Dead Drop Gorgeous - Anna Chapman

By L. Anthony Cervantes
Anna Chapman tripping the lights in New York City…
This agent provocateur and centerfold-ready redhead was working the Manhattan party circuit while passing info to the Russians. Now turned burnt asset for Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR),  redhead player Anya Kushchenko aka Anna Chapman and her career as an undercover agent for the Kremlin came to a skidding climax this week on the tarmac of a secret FSB airport near Moscow.

Anna (center) a Komsomol in Russia’s youth movement

The former Soviet Union was mad about spies (shpion in Russian). With undercover agents behind every door and lurking under every lamp post, Soviet Russia was rampant with spy mania. Indeed, such Russian masterpieces as the great satire The Master and Margarita typified most foreigners as spies… possessing unnatural powers and hatching diabolical plots while being lavishly funded by Western powers.

The former USSR produced volumes of books and scores of movies about Western spies, and to this day there’s exists an aura of suspicion surrounding foreigners. An icon of Russian Soviet spy celebrity is the character Stirlitz in the popular television miniseries Seventeen Moments of Spring, about a master Soviet spy in the Nazi ranks who disrupts both German and Allied cooperation during WWII.

In the West, Soviet spy rings were omnipresent following WWII. The OGPU (predecessor to the KGB) the SVR and Russian Military Intelligence recruited an army of spies comprised mainly of disgruntled citizens

In advantageous government positions. Throughout the Cold War Soviet intelligence officers played handler to numerous infamous spies… In 1962 Russian Intel Officer and spy Rudolf Abel was swapped
for downed CIA U-2 pilot Gary Powers after being convicted of transmitting defense information to the Soviets. In 1953 husband and wife Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were the first civilians in U.S. history to be executed for conspiracy to commit espionage, convicted of passing nuclear weapons information from Los Alamos to the Soviets. 

The Rosenbergs in a final embrace before their execution in 1953

Aldrich Ames, the highest paid of all Soviet American spies, having earned an estimated $4.6 million, is currently serving life without parole for compromising virtually every American agent then in the Soviet Union, ultimately leading to the death of 10.

FBI agent Robert Hanssen, portrayed by Chris Cooper in the cold war drama Breach (Universal, 2007) is serving life in solitary confinement at a Colorado Supermax facility for selling American secrets to Russia for more than US$1.4 million in cash and diamonds over a 22-year period.

Hard line Communists reacted to the recent arrests and deportation with indignity…“These are our citizens, they lived and worked there in the best heroic tradition of Soviet intelligence,” Sergei Malinkovich, head of the old-school Stalinist Communists of St Petersburg said. “We knew all their secrets back then, we could have annexed the United States.” said Malinkovich who proclaimed disappointment that the agents surrendered without putting up a fight.

Aspiring to the likes of Mata Hari, Lona Cohn and Nancy Wake, Anna Chapman’s daytime legend was a 28-year-old real estate web site owner and entrepreneur. Her glam and sometimes risqué Facebook photos conjure up images of a fast and upwardly mobile life that included her marriage and divorce to
Brit Alex Chapmen, stints as an investment broker and real estate entrepreneur.

Anna and her fellow sniffers were reportedly masters of such black bag techniques as dead drops, brush-passes, manufacture and use of invisible ink and encrypted radiograms.

Following in her compatriot’s secretive tradition, Anna Chapman, nicknamed ‘Agent 90-60-90′ by the Russian media because of her plentiful curves, is reportedly being debriefed together with her nine fellow deported agents at an undisclosed government location in Moscow.

So thorough and exhaustive her debriefing is, it caused her not to accept a personal invitation by Angelina Jolie as a special guest at the Moscow premiere of Jolie’s latest film Salt (Columbia 2010). In Salt, Angelina Jolie ironically plays the part of a CIA agent accused of being a Russian operative. Art mirrors life.

Anna’s was ambitious, no doubt. Her Facebook page quipped “If you dream it, you can become it”.
What’s next for Anna? Some in Russia’s inner circle have been overheard suggesting a Duma seat for the lovely damsel to park her assets. Anna has recently been reported to be open to a book deal inked for sums beginning at $250,000 and washed through a friend’s Swiss bank account.

A Playboy shoot may also be in the offing. Such are Anna’s charms that U.S. Vice President Joe Biden on the Jay Leno show quipped when shown a picture of red-haired sensation Chapman “Let me make it clear, it wasn’t my idea to send her back…”