British DJ was married to one of the world’s most notorious Russian spies without knowing
Imagine meeting a woman who you thought could be the love of your life, getting married and then one day waking up to the news that she was actually a spy.
Well, that's exactly what happened to British DJ Alex Chapman one fateful morning in 2010 when his former partner Anna was arrested in New York as part of an FBI investigation into a network of Russian agents operating in the United States.
He had met the glamorous spy shortly after she arrived in the UK in 2001, and they were married between 2002 and 2006, which was enough to earn her British citizenship.
Following their divorce, she moved to Manhattan to build a new life for herself and posed as a realtor, but it later turned out that she had been spying for Russia all along.
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A Channel 4 documentary from earlier this year shed a light on the extraordinary story, with Alex opening up via a PR consultant on what it was like to find out that four years of his life had been a lie.
The PR revealed: "Obviously it's been total shock. She was becoming more and more secretive, she was going to various events where there were lots of rich and powerful people, on her own.
"Now this has all come out, obviously he's starting to think 'maybe this is what was going on'."
MI5, the British intelligence service, were pretty keen to speak with anyone in Britain who might have been connected with Anna once the news broke, and this obviously included Alex.
He would later die in 2016 at the age of just 36, which is why he didn't feature in Channel 4's documentary: Spy Next Door: The Anna Chapman Story.
Meanwhile, the FBI has also spoken out on the operation which saw Anna and nine other spies arrested back in 2010.
“The Russian government spent significant funds and many years training and deploying these operatives,” said one of the FBI's counterintelligence agents who worked on the case. “No government does that without expecting a return on its investment.”
Although they didn’t achieve that objective, the agent said: “Without us there to stop them, given enough time they would have eventually become successful.
“Operation Ghost Stories sends a message to foreign intelligence services that espionage threats to the U.S. will not be tolerated. The FBI’s counterintelligence mission is to identify, disrupt, and defeat the activities of foreign espionage agents, and we take that job very seriously.
“And the threat is not limited to the Russians,” the agent added. “There are a lot of foreign services who want what we have, and that’s why we have agents and analysts in FBI field offices across the country working with other intelligence community partners every day to address these threats.”
In the end, the spies were allowed to return to Russia as part of a high profile spy swap, with Chapman having her British citizenship revoked. Although we're not sure on the extent of her work here in the UK, it's said that her work was praised by Vladimir Putin himself.
Topics: Russia
James Moorhouse
