Sexy Russian spy ‘tried to seduce’ Snowden
Sexy Russian spy Anna Chapman attempted to seduce whistleblower Edward Snowden on Russia's orders, according to a defector.
Boris Karpichkov, a former KGB agent, says an extravagant plan akin to a James Bond novel was laid out to keep Edward Snowden in Russia so that agents could question him.
Karpichkov claims that Chapman, 32, was told to keep the 31-year-old former security agent in Moscow for as long as possible.
Snowden and Chapman met only once, Karpichkov said. But Chapman followed up that meeting last year with a tweet heard round the world.
“Snowden,” she tweeted. “Will you marry me?”
Snowden, will you marry me?!
— Anna (@ChapmanAnna) July 3, 2013
According to Karpichkov, this was all part of the Kremlin's plan.
“But Snowden became concerned about what the consequences would be,” Karpichkov told London’s Sunday People.“If Snowden had accepted, he would have a right to Russian citizenship. That would lock him in Russia. As a citizen he’d need permission to leave.”
Last year, Chapman walked out of an NBC interview in Moscow after the spy-turned-Russian celebrity refused to answer questions about her proposal to Snowden.
The real-life Bond girl initially made headlines in 2010 when she was found to be part of a sleeper cell of Russian agents in the US.
Not long after she left her cover job as an estate agent in New York and was deported back to Russia with nine other spies.
Following her return to Russia, Chapman worked as a model, became the celebrity face of a Moscow bank and joined the leadership of the youth wing of the main pro-Kremlin party.
Snowden left his long-term girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, in Hawaii when he fled the US and was granted asylum in Moscow in August 2013, after six weeks of limbo at the city’s airport.
Snowden was reunited with Mills over the summer in Russia where he now has a three-year residency permit.
He is wanted in the US after leaking classified details of government surveillance programs.
Morning news break – December 8
