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Sex bomb Anna Chapman was ­ordered by her Russian spy bosses to ­seduce US whistleblower Edward Snowden, a defector reveals.

The plan was for the temptress to enthrall the man who exposed American cyber ­snooping – and keep him in Moscow.

That way they could continue to pick his brains about US and UK eavesdropping, the Sunday People reveals.

Anna, 32, even proposed marriage to Snowden, 31, on the orders of Russian ­intelligence high command.

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Former KGB major Boris Karpichkov said: “If Snowden had ­accepted he would have a right to Russian citizenship.

"That would lock him in Russia. As a citizen he’d need permission to leave.”

He says the couple met just once: “But Snowden became ­concerned about what the ­consequences would be.”

Moscow sources told Karpichkov the Anna plan was hatched by Kremlin spymaster Vladimir Skorik.

Former Tory MP Rupert Allason, who writes books on ­espionage under the name Nigel West, said: “Anna is sophisticated enough to live with an American.

"There aren’t many of those in the FSB (formerly the KGB). She would be ­prepared to use her obvious gifts.”

Last year Anna walked out of a US TV interview in Moscow after refusing to answer questions about her ­proposal to Snowden.

She had posted a tweet in the summer which said: “Snowden, will you marry me?!”

Since the US deported her as a spy in 2010, Anna has appeared in saucy photoshoots, paraded on ­catwalks and hosted a TV show.

But she said she ­wanted to maintain her privacy. The ­interviewer Richard Engel said afterwards: “I got the sense she’d been told, ‘Don’t go there.’”

(Image: WENN)

Snowden, who left his long-term girlfriend Lindsay Mills in Hawaii when he fled, was holed up for weeks at Moscow airport before they granted him asylum last August.

The Sunday People revealed how Snowden divulged so much about how our ­intelligence people at GCHQ work, they had to change their methods. A senior Whitehall source told us: “Snowden has committed the worst kind of treachery.”

The American was a systems analyst with the CIA and National Security Agency before he did a flit with 1.7 million documents.

They showed the NSA harvested data on millions of international calls and snooped on foreign leaders. He claimed the UK also monitors communications on a vast scale.