Move over, TechCrunch and watch your back, Wired. The voracious self-promotion empire that is Russian spy babe Anna Chapman now claims another conquest. Russia’s sweetheart and America’s favorite deportee is taking over the reins as editor for a small venture capital newspaper.
Yes, hard as it may be to believe, a Putin ally from the intelligences services has found success in Russian business, politics and, now, media. Chapman will take over as editor of the Russian-languageVenture Business News, a publication covering the world of venture capital. We’ll also be treated to Anna’s musings on matters economic in a weekly column, Field News.
But don’t expect a lot of muckraking investigations or hard-hitting editorial lines under the former Foreign Intelligence Service vet’s direction. Her announcement on the move lays out her plans for the journal using the vacuous platitudes she’s fond of spitting out while shilling for Vladimir Putin’s political party United Russia.
The publication will “promote a positive image of young entrepreneurs, innovators, and technological business managers,” Chapman writes. “We must give them the freedom to be leaders in the country’s modernization, and get them to lead a new management system in a new economy based on the achievements of the mind,” she said, according to a Forbes translation.
Chapman served as a sleeper agent in the United States for years at the behest of Russia’s intelligence services. She acted as part of a network made up of 10 Russian spies that the FBI broke up in the summer of 2010 after years of surveillance.
Since then, Chapman has become Russia’s answer to Lady Gaga. She patented her name in Russia in order to start stamping it on her own line of clothes and other high-end products like perfume and Vodka.
Her attempt to use those skills designing uniforms for Russian astronauts, though, has since fallen through.
Or, the proposal to design uniforms could be just another installment of her overall Chapman-brand promotion, for everything from her social media ventures to her political career.
The move to a publication oriented to venture capital and technology hews closely to Chapman’s cover when she was a spook skulking around New York City. She took the guise of a web-focused real estate mogul. She ran a search site for Russian real estate, domdot.ru, and rubbed elbows with other online entrepreneurs.
Since getting busted and traded back to Russia in a spy swap, Anna has continued along the tech-business trajectory. She landed a gig as an advisor to FundServiceBank, an official backer of Russia’s space agency, to consult on “investment and innovation.”
Check out who she follows on Twitter, and you’ll find that her social media interests tend toward the venture-capital community, too. Anna follows Scientific American, TechCrunch, Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Kevin Rose, a venture capitalist and founder of Digg.com, among others.
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