The glamorous Russian former spy Anna Chapman made a surprise appearance Tuesday at a modernization forum attended by President Dmitry Medvedev and the country’s young elite.
The 28-year-old former sleeper agent appeared at the prestigious function outside Moscow wearing a classic black business dress and an official accreditation badge around her neck.
The LifeNews.ru website said that organizers invited Chapman to the function “to use her wealth of experience in modernizing the country.”
Chapman and nine other Russia spies were expelled from the US in an historic swap that deeply embarrassed the Russian intelligence service and sparked worries over bilateral relations.
But Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin — himself a former agent — went to the group’s defense by meeting and even singing with them on their arrival in Russia and promising them important work in their homeland.
Chapman has since been hired as a representative of a little-known asset management firm called FondsServiceBank. She is also the only one of the spies to have been prominent in public since her return, posing in a raunchy photo shoot for Russia’s Maxim magazine.
The Kommersant business daily reported Monday that another member of the group, Andrei Bezrukov — who was in Boston under the alias Donald Howard Heathfield — was hired as an executive adviser by Russia’s state-run oil giant Rosneft.
Tuesday’s forum took place at the Skolkovo innovation center, touted by Medvedev as Russia’s answer to Silicon Valley.
The center was visited this year by the heads of Google and other US computing giants seeking suitable investment projects.