Glamorous Russian spy Anna Chapman has revealed for the first time how she was recruited by Vladimir Putin‘s foreign intelligence service at the time she was living in London.

In a new 461-page ‘autobiographical’ book entitled ‘BondiAnna: To Russia With Love’, published in Moscow, she portrays herself as a real-life female 007 who used her sex appeal to open countless doors to the rich and powerful.

When she was recruited by the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, she had a British passport from her failed marriage to English ex-public schoolboy, Alex Chapman.

Not only had already woven her way into the British business and political elite, but also the high-rolling expat world of Russian oligarchs and Arab sheikhs.

A young London-based Moscow spy she names as Kirill recruited her after witnessing her expert networking skills, particularly among wealthy and influential men, she wrote.

Kirill engineered sitting next to her on an Aeroflot flight to Moscow, testing her patriotic leanings, before discreetly positively vetting her via her flatmate in London, Elena Savitskaya.

On a subsequent visit to Moscow, a psychologist’s business card was left at her parents’ flat and she called for a consultation, undergoing arduous tests with a therapist.

At her next session, a spy recruiter she calls only Vladimir Vladimirovich – curiously the same first name and patronymic [Russian middle name] as Putin – had replaced the woman in the consulting room.

She regularly graced the cover of magazines like Maxim 

Her undercover spying career would end abruptly five years later when she was detained and publicly unmasked by the FBI as a Russian agent while in New York

‘I felt a mix of confusion, intrigue, and curiosity,’ wrote a breathless Chapman, now 42.

‘Vladimir Vladimirovich was looking at me intently. He sat directly across from me, his eyes meticulously scanning every inch of my face.

‘Finally, he clasped his hands and asked: ‘Anna, what do you know about… intelligence work?”

Her undercover spying career would end abruptly five years later when she was detained and publicly unmasked by the FBI as a Russian agent while in New York.

She was thrown in prison, stripped of her British passport, and sent back to Moscow, swapped in a major exchange that saw double agent Sergei Skripal move from Russia to the UK.

Later, in 2018, he was notoriously poisoned in Salisbury with a nerve agent by a sinister GRU hit squad acting on Putin’s orders.

Her book is a bed-hopping romp around her time in London which included trips to Paris and Geneva with mega-wealthy lovers and admirers – and a strip-poker session in London with a group of multi-millionaires where she won a lucrative hedge fund job, evidently leading to astonishing access to the financial elite.

Yet it is deafeningly silent on both the influential member of the House of Lords and a British tycoon she is believed to have befriended, and on any other damage she may have done to Britain on behalf of Putin’s SVR.

After she was arrested, she was thrown in prison, stripped of her British passport, and sent back to Moscow, swapped in a major exchange that saw double agent Sergei Skripal move from Russia to the UK

Her book details her time in London which included trips to Paris and Geneva with mega-wealthy lovers and admirers

Her new book is titled ‘BondiAnna – to Russia with love’

But she admitted: ‘I knew the effect I had on men.

‘Nature had generously endowed me with the necessary attributes: a slim waist, a full chest, and a cascade of red hair.

‘All I needed was to emphasise it – which I did with simple yet sexy outfits, light makeup, and an effortless air about me. I never wore jewellery – I didn’t feel the need for it.

‘Most importantly, I didn’t try too hard to please.

‘People can always sense when someone is desperate for approval, and it has the opposite effect.

‘That’s what happens with overly dressed-up girls or overly chatty men. I never sought anyone’s approval – I simply was myself.

‘And it worked like magic.’

As she said separately: ‘English Lords and Arab sheikhs were kissing my hand flirtatiously, promising me a bright future.’

A lawyer close to her at the time said she had ‘seductive charm’ and was ‘quite simply gorgeous’ while being relentless in her social networking with influential men.

She says in her book that she never needed to try hard to get the attention of her marks 

She was recruited by the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service

Her flatmate Elena – who she names in the book as Vera Suvitskaya – said later: ‘She would go and talk to a man if she thought he was useful.

‘Just after I first met her, she said of one businessman she knew: ‘I used to sleep with him. I didn’t like sex with him, but I wanted his money’.’

At the time Putin’s enemy number one, billionaire Boris Berezovsky, was exiled in Britain.

She admitted she knew him, he was on her speed dial, saying in the book she turned down his request to sleep with him.

Berezovsky would later die in unexplained circumstances in 2013, a fate astonishingly common to many Putin foes.

In the strip-poker game, she said: ‘The first hand wasn’t promising for me – I lost. I removed my knickers, much to the men’s delight.’

But she then won, kept her dress on and got the hedge fund job starting the next morning.

Her new boss woke her early, saying: ‘You won a job in poker last night.

‘Get your beautiful arse up and come to the office. Coffee’s here.’

She told how Britain had been her dream since she was a child, and through her relationship with Alex she came and conquered, equipping her ideally to be a spy.

‘For years, I had strived for this, and now I’d achieved it: I had a British surname, a British passport, and now even a taxi driver considered me one of their own,’ she boasted.

Chapman was a British citizen for a while, having married public schoolboy Alex Chapman 

Chapman is pictured in Dubai in a recent Instagram photo

She strongly denied that she had seduced Alex – who died of a drug overdose in 2015 – as a way of getting a UK to better target Britain, a charge made against her after she was unmasked.

In her new book, she details for the first time the pain and misery of their relationship after a romantic whirlwind travelling together in Africa and marrying in Moscow, at 20, after – according to Alex – joining the mile high club on BA flight to the Russian capital.

Penniless, she once left him to sleep rough under Waterloo Bridge, she said.

She told how she aborted his baby, after he violently raped her when she went to try and help him, fearing he was dying, after they had split, by no means the only brutal attack she said she faced at his hands

Impoverished at the time, she persuaded a wealthy new lover that she was pregnant with his baby, not Alex’s, and he duly paid £500 for the abortion, a procedure that had complications leaving Anna close to death in intensive care.

She tells how she was determined to divorce Alex, even though she still loved him.

‘I was sure: without this step I would not be able to move on,’ she said.

‘Until you close this door, another one will not open.

‘Just a few years later, I will hear the same phrase from the president of my country in a private conversation at his residence…..’ – ensuring the reader is aware she secured face time with dictator Putin, perhaps the wealthiest and most powerful man she ever encountered in an extraordinary life of a girl from provincial Volgograd.

Despite this, the book is dedicated to Alex [and her family], and she says: ‘I met my future [British] husband back in 2001.

Chapman, unlike the other Russian spies, did not opt for a quiet life on returning to Russia. She is pictured on the front page of Maxim magazine in October 2010

Chapman, in a photo posted to Instagram – one of many of her in form-fitting, slinky outfits and sultry poses

Anna Chapman previously urged her fans to then buy her clothing brand, ‘which I created out of love for my country’

‘Since then, no man has been able to replace him for me….

‘The man who was my husband and will forever remain in my heart – Alex Chapman.’

In her new post-unmasking life in Moscow she is a successful businesswoman, TV presenter, influencer and Putin propagandist, yet she insisted he remained the love of her life.

She told that the day before he died in 2015, the year her son was born, she received a letter from Alex.

According to the book, he told her: ‘You know, Andzhiki [his name for Anna], I’ve seen you.

‘I went to London to restore my documents [after drug rehabilitation], and I was walking down the street.

‘You came out of a restaurant with a man. You were laughing, and then he hugged you. You both drove off, and I just stood there.

‘I forgot where I was going. Maybe I should have called out to you, but I couldn’t.

‘I’m not angry; I know that everything that happened is entirely my responsibility.

‘I even want to apologise—for my drunken rages, my cruelty, my mockery, my revenge, and the pain I caused.

‘Believe me, I never wanted to be like that. More than anything in the world, I wanted to grow old with you and just be by your side for life.

‘I love you, Andzhiki. You are the love of my life. You made it so much better; you filled it with meaning!

‘If I hadn’t met you and loved you, my life would have been nothing.’

Anna wrote: ‘The next morning, [his mother] found her son dead.’

The coroner established that he died of ‘multiple drug overdose’.

Presumably, in repressive Russia, Chapman – daughter of Vasily Kushchenko, believed to have been a spy under diplomatic cover – needed permission from the SVR to write her BondiAnna book, and its contents were thoroughly vetted.

Of her book, she said it was based on real events but some names were changed and ‘5% of the events in the story are fictional.

‘Which ones exactly? That’s a secret.’