Code name “90-60-90”. Nickname “the new Mata Hari”. Name Anna Chapman, born Anna Kushchenko in 1982. It is an incredible story, worthy of the series The Americans (2013-2018), that Brut offers in this two-part documentary. A Cold War-style spy case between Russia and the United States, which takes on particular resonance in these times of war in Ukraine.
“Midinette or high-flying Russian spy?” “, wondered Stéphanie Duncan, on France Culture, in July 2020, recounting, ten years later, the almost romantic career of this daughter of a KGB executive.
In 2010, Washington and Moscow were trying to bring about diplomatic warming. Anna Chapman is quietly arrested in New York as Dmitry Medvedev, President of the Russian Federation, completes an official trip to Washington, hosted by Barack Obama. American counterintelligence should not thwart this historic moment, the police suggest to the one who runs a real estate agency of fifty people that she could be a victim of police – in reality, officers of the FBI.
Sensitive information
Divorced from a wealthy British businessman, Alex Chapman, whose name she will keep, this native of Volgograd had been sent to the United States with nine other “phantom spies” (who take the names of deceased Americans). As she climbed the social ladder, the young woman had infiltrated circles of power in order to collect sensitive information. Brut’s documentary slips in an anecdote: she even managed to get a priest’s phone number!
Returned to her country on July 8, 2010, along with the nine other “illegals” found by the FBI, as part of a prisoner exchange between Russia and the United States – the largest since the end of the Cold War, carried out at Vienna airport – Anna Kushchenko-Chapman becomes a model and appears in propaganda videos for the Russian army, some in favor of the invasion of Donbass and the annexation of Crimea, which will take place in 2014 .
Vladimir Putin would have found in Anna Chapman his “equivalent in petticoats”, says the voiceover of the report by Hugo Baiardi. The short documentary shows the master of the Kremlin, smiling broadly and arms outstretched, as a hero welcoming the ten “phantom spies” back to Moscow. As for the reasons for their arrest in the United States, it “could not have taken place without the help of a mole”, affirms Andrei Kozovoi, professor of Russian history at the University of Lille. According to the Russian daily Kommersant, it would be a certain Colonel Scherbakov, an official of the foreign intelligence service, the SVR. His fate in Moscow is unknown. “Traitors always end badly,” Vladimir Putin, himself a former KGB agent, had just warned.