The Russian honeytrap: alleged spy for Moscow faces five years in US prison | US national security

Nomma Zarubina, 35, now sits in a New York jail awaiting sentencing after pleading responsible final week to costs that she lied to the FBI about her contacts with the FSB, Russia’s largest home intelligence service.

But, in a playbook that comes straight from the chilly struggle, the striking-looking Zarubina – generally known as “Alyssa” to her Russian handlers – was tasked with assembly outstanding Americans in order to lure them into the orbit of Moscow intelligence.

According to US prosecutors, Zarubina attended “seminars, forums and conventions also attended by prominent members of academia, foreign policy, the US government and the media.” Her job was to “identify potentially helpful contacts” in the US and go them on to the FSB so the company may invite them to Russia to “convert” them to the “Russian way of thinking”.

The Siberian-born Zarubina persuaded a number of Capitol Hill energy brokers to pose for footage, labored at a consultant to the UN for the Coordinating Council of Russian Compatriots of the US (KSORS)and spoke at occasions organized by the Free Nations of Post-Russia in Washington and Ottawa, Canada.

But it was all a pose disguising her espionage. Zarubina pleaded responsible to creating false statements to the FBI regarding her relationship with the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, or FSB, and to naturalization fraud for mendacity about her involvement in prostitution-related offenses.

James Barnacle, assistant director in cost of the FBI’s New York workplace, said in a press release: “Zarubina’s intentional concealment of her misconduct and her lies about her affiliation with Russian intelligence were an affront to law enforcement’s national security efforts.”

Zarubina, the federal government charged in 2024, had come to the US in 2016 and been recruited by the FSB “no later than 2020”, furnished with a code title, and directed to start “network marketing” and to look into a person in the US.

That 12 months, she was interviewed by the FBI at a diner in Brooklyn in reference to an company investigation into Elena Branson, the godmother of Zarubina’s daughter, who was later charged with performing as an unregistered international agent.

Branson had been married to William Branson, an professional in worldwide economics and a longtime advisor to the World Bank who additionally served on former president Richard Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisers.

In 2022, prosecutors claimed that Elena Branson corresponded with Putin himself and had based “a Russian propaganda center” in New York that included an “I Love Russia” marketing campaign aimed toward American youth.

But wherever Zarubina’s final loyalties lay, she was arrested and detained in December 2024 on costs of constructing false statements to the FBI.

She was hardly the primary Russian lady to make headlines for spying actions in latest years. Maria Butina, one other engaging Russian lady, was arrested in Washington DC in 2018. Now a Russian legislator and TV character, Butina had befriended leaders of the National Rifle Association and her “Right to Bear Arms” group had satisfied former US national security adviser John Bolton to take part in a video promotes gun rights in Russia.

Then there was Anna Chapman, who was arrested in 2010, charged with being a sleeper agent working underneath deep non-official cowl, and finally returned to Russia in a prisoner change that included Sergei Skripal, later poisoned with novichok in the UK in 2018. For Chapman, spying ran in the household: her father, Vasily Kushchenko, was a senior KGB official. In Bondianna, a memoir printed final 12 months, Chapman made no bones about utilizing her seems to be to realize her ends. “I knew the effect I had on men,” she wrote.

Zarubina additionally knew intercourse may very well be a spy’s software. Her arrest got here months after she despatched a blizzard of texts to an FBI agent that learn as each flirtatious and threatening. “Catch me baby,” she texted at 4.17am in one, adopted by: “So many spies.” And later: “I am sooooo bad.”

A decide repeatedly warned her to cease texting the agent after her arrest and whereas out on bail. But Zarubina continued, together with 65 instances on a single night time in November 2025. “I love you,” she wrote. Getting no response, she known as him a “bitch.”

But she additionally dropped Butina’s title. “I guess Butina got more attention,” she wrote, and texted an image of herself in cowboy hat and ingesting a glass of wine, captioned: “mmmmm.”

Prosecutors in New York then added costs alleging she engaged in interstate transportation of girls for prostitution, allegedly involving a therapeutic massage parlor in East Brunswick, New Jersey.

Ten days in the past, Zarubina pleaded responsible to 1 depend of constructing false statements to the FBI and to 1 depend of naturalization fraud for mendacity on her naturalization software about her involvement in prostitution.

Zarubina instructed the courtroom she’d caught “feelings” for the unnamed FBI agent. “He influenced me. I don’t know how – how to explain that. But my life became so different after I met him. And it’s not something bad, it’s not something negative, but it’s obviously that he just, like, controlled me emotionally.”

Chris Costa, government director of the International Spy Museum and former US counterintelligence agent, says the Zarubina case bears comparability to the Butina and Chapman circumstances.

“Chapman was a bad spy, now a celebrity, who got caught because she didn’t know how to use her equipment and an undercover FBI employee was able to gain her trust. Then a second redhead comes along, Butina, who was deployed to an ever-expanding circle of people that she could influence. Zarubina and Butina are in the similar category.

Filip Kovacevic, a professor at the University of San Francisco who specializes in Russian and Eurasian intelligence history, says that because Zarubina was working for the counterintelligence agency FSB and not the foreign-intelligence agency SVR, she was likely directed to honeytrap “because that’s what counter intelligence does.”

“The indictment says she was directed to get to know someone in the United States, and we know that she was connected to prostitution, so I guess that’s what the FSB knew, too,” Kovacevic says. “So after all the FBI is in getting data from her in regards to the FSB. Who is aware of what sort of offers they made.”

In the Chapman case, Costa points out, she was caught in the act of communicating, but Zarubina’s task was to build a network so building a criminal case about lying to an FBI agent was “probably the best they could do and it’s usually a last resort.”

“Intelligence operations can look a lot like professional relationship building or lobbying until someone pulls the curtain back and discovers there are Russian intelligence connections,” he adds.

But the question of “honeypotting” – an intelligence-gathering tactic in which, Costa explains, “an operative uses romantic or sexual relationships to gain trust and to eventually obtain sensitive information of compromise and blackmail someone” – looms over all of the cases.

“Espionage is the second-oldest profession,” he points out, but cautions that none of these recent cases are of the high-end “hands-in-the-safe” spy craft. “This is rising out a community of individuals and influencers. You would possibly discover a possibility, like a diplomat for some nation who then turns into exploitable.”

But in the Zarubina case, it’s not entirely clear who was honeypotting whom. Zarubina told the court that she “understood communicating with the FBI” because “they actually work the same as Russians work.”

“They frame people, they build cases, you know,” she said, and insisted she was not a “spy.” She had only met with the FBI because she had caught “feelings” for the agent and admitted to drinking. A judge told her to stop “harassing” them.

“My life now seems like a tragedy because I get almost every day threats from many people from many countries who think that I was a spy but they don’t know the whole story,” she told the court.

Zarubina is due to be sentenced in June and could face five years in prison on each count. “If she gets deported, that may not be the best idea for her,” says Kovacevic. “The FSB goes to be indignant as a result of she was alleged to deny the whole lot. That’s what they inform their brokers. But she didn’t – she made a deal.”