My name is Samantha Procter, i am an assistant to Mr Sugden; It is my understanding that you are trying to contact mr Sugden in order to discuss matters related to the book you are currently working on; Mr Sugden is currently away from the office. Please may you forward all relative information to me, which i will bring to the attention of Mr Sugden upon his return;
Repeated requests for clear answers to my questions brought belated and inconclusive replies and then a threat of legal action.
An innocent explanation for this could go as follows. By an unlikely coincidence, two people, both called Steven P. Sugden, share the same date and year of birth and remarkably similar signatures. One of them is from Tunbridge Wells, the other genuinely from Zimbabwe. The latter, who just happens to speak Russian, becomes a director of a London-based company established through questionable means by a relative of his boss. He initially uses the address of a one-bedroom flat rented by his friends the Chapmans, protégés of his boss, and thereafter gives a forwarding address in Dublin. He does so carelessly, misspelling the suburb and even getting the house number wrong until he later corrects it. For prankish reasons he establishes some phoney credentials on the internet purporting to show that he was at school in Dublin. When outsiders start asking questions, he takes fright and clumsily covers his tracks.
Another more sinister version could be that Ms Chapman, in cahoots with her father, was involved in a front company in London that moves money around either on SVR business or as part of some private scheme involving Russian officials and their foreign funds. One director is an employee of her father’s friend, a Russian masquerading as a Zimbabwean who has bolstered his flimsy invented identity with genuine personal data from a real person of the same name in the UK. He has created phoney internet clues to add authenticity. When Ms Chapman moves on, so does Mr ‘Sugden’, giving a misspelled – and misnumbered – Dublin address. My enquiries arouse first alarm and then attempts to escape scrutiny. Without answers from the Zimbabwean Mr Sugden it is hard to rule out either version.
Precisely what bits of Russia’s foreign espionage effort may have been involved, or for that matter how much of Zimbabwe’s natural wealth was plundered, can only be a matter of speculation. The operation seems a bit sloppy by the traditionally high standards of Soviet and Russian tradecraft. Why use a living person’s identity? Why give two successive next-door addresses (in each case misspelled) in Dublin (another address for a Southern Union company, in Northampton, was also misspelled).28 Britain’s Security Service started an investigation but soon dropped it. It hunts spies, not criminals. Although its officials punctiliously refuse to discuss operational matters, on or off the record, I infer that it believes Mr ‘Sugden’ to have used a rather sloppy mixture of SVR techniques for commercial, not espionage purposes. If so, that exemplifies the blurred boundaries between Russian officialdom and wider business interests.
What is clear, however, is the damage done to entirely innocent bystanders. Steven Sugden’s name is still listed at Companies House as a director of three defunct companies (Southern Union, Intercon Trading and Africa Connection). The real, Kentish Steven Sugden is not directly out of pocket, though investigating the issue has cost him and his family considerable time and worry. Anyone doing a credit check on him might note, for example, that the companies had on occasion been less than punctilious in submitting their annual reports and accounts; an outstanding loan of £12,000 might also affect his creditworthiness in some eyes. Companies House is unwilling to delete him from their records; the police are unwilling to accept that a crime was committed; Britain’s Security Service (MI5) has asked him to cease his own investigations into the matter in order not to jeopardise its own, which has fizzled out. The blameless Mr Farrell, and the Crowe family that own 12 Rossmore Grove, have had the addresses of their properties used in a way that is certainly fraudulent and looks sinister. In short, law-abiding people can have their identity and address stolen by the Russian secret service or (at a minimum) its officers’ family cronies, and used for clandestine, or even nefarious, purposes, and when this is uncovered, nobody will do anything to help. I return to this subject in the conclusion. None of these awkward questions has clouded Ms Chapman’s return to Russia.
For a profession that prides itself on obscurity, publicity is a sign of shameful failure. Most spies retire quietly to the shadows after they are exposed. Not so Ms Chapman. Her metamorphosis from a provincial teenager to life as a go-getting émigré, then as a failed spy and finally to being her country’s leading political sex symbol says only a little about her, but a lot about Russia’s attitude to spies, the West, women and its own rulers. The spy scandal in which Ms Chapman featured came at a bad time for Russia’s rulers. The country had suffered the harshest recession in the G-20 in the previous year, and in the summer of 2010 an outbreak of wildfires had shamed the authorities. A thick, stinking smog enveloped Moscow, making one side of Red Square invisible from the other. Blame fell on the poorly privatised state forestry services, which had all but abolished the vital function of fire prevention. Contempt for the regime was growing elsewhere too. Promises of modernisation had proved empty. Trust in the security services and the police had plunged since Mr Putin took power.
The spy scandal thus cast an unwelcome light on two of the regime’s weakest points: corruption and incompetence. The illegals appeared to be an expensive throwback to old Soviet tactics. They had – at least according to the published version of events – failed to gain any secrets and had been under American observation from the start of their mission. Despite the failure of their mission, some of them deserved praise for their personal talents and dedication: Heathfield’s brains, Semenko’s language skills, or even Lazaro’s decades of service all stand out; among the women, the professional career of ‘Cynthia Murphy’, a financial adviser to rich Americans, was a solid achievement. Yet from the beginning it was the most junior and incompetent of the spies who became the celebrity.[39] She has posed semi-naked for glossy magazines; she hosts Mysteries, a lightweight television programme; she has an iPhone app allowing people to play poker with her electronic avatar and has even registered her surname (in fact her ex-husband’s) as a trademark. Chapman-branded products from cosmetics to consumables are on sale or in development. In an article headlined ‘Anna Inc’,29 Newsweek magazine even termed her ‘Russia’s hottest cultural icon’. As well as her showbiz, media and marketing efforts, Ms Chapman has a job at a financial entity called FondServiceBank. This is mainly notable for its close links with the defence industry and for its initials FSB. Grigory Belkin, a spokesman, says it jumped at the chance to have her. ‘It’s very prestigious for any bank to have an employee with a specific background… linked with doing helpful things for the state.’
39
am Her website (annachapman.ru) gives details of her exploits. Curiously, it was registered in April 2010, before the spy scandal broke.