Sunday, July 04, 2010

Heartbreak: America's Newest Sweetheart Fears Deportation

In the spirit of openness and forgiveness, I'll volunteer to host our guest if it's decided she's allowed to stay here in America. I promise to keep an eye on her at all times.
The Russian diplomat's daughter accused of being a spy is "embarrassed" by photos of her that have turned up in media reports and fears she will be deported, her lawyer said.

Attorney Robert Baum told The Associated Press that he showed Anna Chapman, 28, some of the tabloid newspaper stories that have branded the redhead as a femme fatale and feature photographs from her Facebook page, showing the smiling Russian enjoying Manhattan's nightlife scene, posing in front of the Statue of Liberty and mixing with businessmen at a conference.

"She was embarrassed by some of the photos that were obviously taken from her Facebook pages," the lawyer said. "The truth is she probably no different than your typical single 28-year-old woman in New York City. She runs a successful business, goes out at night. She dates men, enjoys a social life."

Chapman is charged with conspiring to act as an unregistered agent of a foreign government, which carries a potential penalty of five years in prison. She was the first of 10 spy suspects arrested over the weekend in the United States to be denied bail.

Baum said Chapman's father told her to go to police with a fake passport an undercover FBI agent had given to her, leading to her arrest and solitary confinement. He said he may use that information to appeal the bail decision.

At a bail hearing Monday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Farbiarz said only that investigators on June 27 intercepted phone calls in which Chapman was "talking to a man who is advising her, who is telling her essentially ... to make up a story, to say that she's being intimidated, that this might be some other criminal activity, and who advises her to get out of the country and to go to the police."

Baum said he believed the phone calls cited by prosecutors were conversations between Chapman and her father, whom Baum described as a low-level embassy employee whose family was middle class.

Baum said Chapman told him she reached out to her father, Vasily Kushchenko, a day after an FBI agent posing as a Russian consulate employee asked her to deliver a fraudulent passport to another woman working as a spy.

"She spoke to her father, and her father said, 'Go turn the passport in,'" Baum said. "Her father said, 'You've got this passport. It's forged. Go turn it into the police,' and that's exactly what she did."

Yusill Scribner, a spokeswoman for federal prosecutors in Manhattan, declined to comment on Baum's comments.

Baum discounted published reports Friday quoting Chapman's ex-husband as saying her father is a spy.

"I won't go into the circumstances of divorce, but he may be somewhat bitter about it," Baum said.

Baum said he has spent several hours with his client over two nights this week, finding her "very frightened."

He said she was kept isolated in a cell in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. He said she is allowed one hour a day of exercise, the only time she is allowed to be with another inmate.

Otherwise, she is given no access to phones, television or newspapers, Baum said.

"I can't tell you why, whether it's because of the nature of the charges or whether she's in some type of protective custody," he said. "In some respects, it's a good thing that she's alone because she's frightened about being with other inmates."
Meanwhile, more enticing details about the femme fatale emerge.
"I found her Russian accent such a turn-on," News of the World quoted Alex as saying.

"The sex was great and she had this incredible body. It was more about lust at first. I hadn't met anybody like her before," he added.

The 30-year-old also revealed that the raunchy Russian liked posing for pictures and loved trying out sex toys.

"I took one of her topless first thing in the morning," he said.

"I said to Anna 'go on get them out!' and I took the picture of her with only a bit of the duvet over her. She laughed about it.

"We were having so much fun. We also experimented with sex toys.

"It was great fun although Anna was covering her face with a hat when I took the pictures," he added.

Alex also said that Anna was never apprehensive about experimenting different places.

"When we were on the plane we came up with a plan to join the mile high club. I went to the toilet first and told her to follow later and knock," he said.

"Anna was wearing a denim dress so I hitched it up and we just went for it. It was fantastic because of the thrill of doing it on a plane. We were in the toilet for about 15 minutes and then one of the cabin crew knocked on the door. I said Anna had been sick and I was helping her," he added.
Looks like she also fixed her gaze upon the royals in Britain.
MI5 chiefs are probing an extraordinary link between glamorous Russian spy Anna Chapman and the royals.

Beautiful redhead Anna was fixated with Princes William and Harry and schemed her way into their social circle, the Sunday Mirror can reveal.

She frequented Boujis, the nightclub haunt of the two young princes - where repeated concerns have been raised about their safety - with the explicit intention of meeting them.

Now officials at MI5 are urgently investigating whether a security risk was posed by Anna, 28, one of 10 alleged Kremlin spies arrested in the US. The Russian diplomat's daughter was one of a crowd of designer-clothes wearing women who went to the exclusive West London nightclub to try to meet the princes, a close friend of hers told us.

And amid the club's hedonistic "break every rule" parties, it will be virtually impossible for MI5 to rule out Chapman having met one or both of them, however fleetingly. "Any possibility that a Russian spy may have been in the company of princes Harry and William is extremely worrying," said a security source.

"Keeping the princes fully protected in that kind of alcohol-fuelled, closed-in environment has always been a major headache."
So with all this, are we taking the whole spy thing too lightly? Some think so.
Aside from the general shock that alleged Russian covert agents were lurking in American suburbs, one of the more notable aspects of the case is the reaction it generated in circles high and low.

Pundits quoted cartoon characters Boris and Natasha. Bloggers suggested the spies get their own reality show. Redheaded Anna Chapman — a Manhattan socialite charged as an unregistered agent of a foreign government — was glorified in the tabloids, and almost no coverage escaped without at least one reference to a movie, book or Mad magazine.

Never it seems has the spy business been taken so lightly. It is a situation experts say is understandable, given that the suspects seemed to pose little threat to national security, at least based on the evidence prosecutors have released so far.

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