Deception Read Free

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 pupil: 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:
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    â€¢ Primarily involved in selling private jets to companies and individuals in Russia
    â€¢ Conducting research on East European markets, keeping updated on territory social events and business news, participated and helped organise NetJets European marketing events
    â€¢ High-end client interaction, targeting Senior Executives and key decision makers within multi-national global organisations and wealthy individuals
    â€¢ Cold-calling prospects based on research obtained from industry sources
    â€¢ Developing proposals and formulating documentation in line with client requirements
    â€¢ 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
    â€¢ Post-sales relations to ensure smooth running of processes, involving customer service problem-solving
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    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