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In June 2010, Anna Chapman was arrested in New York City as part of a major FBI operation targeting Russian spies. Members of the “illegals programme” had, for decades, ingratiated themselves into American workplaces and communities, all while working for Russia’s foreign intelligence service (SVR). While Chapman was ostensibly in the US to sell real estate to wealthy Russians, she was something of an outlier among the group. The 28-year-old had been in Manhattan for only a year, having spent much of the previous decade in London. There, she had married (and later separated from) a British citizen, Alex Chapman. It was also where she may or may not have been initially recruited as a Russian state asset. Her connections to Britain would, for a while, make Anna Chapman a tabloid mainstay; here we see her ex, Marcus Read, reading an old interview he did with the Mirror, headlined “My crazy six weeks of passion with Russian spy girl Anna Chapman”.
The working title of this two-part documentary was Red Hot Spy: The Anna Chapman Story. Indeed, much is made of how irresistibly alluring and apparently manipulative Chapman was, and the pull of her flame-coloured locks (tabloid infamy also coincided with a dye job). Read met Chapman in Zimbabwe, and she ended up joining him in Brighton for a time, before ditching him at a techno night to embark on a relationship with Alex Chapman. “Here I am, 20-odd years later ,still talking about it,” says Read, perhaps wistful, clearly still incredulous. It is, maybe, the first clue that The Spy Next Door doesn’t contain any big new revelations about Chapman (who has returned to Russia and didn’t want to be involved with the programme), but rather is a slick reworking of old news.
Still, it is rather slick. Former US intelligence staff paint a picture of a slippery young spy who managed to blend in with a crowd of freelancers on laptops at her local Starbucks, all while sending sensitive data dumps to her handlers. We also hear from esteemed figures such as Sir Roderic Lyne, British ambassador to Russia between 2000 and 2004, who outlines the wider political context that made the Chapman case – and the broader FBI operation – so charged. From the early 00s, Tony Blair and George Bush – and later Barack Obama – were adopting a canny keep-your-friends-close-and-Putin’s-inner-circle-closer approach to foreign policy. Lyne says: “[the west] said, we no longer consider ourselves as adversaries.” Cue archive footage of Obama and the then-Russian president Dmitry Medvedev gorging on cheeseburgers and Coca-Cola. How times have changed.
Back to Chapman, then, and this woman with “an air of mystique”, as Read puts it. He knew little about her, except that her father had been in the KGB. Ed Foley, an FBI agent, says that Anna “knew exactly what she was doing” when she was in New York. She didn’t seem to have undergone sophisticated training, but she had a talent for social engineering and, he says, “seduction”.
The Bechdel test was the least of Chapman’s problems, but it is a little tiresome to hear an endless string of men (and it is all men, apart from one) talk about her. Foley says that Chapman was “quite literally in bed with some of the top Wall Street financial people, people who had influence in political circles”, adding “you sleep around with anybody … she could’ve been the first lady of New York City”. But where does sex end and spy craft begin?
There is an interesting documentary somewhere in here, but – ironically – it’s not the parts about Chapman that are the most engrossing. The only woman interviewed here is Marina Litvinenko, widow of Alexander, killed in London in 2006. Russia has never admitted killing Litvinenko with a cup of polonium-laced tea but, in 2021, the European court of human rights ruled that it was responsible. What we hear from Litvinenko is brief but impactful, not least when it comes to her view on how Russia would later use Chapman in its propaganda efforts. And, from Litvinenko to Boris Berezovsky – found dead at his home in Ascot in 2013 – via a string of other suspicious deaths on UK soil, there is another, more intriguing set of threads that is mentioned only briefly here (for more, maybe try Patrick Radden Keefe’s nonfiction book London Falling).
The final sting on Chapman is told in tense, exciting fashion, with asides for all the surreal details of course (her ex-husband being advised by the infamous spin doctor Max Clifford, for one). But ultimately this programme is little more than a salacious look at a footnote in spy history. “Red hot” indeed.
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