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.
