‘The name’s Steele, Christopher Steele.’ That’s the way a former MI6 operative who wrote the notorious dossier alleging collusion between Trump and Putin introduced himself at a debate at the Cambridge Union last October. ‘And as you can see, sir,’ he told the union president to giggles from the audience, ‘tonight I’ve come dressed in my usual work clothes: black dinner jacket and the signature James Bond Omega watch.’
Less than a week later, Steele was denounced as a ‘reputation-mauler for hire’ and faced the prospect of ruinous legal action over allegedly feeding an MP knowingly false claims that a British businessman was a Kremlin agent. His investigations business, Orbis, was already reeling from spending $800,000 to see off a lawsuit from the US president over the dossier, and had recently suffered a huge exodus of staff. But that evening, Steele was determined to have fun. Reminiscing about his presidency of the union as a student in the 1980s, he hammed up his status as spymaster turned democratic crusader. It was an image Steele had perfected over years of largely uncritical media interviews (down to the quip about the watch), and it’s the image he presents in Unredacted, a self-exculpatory and score-settling memoir in which he represents himself as a truth-seeker standing up to a clueless cross-Atlantic establishment.
Steele was born on a UK military base in Aden and spent time as a child at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus – the base for British reconnaissance flights over Gaza, and in the news again after being attacked during the US-Israeli war on Iran – where his father worked as a climatologist for the British army. After studying social and political sciences at Cambridge, he unsuccessfully interviewed for a newspaper job and failed the civil service exam before being recruited into the secret intelligence service. Steele joined MI6’s Russia desk in 1987, just as Gorbachev was launching perestroika. Three years later, at the age of 25, he was posted to Moscow as second secretary at the British Embassy – a Foreign Office cover. The year after that, the Soviet Union collapsed. In 1993 he returned to London.
During his next posting, in Paris, Steele’s cover was blown after a list of more than a hundred MI6 agents working in embassies around the world was leaked on the internet. This public outing put paid to his career as a field agent. After his posting to Paris ended, Steele claims to have been appointed head of the MI6 Russia desk in London. By 2009, he had resigned and founded a business intelligence consultancy called Orbis with Chris Burrows, who was also on the leaked list.
In its first few years, Orbis kept a low profile in London’s crowded field of private intelligence companies. That changed in 2016 when Steele was reportedly paid $168,000 by an American firm called Fusion GPS to investigate Donald Trump, who had recently won the Republican presidential nomination. Fusion GPS was founded by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, former reporters for the Wall Street Journal who had made their careers out of delving into Russian corruption. The project was originally commissioned by a conservative news outlet, the Washington Free Beacon, but ended up being financed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
The result was a collection of brief reports asserting links between Trump’s team and Russia. The dossier claimed that the ‘Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years’, and that ‘he and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.’ What made the dossier infamous was its declaration that, as a result of his ‘perverted sexual acts which have been arranged/monitored by the FSB’, the Russian state security service ‘has compromised Trump through his activities in Moscow sufficiently to be able to blackmail him’. But the most damaging allegation by far concerned ‘evidence of extensive conspiracy between TRUMP’s campaign team and [the] Kremlin’ – evidence that the dossier glaringly failed to provide.
In May 2017, Robert Mueller, the former head of the FBI, was appointed special counsel to oversee the official investigation into Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 election. After nearly two years of exhaustive research, the Mueller Report found no evidence that Trump and his team had engaged in conspiracy or co-ordination with Moscow to interfere with the outcome of the 2016 election. However, the investigation did establish that the Russian government ‘perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome’, and that Trump had tried to impede the investigation.
Neither Mueller’s investigation nor any other probe found evidence to support the dossier’s other key allegations: the existence of the so-called ‘pee tape’ of prostitutes supposedly hired by Trump to urinate on the bed Obama had used on a visit to Moscow; that Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen had travelled to Prague for secret briefings with Kremlin officials and hackers; that another Trump staffer had discussed sanctions relief at a meeting with Igor Sechin, the head of Russia’s state-owned oil company, Rosneft; or that Trump had somehow been ‘cultivated’ by the Russian secret services.
Nevertheless, Steele has doggedly stood by the dossier. ‘Our 2016 Trump-Russia reporting has not been “discredited”,’ he writes in Unredacted, quoting his own statement on X. ‘In fact its main tenets continue to hold up well and almost no detail has been disproven.’ But its core assertions remain contested and unproven. Such was the amount of uncorroborated and implausible information in the dossier that many experts, including the former CIA officer Daniel Hoffman and Ben Macintyre, a journalist who has written books on Russian espionage, suspected that it was itself a product of Russian disinformation.
Why was the dossier so shoddy, and why, despite this, did it command such influence? Steele’s own apparent lack of expertise may be relevant here. He makes much of his linguistic prowess, boasting of having read Anna Karenina in the original ‘in two volumes from cover to cover’, yet he has a shakier grasp of Russian than he claims. He mentions, for instance, a chance encounter with Gorbachev he says he had while serving as a junior spy in Moscow. When asked by Gorbachev, who was on his way to a meeting with John Major, what he did for a living, he claims to have answered: ‘I follow you very closely.’ Alas, the formulation he includes in the text, ‘Я следую вас очень близко,’ is a clumsily literal translation that makes little grammatical sense. One former employee of Steele’s I spoke to described his grasp of Russian as ‘tragicomic’.