Anna was the perfect combination of the brain with beauty. She was intelligent, pretty, and young. The girl had a charm that would draw people towards her. But the man who attracted her attention was Alex Chapman. The two met at a party and got along instantly. The two looked perfect together. They tied the knot after dating each other for five months. Their marriage marked the end of their love story and the beginning of another one that was full of dark twists and secret.
The beautiful Anna began to change after marriage. Soon she became a stranger for Alex. Their was no love, trust or understanding between them. The only thing that remained between them was many secrets that Anna had kept from him all through their marriage. Secrets that later on costed the U.S. Before disappearing Anna told him a secret about her family that took his breath away. Anna was completely a new person to him now. He felt as if he was living with a big lie throughout his marriage. Alex said, “I thought I knew her."
Anna was born in Stalingrad, Russia in February of 1982. She was born into a wealthy family and had always lived her life in luxury. The girl grew up to be beautiful and very intelligent with an IQ of 162. Both of her parents were working. Her mother was an eminent teacher and her father was a prominent Russian diplomat.
The woman was very much attached to her father. However, due to work her father lived in Kenya. Anna had excelled herself as a student and continued to achieve new ladder of success. There was way more to her. She soon moved to Moscow to pursue her masters in Economics from the People’s Friendship University of Russia.
Anna loved traveling and so she would often fly to different parts of the world exploring them. In the year 2001, she made to London. The girl loved London and especially its nightlife. She started hitting clubs every night. Very soon she had adapted to the local nightlife of London.
It was during one of her visit to clubs when she met Alex Chapman. Alex fell in love with her instantly. He reminisced, “I knew right away I had to talk to her.” The charm of Anna had made him smitten. Little did he know he was going to regret his decision a few years later.
Alex gathered all the courage he had and stepped towards her. He reminisces, "Anna was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen in my life.” “I plucked up some courage and went over to her and said 'I’m sorry, but you’re the most gorgeous girl I’ve ever seen.’ She turned round and looked at me and said 'My God, so are you’. I never expected that, but we got talking and spent the whole night just chatting, until about 7am. People go on about love at first sight and until then I had thought it was a load of rubbish, but as soon as I saw Anna I knew I had to be with her.”
They felt very comfortable with each other and so started meeting. They did not hesitate from admitting their feelings to each other. And that is how their love story began. It was going smoothly. They dated each other for five months. Anna would meet him by shuttling between Moscow and London.
It seemed like they were living a dream. Alex was a hundred percent sure about Anna and their relationship. So, after dating for five months they got married. However, they kept it as a secret from their parents. Because they knew that they would never approve of their marriage.
Keeping their marriage a secret was tougher than they had expected. Anna would fly forth and back from Moscow to London to see Alex. Anna was still pursuing her studies and that is why could not get much time to spend with her husband. Alex would wait for weekends not knowing what his wife used to do on weekdays.
Alex was a cool dude who loved partying and hanging out with friends. He loved to show off his pretty and intelligent wife to his friends. Just like Anna, Alex too loved going on trips. So, whenever Anna would get time off her studies, they would go on long trips.
Few months had gone by and it was time for Alex to meet Anna's father. The pair flew to Africa to visit her parents. No need to say Alex was nervous and excited at the same time. However, his meeting with her dad did not go the way he had expected.
Her father Vasily Kushchyenko came across as a curious person to Alex. He felt weird vibes around her father. He seemed to be a proud and serious man. Alex said, “Anna’s father paid for us to go on honeymoon to Egypt for two weeks and then to Zimbabwe, where her parents were living.” “Her dad was scary. He was very concerned about which direction my life was going, how I was going to 'earn my money’. Anna told me he worked as a diplomat for the Russian government. It was only much later that she told me he had..........
Alex learned that Vasily had a great influence on Anna. Clearly, Anna was very fond of her father and Vasily too was very possessive of her. However, Alex and Vasily could not get along. Vasily was very much skeptical of him. After spending a few days in Africa, the newlywed couple headed back to London.
The visit was a traumatic experience for Alex. He felt so relieved when they came back to London. Apparently, he did not like her father and tried to erase all those scary memories he had of him. But that was just the beginning.
Apart from that Africa visit, everything was going perfect. Anna moved to London and soon got her English passport. She completed her graduation with a first-class degree. The woman had many big opportunities awaiting her. She joined a big investment corporation. She worked with NetJets and Barclays at the beginning of her career.
A loving family and a good job, what more do you want? But despite having it all, Anna began to change. Alex could sense it. It all began around 2005, she had begun to keep things from him. Most of the time she would stay out meeting with people she referred to as her "Russian friends."
But Alex was more concerned about her changing behavior. With time she was changing into a different person. She started making excuses not to spend time with him. He did not remember when was the last time they had dinner together.
Anna had become increasingly materialistic. She would splurge all her money on designer bags, jewelry, and clothes. Alex said, "She had never been materialistic during the years we were together, but in 2005 and 2006 after she started having these meetings with people she referred to as 'Russian friends’, she was transformed into someone with access to a lot of money, boasting about all the influential people she was meeting." Alex had no clue what was she up to.Every time he would try to ask her she would dodge the question.
Alex suspected that she was doing it all only to fit in her new group of V.I.P friends. Every night she would be out attending parties and mingling with new people. And at back home, she would talk only about people she used to meet in those parties. The distance was creeping in between them.
Alex recalled, “It was like someone having a midlife crisis but in their 20s. She would arrange to go out but when I said I would join her she told me not to bother because they would all be speaking Russian. She was adamant I wasn’t to meet them.
The couple was no more a happy couple now. Most of their conversation would be about blaming each other. Clearly, their marriage was collapsing. They would not talk much. It seemed like two strangers were living in a house. Alex said, "she fell in with a group of people who had a lot of influence. She would go to film premieres and became arrogant and obnoxious, always going on about powerful people she was meeting.” Anna would rarely show up at her home.
Alex thought that maybe her Russian friends were having too much influence on her. But little did he know that Anna was the game planner. She was up to something that he could not have imagined ever.
2006 was the year that marked their divorce. Anna decided to move back to Moscow. Oddly enough, she was going to leave behind her well-paying job and connections that she had made over the years. It did not go well with the nature of Anna.
There was a lot of things about Anna that Alex did not know. Before leaving him forever, Anna decided to tell him a big secret of her family. It was about her dad. The same person that sent out weird vibes.
Her father was not any other diplomat. He had worked as a top agent in the KGB, the spy agency of Soviet. This was one of the blows that Alex was going to get. The news got him so stunned that he could have been knocked down by a feather. Unfortunately for the man, he was going to realize that he had not married a girl but a body layered with many secrets.
Thereafter the woman shifted back to Moscow. Many years passed by but there was no news of Anna. People suspected if she was alive. She was gone for the world. Nobody knew a thing about her except for her family and a few closest friends. Alex too had forgotten about her until she started to make news again.
The woman reappeared in New York City. She had relocated to the U.S. But why? The woman never liked the country. In fact, she used to make fun of American accent whenever she heard one on TV or radio. What had gone in those low key years of her life that she had decided to move to America?
The woman was back! She took up a job and soon elevated to the position of the head of an international real estate business. In her free time, she could be seen making friends with people coming from the high strata of society. Anna soon got into a rumor.
The rumor was that she had started seeing Michel Bittan, New Jersey tycoon. The man was extremely wealthy and successful in his business. She had met him at a party.
It was one hot day of 2012 summer, Anna got a call from a stranger calling himself Roman. The man on the other side of the phone claimed that he is a Russian consular official. He wanted to have a meeting with Anna so asked her to see him at a coffee shop. He asked her to use a code phrase.
First thing THE man said to her when they met was “Didn’t we meet in L.A. last summer?” To which Anna replied, “No, I think it was the Hamptons.” Well, it was the code phrase the man was referring to in the call.
Roman had work for her. The man asked her if she can pass a fake passport to a man who allegedly is a spy the next day. The location was finalized. Now, they just needed someone who could do the work of delivering the passport for them.
Anna had never seen this man before. Moreover, no one had ever given any instructions like this one. So, initially, she did flinch. But after pondering a while, she took the passport from him and agreed to do the job.
Even after taking the passport she was not sure. So when she was done with her meeting, she got herself an untraceable burner phone and called her father to seek his opinion. His father suggested her otherwise.
Vasily too found it odd. So he told her to give the passport to the police immediately. If it's a trap that is the only way out. Police would not suspect her as she herself handed over the passport to them.
However, she was already in the eye of the FBI. They had been keeping an eye on her for months. Anna never got a wind of it and the FBI had collected enough evidence to get her behind the bars.
In no time the Russian woman hit the headlines and became the face of the front page of the newspapers. Her mission on behalf of Russia lay exposed in front of everyone. The details were out and the undercover agent inside the prison.
FBI started tracking her when they caught a secret signal that Anna sent to a Russian diplomat. She transmitted the signal from a bookstore in New York. It was from there on FBI had started keeping her under their watch. They tracked every movement of her.
Her meeting with "Roman' was planned. That was the final stage to reach and arrest her in the move. Now the game was over. She had been caught. She had been caught red-handed. The police arrested her on the count of "carrying out long-term, deep-cover assignments in the United States on behalf of the Russian Federation." So what was going to happen next?
On further interrogation, FBI learned that Anna was one of those 10 Russian "sleeper" agents that had been caught that summer. These agents had to ‘build contacts with academics, industrialists, and policymakers to gain access to intelligence.’ The woman did not want to undergo a lengthy trial and so owned up her sins.
The authorities got her to board a one-way plane to Moscow and commanded her to come back with four double agents who had aimed at the U.S. and England.
Do you want to know who celebrated the return of captured spies? Well, it was Russian President Vladimir Putin himself. One point to note here is that Putin himself has served as an agent for KGB.
Anna too had not imagined this. She and other uncovered agents were treated as heroes. The government had arranged a huge ceremony in their honor. The celebration was all about fanfare and patriotic music.
Anna Chapman had become a household name now. It was beyond everyone as to how did she manage to pull off such a big task that too on her own. The woman began to give several media appearances in Russia. People even started dubbing her "Russia's most glamorous spy."
In one of her interviews, she answered the question. She said that the secret weapon that she put in use every time she faced any difficulty was the art of seduction.
Some people suspect that she even tried to seduce Edward Snowden, an American whistleblower. The assumption has been derived from one of her tweets that she directed to him, “Will you marry me?” However, Snowden is not sure if she was joking or was serious. Anna, on the other hand, prefers to dodge the question whenever asked about her tweet and Snowden.
Alex, her estranged husband had appeared in many interviews talking about his relationship with Anna during her stint in jail. In many interviews, he admitted that he was not surprised when he learned about Anna's arrest. He explained, “Whether or not she’s a spy, who can say, but when I read about her being arrested it wasn’t that much of a surprise, to be honest.’’ ''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!’.”
The man was discovered dead in May of 2018. According to reports he died of natural causes. One of the family members said, "It was very distressing at the time, but he died from natural causes. There was nothing suspicious about his death. His father dealt with everything and it was very sad but I don't want to go into any further details." However, there are a bunch of people who suspect it. Alex was 36 years old when he died.
Anna, on the other hand, was enjoying her fame. She was running a financial consultancy, fashion boutique and appeared in many glamorous photoshoots. The woman soon rose to become a multi-millionaire. The woman appeared in a local TV show and took to politics. But that was not what surprised her fans the most.
The woman disappeared again in 2015. before her disappearance, she used to post on social media on a daily basis but for some time she just got vanished out of thin air. Later on, it was revealed that the woman was hiding her baby bump. She came back to limelight after giving birth to a baby boy. However, the identity of the father of her son is still a secret.
Post her pregnancy, the woman has shifted her focus from modeling to a political youth movement. She has won the seat of Young Guard of United Russia. Since then Anna can be spotted “engaged in educating young people.”