Anna Chapman strips to lingerie in Maxim photos

[October 22, 2010]  MOSCOW (AP) -- Russian spy Anna Chapman was revealed by others in June as a sleeper agent in the United States. Now she's decided to reveal more of herself.

She's stripped down to black lingerie for a photospread in the Russian edition of Maxim, appearing on the cover of the November issue under the caption "For Your Eyes Only." That's the title of a 1981 movie featuring the fictional British spy James Bond. The magazine hits the shelves Friday.

Since Chapman, a red-haired 28-year-old, was deported from the U.S. along with nine other sleeper agents as part of the biggest spy swap since the Cold War, she has said little about her work as a spy, limiting interviews instead to schmaltz.

True to form, she reveals nothing of spycraft in a short interview that accompanies the racy photos in Maxim.

"Charm, like love and friendship, is the same everywhere," she informs the magazine.

"Most men can be divided into three categories: the primitive ones who only need sex, the smarter ones who want to be loved, and then the last group, those who not only want to be loved but also need for that love to be the biggest and most beautiful feeling in their lives. It's hardest of all with this last group, but that's my favorite one."

Chapman might be choosing her topics carefully out of fear that, with one misplaced word, she could be toast.

In a country led by a former spy, Vladimir Putin, and where loyalties and connections often trump the laws of the land, a revealing interview is betrayal. It could be -- at least with respect to one's career -- fatal.

As a spy, albeit a failed one, Chapman understands the need for self-censorship better than most. Better a revealing photo than a revealing interview.

She brushed away questions from a reporter when she made an appearance at the launching of a Russian rocket earlier this month from a cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. And she was a no-show at a hip Moscow nightclub, despite having promised the club's management she'd turn up.

"The most negative feeling I am capable of having toward a man is pity," she tells Maxim. The cover shot shows her in black lingerie, holding a gun aloft as huge diamond earrings shine from behind flowing red locks.

And she is as hazy about her future plans as she is about her past.

Her burning desire is "to open interesting, creative projects, to put my soul into them, to help realize the talents of my team, to make people happy," she says.

For a spy who, along with the others, sang patriotic songs with Putin upon returning to the Motherland, and who received the state's highest honor in an award ceremony at the Kremlin earlier this week, her career options appear plentiful. She was recently unveiled as the face of an obscure Russian bank with the same initials as the country's main spy agency.

Right now, though, she's focusing on cementing her James Bond chic and, for the most part, Russian media are happy to play along.

When Ilya Bezugly, Maxim's editorial director, was asked how he snared Chapman for the interview, he had a ready answer.

"I could tell you," he said, "but then I'd have to kill you."

[Associated Press; By DAVID NOWAK and SIMON SHUSTER]

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