Anna Chapman

Some Lesser Known Facts About Anna Chapman

• Anna Chapman was born and raised in Volgograd, Russia.

• Her father was a high-ranking Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti official and also served as the Russian ambassador to Kenya. In 2010, he held a senior position at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

• In 2000, Anna moved to the United Kingdom.

• In 2001, she met Alex Chapman, her husband, at a rave party in London Docklands.

• Soon after, they got married in Moscow and obtained British citizenship and a British Passport, in addition to her native Russian one.

• In 2003, Anna moved to London. Chapman first rose to fame in London, where her charm helped her move among influential business leaders, politicians, and oligarchs. A London-based Russian agent noticed her networking skills and recruited her.

• In 2006, Anna and Alex divorced. It was reported that in 2008, Alex died due to a drug overdose.

• In 2009, she moved to New York and founded a real estate business called PropertyFinder LLC. In an interview, her husband, Alex, mentioned that Anna had told him the company struggled with debt during its first year. However, later she had grown the business to a significant success.

• On 27 June 2010, Anna was among ten Russian agents who were arrested by the FBI as part of the “illegals Program”. They all were accused of acting as unregistered agents of a foreign government.

• According to some reports, Chapman was believed to have been recruited by the SVR in or around 2000.

• Anna Chapman worked with a network of others until an undercover FBI agent trapped her at a coffee shop in Manhattan. The FBI agent offered Chapman a fake passport and asked her to forward it to another spy. However, on her father’s advice, she returned the passport to a local police station. She was arrested shortly thereafter.

• After being charged, Chapman became part of a spy swap deal between the United States and Russia, which was the largest exchange of its kind since 1986. The swap took place on 8 July 2010.

• In an interview, her lawyer Robert Baum revealed that Anna Chapman wanted to move to the UK after her arrest, but the British Home Office cancelled her citizenship on 13 July 2010 under Section 40 of the British Nationality Act 1981, preventing her return. This special power had been used only about a dozen times before. He added that she was very upset after losing her UK citizenship and being barred from entering the country.

• After her arrest by the FBI, Chapman gained celebrity status. Several photos and videos of her were uploaded to YouTube and Facebook. She was also referred her as “the Red under the bed.”

• A Moscow bank, Fund Service Bank, that handled the payment on behalf of state and private sector enterprises in the Russian aerospace industry, appointed Anna as the President of their investment and innovation issues.

• In late December 2010, Chapman joined the public council of the Young Guard of United Russia, where she served in educating young people.

• On 21 January 2011, Anna joined the TV industry and began hosting a weekly TV show in Russia titled Secrets of the World on REN TV.

  

• In May 2011, Chapman gave a testimony in a trial in Moscow against Col. Alexander Poteyev, a former KGB officer. In the trial, she claimed that Poteyev was the one who gave the US authorities the information that led to her arrest in 2010. She also claimed that she was caught soon after an undercover US agent used a secret code that only she and Col. Alexander Poteyev knew.

• In June 2011, she was appointed as the editor of a business news magazine named Venture.

• In July, a Russian TV station named her “Woman of the Year.”

• In October 2011, Chapman wrote a column for a local newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, about writer Alexander Pushkin. Later, she was accused of plagiarizing content from a book by Kremlin advisor Oleg Matveychev. After this incident, she faced a lot of criticism. During a speech at St. Petersburg University, students had mocked her and held signs saying things like “Chapman, get out of the university!” and “The Kremlin and the porn studio are in the other direction!”

• In August 2013, Anna visited Nagorno-Karabakh with Russian officials to discuss peace issues between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Her visit caused anger in Azerbaijan, and its government banned her and the Russian groups from entering the country.

• As a model, Chapman posed on the cover of the Russian version of Maxim magazine in Agent Provocateur lingerie. The magazine included Chapman in its list of “Russia’s 100 sexiest women.

• In 2011, Chapman made an appearance as a runway model for Moscow Fashion Week at the Shiyan & Rudkovskaya show and in 2012 for Antalya at the Dosso Dossi.

• In 2015, Anna gave birth to a boy. However, she kept his father’s name private.

• In October 2025, Anna Chapman was appointed as the head of the newly established Museum of Russian Intelligence. The museum is directly linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s foreign spy agency, the SVR, and is registered near Moscow’s Gorky Park, within the press office of the Foreign Intelligence Service. The museum is set to spotlight the history and “achievements” of Russian espionage.