Russian Spy Steals Show At Rocket Launch

[Xing Cai]

Russian Spy Steals Show At Rocket Launch

10:20am Friday October 08, 2010
Richard Williams

Deported Russian spy Anna Chapman has made a surprise public appearance at the launch of a space rocket in Kazakhstan.

Chapman has rarely appeared in public since her deportation from the US

Dressed in a scarlet peacoat, the auburn-haired beauty sparked a flurry of interest when journalists spotted her in front of the astronauts' hotel at the Baikonur cosmodrome. But just as the glamorous secret agent began to steal the show from the newly modernised Russian Soyuz rocket, she was hauled off by security guards. Chapman was one of the 10 agents arrested and then expelled from America in the biggest spy swap since the Cold War. And Russian officials will be keen the 28-year-old - recently nominated one of the country's 100 sexiest women - does not distract attention from the launch.

The mission to the International Space Station (ISS) has gone to plan and the rocket has successfully entered orbit, according to officials. It is the first such craft to be fully equipped with a digital measuring system and the launch is the first time the new design has been used. The crew includes one of Russia's most experienced spacemen, Alexander Kaleri, whose first mission to space was in March 1992 just after the fall of the Soviet Union. Joining him are American Scott Kelly, who has made two spaceflights, and Oleg Skripochka, who is making his first.

Everyone is feeling good
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<cite> Alexander Kaleri, Russian astronaut

</cite> On board the ISS, where they will spend the next five months, they will join Americans Douglas Wheelock and Shannon Walker as well as Russian Fyodor Yurchikhin. "Everyone is feeling good. Everything is fine on board," Kaleri reported back to mission control in images broadcast on state television. Chapman has kept a low profile since returning to Russia, while making tentative moves to reinvent herself as a showbusiness figure. In August she posed for a photo shoot published in weekly gossip magazine Zhara, modeling an assortment of clingy cocktail dresses at a hotel in central Moscow.

 

[Xing Cai]

A man reads Russian Tvoi den (Your day) newspaper with new Anna Chapman pictures in Moscow on August 27, 2010. Flame-haired and squeezed into a body-hugging cocktail dress, Russian spy Anna Champan has emerged from the shadows in an erotic photo-shoot and walked straight into a new scandal, reports said Friday. The glamorous Chapman, 28, was at the centre of the biggest spy crisis between the United States and Russia since the Cold War as one of the US-based sleeper agents who last month were exchanged in a dramatic spy swap. AFP

An internet user looks at a facebook page dedicated to Anna Chapman in Paris on July 23, 2010. Two weeks after 10 Russian spies flew back from the United States to Moscow, the buzz of interest around the rings most photogenic member, the feisty redhead Anna Chapman, shows no signs of receding. While Chapman remains in an unknown location since her arrival in Moscow, reportedly being debriefed, she has apparently found time to write enigmatic Facebook updates and negotiate with journalists on her first interview. AFP


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