Reds: Has Anna Chapman's arrest as a Russian spy lifted the lid on a secret world of espionage?

HER face has dominated the news agenda for several days now in what has become a tabloid – and broadsheet – love affair with a young Russian girl. A few days ago, Anna Chapman was just a 28-year-old businesswoman and self-confessed "party girl" trying to make her way in New York.

Now, as the world knows, she has been unmasked as part of an alleged network of deep-cover agents operating out of US suburbia for at least a decade, passing on "secrets" to Mother Russia.

Her sultry poses, mainly gleaned from her Facebook page, have brought her the label of the flame-haired temptress, much to the surprise of her apparently mystified British former husband and his family, who knew her simply as a teenage bride who had developed a taste for the high life before moving to America.

But images of the other members of the network have also been distinguished only by their banality. One couple stares out from their back yard, enjoying a barbecue in the sun.

Even in the arcane world of international espionage, things ain't what they used to be. When the FBI lifted what was initially thought to be 11 of Russia's finest last Sunday, instead of subterfuge, stealth and scary reds under the bed, they brought a motley troupe of suburban nonentities blinking into the glare of the international media. Few knew what to make of spies so comically inept and unthreatening that, in the past ten years, the FBI believes the ring has yet to pass one piece of classified material to Moscow. No wonder the FBI's attempts to portray the capture as a major coup has been met with bemusement and mirth.

At first sight, the ring sounds as if it's made up of the same brand of ideologically driven Cold War warriors who did so much to bolster Russia's cause during the period of intense competition between the world's two superpowers. Spies like Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, executed in June 1953 for passing classified atomic documents to Russian intelligence, would have recognised the methods outlined in courtrooms in New York, Boston and Virginia last week. Dead letter drops, false identities, invisible ink, radio transmitters, code books, elaborate cover stories and techniques so sophisticated that the FBI have yet to decide whether to reveal them: it's the stuff of John Le Carr novels.

The Rosenbergs would, however, have been less familiar with the spy ring's apparent tactic of targeting information already in the public domain. Ethel and Julius might even have agreed with the lawyer for two of the accused, who told Judge Jennifer Boal that the case was "all hyperbole, your honour", because all the FBI have so far been able to prove is that his clients "successfully infiltrated neighbourhoods, cocktail parties and the Parent Teachers' Association". So innocuous were their activities that prosecutors found themselves unable to charge them with anything more serious than the obscure and rarely used offence of conspiracy to act as agents of a foreign government, which carries a maximum five-year jail sentence.

The case against the 11 is a complete conundrum. On the one hand their operation bears many of the hallmarks of a well-financed and professional "deep-cover" operation put in place years ago by the SVR, the Russian External Intelligence Service, the successor to the KGB. On the other, the levels of ineptitude are so staggering that it's difficult to believe that the SVR could have been involved.

The FBI's contention that the spy ring is a credible threat to the security of the nation was given a fillip on Thursday when Christopher Metsos, the man accused of being the ring's paymaster and their main link with their Russian spymasters, absconded from a Larnaca courtroom after he was freed on 21,700 bail. Despite an intensive manhunt by Cypriot police, the shadowy figure of Metsos has yet to be found, with the American authorities clearly believing him to have been whisked off the island or across the border into Turkish Cyprus.

With its credibility now at stake, the FBI has been at pains to prove that it has a cast-iron case against the accused who remain in custody. "This is a case that was truly, truly overwhelming and in the space of a week has gotten much, much better", assistant US attorney Michael Farbiarz told magistrate judge Ronald Ellis, before adding that Metsos's abscondment so shortly after his arrest on an international Interpol alert was proof that "there are a lot of Russian government officials (both abroad and] in the United States who are actively assisting this conspiracy."

The discovery of $80,000 in new $100 bills in a safe-deposit box belonging to two of the accused further strengthened the case for the prosecution, which came in the form of a whopping 55-page indictment.

Despite living largely mundane, surburban existences and being thoroughly Americanised, there is also the question of identity. So far only four of the group have owned up to being born in Russia. They include British passport holder Chapman, the photogenic Mata Hari daughter of a high-ranking KGB executive, Arlington-based travel agent Mikhail Semenko, and Michael Zotillo (Michail Kutzick) and Patricia Mills (Natalia Pereverzeva), a couple also from Arlington.

But prosecutors say eight of the 11 charged are from Russia, while most have assumed identities. With the exception of Metsos, most of the rest all look like archetypal American suburbanites. Yet looks, say the prosecutors, could not be more misleading.

Richard and Cynthia Murphy from Montclair in New Jersey, for instance, say they were born in Philadelphia and New York respectively. He's a stay-at-home dad described by neighbours as "kinda lazy"; she's a financial consultant working in Manhattan. One neighbour, Margo Sokolow, told how the Murphy's two daughters rode their pink bikes around the road with the other children in the street; another, Jessie Gugig, said "they couldn't have been spies – look what they did with the hydrangeas."

Yet the FBI say they were the most active of the group, that Richard met Metsos regularly while Cynthia, when not extolling her husband to do more for the cause, tried to build a relationship with a New York financier with a friend in Barack Obama's cabinet. It was in their safe-deposit house that the $80,000 stuffed into eight envelopes was found, while their coded message – "we need to do as the Romans do in a society that values home ownership" – defending their bourgeois suburban house purchase to the SVR was recorded by the FBI. The judge refused bail because there was no way to establish who they really are.

Donald Heathfield and Tracey Ann Foley, who entered a Boston courtroom wearing handcuffs and leg shackles, are an equally unlikely pair of spies. Living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just around the corner from Harvard, and with two grown-up children, to their neighbours they were partners in Techcast, a think-tank trying to predict tomorrow's technology.

To prosecutors, Heathfield is a Russian who stole the identity of a Canadian who died at six months of age in 1963 and who has travelled on a fake British passport. The identity of the third couple is also a source of great debate. Vicky Pelaez is almost certainly the 55-year-old Peruvian journalist she purports to be, but her partner Juan Lazaro is neither a Peruvian citizen nor born in Uruguay, as he initially insisted. The final couple are bad-tempered telecoms worker Zottolli and his nagging wife Mills, who lived in a flat just outside of Washington DC, with their toddler son. They were highly conspicuous because of their thick Russian accents; hardly ace spies.

Sergei Tretyakov, a recent defector from the SVR, said earlier this year that "Russia is doing everything it can to embarrass the US: the SVR residenturas in the US are not less, but in some aspects even more active today than during the Cold War".

In many ways the operation to insert sleeper "moles" into American suburbia over a substantial time period was well conceived. Chapman's top-end real estate company would have brought her into contact with Wall Street's finest; Arlington and Washington DC are America's military, biotech and political epi-centres; while Harvard and MIT are stuffed with government consultants. One MIT professor, former CIA director John Deutch, who was born in Brussels to a Russian father, kept top-secret intelligence files on his home computer and only escaped prosecution after being pardoned by Bill Clinton on his last day as president.

There have been suggestions that neo-cons in a competing American intelligence agency blew the whistle to derail a growing detente between Obama and Dmitry Medvedev, but this week's events smack more of cock-up than conspiracy. In fact, no-one had benefited from a deeply embarrassing episode.

The world now knows that the SVR's encrypted e-mails have been decoded, their mobiles bugged and their entertainingly amateurish daylight bag-swaps and money drops videotaped. Moreover, if this was an SVR operation – and former agent Mikhail Lyubimov said that "it sounds preposterous to me, we've never used illegals like this" – then the agency has been paying for a ten-year operation that has yielded absolutely nyet.

As the case wends it way through the courts yet more entertainment value is sure to be had. There's a temptation to think that you couldn't make this stuff up, but that's not true because someone already has and his name is Mike Myers. Eat your heart out Austin Powers.