When Vyacheslav Serkov got a phone call last week from a friend asking whether his former high school sweetheart had been arrested in New York on suspicion of spying, he could not believe his ears.
Serkov, 29, has known Anna Chapman, 28, since they attended eighth grade together at a school in Volgograd. He got the phone call on June 29, a day after the U.S. Justice Department announced that it had arrested Chapman and nine other suspects on suspicion of working for Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service.
While Serkov said Chapman was sometimes secretive, he insisted that there was nothing wrong with that and expressed chagrin at the portrait of Chapman painted by the media.
"She has always been secretive and warmhearted at the same time. There have always been a lot of friends around her," said Serkov, who dated her for more than a year when they were about 15.
He said they had kept in touch even after the breakup and her brief marriage.
"I know her as a very good person, smart and always kind-hearted," he said in a telephone interview from Volgograd.
Chapman — whom Serkov knew as Anya Kushchenko, a diplomat's daughter living with her grandparents in Volgograd — has become the most famous of the 11 suspects in the U.S. spy case, with the media likening her to a foxy James Bond-style spy and her British ex-husband Alex Chapman sharing topless photos and intimate details about their life with the tabloids.
"I'm upset and try not to look at what the media write about her," Serkov said in a sad voice. "I don't believe what they say, that she was a spy … ."
Chapman founded a successful real estate web site with her younger sister, Yekaterina, before she moved to New York last year, ostensibly to pursue her career in real estate.
Her sister and mother, Irina Kushchenko, who live in Moscow, also said they could not believe what has happened.
"At first we thought it was some sort of PR trick to attract visitors" to the real estate web site, Yekaterina Kushchenko told Lifenews.ru.
Her mother said Chapman, who was described by U.S. prosecutors as a "highly trained agent "and a "practiced deceiver," had called her parents shortly before her arrest and sounded "frightened" and "shocked."
"Anya called her father and said that someone was trying to frame her," the mother said, Lifenews.ru reported.
Chapman's lawyer, Robert Baum, told journalists last week that his client reached out to her father, veteran diplomat Vasily Kushchenko, a day after an FBI agent posing as a Russian consulate employee asked her to deliver a fake passport in a sting operation.
"He advised her not to hand over anything to anyone and that she should go to the police as soon as possible," her mother said.
The mother said she and her husband would like to hire a good lawyer for their daughter, but they can't afford one. She repeatedly said she believes in her daughter's innocence.
Chapman's friend Serkov said she never was an outspoken Russian patriot and took no interest in politics.
"The only thing she was interested in was business," he said.
Chapman, a 2005 economics graduate of Moscow's Peoples' Friendship University, created her real estate web site several years ago.
Serkov said she was always smart and got top grades in all subjects in school.
"Her main hobby was studying English," he said, adding that she learned it well while living in Africa with her parents.
Her father served as a diplomat in Kenya and Zimbabwe, but they wanted her to get a good education so they sent her to stay with her grandparents in Volgograd during her school years.
"She missed them when they were away," Serkov said.
He said Chapman has changed very little since they dated, so he had trouble reconciling the woman her knew with the one described by her ex-husband.
Chapman met her now ex-husband in London at a party in 2002, and they got married later that year in Moscow. They divorced in Britain four years later. In addition to sharing lurid details about their life together, Alex Chapman has indicated that he had no reason to doubt that his ex-wife was a Russian spy.
"In my personal opinion, he might be just taking revenge on her," Serkov said.