Anna Chapman Redux: White House Honey Trap?
[She got] closer and closer to higher and higher ranking leadership...she got close enough to disturb us. We were becoming very concerned. They [Chapman and the rest of the spy circle] were getting close enough to a sitting U.S. cabinet member that we thought we could no longer allow this to continue. ~ Frank Figliuzzi, Assistant Director for Counterintelligence, FBI.
Dear Anna:
In my last open letter to you on the occasion of your thirtieth birthday in February (Happy Birthday Anna Chapman!), I promised to lay off your case, give you breathing room to re-tool yourself from a striving strumpet to a levelheaded grown-up woman, even to ponder donning a nun's habit and living according to the Good Book. I felt that I had milked your tarnished salacious reputation in my baldfaced effort to shill my bestselling political thrillers for all I could. And, in contrast to you, I worried about my own reputation: that of a pitiless stalker of a fallen woman (come to think of it, I'm not sure you ever weren't fallen). Anyway, I truly intended to leave you alone forever. Really. Honest. No kidding. Scout's honor. I mean it.
But, like it or not, you keep popping up in the news -- and, alas, it's never good news. And this time it's a doozy. The FBI's counterintel chief Frank Figliuzzi, in an interview with the BBC, added, "They were getting close enough to a sitting U.S. cabinet member that we thought we could no longer allow this to continue." So, I have no choice but to dust off my blog and weigh in yet again. It's like that scene in Godfather III when an ageing Don Corleone says, "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!" But I digress...
According to the original June 2010 indictment against you and your fellow failed spies, it was the frumpy and dumpy Lidiya Guryeva, alias "Cynthia Murphy," who attempted to weasel herself into the circle of an unnamed “prominent-based New York financier” who was friends with a “current cabinet official,” also unnamed. One of your Moscow handlers was reported to have remarked, “maybe he can provide [Guryeva] with remarks re U.S. foreign policy, ‘roumors’ [sic] about White House internal ‘kitchen,’ invite her to venues.”
This is disappointing to your legions of adoring fans, myself included. Frankly, I can't picture Lidiya seducing anybody. Can you? I mean, the SVR paired her with the equally frumpy-dumpy Vladimir ("Richard Murphy") Guryev as if they were mating farm animals. This gets into a whole other sordid aspect of your country's soulless foreign intel agency which I may address in a separate blog post one day (yechh!).
But all this hoopla about a White House honey trap may be much ado about nothing. An FBI spokesman subsequently clarified,“There is no allegation or suggestion in the complaint that Anna Chapman or anyone else associated with this investigation attempted to seduce a U.S. Cabinet official.” Instead, the clutzy "Cynthia Murphy" reportedly was attempting to sidle up to a rich New York plutocrat who co-chaired Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign. There is no evidence anywhere that you were in this particular picture. Which is understandable considering that you squandered your waking hours getting hammered at Manhattan clubs along with vapid NYC yuppies dancing on the deck of America's financial Titanic. Besides, had you been setting a honey trap for White House officials, you would have blown the entire operation from the get-go, such are your skills in espionage tradecraft.
So, I guess, Anna, you deserve neither the added notoriety of this latest ill-founded report nor, for that matter, more of my gratuitous snarkiness. So, I'll lay off -- until next time.