ANNA Chapman has embarked on a political career as the new pin-up girl of Vladimir Putin's youth movement. It hailed Ms Chapman, 28, as a patriotic role model for young Russians after her brief career as an undercover agent in the US ended in arrest by the FBI, along with nine other "sleeper" spies.
Her arrival on the political stage comes a year before elections to Russia's parliament, the Duma, are due to take place. Reportedly on Mr Putin's orders, United Russia added several attractive women to its candidate list at the last election, including the former Olympic gymnast Alina Kabaeva, who is alleged to be his mistress.
Many Young Guards leaders have gone on to make political careers in the Duma with United Russia. State television reported Ms Chapman's entry into its ranks on national news bulletins and broadcast part of her speech to activists at its congress in Moscow.
"I want us to learn to be positive. How much energy did we spend in order to become a great power?" she said, dressed in a figure-hugging red-and-black outfit. "We must transform the future, we must begin with ourselves. There would be less negativity in society if each of us woke up with a smile."
Ms Chapman has transformed herself since the summer spy scandal, when her Bond-girl looks earned her the name "Agent 36-24-36" in Russian tabloids. She and her handlers at Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service have astutely exploited her image as a modern Mata Hari to make spying for the Kremlin seem like a cool career option for a new generation of post-Soviet youth.
She has posed in lingerie for a men's magazine, sung patriotic songs with Mr Putin, below, and appeared at the launch of a rocket carrying a joint Russian-US crew to the International Space Station since her return to Moscow in a spy swap in July.
The former Russian spy joined the Young Guards, the youth wing of the ruling United Russia party, and was immediately made a member of its governing public council. The group is dubbed the "Putin Youth" by critics because of its fanatical devotion to the Prime Minister.
She was also hired as an "adviser on investment and innovation" by the little-known FondServiceBank in Moscow, whose initials match those of Russia's domestic spy agency, the Federal Security Service. Timur Prokopenko, who was elected one of the Young Guards' three new leaders at the congress, said that Ms Chapman was a "hero of our generation". He said: "She can play an active part in developing our youth because she represents an ideal for them to emulate."
She was, he added, already writing a book on the subject of innovation. He said that the invitation to Ms Chapman to join Young Guards had come at an innovation forum addressed by President Medvedev in Moscow last week.
Ms Chapman appeared less keen to talk about her new life as a Young Guard. She told her bodyguard to take her away from the congress after reporters asked her what role she would play.
The Young Guards group has its roots in the Soviet Komsomol youth movement. It was revived as a vehicle for mobilising "patriotic" youth on the streets to support Mr Putin and fight any threat of a pro-democracy revolution in Russia.
It came under suspicion after the Kommersant journalist Oleg Kashin was brutally attacked last month by two men with an iron bar. The group had posted photographs of him and other journalists critical of the Kremlin on its website with the words "Will Be Punished".
Mr Putin, who was a Soviet KGB agent in the former East Germany, has lavished praise on the nine spies since they returned to Russia. President Medvedev awarded them top state honours for service to Russia in October, despite FBI claims that the spies failed to obtain any secrets. Veteran KGB agents, by contrast, have strongly criticised the agents for a lack of professionalism.
RELATED NEWS
The bizarre case of
Russian Spy ring arrested by the US-FBI and already deportation just keeps on getting stranger. In particular, one of the alleged spies, 28-year-old
Anna Chapman, is getting a lot of attention because of her “vixen” looks and lingerie shots on Facebook. Now, her former husband in London says her father was a former KGB officer and that she left him to pursue her startup dreams in the United States.
Chapman networked her way into the New York City entrepreneurial scene. In fact, before New York Entrepreneur Week last April, she sat down for a video interview to talk about her apartment rental Website, NYCRentals.com. You can watch the video below, courtesy of And Now Media (it has appeared elsewhere on the Web). Chapman does not come across as a very sophisticated businesswoman, or spy for that matter. Initially, she comes across as something of a red-headed ditz flirting with the camera, or maybe she is just nervous, but as she begins to talk about her business she starts to sound a little more believable.
The Website is up and running, although it is barebones. And she was shopping around a business plan, really more of a two-page executive summary, which we have obtained exclusively (also embedded below). NYCRentals is an apartment search engine which brings together listings for a very limited number of apartments in some neighborhoods of New York City. The executive summary pitches it as a vertical search engine for apartment rentals which aggregates listings from different broker sites. It is not a particularly original idea.
The name of the company behind the site is PropertyFinder, which is described as an “affiliate of a holding company in Russia by Anna Chapman who holds the majority shares in that company as well.” It is obvious the document was written by someone without a full mastery of English. It lists “Graigslist” as a competitor and is filled with grammatical errors. One typical sentence reads:
By specializing on narrow region it will allow for a system to gather not only information about letting but also create rich with information database with buildings, city infrastructure, other useful and relevant for choosing real estate to live area specifics.
Maybe NYCRentals was just a front to give Chapman an excuse to meet high-profile targets. Or maybe she really thought she could crack the New York City rental market. Update: It appears that the domain NYCRentals.com was only recently purchased on June 22 for $25,350.
It is still not clear what Chapman’s role in the alleged spy ring was or why she sought publicity. One theory is that these so-called spies were really trying to infiltrate different parts of American society to network and perhaps find valuable contacts who could provide real intelligence to Russia. But all evidence so far is that these spies who could not shoot straight. One contact from New York Entrepreneur Week who met with Chapman on several occasions, Aron Shoenfeld (no relation to me), describes her as a “very aggressive networker.” But she seemed no more aggressive than any ambitious entrepreneur. Maybe entrepreneurs would make good spies.
Or maybe she just wasn’t a very good spy.
Now the world has some idea what Pippa Middleton’s form-fitting royal wedding gown was hiding.
