Anna Chapman and nine other Russian secret agents were returned to Russia in exchange for four Western spies in a dramatic swap in 2010.
The exchange, described as the biggest spy swap since the Cold War and which saw Sergei Skripal returned to the West, saw two aircraft parked next to each other in Vienna as the 14 agents involved in the deal swapped planes.
The ten Russian ‘sleeper’ agents had been arrested in the United States, after pleading guilty to ‘conspiracy to act as an unregistered agent of a foreign country’.
It was claimed they had lived double lives in the US, with fake passports and false identities, with some of them leaving families behind amid the swap, according to The Guardian.
Anna Chapman (pictured) and nine other Russian secret agents were returned to Russia in exchange for four Western spies in a dramatic swap in 2010
They included Anna Chapman, who had worked several years in London including for Barclays Bank.
The swap included Sergei Skripal, who was granted refuge in Britain in the spy swap the BBC reported.
Skripal received a jail term of 13 years for spying for Britain in 2006, as Russian authorities accused him of paying $100,000 (£72,300 at today’s rate) for intelligence.
The swap took place after US officials determined there was ‘no significant national security benefit’ in imprisoning the ten Russian agents.
The other three spies handed over by Russia were Alexander Zaporozhsky, Igor Sutyagin and Gennady Vasilenko.
Reports surfaced in 2014 alleging that Chapman had tried to seduce whistleblower Edward Snowden on orders from the Kremlin, according to a defector Boris Karpichkov, a former KGB agent.
The former Russian spy also gave birth to her first child in 2015, it was reported.
The ex-spy was reportedly running an antique shop in a trendy district of Moscow and working as a TV host after her return to Russia.
The swap included Anna Chapman, who had worked several years in London including for Barclays Bank