There can be little doubt now that she was in fact a spy, albiet not a very good one.
Did anyone see U.S. VP Biden's take on the exchange on American TV?
Spy's anxious call to her KGB father hastened network's downfall
WALTER PINCUS
July 13, 2010
WASHINGTON: An anxious phone call last month from the Russian spy Anna Chapman to her father, a KGB veteran working in Moscow's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, led the Obama administration to hasten the arrests of Chapman and nine other Russian agents in the United States, US law enforcement and intelligence sources say.
In the call to Moscow, monitored by US security officials, Chapman voiced suspicions that she might have been discovered. Planning had started last month to arrest four couples who had been under FBI surveillance for years, in addition to Chapman, 28, and another Russian operator, Mikhail Semenov, who had been in the US for only a few months.
Part of the plan involved getting Chapman and Semenov to undertake acts, at the suggestion of FBI informants, that would enable them to be indicted for more than just carrying out secret communications with Russian officials. Chapman's call to Moscow, after a troubling meeting with an FBI informant, came on the eve of a scheduled trip by one of the other Russians, Richard Murphy.
He was to leave for Moscow the next day to consult with his superiors at Moscow Centre, headquarters of the SVR, Russia's foreign intelligence agency.
The FBI knew Murphy's plans would take him first to France and then to Russia because the agency had followed him on a similar trip to Moscow in March.
But his FBI monitors feared the SVR, alerted by Chapman's call, might not allow him to return.
They also worried the SVR could alert the other ''illegals'' - the term used for deep-cover agents who do not have diplomatic cover - in the US to flee the country or seek shelter in Russian missions.
In a television interview on Sunday the US Attorney-General, Eric Holder, did not mention the Chapman call. Instead, he said, ''there were operational concerns that if we did not act at that point, the possibility existed that we would not be able to break up the ring in the totality in the way that we have now''.
The FBI informant aroused Chapman's concerns for several reasons. In his initial phone call on June 26, he asked her to come to New York from Connecticut, where she was spending the weekend.
Her meetings up to then had been on Wednesdays and were not face-to-face. The agents had been instructed to pass information solely via encrypted private computer networks.
The FBI informant identified himself in the call as a Russian she knew as a superior, but when she met him, he turned out not to be that person, according to someone familiar with her case.
Her concerns deepened when ''Roman'', the name the informant used, asked her to take on a task that went beyond what she expected from her bosses at Moscow Centre - a face-to-face transfer of a fake passport to another Russian ''illegal''.
After the meeting, Chapman bought a new mobile. She made two calls, one to her father in Moscow and another to a friend in New York. Both advised her not to go through with the transfer.
Her father told her to take the fake passport to New York police.
About 1pm on June 27 Chapman went to the 1st Precinct in Lower Manhattan, turned in the passport and told the police what had occurred. The police called the FBI. When FBI officials arrived a few hours later they asked her a few questions and then arrested her.
The Washington Post
Link here:
http://www.smh.com.au/world/spys ... 20100712-10807.html
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Last edited by atomic3d at 13-7-2010 05:45 ]
