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 pupiclass="underline" 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.
Despite her unremarkable professional career, Ms Chapman was fast ascending the London social ladder. Her marriage came under increasing strain and the couple parted in 2005. Mr Chapman says that following the split his ex-wife slept with a series of wealthy older men. Another Russian woman, Lena Savitskaya, who claims to have shared a flat with Ms Chapman for two years, says that her friend moved in the same circles as, among others, the fugitive Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky. A picture from those days shows the young women partying with two junior members of the European aristocracy: the heir to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and a minor member of the former Russian imperial house of Romanov.19 She also hung out in London nightclubs patronised by members of the British royal family, befriended the managers and seemed to show eagerness to get to know their best-known clients personally, leading some British tabloids to wonder if her real mission had been to bed a prince. That seems unlikely: intimate friends of the royal family are subject to intense if discreet background checks to exclude any security risk. Any such scrutiny would have exposed not only Ms Chapman’s family connections with Russian officialdom but also some curious business activities that she was already involved with at this time.
Her presumed acquaintance with Mr Berezovsky is a more plausible sign of real intelligence activity. In the eyes of the Russian authorities, the tycoon is the epitome of the influence-peddling and sleaze that characterised the presidency of Boris Yeltsin. Mr Berezovsky was a friend of the former Russian president’s daughter, and at one point had an office in the anteroom of the then-prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin. Mr Berezovsky was closely associated with Mr Putin in the early years of his rule, brokering deals and easing the transition between the old and new regimes. Some even wondered if the tongue-tied ex-spook from St Petersburg, who initially seemed so ill at ease in the limelight, would end up the puppet of the wily master manipulator. Mr Berezovsky lost out, fleeing the country in 2001.[36] He maintains a caustic commentary on the corruption and incompetence of the Putin regime, and conducts bewildering political and business manoeuvres in the countries of the former Soviet Union. In June 2007 British police arrested and deported a contract killer only minutes away from Mr Berezovsky’s office. ‘I was informed by Scotland Yard that my life was in danger and they recommended that I leave the country,’ the tycoon told a journalist at the time.20 Friendship with Mr Berezovsky would provide insights into his movements, routines and security procedures – just the sort of information that an assassin would need. Mr Berezovsky declined to comment. But the most startling aspect of Ms Chapman’s life in London has nothing to do with her glitzy friends; the clues to it lie in the dry documents of London’s Companies House.
36
aj He gained political asylum in Britain in 2003, taking up a promise made when he brokered the release of two British hostages in Chechnya in 1998.