‘Russian spy’ Chapman spent five years in London

Anna Chapman, the most glamorous of the 11 people arrested in the US at the weekend for allegedly being part of a Russian spy ring, spent five years in London and may have married a British citizen.

According to her profile on the LinkedIn networking website, Chapman worked in London for up to five years from September 2003. It lists NetJets, a company that leases executive jets to the rich, the investment arm of Barclays Bank and Navigator hedge fund as her employers in London.

NetJets Europe told the Guardian: "Ms Chapman was employed by NetJets Europe from May to July 2004, as an executive assistant in the sales department." Barclays initially denied all knowledge of Chapman, before later revealing she had worked for the bank's small business banking division - not the investment arm -  between 2004 and 2005.

A former colleague of Chapman's at Navigator told the Mail: "I always wondered how a Russian would have a last name like Chapman and I thought she may have married a European." Reports in the US media have also suggested she may have married a British citizen.

Chapman, 28, speaks Russian, French and German. She is thought to own a flat in New York and to have a masters degree in economics from the University of People's Friendship in Moscow. Since 2006 she has run an online estate agency.

But despite being a high achiever, her brush with the espionage sector appears to have been brief. Prosecutors called her a "highly trained agent" and a "practised deceiver", but the way in which she was stung by the FBI suggests she was something of an amateur.

Chapman is reported to have been meeting with Russian agents weekly since January of this year to pass on US government secrets gleaned from supposed high society connections.

On Saturday, she met an undercover FBI agent who was posing as a Russian spy. The FBI agent was pretending to send Chapman on a mission to deliver a fake passport to a fellow Russian spy.

"Are you ready for this step?" he asked.

"Shit yes," she replied.

In classic 007 style, the agent told her the spy would identify herself by greeting her with the line: "Haven't we met in California last summer?" Chapman was to reply: "No, I think it was in the Hamptons." She was arrested before the fake drop was made.

And Chapman wasn't the only amateur. Mark Lowenthal, a former senior CIA official, told the Washington Post the whole Russian spy ring was "feckless" because you could find out the kind of information they seemed to be after by reading the right newspaper.

And Mikhail Lyubimov, a former member of the SVR (Russia's foreign intelligence service) said: "It sounds preposterous to me. We've never used illegals like this. And it's a comedy to have 10 of them connected." ·