BOND-AGE: Suspected Kremlin agent “Katya” (top photo) has been videotaped in sexcapades with eight partners — all of them critics of leaders Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin, with Mrs. Medvedev (above). (UPI)
She’s from Russia with love — and armed with sex toys, drugs and secret videotape.
At least eight prominent Kremlin critics have been caught in a hidden camera sex sting by a sultry young Moscow model in what they say is a classic KGB-style “honey trap.”
Little is known about the woman, Ekaterina Gerasimova, except that she’s in her 20s, has dazzling blue eyes, uses the social networking Web nickname “Mu Mu” and has disgraced a growing list of pols and media types in videos that are surfacing on the Internet.
Her latest victim is satirist Viktor Shenderovich, who is married and wrote for a popular TV program that used clowns to bash Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin cronies.
Shenderovich, 59, said “Katya” posed as a journalist and lured him to a Moscow apartment. “She made it clear that she was interested in me as a man,” he said. “I should have realized this was some sort of danger sign.”
He described on his blog how they had sex — but “without much pleasure” because she was “as dull as your whole sad Gestapo.”
He said he later recognized her from photos in the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, which described how Katya had bedded other Putin critics.
Hours after Shenderovich wrote that, a video surfaced online showing separate clips of him — as well as two extremist dissidents, Eduard Limonov and Alexander Potkin — having sex with Katya.
Potkin, 33, who is married, was upset by the expose. “Now you see that there are no guarantees of having your private life protected,” he said.
Other victims said they fear that videos of them are about to surface. Among them are Yury Shevchuk, the anti-Putin frontman for a popular Russian rock group, DDT, and Ilya Yashin, a leader of the Solidarity opposition group.
Yashin, 27, said he spent a night with Katya in 2008 after meeting her through a Russian social network. He said she invited him for a threesome with her female roommate, a model named Nastya, using sex toys and handcuffs.
Yashin said he left the apartment when she offered him cocaine. He said he asked her if he was being taped but she denied it.
“The only thing I can be blamed for in this provocation is, I had sex with two girls,” he said.
Shenderovich sarcastically accused Putin’s security services of age discrimination in its treatment of him and Yashin. “This means young oppositionists get two free girls and a portion of cocaine, while 50-year-olds like us only get one and no toys,” he wrote.
Another Putin critic, right-winger Roman Dobrokhotov, said Katya, using the alias “Zhanna,” targeted him last year and used a “small mountain” of pot as ammunition.
The Novaya Gazeta article said Katya had also caught Mikhail Fishman, the married editor of the Russian edition of Newsweek, in a video that showed him snorting cocaine.
Fishman didn’t confirm that he was the man in the video but said he was the victim of a “thoroughly planned” trap carried out by Russia’s federal security service, the successor to the KGB. He said it was an effort to blackmail him.
But who is responsible for “Katyagate”?
Katya has disappeared and her former modeling agency said it knows nothing about her whereabouts.
The damaging tapes have been released by the obscure “Civil Committee for the Defense of Morality, Law and Civil Agreement.”
Katya’s method recalls the KGB’s infamous “honey traps,” in which a Western politician, businessman or journalist was seduced by a female agent and secretly photographed, as James Bond was by the Soviets in “From Russia with Love.”
Yashin accused the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi of orchestrating the traps, noting that Nashi had posted video on its Web site earlier this year that seemed to show him, Fishman and Dmitry Oreshkin, a liberal media critic of Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev, giving bribes to Moscow’s traffic police.
But Fishman and Shenderovich suspect the security service, and there is evidence that Katya’s operation was professionally managed.
The central Moscow apartment she used is listed online with a monthly rent of $2,500. The videos, although grainy and low-resolution, employed music, clips from Russian comedy shows and multiple camera angles. “This needs professionals,” retired agent Kiril Kabanov said.
Shenderovich said “federal” officials had to be involved in the secret videos. “It was done by authorities with two purposes: discrediting and blackmailing.”
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, shrugged off Shenderovich’s charge. “We’d like it if he faced his problems alone,” he said.
Shenderovich saw an upside to all this. “Now that the opposition is permanently tarnished,” the government can turn to catching Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov, he wrote.
“My advice to you: Send him to Katya.”