Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Anna Chapman Updates

Anna Chapman’s story is unfolding like a plot straight out of a James Bond flick.
The beautiful 28-year-old divorcee who says she ran an online real estate company worth $2 million, was one of 11 accused Russian secret agents arrested by FBI agents.
Prosecutors say they were all part of a ring of old-school spies that answered to “Moscow Central”and lived deep undercover as ordinary suburbanites.

Chapman’s Facebook page, on which she also uses the Russian form of her name “Anya,”reveals a photo album of sexy profile pictures that could easily be headshots in a casting call to find the next Bond girl.
Chapman poses in a slinky animal print mini dress in one shot casually holding a cigarette, and a fiery form-fitting scarlett cocktail dress in several others.
The page appears to be still active – a friend posted a link to a Washington Post story detailing her arrest on Tuesday.
The “about me”section features this credo: “If you can imagine it, you can achieve it; if you can dream it, you can become it.”
Five of the suspects, including Chapman, were arrested in New York. Chapman’s alleged missions, described in an 18-page court complaint, read like the pages of a spy thriller.
According to the document, she bought a cell phone under the alias “Irine Kustov” and the phony address “99 Fake Street.”

FBI
agents found the Verizon phone contract and Motorola charger along with packaging for calling cards that can be used for international calls in a trash can after Chapman was arrested, according to the complaint.
The court document also details Chapman’s interactions with an undercover FBI agent who fed her instructions for preparing a fake passport to transfer to another female spy.
She was instructed to hold a magazine a certain way to signal the other spy to initiate contact.

Chapman
is quoted in the complaint repeating back the following instructions: “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.”
She was arrested before the mission was carried out. Chapman appeared in Manhattan federal court on June 28, 2010 with four other alleged spies.
“The evidence here is overwhelming. It is simple. It is strong,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Farbiarz the hearing.
“This is a Russian agent!” he said, gesturing dramatically at Chapman. Farbiarz went on to call her a “practiced deceiver”and an “extraordinary agent.”
The Russian government downplayed the arrests, calling the allegations “baseless and improper.”
Beginning as early as 2000, the accused spies were watched meeting on benches in Central Park and Brooklyn, plotting in a Queens restaurant, exchanging computer files wirelessly in a Times Square Starbucks, smoothly switching bags in the Forest Hills, Queens, Long Island Rail Road station and burying money in the ground upstate.
Aside from the New York area, the alleged spies operated in Boston, Seattle and Arlington, Va.

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