A female Russian spy -- possibly flame-haired media darling Anna Chapman -- was close to seducing a member of U.S. President Barack Obama's cabinet in 2010, the assistant director of the FBI for counterintelligence revealed in a recent interview with British television.
Frank Figliuzzi said the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been tracking a 10-person Russian spy ring for years but had to act sooner than planned because the female agent was getting close to drawing a U.S. official into a "honey trap."
The individual "got closer and closer to higher and higher ranking leadership. She got close enough to disturb us," Figliuzzi said in a segment that aired Monday of "Modern Spies," a documentary series on the BBC Two channel in Britain.
Chapman was arrested along with nine other suspected spies in June 2010, and although Figliuzzi didn't identify the U.S. official or the Russian operative in question, the BBC assumed he was talking about Chapman, who has drawn sporadic media attention in the United States and Russia since the arrests.
But another suspect from the same ring could, theoretically, have had access to U.S. officials. Among a group that authorities considered mostly harmless, Chapman and Cynthia Murphy (a Russian national whose real name is Lidiya Guryeva, according to prosecutors), of Montclair, N.J., were said to have used social connections as well as flirtation in their purported spying, and one came closer than her colleagues to extracting sensitive information.
"We were becoming very concerned," Figliuzzi said. "They were getting close enough to a sitting U.S. cabinet member that we thought we could no longer allow this to continue."
These details aren't included in the criminal complaint federal prosecutors in New York filed with a judge nearly two years ago. That document does say Chapman passed intelligence to Russian agents in Manhattan and that the other people implicated in the spy ring collected "tidbits" of information then "unknown publicly" from contacts and "people who have access to important venues" such as the White House.
Since the arrests, Chapman's supposed seductive powers have been the stuff of media reports. Prominent New York businessmen recalled cocktail parties at which they met the Moscow native and soon found themselves "completely incapable of thinking" and "knocked out."
"I think part of her value was indeed her ability to be engaging, charismatic and I think to that extent she might have been viewed by [Russia's intelligence services] as a potential honey trap," the FBI official said.
There are 23 people in Obama's cabinet, only one of whom wasn't married at the time of the June 2010 spy arrests, although politicians with spouses can't be excluded from the list of possible marks.
Figliuzzi's statement was gender-neutral, a fact that the Ace of Spades HQ blog took to mean that a female cabinet member could have been a target of the Russian spy ring.
At the time of the FBI bust, there were reports linking Murphy to venture capitalist Alan Patricof, a friend and supporter of Bill and Hillary Clinton. After meeting them in the Hamptons, a tony seaside location frequented by Manhattan's wealthy, Patricof became a donor to Hillary Clinton's U.S. Senate and presidential campaigns, in effect providing the weblike connections needed for conspiracy theorists to tie either Chapman or Murphy to Obama's secretary of state.
Although no name is cited in the criminal complaint, a meeting between Murphy and "a personal friend of a current Cabinet official" is referenced. Patricof has denied he discussed "anything but paying the bills" with Murphy, telling the Washington Post in June 2010 that "she never once asked me about government, politics or anything remotely close to that subject."
Chapman, now 29 but still using her surname from a brief marriage to a Briton, was deported to Russia after pleading guilty to conspiracy charges. She's now a minor celebrity in her native country, having hosted a weekly TV program about paranormal events, "Secrets of the World," posed for magazine lingerie shoots and given speeches at rallies for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
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Anna Chapman: Russian Spy Close Enough To Obama Cabinet Official To 'Disturb Us' Says FBI
Source:IBTimes
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