‘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’.
These
are pedantic observations. But they underscore the fact that, for all
his purported expertise, Steele possesses no academic background in
Russian studies, lived there continuously for just three years of a
22-year career and, by his own admission, hasn’t visited the country
since 2009. Significantly, at no point in his government service is he
likely to have line-managed Russian field agents to any great extent –
he would have been too junior in 1990 and too senior in 2006-9. And it
is field agents, whether spies or subcontractors, who provide the
critical raw information that differentiates human-led intelligence from
the mass of much cheaper open-source research. Others in the business
intelligence sector have cast doubt on Steele’s analytic abilities – a
shortcoming that may have led him to place unjustified trust in
unverified reports from his sources. ‘He’s very bad at distinguishing
truth from fiction,’ one industry figure told me. ‘That’s why we didn’t
hire him.’
Beyond
the question of Steele’s competence, the structure of the business
intelligence sector shares the blame for the dossier’s deficiencies.
Steele frequently writes about the ‘collectors’ or ‘head agents’ whom
Orbis hires to conduct its research. Such labels deliberately evoke the
hard glamour of spycraft. In fact, these ‘collectors’ are simply
subcontractors who, in turn, often pay their own sources for relevant
information, which becomes ever more corrupted as it travels down the
line. Many firms are founded by former spies, but few subcontractors are
former intelligence agents, and those who claim to be are treated with
suspicion. Some collectors run their own small firms, creating yet
another layer of subcontractors.
At the
business intelligence companies where I worked for several years, our
subs tended to be bilingual ‘knowledge workers’ from think tanks and
NGOs, freelance journalists, PhD students or former PhD students: in
other words, those inhabiting the no man’s land between academia and the
‘real world’, between Russia and the West, between youth and adulthood,
between journalism and being a gun for hire. They are often highly
educated people who for one reason or another have left the paths
followed by their friends and university roommates: from the Gubkin
University of Oil and Gas to Gazprom, from the Moscow State Institute of
International Relations to parliamentary aide or second secretary at a
Russian embassy, from the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics to
an oligarch-owned tech company. Since the banning of the late Alexei
Navalny’s opposition network, many of his former activists, dispersed
across Eastern Europe and needing to make a living, have become
collectors.
What does the job mean in
practice? As soon as a client’s project is taken on, often involving the
investigation of a commercial rival, we start calling round the subs to
see who has the relevant expertise and capacity. Usually, they receive
about a fifth of the amount the company charges to the client. For
routine projects, that’s between £2000 and £4000. For that sum, the sub
is expected to deliver preferably verbatim commentary from between five
and ten sources – known as human intelligence or HUMINT – alongside public records research, such as obtaining court filings and cadastral records.
What
happens next varies from sub to sub but tends to involve the following.
The sub rings up their contacts – friends, family members, former
colleagues, ex or would-be lovers – and potentially offers them a cut of
the fee if they or someone they know can say something about the
subject of the investigation. Sometimes, the sub uses their income to
keep a few people on retainer. Then it’s a race against time for the sub
to secure the requisite number of source comments within the usual two
to three-week deadline. Because they are generally paid per source, subs
are incentivised to pass along all commentary, including things they
suspect to be hearsay or even false. The most diligent compensate for
shoddy content with detailed caveats. But many do not.
No
subcontractor willingly reveals the identities of their primary sources
to the analyst at the firm, who in turn often conceals the existence of
the subcontractors to the client (though it is an open secret that
business intelligence consultants do not usually conduct their own
primary source work). The commentary found in business intelligence
reports is thus several degrees removed from its original source, which
is, in any case, unknowable to the commissioning analyst, just as it is
to the client. All this makes such intelligence essentially
unverifiable.
When I commissioned a sub
to conduct source inquiries, I could never be entirely sure that they
hadn’t at least partly made them up. The best way to guard against this
is to triangulate the research from several different subs and
sense-check it through extensive research in public records. In
practice, however, deadlines and budgets are almost always too tight to
allow such fastidiousness. It’s sometimes possible to spot signs of
sloppiness or subterfuge: one sub became notorious for lifting
‘intelligence’ wholesale from Facebook walls; another would procure
quotes from supposedly well-placed sources which, after some research,
were more often than not found to resemble parts of articles published
in local papers.
But even the most
reliable subs aren’t above massaging or padding out their reports,
sometimes as a consequence of unreasonable demands by clients. One of
our clients once insisted on a minimum of ten sources in a highly
complex and urgent report. Against the odds, my sub delivered the work,
to the client’s great satisfaction. Months later, he confessed that
while all the quotes were real, he had spoken to only four sources and
‘cloned’ the rest to comply with the request. I kept this information to
myself.
‘The team
at Orbis,’ Steele writes, ‘had acquired – and retains – reliable direct
access to Russian sources, allowing us to illuminate the workings of
Vladimir Putin’s autocratic and closed regime.’ In reality, for the
dossier Steele relied primarily on a single sub, a Russian-American
researcher called Igor Danchenko. Before joining Orbis, Danchenko had
worked as a senior research analyst at the Brookings Institution, where
he distinguished himself by uncovering signs of plagiarism in Putin’s
university dissertation in economic science. A lawyer by training,
Danchenko is an expert in Russian energy politics and came to Steele
highly recommended by Fiona Hill, once Trump’s Russia adviser and now
the chancellor of Durham University.
It’s
surprising that I had never met Danchenko. We both come from remote
Russian cities (Murmansk for me, Perm for him) and served time as
researchers at Washington DC think tanks in
the 2000s before stumbling into business intelligence, mainly for lack
of better options. Iggy, as he is widely known, has worked with several
of my former colleagues in London and the US.
They praised his diligence and were horrified by the toll the dossier
had taken on his life: unmasked by an anonymous blogger in 2017, he was
later charged with lying about his sources to the FBI but was eventually acquitted in October 2022. The ordeal left him financially broken and all but unemployable.
Steele
‘supported me after I won’, Danchenko told me. ‘But before that, I was
alone. Nobody stood by me, apart from my wife and literally two
friends.’ Steele had broken off contact once the dossier was published.
‘My wife thinks that he could have found a way to pass on a small
message, to say “Take care, man,” just to do a human thing,’ Danchenko
said. ‘But he acted like a true spy. He broke all communication. So as
not to expose anyone. And so did I.’ Danchenko spent nearly five hours
talking to me on the phone. He spoke in eloquent and profanity-leavened
Russian, only occasionally segueing into mildly accented English. He
struck me as thoughtful and idealistic, with scabrous humour and a
strong sense of personal morality. Describing himself as a ‘typical
masochist’ who relishes his ability to endure pressure, Danchenko quoted
Joseph Brodsky and Eduard Limonov, invoked the Russian international
relations scholar Alexei Bogaturov, recited the lyrics to a song by
Grazhdanskaya Oborona, the USSR’s first
psychedelic punk band, and riffed on Chomsky’s notion of universal
grammar. Although he is not a drinker, talking to Danchenko in the early
hours I felt like I was trapped in Venedikt Yerofeyev’s alcoholic fever
dream Moskva-Petushki. There was something anachronistic about him, the aura of a Soviet-era intelligent from a previous generation.
By
the time Steele asked him to unearth kompromat on Trump, Danchenko had
completed, on his estimate, at least a hundred reports for Orbis. Most
comprised open-source research for innocuous assignments relating to
risk analysis or pre-transactional due diligence, but many also involved
HUMINT. Although he had little experience in such a high-profile matter, he took on the job of investigating a US presidential candidate just as he would any other assignment, and wasn’t paid a special rate for it....
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