe she got caught up in something she didn't want to do. Because honestly, some of the things he's read in the papers don't add up. "I mean, because everything I remember about her is all positive.... She's a really lovely girl."
And that's the real secret these pictures reveal, the only solid and clean thing in this whole story-a lovely young girl at ease in her skin, eager and open, concealing nothing, reveling in her beauty without vanity or conceit, the truth right there on the beautiful surface. No mystery, no secrets. And when you tell the truth, as she herself told us, you don't have to remember the lies.
А я наверное дождусь, когда эта история появится где-нибудь переведенная :)
© Playboy USA
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