The scene could come straight from a romance novel. Dressed in a Zara suit, which ‘amazingly emphasised my figure’, our 20-something flame-haired heroine walks into a conference hall filled with Russian oligarchs, catching the eye of every man there.
Scooping up the billionaires’ business cards faster than a JCB digger, she casts come-hither glances as she works the room.
‘When I entered the main hall, everyone simultaneously turned in my direction. I knew that I looked great,’ she later recalled.
No, not an extract from a Jilly Cooper page-turner, though, arguably, it is a bonk-buster.
Rather, it’s a description of events which purportedly took place at London’s Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre during the 2003 Russian Economic Forum attended by Prince Andrew.
It comes from the autobiography of notorious Russian spy Anna Chapman, which has been published in her native Russia and to which the Mail has gained exclusive access.
Notorious Russian spy Anna Chapman pictured back in Moscow
Chapman, now 42, became infamous in 2010 when she was unveiled as an undercover agent after a sting operation by the FBI in the US.
Unceremoniously booted back to Moscow with her tail between her shapely legs, she reinvented herself as an influencer, a TV presenter and, now, an author. For Chapman, born Anna Vasilyevna Kushchenko, has written a tell-all memoir about how she was recruited as an undercover agent in Putin’s foreign intelligence service the SVR.
A story which, by her bizarre admission, is ‘five per cent fiction’, it includes an account of five years she spent in the UK and the marriage that handed her a coveted British passport and surname.
Jaw-dropping to say the least, To Russia With Love is for the most part a boastful, sickly-sweet account of Chapman’s own brilliance.
While much is impossible to verify, the years she spent in London before she became a spy were, she says, filled with wealthy Arab sheikhs, suitcases stuffed with cash, diamond necklaces, shopping trips via private jet to Paris and Geneva and magnums of Dom Perignon champagne slurped at London’s swankiest nightspots.
But in the midst of this pulp ‘faction’, written with a ghostwriter, lie devastating allegations about her British husband Alex Chapman, who she met in 2001 in a London Docklands nightclub.
He died, aged 36, in May 2015 of a drugs overdose and so is not here to defend himself. But his ex-wife ruthlessly paints him as a violent alcoholic and drug addict.
In one shocking chapter she accuses him of trying to kill her with a power drill an hour before she trotted off to Westminster to make that memorable entrance at the Russian Economic Forum.
‘A sharp pain, the drill twisting the skin, splashes of blood on the snow white linen,’ she writes describing how she locked herself in the bathroom at the couple’s flat in Stoke Newington, North London, to get away from her husband after he attacked her in bed.
‘The drill pierced the thin wood and the shiny tip popped out right in front of my nose,’ she adds in a scene which conjures up images of Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
She apparently escaped after Alex passed out on the floor.
Anna pictured with her husband Alex Chapman who she claims attacked her
When she returned to their flat months later, she claims he raped her: ‘You won’t get away b****! You’re mine for ever!’ she recalls him saying before recounting the ‘cracking sound of tearing lace’.
That alleged rape, she says, resulted in a pregnancy, which she claims she told Alex’s mother Jane on the phone was ‘probably a boy’.
‘I need to make a decision about keeping the child. For that, I need to ask if you can help raise the baby,’ she recalls telling Mrs Chapman, living in the New Forest, Hampshire. Cruelly, she claims her mother-in-law’s refusal to take care of the child ‘helped me make my final decision. I will not give birth’.
The abortion was not successful and the most stomach-churning of her claims is that, days after the procedure, she delivered the foetus at home, put it in the fridge and later buried it in a shoe box somewhere in Hyde Park.
Her former mother-in-law told the Mail last week that she was unaware of the book and didn’t want to even hear about the allegations so it’s impossible to prove their veracity.
But written to bolster her fame in Russia, readers there will care little if Chapman traduces the reputation of her dead husband.
What is known is that the Volgograd-born daughter of a former KGB agent turned Russian diplomat arrived in London in 2001 aged 19 after meeting Brighton-based DJ Marcus Read in a bar in Zimbabwe, where her father was posted at the time.
After he picked her up at Heathrow, the pair embarked on a six-week fling. Read recalled: ‘The sex was brilliant, we were getting on great, and then she was off.’
She dumped him after meeting trainee psychiatrist Alex who became her husband six months later. Despite the horrors she claims to have suffered at his hands, she says they were also like ‘two magnets, striving to unite’.
She says they separated in 2003 – though before his death Alex claimed they continued to see each other till their divorce in 2006.
Alex, who was interviewed by British security services after his ex-wife’s 2010 arrest in New York, always believed that Chapman was ‘conditioned’ after her arrival in the UK and that her personality changed after she began having secretive meetings with Russians.
He told the Telegraph in 2010: ‘She was transformed into someone with access to a lot of money, boasting about all the influential people she was meeting.’
Indeed, with elements of the films Pretty Woman and Fifty Shades Of Grey – and a dash of a Bond movie – the tales Chapman tells might have been ripped straight from a Netflix script.
Take the end of the first day of the Russian Economic Forum in April 2003 when, after that alleged attack by her husband with a power drill and having bewitched a room of oligarchs, our heroine has nowhere to sleep and so heads to Waterloo Bridge to spend the night with the homeless.
Anna Chapman was sent back to Moscow after being exposed by the FBI
She describes warming herself next to their brazier, then beds down on a urine-stained blanket and rests her head on her white Chloe handbag.
When the bag, bulging with oligarchs’ business cards she had collected during the day, is snatched in the night, she apparently takes off her heels, runs after the thief and retrieves it, later washing her feet in the Thames. It is a scene, she admits, ‘just like the movies’.
Next day, a kindly shop assistant lends her money – later repaid –for a new outfit so Chapman can return for day two of the forum.
This time she claims a billionaire oligarch, given the pseudonym Victor, invites her to join him and his friends for drinks at Mayfair hotel Claridge’s. Readers are told that her companions, three super-rich men and a sex worker, all ‘nod approvingly’ or ‘listen with interest’ when she speaks.
Like a fairy godfather, the mysterious Victor then leaves a key for her at Claridge’s reception. The Presidential Suite, no less!
A porter hands her a piece of paper with four numbers. It doesn’t take clever Anna long to work out Victor has left her the code to the safe in the room. ‘The heavy door swung open lazily. At the bottom of the safe lay a hundred thousand dollars,’ she writes.
She rents a flat in upmarket South Kensington and gets a job at private jet firm ‘JetSales’ after showing its Swedish director her impressive haul of business cards.
So does it have any relationship to the truth?
In real life, economics graduate Chapman worked for NetJets Europe as a sales assistant but didn’t get the job until more than a year after the 2003 forum and was only employed from May to July 2004, when she was sacked.
None of this is mentioned. Instead, in her memoir, she is hanging out in London’s celebrity hotspots. One of them is The Cow, a Notting Hill restaurant fraternised by Tom Cruise, David Beckham, Kate Moss and Stella McCartney.
Another time, she describes walking alone into Mayfair restaurant Cipriani, knowing there was ‘always someone willing to treat a charming lady to a drink’. She adds: ‘Dozens of eyes turned towards me. I knew how to make an entrance. I walked through the hall with a signature sway of my hips.’
According to her book, she later went off with two wealthy businessmen to a Kensington apartment and played strip poker.
After losing the first hand, she says she removed her knickers ‘much to the men’s delight’. She went on to win the second hand.
Her prize, she writes, was a job working for hedge fund boss ‘Nicholas’ who phoned her in the morning and told her to ‘get your beautiful arse up and come to the office’.
In 2010, after she was unveiled as a spy, Nicholas Camilleri, chief executive of Mayfair-based hedge fund Navigator Asset Management Advisers, admitted meeting Chapman at Cipriani in 2005 and says she ‘almost immediately’ asked for a job.
She was a PA for ‘a matter of months’ and Camilleri, who took his life in Malta in 2022, described her as a ‘green, wet behind the ears girl’ who failed to impress.
Chapman’s claim that she moved to an apartment in Mayfair is true but it’s unclear how she paid the rent. Her flatmate was Lena Savitskaya, a Belarusian waitress at the Berkeley Hotel.
For two years, the women partied together, seeking the company of rich and powerful men.
They were pictured with plunging necklines at a ‘War and Peace’ costume ball at the Dorchester, standing by Grand Duke George Mikhailovich Romanov, descendant of the Tsars and heir apparent to the Imperial Russian throne, and Prince Guillaume, heir to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.
The pair also went on to befriend exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who admitted knowing Chapman before he took his life at his Surrey home in 2013.
Lena told the Mail in 2010 that her former flatmate had only married Alex Chapman ‘to get a passport’ and had ‘ruined’ her life after stealing a wealthy Arab boyfriend she had hoped to marry.
Chapman covers this in chapter 33 of her 461-page tome, saying the sheikh boyfriend was ‘visibly impressed’ by her dreams of going to Harvard to ‘study for an MBE’. She says his assistant turned up next day with $80,000 in a suitcase.
Then, en route to Paris with the sheikh on his Gulfstream jet, Chapman says she was given a diamond necklace. But during their stay at the five-star Hotel George V, she insists they had separate suites, hinting she did not sleep with him, saying: ‘The life of a gold-digger didn’t appeal to me.’ She also claims to have turned down a proposal from a billionaire oligarch who ‘pampered’ her.
Nevertheless, she admits pawning the jewels given by benefactors before returning in 2005 to Moscow where, finally she says, she was approached by the SVR, who had been watching her for months, and recruited as an agent.
She claims she was only recruited because an SVR agent, referred to as Kirill, spotted her in the VIP box at Chelsea FC beside owner Roman Abramovich in 2003 and was immediately struck by her presence. ‘Who is this? Someone’s wife, mistress, daughter or secretary?’ she writes.
‘Kirill almost got up from his seat to better examine the facial features, figure and gaze of the mysterious girl. She actively participated in the conversations and the others – top managers, politicians and businessmen – listened attentively, nodding from time to time, agreeing. What was special about her? He promised himself that he would definitely find out.’
While the book ends with her recruitment, what happened next is well documented.
Having used her British passport to get to the US, Chapman set herself up in New York as CEO of a website selling real estate while continuing to rub shoulders with the super-wealthy.
She is said to have passed information to Russian agents from locations such as coffee shops and book stores across the city.
There has never been any evidence any of it was of great use but after her arrest by the FBI in 2010, she was among ten Russian sleeper agents deported to Moscow as part of the swap that saw Sergei Skripal – who in 2018 survived the poisoning attempt in Salisbury – sent to the UK.
The ensuing publicity brought Chapman the fame she has craved for much of her life.
She has spent the past 15 years desperately clawing after celebrity in her homeland. Such efforts have largely involved stripping off for photographers, a brief and somewhat disastrous turn as a fashion designer and a short stint hosting a TV chat show.
She remains one of Vladimir Putin’s most faithful cheerleaders and has thrown her voice behind Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Now she appears to crave literary stardom, as well as the TV series it might inspire. Chapman ends her book by thanking her ghostwriter and promising readers a second thrilling instalment.
But it’s hard, given the tall tales she has already cranked out, to imagine what on Earth there is left worth saying.
Additional reporting: Will Stewart
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