by Edward Lucas
It lists his interests in ‘non-profits, think tanks, public policy, advocacy and educational institutions’ and his specialities as: ‘International Relations, Foreign Policy Analysis; Program and Project Management; Policy Research and Writing; Senior Executive Council Coordination; Marketing and Sales Management; Membership Recruitment Initiatives; Client and Public Relations.’ Like Heathfield, Semenko constructed a suitable web presence, marketing his expertise with an enjoyable and interesting blog on the Chinese economy. In mid 2011 it was still available at chinaeconomytoday.wordpress.com. It describes him as ‘an expert in Chinese economic policy’ with fluent Mandarin and ‘Rusian’ [sic], available for translation and consulting. The last blog entry, on 24 June 2010 (just before the spy scandal broke) was a thoughtful piece about the undervaluation of the Chinese currency. Two days earlier, an interesting posting dealt with Chinese business manners; before that came a witty piece about the mangled ‘Chinglish’ of confident but inexpert Chinese English-speakers. Semenko matched Heathfield in audacity, but lagged behind him in other respects. Whereas Heathfield, two decades his senior, hobnobbed with the big beasts of American business and government, Semenko moved in a lower orbit, impressing people with his youthful eagerness rather than his expertise. But even in the wonkish world of Washington, people who speak both Russian and Mandarin fluently are thin on the ground. Semenko’s mission, according to a decrypted message from his bosses in Moscow, was to ‘search and develop ties in policymaking circles’.2 That would have presumably meant gaining a job in a think tank and then perhaps in government, where he could have worked as a passive or even an active asset. At some point he, like many other foreigners working in America, would have swapped his H1B visa (issued to highly qualified foreign workers) for a Green Card and then American citizenship. That creates an important line of defence for a spymaster. A detailed background check would have exposed Heathfield as a fraud. He had stolen a dead baby’s birth certificate. But a similar check on Semenko, whether or not he eventually became a US citizen, would have produced nothing incriminating. His account of himself was not untrue. It was just not the whole truth.
Semenko was recruited at university and trained during gaps in his academic career. Had he grown up in a country where co-workers and fellow-students could be quizzed, and foreign travel records scrutinised, he would have been left dangerously open to discovery. A Finnish, Indian or Brazilian student would find it hard to explain or conceal frequent trips to Russia. But it is all but impossible to check out the credentials of someone like Semenko, who divided his time between his native Russia and China. If such a Russian says he spent a summer at a relative’s dacha when in fact he was at spy school, how will the bureaucrat ticking the boxes on his American security clearance spot it? Had Semenko become an American citizen, discriminating against him on grounds of origin would have been offensive and possibly illegal. Only a Western penetration agent inside Russia’s own security and intelligence apparatus would have been able to uncover him. As we will see, that seems to have been the case – on this occasion.
But even Semenko’s entry-level spying activities are worth analysing. Among the think tanks he targeted was the American Foreign Policy Council.3 This is a small, hawkish outfit, which has a long (and in my view admirable) record of contradicting the consensus among Washington-based Russia-watchers. One of its Russia experts until recently was J. Michael Waller, a proponent of the theory that the former KGB retained influence in Russia after the Soviet collapse, and returned to power with Mr Putin in 1999.4 Another is Ilan Berman, an expert on Russian links with Iran and the Muslim world, and a consultant to both the CIA and the Pentagon. Keeping an eye on those in America who truly understand Russia may be more valuable than more overt Kremlin activities (discussed in previous chapters) such as peddling propaganda that all is well, and soft-soaping those who believe it.
On 26 June an undercover FBI agent made contact with Semenko, pretending to be a Russian intelligence officer. The exchange (initially in Russian) went: ‘Could we have met in Beijing in 2004’ to which Semenko replied: ‘Yes we might have but I believe it was in Harbin’. This was no casual chat: the FBI agent was using a codeword to establish his credentials. Semenko’s response showed that he had accepted the American’s bona fides. The FBI agent then asserted that the most recent data swap on 5 June between Semenko’s laptop and that of a Russian official had failed. He admonished Semenko to take more care of the ‘sensitive’ equipment. Semenko then accepted a package containing $5,000, which the FBI agent told him to take to a dead drop at a park in Arlington the next day. He did so and was arrested shortly afterwards.
A far snazzier version of Semenko was, of course, Ms Chapman.ah Her career took her via an unwitting English husband, Alexander, to the glitziest nightclubs in London and New York, and a social life that has attracted prurient attention5 from the tabloid newspapers, not least when he sold topless pictures taken during their marriage. But the revelation that a young Russian woman has not only breasts but a sex life is news only by the standards of the popular press. Her cover story was utterly convincing: a young Russian who marries a British man, working first in banking, then in an executive jet company, and then in real estate. These are all jobs that can be useful for an intelligence service. But nothing about her personal or professional life distinguished her from hundreds of thousands of other young women from the ex-communist world who head abroad in search of fame, fortune, marriage and travel.
Later on I plot her meteoric career on her return to Russia. A convenient first point of analysis of her career before that is her entry on LinkedIn.6 Like those of her colleagues it is an artful mixture of truth, exaggeration and outright falsehood. She was born in Russia and speaks English fluently, with a mild accent that disguises her indifferent grammar.7 She also claims conversational German and basic French. After that, it gets more complicated. Illegals commonly set up an identity in one country and then use it as a springboard for a more effective and espionage-focused life in another one. Ms Chapman built up an English CV and gained a real passport by marrying a British citizen, before moving on. It is unclear who paid for her jet-setting lifestyle: certainly not her work as a personal assistant or as a humble banking adviser. Southern Union, a company with which she was associated, may have provided some. She says she received a grant from a Russian government fund that supports start-ups. This may have been a disguised payment from Russian intelligence.
She returned to Moscow in 2006 to try to set up a Western-style real-estate company called domdot.ru. She describes it as a ‘search engine in real estate for [sic] Russian speaking audience’ and her own role as ‘running all aspects of business, setting strategy for development, international expansion, people management, investors reporting.’ Business contacts who had email dealings with her say she made an unremarkable but professional impression.8 But it seems to have got nowhere. She then moved to New York, where it is unclear if her business idea, a property search engine called NYCRentals.com, was part of a cover story or a real business. The business plan on its website was written in careless, Russian-inflected English that would have inspired little confidence among potential investors:
By specialising on narrow region it will allow for a system to gather not only information about letting but also create rich with information database with building, city infrastructure, other useful and relevant for choosing real estate to live area specifics.9
A video interview she gave about it for an entrepreneurship event in New York was notably light on content and heavy on flirting with the camera.10 Plans were not far advanced: she bought the NYCRentals.com website only on 22 June 2010, for $25,350.11 Her private life, however, was another matter. Former friends in New York describe her as a hard-partying and insatiable networker. Among her conquests was a multi-millionaire businessman from New Jersey, more than twice her age. The New York Post called her a
flame-haired 007-worthy beauty who flitted from high-profile parties t
o top secret meetings around Manhattan [with] a fancy Financial District apartment and a Victoria’s Secret body.12
She seems to have come on to the spycatchers’ radar quite late in the story. The FBI says that on ‘approximately ten Wednesdays’ in the first half of 2010, Ms Chapman used a laptop to exchange clandestine messages with a Russian government official.ai On one occasion the official drove a minivan past the coffee shop, long enough for Ms Chapman to send a burst transmission from her laptop to a computer in his car. On another, she was inside a bookshop while the official was passing near by. On a third occasion, the official appears to have noticed that he was under surveillance and aborted the mission. The same official had already been spotted carrying out a brush-pass with one of the other illegals in 2004: it is likely that he led the FBI to Ms Chapman, not vice versa.
In the curious sting operation that followed, an FBI undercover agent posing as an intelligence officer based at the Russian consolate made contact with Ms Chapman, saying that he urgently needed to meet her. As with Semenko, he used a series of passphrases to establish his credentials, claiming to be called ‘Ilya Fabrichnikov’ – a code name that she had previously been given from her controllers in Moscow. She was willing to discuss the technical problems she was having with her computer and hand it over to be repaired; she also agreed to a second meeting at which she would be given a passport in a false name which she was to pass on to another female illegal. On 26 June, a Saturday, the FBI man called Ms Chapman again, saying that he needed to meet with her that day. She phoned back and asked if the meeting could be postponed until the next morning but then changed her mind and agreed to meet that afternoon. She seems to have made little attempt to check his bona fides, and discussed both her technical problems and her Wednesday electronic hook-ups. Mr ‘Fabrichnikov’ (evidently a native Russian-speaker, although the pair spoke English later in the conversation) then asked her if she would be willing to pass on the document, saying: ‘There is a person here who is just like you . . . but unlike you she is not here under her real name . . . we have to give her new documents . . . are you ready for this next step?’ Ms Chapman replied: ‘Shit, of course.’ She received the false passport, a description of its intended recipient and instructions about how to recognise her. Ms Chapman was to ask: ‘Excuse me, but haven’t we met in California last summer?’ The other party would reply: ‘No, I think it was the Hamptons.’ Ms Chapman handed over her faulty computer.13
This was all oddly hurried behaviour by the FBI. It strongly suggests that the American officials had to force the pace, probably because their source in Moscow had bolted, and would soon be missed. Ms Chapman belatedly had second thoughts about the meeting. She hurried to a pharmacy and then to a mobile phone shop where she bought a cell-phone and two international calling cards. She took only limited anti-surveillance measures, not the through ones that would be expected from a well-trained intelligence officer who realises that the hunt is on. She phoned her father in Moscow, to be told that a senior SVR officer dealing with the illegals had disappeared. That was oddly sloppy tradecraft. So was giving palpably fake identity details on the customer agreement, where she described herself as ‘Irine Kutsov’ of ‘99 Fake St’. A cardinal principle of undercover work is to tell no unnecessary falsehoods and shun any indulgence in humour. A simple ‘Jane Smith’ and an unremarkable but illegible scribble for the address would have been more consistent with the professionalism normally expected of one of the oldest and savviest spy services in the world. Evidently alarmed, the next day she went to a police station in Manhattan and handed in the passport – apparently claiming that she had been given it in error. When FBI officials arrived they arrested her.
But whom had they caught? Anna Vasilyevna Kushchenko was born on ‘Defender of the Fatherland Day’, 23 February 1982. Her grandfather was a Cossack, her father in the KGB and her favourite children’s story was a bombastic Soviet fable called ‘The Tale of the Military Secret’.14 She enjoyed acting it out, making her grandmother play the role of the hateful ‘bourgeois’, who tortures a little boy to make him confess the ‘hidden secret’ of the Red Army (which is, of course, the inspirational power of communism). By the time she was ten that world had collapsed, and with it the prison-like constraints it imposed on its inmates. Ms Chapman’s generation had the world in front of them. One childhood friend, Elena Slesarenko, went on to win an Olympic gold medal in 2004. Another classmate is said to have ended up in Japan as a successful model. Ms Chapman’s interests turned abroad too. At the age of sixteen, as the film Titanic came out in Russia, she penned a drawing of its star Leonardo DiCaprio so popular with her classmates that she and her sister earned pocket money selling photocopies.
When Ms Chapman was thirteen her father Vasily was posted back to Africa, while she stayed behind in Volgograd with her grandparents. Her grandfather was ill and the young teenager learned a toughness and self-reliance that would later stand her in good stead. In a chaotic and poverty-stricken country, she yearned for the comfort and glamour of life in the West. A song that epitomises those years – enough for Mr Medvedev to be caught on video clumsily dancing to it over two decades later – is the 1990 ‘American Boy’ by the girl-band Kombinatsiya.15 When Ms Chapman told a school friend, Valeriya Apanasenko, ‘I’ll find myself a husband in England, I’ll go there and live there,’ she was at least unconsciously reflecting its stilted and saccharine English lyrics, which bemoan the lot of a ‘simple Russian girl’, who has never been abroad and is waiting for her ‘foreign prince’ to whisk her away to a world of luxury.
Her first stop was Ramneki, a smart Moscow suburb, where she lived before a stint with her family in Zimbabwe. She was not a star pupil: her mother Irina, a former teacher, describes her as having ‘solid Bs’. None the less, perhaps thanks to her father’s professional connections, she was able to study at the University of People’s Friendship in Moscow, a shabby but trendy establishment known since Soviet days for its lively social scene and large numbers of students from developing countries. But this was just a staging post. Aged 19, she met the 21-year-old Alex Chapman at a rave in London’s Docklands in the summer of 2001. The English boy came to Moscow while she finished her studies. In March 2002 they married in a civil ceremony. Ms Chapman told a friend that she had married her husband in order to obtain a British passport (it was later cancelled by the authorities). That is in itself not a sign of an intelligence connection: Ms Chapman would not be the first Russian woman to marry a gullible foreigner in the hope of acquiring his nationality and name. The couple lived in the unglamorous inner-London district of Stoke Newington.16 According to her own account of her life, Ms Chapman worked at a hedge fund, Navigator Asset Management. People recall that she partied hard, often in the company of rich nightclubbers. Her boss, Nicholas Camilleri, described her later as a ‘green, wet behind the ears’ type of girl.17 She then moved briefly to a junior job at NetJets, a company that provides executive jet services to wealthy customers. Ms Chapman claims that she was:
• Primarily involved in selling private jets to companies and individuals in Russia
• Conducting research on East European markets, keeping updated on territory social events and business news, participated and helped organise NetJets European marketing events
• High-end client interaction, targeting Senior Executives and key decision makers within multi-national global organisations and wealthy individuals
• Cold-calling prospects based on research obtained from industry sources
• Developing proposals and formulating documentation in line with client requirements
• Working to timescales as set by the client, with a sales cycle of between one week and one year, depending on the complexity of sale
• Post-sales relations to ensure smooth running of processes, involving customer service problem-solving
For a three-month stint in a junior position, some might think that was on the effusive side. If Ms Chapman was even on the books
of the SVR at this point, her main role was probably acquiring cover, with a view to some serious spying later on. But the people who use executive jets are often of interest to intelligence services; bugging their conversations, for example, would require placing and removing a recording device on an aircraft. It might also be useful simply to know who was travelling with whom, and where. The same applies to her next job, as an adviser in the small business division of a branch of Barclays Bank in Ealing, west London. Ms Chapman’s LinkedIn profile refers caustically to her post as ‘slave’ – and also places it in the more glamorous-sounding investment banking division of Barclays Capital.
But slaves can be good spies. Understanding how the rules work inside an organisation helps those wanting to bend or break them. Even a junior bank employee may be able, for example, to make credit checks. That would be handy for the SVR’s N-line department (which establishes identities for illegals). It needs to see if its work is accumulating the right degree of solidity. It could also help evade or manipulate ‘know your customer’ requirements: useful for anyone needing to establish a bank account in a hurry. A lowly employee may also have access to customers’ account details, meaning that such a person could see if potential targets for recruitment had money worries. (If Barclays has kept logs of Ms Chapman’s activities, spycatchers may find them rewarding subjects of enquiry.) A glaring instance of resume padding came in a Russian television interview where Ms Chapman claimed to have worked for the billionaire Warren Buffett (who indeed owns Netjets but was hardly her boss).18 In fact, her experience of the overlap between spycraft and finance was of a different, less prestigious and more troubling kind.