The Rest Is Classified - 11. The Spy Who Loved Me: Undercover in Londongrad (Ep 1)

Episode Date: January 15, 2025

How did a Russian spy manage to infiltrate the upper echelons of London and New York society? Was Anna Chapman really an old fashioned Russian honeytrap or was she underestimated by the world's press? What was life like for wealthy Russians in "Londongrad" in the early 21st century?  The year is 2001 and the 18-year-old daughter of a Russian oligarch is partying in London. She meets a handsome young man at a warehouse rave and her passport to a new life in Western Europe glistens before her very eyes. What could possibly go wrong? Join David and Gordon as they take us back to the height of Londongrad and what happens when a Russian spy tries to infiltrate high society.  Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ www.nordvpn.com/restisclassified It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee!  Email: [e-mail] Twitter: @triclassified Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by our new friends at NordVPN. Now Gordon, you have been a NordVPN user for over a year now, and why in the world do you like them so much? So many reasons, David, but one feature in particular that I love is that with just one subscription you can keep multiple devices safe, up to 10 at once with the NordVPN app. So I've got a lot of phones and laptops around the house which I've used over the years in various places and to keep them all safe and secure I do use that NordVPN. You can also protect unlimited devices on your router by using NordVPN which

means that it is perfect for keeping your family safe online when they're using social media, email, banking online, or really anything for that matter. If you want to ensure that you're safe online, you should take advantage of our exclusive NordVPN discount. All you need to do is go to nordvpn.com slash rest is classified. And when you sign up, you can receive a bonus for months on top of your subscription plan and there's no risk with NORD's 30-day money-back guarantee. The link is also in the episode description box. 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 around and looked at me and said, my god, so are you. I just couldn't stop thinking about her. Well,

Gordon, those are the words of a man named Alex Chapman. He's talking about a girl who was then known as Anna Kushenko. He's just met her, surprisingly, at a party. They're out on the dance floor. They're in London. It's the summer of 2001. She's 19. He's 21, and they're going to get married soon. She'll become Anna Chapman.

And then, importantly for our story today, famous or infamous as a Russian spy. And this time on The Rest is Classified, we are talking about Gordon Carrera's favorite subject, Russians hiding in plain sight. Well, thank you. I'm Gordon Carrera. Thank you also for those accents, which were beautifully done, David. I'm told it's a Stoke Newington accent, Gordon. No, it wasn't. Neither was Anna's, particularly Russian. But we'll leave that. Let's leave that. This is, as you said, the story of Anna Chapman. When it emerged first in 2010, it had everything, particularly for the tabloids.

Here was this sultry redhead young woman who'd been living a party lifestyle in London and New York, living it up, but who it turned out was a deep cover Russian spy. She was one of a group who was arrested at that time, but inevitably all the attention focused on her. And I think caricatured her, didn't it, David? I mean, it portrayed her as the kind of classic honey trap, you know, the kind of woman sent to seduce in the spy world. A bit of a cliche and a stereotype, but I'm not sure that that's quite right.

And I think what we're going to look at today is how actually that's unfair treatment of her when she's actually far more interesting and perhaps even far more dangerous. This story on one side, you have this beautiful Russian woman who's the centerpiece of the story. She's involved in espionage. And there is a tendency, I think,

when you put those things together, of course, to really look at her as kind of, I mean, frankly, a sex symbol, a seductress, you know, a honey trap that's sort of seducing as part of her espionage work. And we'll see, of course, that that's a gross caricature of who Anna Chapman really was and is. and frankly, it really ignores the reality that the type of espionage that she's involved in, which by the way is ongoing today, and to some degree is probably even more prevalent now,

post-Ukraine, it's extremely threatening. Again, we can sort of make her a cartoon, or as I hope we'll do here, really look closely at who she was, where she came from and the very real threat that I think she posed to both the US and the UK or sort of that spies like her pose to our societies. That's right. I think it is that sense in which her story actually tells us something about how Russia spies and also how we're vulnerable to that spying, which

is definitely still relevant today and very interesting. And you can see it all through the lens of this kind of quite interesting and quite extraordinary in some ways, young woman who gets caught in 2010. I think, you know, to some degree, Gordon, I don't know if we had the word back then, or if we did, it was probably relatively new. but I think Anna is almost an influencer in a way where she as we'll see part of her story she's almost selling

a fantasy to convince people to get close to people who might have interesting information. She's putting out to the world an image of the seductress in a way that is a total caricature, but that plays on some of our deepest fantasies about espionage and makes the story fascinating. But if we focus only on that, we sort of missed the point, don't we? I think that's right. Definitely. Should we go back to the rave, Gordon, where Anna and Alex first met. I mean, this is a scene, of course, you know, 2001, I suppose a young Gordon Carrera would have been similarly at such venues. And I believe the Docklands, right, Gordon? I mean, this is your scene. This was an underground rave in the Docklands in the summer 2001. I could search my diary

and check whether I'd been at this particular rave, but I think- That's how zapped you were from 2001. That's how good it was. But I think it's how zapped you were from 2001. That's how good it was. But I think it's pretty unlikely, given what I was doing in 2001, that I would have been at this rave. But Anna was there and Alex was there. And now Alex, at this point, he's a 21 year old. He left boarding school at 16.

You get the feeling of a kind of young man who's still trying to find his way. He's into music, working at a recording studio. He's at this underground rave, summer 2001. And there is Anna at the rave in this long white dress. What's the Docklands equivalent in the States, by the way? Is there a New York equivalent of the Docklands? I don't know. It's kind of industrial, especially 2001, industrial, slightly gritty, edgy.

I don't know. What's the equivalent in Dallas where you are? Is there a... That's a great question. I also don't remember or know. Maybe in New York, is it the meatpacking district back in 01, something like that? Okay, but this is a cool place to be. And there is Anna, and at this point, she's 19 years old. She's wearing this long white dress, and immediately, Alex is smitten. They meet up, they talk through the night.

She says he loves his accent, which was obviously beautifully recreated by you, and his hair, which she describes as a bit like Liam Gallagher from the band Oasis. She's a student, and this is a crucial bit. She's a student. She's studying economics in Moscow, and she's going back the next day to Moscow. It looks for a moment as if this romance might be just a one-night thing. But interestingly enough, they decide they're going to keep going and they agree to start meeting and over the next few months they go back and forth between London and Moscow. It's interesting, he doesn't know that much about her. She seems to have grown up in Volgograd. He doesn't meet her family at this point because her family seemed to be abroad. He's being brought up by, I think

largely her grandmother. But amazingly quickly, within a matter of months, Alex is proposing marriage. And they don't tell either of their parents, it looks like, according to what Alex said soon afterwards. And in 2002, they just get married. Looking back, of course, you could have a very suspicious lens. Is the marriage arranged? Is she being pushed into this by unseen sort of puppeteers in Moscow? I kind of look at this as these are really young people who have fallen sort of madly in love and they're young and want to get married, right? Yeah. And I think even Anna later says there were no secret motives at this time and it was

a genuine romance. It's hard to be sure. I think the one thing to say is that this is a time where she is of the first generation of young Russians who can come over to London. It's interesting, isn't it? She's going back and forth between London and Moscow in 2001. For young Muscovites, young Russians, this is quite exciting. The Cold War only ended about a decade before. She's young, she's ambitious, and she's smart. You can't think that somewhere there isn't the thought that getting a British passport is also kind of useful for her. You know, that's a fairly familiar story about that. So do we really know what went on between them?

It's hard to say, but it does look like romance plus perhaps that passport and the chance to move from being Anna Kyshenko to Anna Chapman is perhaps part of it. The story I think really gets interesting when it comes to the honeymoon and the fact is they go for their honeymoon to Zimbabwe. Now that's is perhaps part of it. A story I think really gets interesting when it comes to the honeymoon. And the fact is they go for their honeymoon to Zimbabwe. Now that's not a normal place you go for your six week honeymoon, but the reason is her dad is there

and her dad is serving in the embassy as a diplomat. It's also a bad sign for a marriage if the honeymoon destination is being chosen based on your father's location. I think that's an immediate red flag. And it does seem like Anna's mother is quite welcoming and quite keen on this young Briton who her daughter is married, but the father is suspicious immediately and kind of asks, what business do you have in Russia or what links do you have? And he just seems like a kind of domineering and quite difficult character and who is instantly suspicious.

And also that he would drive around in a blacked out Land Rover with other vehicles always in front and behind him, which was more security than potentially the ambassador might have had. So what does that tell you, David, with your CIA background about Anna's father and this Russian diplomat? I've been to too many raves, Gordon, to connect those dots. Gray cells can't do it anymore. I think it's pretty obvious that he's not just a regular diplomat, but he is what would

have been KGB and what's now become the SVR, Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. He's told eventually by Anna that her father was former KGB. Yeah, exactly. So I guess if he hadn't guessed it, he eventually learns. So we've really got this idea that there's something a little bit different there about Anna. At that point, then they go back to London, they get this flat in Stoke-Newington, hence the accent. They don't have much money. She's going back and forth to Moscow to finish her degree. She graduates with first-class honors, 2004. She's clearly smart. We should say on that point, I obviously cannot verify this, but many reports that her IQ test was like off the charts as well. Like she is not just above average intelligence. Anna Chapman is really, really wicked smart. Yeah, exactly. I think that's worth saying.

But the marriage already starts to disintegrate pretty soon after she finishes her degree, after they start settling in London, stuff starts to go wrong and she starts to change. And I mean, it's a slightly sad story because she just immediately starts hanging out with a different crowd, basically. And it happens pretty quickly, doesn't it? They're back in London, they're living in Stoke Newington. And it is kind of sad, isn't it, on the individual human level here, because he starts to see Anna kind of hanging out with a different crowd, changing, keeping things from him.

I mean, this is a story of high espionage, but at the end of the day, there's people involved and the marriage really comes apart, I think in part because of it. Although I will say we don't precisely know Doobie Gordon when she was quote unquote recruited, recruited, or what her relationship with the Russian Secret Services was formally at this point? No, and we might come back to where that might have happened. But you're right, we don't know for

sure. But there is this quote from Alex, which he says later, there was such a dramatic change in the way she went about things. I felt I hardly knew her anymore. 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'd all be speaking Russian. And she started meeting these people she refers to as her Russian friends. And I think maybe it's worth stepping back for a moment and talking about Russia and Britain at this point, because this, I think, is almost the high point of Londonagrad, as people call it. Moscow on Thames, as other people described it, which is the peak period of Russian

influence in Britain and particularly in London. I don't think it was replicated in the US, but I think London and Britain were particularly the focus of where Russian influence came. I think lots of reasons for that. Short flight from Moscow over to London, you'd have all these Russian businessmen, the so-called oligarchs, the kind of people who mix business and politics, who would come and they'd come and watch a football match, maybe an arsenal on the weekend. Their wives would go and do shopping. Maybe they'd send their kids to school in Britain.

They'd invest here, the visa regime, everything was quite permissive. It was quite easy. And of course, they also worked out they could stash their money and spend it in London and London and particularly the city of London welcomed them with open arms, said, you know, come along, bring all your money, we don't really care where it came from. And you know, there was an interesting question how far some of these things were about reputation laundering by some of

these people who had influence in Russia and wanted to improve their reputation in the UK, how far they wanted a safe haven. So you had both Russian dissidents and exiles, but also kind of people close to Vladimir Putin, you know, all of them coming over to London in this time. And you can just feel you could feel I mean, I remember seeing it, you could feel the money flooding, the houses being bought, the people in the restaurants, just that sense of Russian influence. Equally, obviously, that brings with it a darker side, but the security service, MI5, police, they didn't have the resources or the ability to look at this

in very much detail. This is the post 2001 era when they're focusing on terrorism, terrorist threats. So they're not really that bothered about it. Even though Putin started killing people in London in this time period. Yeah, because 2006, yeah, 2006, you get Alexander Litvinenko who's poisoned with polonium. It's interesting. I don't think that was ever that level of influence in say New York or Washington. It was never quite the same. Never to the same degree. I mean, this is the world Anna's floating in. And so we're picking her out here. There are lots of Russians like her in London in this period. She does not stand out

at all. Right? I mean, even if MI5 had been paying very, very, very close attention, which would have been almost impossible given how, very close attention, which would have been almost impossible given how many Russians were there, she would have been remarkably low on the list, let's say. She starts to move into the fast set in London, into the place where Russian money and British money is intermingling. She gets a job which is renting and selling private planes, private jets. You can't get a better way to mix with the fast set than that. She gets a job which is renting and selling private planes, private jets.

You can't get a better way to mix with the kind of farce than that. She's going to film premier society parties. She starts hanging out with a kind of boss of a hedge fund who takes her to Annabelle's, which is a famous nightclub where the kind of Euro trash, if you like, minor European royalty, people who want to meet them are all hanging out and drinking late into the night. She's just moving into those circles and moves eventually over to Chelsea, much more upmarket than Stoke Newington where she was with Alex. She's organizing a 235-pound ticket white tie Russian-themed Warren Peace Ball at the Dorchester Hotel, which is a fancy.

I've had high tea at the Dorchester, Gordon. Yeah, have you? It was very lovely and I almost had a heart attack when I received the bill at the end. £235 a ticket sounds like you might get some small finger sandwiches and a couple of cups of tea for that Russian themed Warren Peace Ball. These aren't the places normal people hang out apart from you, obviously. Exactly. Do you feel like she's, this is sort of her London dream. Is this what she was after, do you think? Or is she sort of, is she a fish out of water in this remarkably lavish, glittering

scene? I think this is where she wants to be. I think she loves it. She's a natural at it. She's where she wants to be. She's enjoying it. I think the interesting question is whether she's just there because she's enjoying it or whether she's there because she's been told to do it, or directed to do it. But the reality maybe it's a bit of a mix of both. And maybe they're Gordon with Anna yucking it up with Euro trash at the Dorchester and mingling in high society. We'll

take a break. When we come come back we can talk about how this extremely unique woman becomes a spy. This episode is brought to you by our new friends at NordVPN. Now David, what do you find useful about NordVPN? Well I really like NordVPN's Threat Protection Pro, which is an incredibly powerful and effective anti-virus tool. It is integrated directly into the NordVPN app and allows you to browse safely and smoothly while also protecting you from phishing and other cyber threats.

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with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee. The link is also in the episode description box. Well, welcome back. We are talking about Anna Chapman and she has just ensconced herself in the world of London high society, balls, high tea at the Dorchester. And Gordon, I think the question now is, is she a spy or when did she become a spy? Yeah. And I've asked lots of people this and no one actually seems to know the definitive answer. Did she arrive in London, age 19, with the intention simply of marrying someone, getting a passport, becoming a spy, and doing this as part of a grand strategy?

Or did it come later? Did she get into this world and then someone in Moscow, perhaps through her father, go, hmm, she could be useful. Let's recruit her to help us. And the truth is, we don't know for sure. There are some suspicious things though, right? Because she was, she's floating in a lot of different Russian circles in London, but she is also getting close to a man named Boris Berezovsky, right?

Who's, you know well, friend of the podcast. He's not a friend. I wouldn't quite describe as that. So yeah, that is an interesting one. So she's dating a lot of people. At one point, Boris Berezovsky meets her and is introduced to her. And as someone put it, he took quite a fancy to her and he sends his car to pick her up for lunch. Now, who was Boris Berezovsky? He was a very interesting man. When you talk about oligarchs in Russia in the 90s, so these are these people who were kind of powerful figures who are wealthy, owned businesses, but also dabble in politics and have the kind of power behind the throne of people like Yeltsin, who's the leader in the 90s.

Working at an aluminum smelting plant in 1992 and then by 2005, he owns two English Premier League football teams kind of a guy. Yeah, not quite. But yeah, he is that kind of guy. I mean, he's at one point, he's like, you know, he moves into politics. He's a national security council in Russia in the 90s. The interesting thing about him is he is this powerful figure. And in his mind, he effectively picks Putin to be the next leader and picks Putin as a person who he

thinks will protect this system where the oligarchs have the power. But then after Putin takes over in 2000, he suddenly realized Putin's not going to be controllable, and Putin's his own man. Putin turns on the oligarchs and basically says, I don't work for you, you work for me, and you work for the state. Borisovsky is one of those who tries to fight against this and ends up fleeing. He ends up fleeing to London. He comes to London with all his money and wealth and influence and sets up in Mayfair.

I did once, I met him in Mayfair at his office. It was exactly what you'd imagine a Russian Ollycox office in Mayfair to be like. I mean, plush, fancy, lots of people hanging around who didn't quite say who they were or what they would do. Heavies, just heavies kind of hanging around. Yeah, definitely some heavies, definitely some heavies, some other people who were just kind of hangers-on. And it was interesting because I was interviewing him about a book which he'd been involved in, which was accusing Vladimir Putin of having blown up some apartment buildings in Russia a few years earlier. So Berezovsky

sponsored this story as part of his campaign against Putin because the two hated each other intensely and he sat there with a very thick Russian accent and told me about how bad Putin was, and then drove off in his fancy arm plaited Mercedes I think at the end to true oligarch style. When I picture an oligarch's apartment in London, I guess I picture like chandeliers, horribly gaudy furniture, zebra prints, tassels, things like that. It wasn't quite like that. I mean, it was that kind of London anonymously very rich style that you have, which you see in places. He's a very

interesting character because he is, if you like, the center of the anti-Putin opposition in London, and Putin particularly hates him. One of the things, Alexander Litvinenko, we mentioned, who gets poisoned with polonium, has been working for Berezovsky both in the 90s and then in London, and that's possibly one of the reasons he gets killed. Beresofsky himself ultimately dies a somewhat mysterious death in his house and he's discovered hanging in his bathroom behind a locked door. He was strangled with a rope, his own rope, right? Was that the theory? Yeah, and found hanging and I think it's never quite clear, you know, I think there's different views about how suspicious that was or not. With Boris though, there's a theory that Anna is being kind of directed, nudged at Boris

and people like him who are Putin oppositionists. I think that's the point is if you were Russian intelligence and you wanted an agent to keep your eye on someone in London, your top target who you'd want intelligence on and information on would be Boris Berezovsky. So I think that's why the fact that she's kind of hanging out with him feels suspicious to me. I'll say, Gordon, I think her process of becoming an intelligence officer, I see it as kind of a more organic step-by-step process, I see it as kind of a more organic step-by-step process because that's a bit of how the Russians operate. We tend to think of the categories of like,

are you an asset or are you not, or are you an intelligence officer? What type are you? I think in the West, particularly in the States with CIA, we have more rigid categories for these types of people. I think the Russians are pretty fluid with it. And the Russians really they care about is do you produce? They care less about whether are they a formally recruited

asset or are they not? At CIA, we cared a lot about that. And the words mattered for what you called somebody. But I think with the Russians, it's a little bit more like, can she give us interesting things? And they could push her in a variety of kind of largely informal settings up to this point to see if she can produce. And I would imagine that her getting close to Boris Berezovsky is probably something that the Russians would

look at and say, well, maybe she can. So I tend to think it's actually she's got to produce before the relationship progresses. It's not the other way around. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting way of seeing it because rather than thinking she is someone who is trained as a spy and recruited, put through a year or two of training and then sent to do this, she's someone who they go, you've got access, you've got influence, you proved that in London. Let's start using you and training you up as you go to become a spy. It's worth reflecting here about the way Russia spies, which is slightly different as well,

in that one of the things that they do is use these people under what they call illegal cover, which it's kind of odd phrase, but the contrast is they think of someone who's under diplomatic cover. A spy who's working at the embassy, they have legal cover because they've got diplomatic immunity. And if they get arrested, they can't be arrested, they just get expelled. But an illegal is someone who doesn't have, if you like, diplomatic cover, but is blending into a society and who is moving around with it, kind of swimming in the waters, hopefully unseen. And it's a particular type of spy which the Russians specialize in. Well, and she'll be a particular type, won't she? Because when you think of an illegal,

I mean, the show that really captures this dynamic is called The Americans. And the premise is, it's, you know, sort of Reagan era, United States in the 80s, height of the Cold War. And the premise is that there are two Russians who come to the States, they're living under assumed identities, typically gleaned from fabricating kind of a passport based off a real person who may have passed away when they were two or three or something

that could have taken the identity, I think the Russians call it tomb stoning, but living under a false name. And Anna isn't going to do that, although she's got that great last name Chapman, which can kind of mask the fact that she's Russian. She's not hiding who she is, right, at any point. So in some respect, she's a little bit like a CIA officer

who'd be under a commercial cover, who is probably operating with their real name, but hiding the fact that they're working for CIA, right? But she's sort of not your illegal who's taken Argentinian documents and come up with a new identity. Exactly. And I think the Russians were famous, and the Soviets, for using these deep cover illegals who they trained for years, and they train them to actually pose as being another nationality. You take a Russian and you'd make them into being a Canadian or a Briton or an American and insert them with the identity of a real, maybe a Briton or an American who died and have them embed themselves deep in society. The idea was that they could then

do things which a Russian couldn't do. You know, they could move in circles and not be as suspicious. And so that was your classic deep cover illegal. But what I think we're seeing here in the 90s and 2000s is a recognition by Russia that times have changed. And for two reasons, I think one is that it's harder to do that kind of deep cover stuff. One of the reasons is biometrics because you've got kind of passports, you've got databases.

It's harder to kind of create a fake identity and then sustain it when you know whether it's fingerprints or DNA or facial recognition to use different names and different types of cover. But also one of the reasons that they needed to do this in the kind of 20s and 30s and in the Cold War onwards and use these illegals was because Russians couldn't move easily in Western society, where suddenly you've got this period where, as we said, from the 90s to the 2000s, Russians can come into London, they can move around London.

That's not suspicious. There's not a kind of barrier to it. So Anna, I think, is emblematic of this new type of spying that Russia can do, which is no need to do the deep training for some illegal spy, but take someone who's already moving in between the two societies or has got links in London or somewhere and just train them up, use them, make the most of them, because they're there. They've got the ability to kind of meet people and talk to people and move in interesting circles.

There's a great Russian acronym to describe this type of asset. They call them the apparatus of attached employees. And basically, it is you're an intelligence officer, but you're also working at a company. And that company could be Gazprom, or it could be, in Anna's case, your own little property kind of real estate brokerage that you set up. The other sort of term or label that we talked about at the beginning of this show that gets

painted across this whole story, and I think falsely, is honey trap. This idea that she is getting information, getting sensitive information, getting access by seducing people. I mean, and I think, Gordon, it's just not the case at all with the Anna Chapman story. But I think it's important we talk about it a little bit, because you see that a lot in the way that she's discussed after this in the tabloids and in the media, right? Yeah.

And that's partly because, you know, honey traps are kind of feature of the mythology around spies, whether it was go back to kind of Mata Hari in World War I. And then, you know, there is some truth to it in that the KGB, the Soviets definitely in the Cold War did use honey traps. I mean, they used them particularly actually within the Soviet Union. If you were a diplomat, a visiting businessman who went to Moscow, you would find that attractive woman at the bar. You were Pierre, the overweight commercial attache at the embassy, and you spend a wonderful

evening with Katya, and then you wake up and Uncle Sasha is sitting by your bed and all of a sudden your world has turned upside down, right? That would be kind of the classic. That's the classic way it would happen is Uncle Sasha would say, I'm afraid, you know, you're in a little bit of trouble now and we have these pictures of you with Katya last night and you better start spying for us or else you're out. I mean, they did do this quite successfully. They did it successfully. They even use homosexual gay honey traps famously with John Vassal who was a Briton in Moscow.

They used Romeo spies, male honey traps. Astazze were particularly good at doing that in West Germany. So there is a history of it, but actually I think you're right, Anna Chapman doesn't really fit into that. She's the daughter of a KGB SVR officer, of a Russian diplomat. She's a very intelligent young woman. The fact she's attractive is no doubt an aid to her doing her work of moving around society

and getting to know people, which is clearly what she's there for, to gather intelligence and influence. I think it's far too simplistic to kind of portray her somehow as someone who's, that's all she is, or that's what she is. And she, of course, in around maybe 2005 and 2006, I think she starts to set her sights on America, doesn't she? No longer content starts to set her sights on America, doesn't she? No longer content with London grad and her Euro trash parties at the Dorchester. She's tells kind of bizarrely, I think, cause I believe they're already either separated

or divorced at this point, but she tells Alex that she's going back to Russia, doesn't she? And has this weird sort of sojourn in Moscow before then going onward to the States. Yeah, and it is interesting because he remembers that she'd actually always been quite anti-American and she'd made dismissive references to Americans when they were watching Hollywood movies. And then suddenly, she decides she wants to go. So again, back to the kind of when did she become a spy, by this point, she is definitely being directed.

She spends a few months in Moscow, right? Yeah, it's not quite clear how long, but definitely months, maybe even longer. And then she's on a path to the US, which is clearly, if you're Moscow as well, is the kind of big prize. So you could imagine them thinking, she's good at what she does, she's got influence,

she's built up her kind of cover in London effectively. Let's put her onto the big stage, as it were, you know, off to Manhattan. This to me, again, from the outside feels like a moment where in the comfort, the warm embrace of Russia, she's probably getting some practical instruction in how will we communicate? You know, how do you use the type of clandestine communication or covert communication, covecom? How do you use this stuff? What sort of things that she would get the taskings? This is a time when you could do more formal training. To me, it tracks with this idea that they've been kind of operationally testing her in London. And she's probably given them some useful stuff too, but they've been operationally testing her. She's produced

and now they're going to take the next step. And they do sort of arrange a plausible reason for her to go to the States. That's right. Because by the late 2000s, she's setting up a business, she set up her own business, which is selling property in America to rich Russians online. And she's got a business card, which says on it, explore your possibilities. That's what my business card says. I can't believe it. This is where I must have gotten it from her. There's also one of those great videos of her that I found online, which is where she's explaining how she came up with her startup idea. You know, she's got the classic spiel, which is, you know, I saw this gap in the market, I realized there's, you know, no one's doing this for Russians. And I just thought, Hey, I could do it.

And I started my own business. So she's there. She maybe has a bit of support from the Russian government and some money to do that as well. But she started this kind of property tech company, you know, she's in that world. She's living in a really fancy art deco, you know, apartment in Manhattan. She's living it up in New York. She's definitely got support from Moscow Gordon, right? I mean, there's money. She's been given some startup funds to make this work. And again, she's dating interesting people. She dates one former Marine who had worked,

had kind of security clearances at the past. You know, these people who are kind of on the fringes of politics. I think it's a good question though, to think what she was, what her task was. Yeah, what is she actually sending to Moscow? What are they getting in return? Yeah, what's the return? And I think the answer is that with these kind of illegals, it's not classic secrets. They're not working in government or

handling an agent, a source who's got access to Pentagon secrets. It's something else that Russia is after, which is its influence, its gossip, its information. I think it's easy to underestimate how useful that is, but one of the things is understanding who's rich and powerful, if you move in those circles, what their weaknesses and vulnerabilities might be, what the gossip is about them. Gathering that kind of information is useful, isn't it? Absolutely. And what I find fascinating about this is the stark contrast it paints between, I'll take the CIA example, right? The type of intelligence that we were trying to collect on,

I worked on the Middle East, on Syria, let's say, versus the kind of things that the Russians are interested in when they're looking at the states. And I'm continually amazed at how narrow our view of intelligence is. I mean, we had pretty rigorous, what we called intelligence requirements that dictated what collectors, what case officers would try to go out and get, the types of assets they would recruit, and the type of information that was considered to be valuable or sometimes even secret. And a lot of it would have to do with sort of plans and intentions of the Assad family, or certainly today the plans and intentions of Vladimir Putin and the Russian regime. Russia, because I think they see the security services as a critical tool, perhaps their most useful tool,

to sort of shape other societies or to bend them or try to manipulate them for Russia's interest, they're really interested in trying to map the kind of social environment, the kind of the full ecosystem of the United States, right? They want to see where are the cracks and fissures, who hates who, who would be open to taking money from us even unwittingly to do things that might be in our interest. And that is where a spy like Anna, I think, is very valuable, because she could get a sense in New York of kind of who's up and who's down and who's who. And so it's the ability to understand society, therefore maybe influence it, and perhaps work out who Russian

intelligence might be able to target to recruit or to influence. So it's a pretty valuable set of things, which you only get by being somehow embedded in that society, don't you? By kind of living in it. I think the difference fundamentally between us and the way the Russians approach this is we're trying to understand or to sort of gather secrets to help us understand decision makers in a particular society. The Russians are gathering information to try to shape and undermine that society. And that's the difference, right? That's the kind of conceptual difference in why we do not have illegals.

We don't have those programs and the Russians do. Yeah. The difference is we're after secrets and they're after secrets, but also influence. Amy Gordon there with Anna ensconced in her Manhattan apartment and living her party lifestyle, building her Rolodex of Contacts. We should end it because when we come back next week, we'll see that one of the largest FBI counterintelligence investigations ever is very much on her tail. She is being watched and monitored as she moves around New York and this whole thing is about to come crashing down. So maybe we leave it there, we come back, we'll see what happens to Anna Chapman when the net closes.

See you next time!