Vladimir Putin has revealed that he sang patriotic songs with flame-haired spy Anna Chapman and the other nine Russian agents who returned to Moscow from America after this month's historic spy swap
Vladimir Putin has revealed that he sang patriotic songs with flame-haired spy Anna Chapman and the other nine Russian agents who returned to Moscow from America after this month's historic spy swap.
Hero treatment
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The Kremlin prime minister, himself a former KGB colonel who spied in East Germany in Soviet times, made clear the ten are being treated as heroes despite their cover being blown and claims they had gained no US secrets.
But Putin admitted that Anna Chapman, formerly married to a British man, was present at the extraordinary patriotic sing along.
"I met with them. We talked about life. "We sang From Where the Motherland Begins, a Soviet song made famous in a wildly popular 1968 USSR about a Russian agent working in Nazi Germany.
"I'm not joking, I am serious. And other songs with a similar content."
Many of Chapman's fellow spies had been working for years undercover in the United States as sleeper agents.
Bond girl
Chapman, who has the looks of a Bond girl, was one of two operating under her own name, as she had during her earlier life in London.
Her family had earlier denied she was a spy but Putin appears to contradict this by appearing to confirm that the entire group were Russian agents.
After her return to Moscow, Home Secretary Theresa May withdrew her British passport obtained after her marriage to ex-public schoolboy Alex Chapman, whose surname she still uses.
Putin, who attended a meeting of bikers in Ukraine yesterday arriving on a Harley Davidson Trike, blamed the group's cover on betrayal by a Russian agent, suggesting the culprit was top Moscow spy Sergei Tretyakov.
He defected to the United States in 2000. He died of a heart attack in June.
Treachery
"It was a result of treachery, and traitors always end up badly either from abuse of alcohol or drugs, somewhere in the gutter," he said.
"One has recently ended up almost like this. And I don't understand what it was all about."
Asked if he knew the names of the traitors who betrayed them, he said, "I cannot answer this question here.They live by their own laws, and all special services are well aware of these laws."
"They will work, I am sure, they will work in worthy places. I do not doubt that they will have an interesting, bright life," he said.
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