Spy Anna Chapman to Host 'Mysteries' Russian Television Show
Jan. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Russian spy Anna Chapman, expelled from the U.S. last year, will host a television show dedicated to exposing "the biggest secrets in the world," the Moscow- based network that hired her said.
"Mysteries of the World With Anna Chapman" will debut Jan. 21 and run every Friday, said Marina Volodina, a spokeswoman for Moscow-based REN-TV, by phone today. Volodina declined to say how much Chapman will earn from the program.
Red-haired Chapman has been the most visible of the 10 people who were deported from the U.S. last July for being members of what the Justice Department called a "deep-cover" spy ring. She gave her first television interview in December, after the U.S. edition of Playboy magazine published nude pictures of the 28-year-old agent.
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Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, told reporters last July that the agents would have "interesting, bright" lives in Russia. He also discussed "life" and sang "patriotic songs" during a meeting with the group, according to the government's website.
Chapman told viewers of the talk show "Let Them Speak" on state-run Channel One to "keep watching television" to learn the "secrets" she said she would reveal in 2011. She said in that interview that she declined an offer to appear on the Oprah Winfrey show in the U.S. "to support the domestic producer."
Another female member of the spy ring, Natalia Pereverzeva, who went by the name Patricia Mills, was hired by state-run pipeline operator OAO Transneft as an adviser on international projects to Chief Executive Officer Nikolai Tokarev, the Kommersant newspaper reported today, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter. Igor Dyomin, a Transneft spokesman, said he couldn't comment on company employees.
Chapman last month was elected an official at Molodaya Gvardiya, or Young Guard, the youth wing of Putin's United Russia party. She has been working since October as an adviser to Moscow-based Fondservisbank, which invests in aerospace and high-technology industries. A third agent, Andrei Bezrukov, who lived in the U.S. as Donald Heathfield, is working as an adviser to oil-producer OAO Rosneft, according to Kommersant
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