From Vadim Nikitin at the London Review of Books, Vol. 48 No. 6 · 2 April 2026:
by Christopher Steele.
Mariner, 336 pp., £24, October 2024,
‘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....
....MUCH MORE
Long-time readers might recall our thoughts upon reading the Dossier, January 13, 2017, three days after BuzzFeed broke the story and a week before Trump's inauguration:
I miss Russia, Russia, Russia.
And Stormy Daniels.
And Avenatti.
Cohen in Prague.
Steele and pee-pee tapes.
Those were simpler times....
"Media That Focus on Scandals and Spread Fake News to Smear Politicians Risk Becoming Like People Who Have a Morbid Fascination with Excrement"--Pope Francis
