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Nomma Zarubina, 35, now sits in a New York jail awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty last week to charges that she lied to the FBI about her contacts with the FSB, Russia’s biggest domestic intelligence service.
But, in a playbook that comes straight from the cold war, the striking-looking Zarubina – known as “Alyssa” to her Russian handlers – was tasked with meeting prominent 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 pass them on to the FSB so the agency could invite them to Russia to “convert” them to the “Russian way of thinking”.
The Siberian-born Zarubina persuaded several Capitol Hill power brokers to pose for pictures, worked at a representative to the UN for the Coordinating Council of Russian Compatriots of the US (KSORS), and spoke at events organized by the Free Nations of Post-Russia in Washington and Ottawa, Canada.
But it was all a pose disguising her espionage. Zarubina pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI relating to her relationship with the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, or FSB, and to naturalization fraud for lying about her involvement in prostitution-related offenses.
James Barnacle, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York office, said in a statement: “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 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 name, and directed to begin “network marketing” and to look into an individual in the US.
That year, she was interviewed by the FBI at a diner in Brooklyn in connection with an agency investigation into Elena Branson, the godmother of Zarubina’s daughter, who was later charged with acting as an unregistered foreign agent.
Branson had been married to William Branson, an expert in international economics and a longtime consultant to the World Bank who also served on former president Richard Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisers.
In 2022, prosecutors claimed that Elena Branson corresponded with Putin himself and had founded “a Russian propaganda center” in New York that included an “I Love Russia” campaign aimed at American youth.
But wherever Zarubina’s ultimate loyalties lay, she was arrested and detained in December 2024 on charges of making false statements to the FBI.
She was hardly the first Russian woman to make headlines for spying activities in recent years. Maria Butina, another attractive Russian woman, was arrested in Washington DC in 2018. Now a Russian legislator and TV personality, Butina had befriended leaders of the National Rifle Association and her “Right to Bear Arms” organization had convinced former US national security adviser John Bolton to participate in a video promotes gun rights in Russia.
Then there was Anna Chapman, who was arrested in 2010, charged with being a sleeper agent operating under deep non-official cover, and eventually returned to Russia in a prisoner exchange that included Sergei Skripal, later poisoned with novichok in the UK in 2018. For Chapman, spying ran in the family: her father, Vasily Kushchenko, was a senior KGB official. In Bondianna, a memoir published last year, Chapman made no bones about using her looks to achieve her ends. “I knew the effect I had on men,” she wrote.
Zarubina also knew sex could be a spy’s tool. Her arrest came months after she sent a blizzard of texts to an FBI agent that read as both flirtatious and threatening. “Catch me baby,” she texted at 4.17am in one, followed by: “So many spies.” And later: “I am sooooo bad.”
A judge repeatedly warned her to stop texting the agent after her arrest and while out on bail. But Zarubina continued, including 65 times on a single night in November 2025. “I love you,” she wrote. Getting no response, she called him a “bitch”.
But she also dropped Butina’s name. “I guess Butina got more attention,” she wrote, and texted a picture of herself in cowboy hat and drinking a glass of wine, captioned: “mmmmm.”
Prosecutors in New York then added charges alleging she engaged in interstate transport of women for prostitution, allegedly involving a massage parlor in East Brunswick, New Jersey.
Ten days ago, Zarubina pleaded guilty to one count of making false statements to the FBI and to one count of naturalization fraud for lying on her naturalization application about her involvement in prostitution.
Zarubina told the court 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, executive director of the International Spy Museum and former US counterintelligence agent, says the Zarubina case bears comparison to the Butina and Chapman cases.
“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 somebody 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 of course the FBI is interested in getting information from her about the FSB. Who knows what kind of deals 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 growing out a network of people and influencers. You might find an opportunity, like a diplomat for some country who then becomes 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 is going to be angry because she was supposed to deny everything. That’s what they tell their agents. But she did not – she made a deal.”
