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Publish and Be Damned

January 2017

BuzzFeed offices, New York

I know the press only too well. Almost all editors hide away in spider-dens…plotting how they can put over their lies, and advance their own positions and fill their greedy pocketbooks by calumniating Statesmen.

—SINCLAIR LEWIS, It Can’t Happen Here

By early 2017 the allegations concerning Donald Trump and Russia were the worst-kept secret in politics and the media. Practically every senior editor and columnist was aware of the claims, if not the colorful detail. The Guardian’s Julian Borger, The New York Times, Politico, and others had seen copies of the dossier. I knew it existed but hadn’t yet read it.

The dossier had been passed around in the same manner as samizdat, the Soviet term for works—Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn—forbidden by the Kremlin authorities and read at home in the dead of night. Once finished, these typed manuscripts were passed on in secret.

Steele wasn’t leaking his own research. But Glenn Simpson—convinced of the need to find an audience and mindful that an FBI probe might take years—was behind this campaign of unattributable briefing.

For months, reporters on the national security beat and Moscow correspondents had been working feverishly to substantiate the allegations. There were emails, clandestine editorial meetings, encrypted Signal phone calls, scrambled messages sent using PGP, or pretty good privacy. There were trips to Prague, the alleged possible location, or near-location, of a rendezvous between Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, and Russian operatives. And to Moscow.

In October an email written by a person in the Clinton camp reached my inbox. It set out some of the unproven allegations against Trump, including sex with prostitutes in Moscow. The email said the claims came from a source inside the FSB. This was not Steele’s work, but some of it echoed the dossier. The email, it struck me, was like an errant copy of a Shakespeare play hastily written down afterward by an audience member from memory. It was intriguing. But how well would it stand up?

Of this hectic investigative activity, the U.S. public knew little. There was Corn’s article in Mother Jones and a piece by Franklin Foer in Slate. It concerned an email server allegedly used for secret communications between the Russian bank Alfa and the Trump team. Fascinating—if true—but what might it mean? Beyond these tantalizing public scraps, not much was published. The media, and intelligence services in the United States and Europe, plus elected representatives, were nursing a gigantic secret.

The dilemma for editors in chief here was clear.

The Steele dossier seemed plausible. But unless its key assertions could be verified—that Trump had actively connived with Russians, in particular over the release of stolen emails—it was difficult to see how it might be published. There was no public interest in promulgating wrong information—you ran the risk of looking like an idiot. Plus there was a possibility of legal action. Probably Putin wouldn’t sue. The KGB had other methods. The same couldn’t be said for Trump, a serial litigant whose default mode was attack in the courts, to wrestle the other guy to the ground, à la WWE.

What changed the editorial dynamics was McCain’s fateful intervention. On the brink of Trump assuming the presidency, it tipped the balance toward publication. If U.S. intelligence agencies believed Steele to be credible, and were themselves seeking to verify his claims, then surely this was—a story? The fact that the FBI had sought a FISA court warrant to investigate further was certainly reportable.

CNN broke the first news, ten days before Trump’s inauguration. It reported that U.S. intelligence agency chiefs had presented classified documents to Obama and to the incoming president. They included allegations “that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump.” CNN sourced its information to “multiple U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the briefings.”

The pared-down version of the dossier also went to the Gang of Eight—the top four Republican and Democratic party leaders in the House and Senate, plus the chairman and ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, CNN said. The two-page synopsis was highly sensitive and therefore wasn’t included with a classified report on Russian hacking shared more widely within government.

CNN said it couldn’t prove the dossier’s more lurid claims. Therefore it wouldn’t report them. The agency heads had taken “the extraordinary step” of giving the synopsis to Trump because they wanted him to be aware that the allegations about him were now widely disseminated—at least inside the intelligence community and Congress.

CNN’s decision to broadcast the story in general terms was bold. And, surely, the right one. For months, insiders had known about this stuff while the public was kept ignorant.

The decision would earn the channel much grief. One of the contributors who explained the dossier’s origins on TV was Carl Bernstein, the original Watergate reporter, now a distinguished-looking white-haired figure of seventy-three. (His erstwhile collaborator, Bob Woodward, still working at The Washington Post, was unimpressed with Steele’s work. Woodward called it an affront to Trump and a “garbage document.”)

Hours later the online media outfit BuzzFeed made one of the biggest calls in U.S. editorial publishing history.

The company is based in New York, in offices on East 18th Street in Manhattan. Nearby is Union Square Park, a pleasant green spot with a Barnes & Noble bookshop and artisanal coffee bars. BuzzFeed’s staff are young: twenty- and thirty-year-olds, most of whom have never worked on anything as quaint or historical as an inky print newspaper. Founded in 2006, BuzzFeed still did listicles—cute lists of anything from cake pictures to cheap hair products. But in 2011 Ben Smith was appointed editor in chief, and BuzzFeed expanded into serious journalism. It had a network of foreign correspondents. It broke stories. It ran investigations.

In the wake of CNN’s reporting. BuzzFeed did what no one else was willing to do: it placed the full dossier online. Ironically enough, Simpson had judiciously briefed details around D.C. but hadn’t given it to Smith. BuzzFeed obtained a copy from a different source.

Steele’s thirty-five-page report was now available for everybody to read—from Phoenix, Arizona, to Russia’s remote Kamchatka Peninsula on the Pacific. BuzzFeed made a few redactions. Some descriptions where it was possible to identify a source from his or her job title were blacked out. One “company comment” was deleted. But the information that practically everybody in the elite already knew was now pumped into the democratic bloodstream.

In an accompanying article BuzzFeed said it had published this document “so that Americans can make up their own minds.” The allegations, it said, had “circulated at the highest levels of the U.S. government.” It noted the report was unverified and had some errors.

The reaction from the president-elect was thunderous. It was delivered via his usual route, above the heads of the detested liberal media, and direct to the fervent millions who had voted for him.

At 1:19 a.m. on January 11 Trump tweeted:

FAKE NEWS—A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!

The fake news claim would swell and be repeated. Trump would go on to dismiss Steele as a peddler of “phony allegations” and a “failed spy afraid of being sued.” The people who commissioned him were “sleazebag political operatives, both Democrats and Republicans. FAKE NEWS! Russia says nothing exists.”

As for BuzzFeed…well, it was a “failing pile of garbage” and “a left-wing blog.”

This was an angry fugue that would play throughout Trump’s presidency as his relations with much of the media descended into open, embittered conflict. In the meantime, Trump’s aides repeated their boss’s absolutist assertions that there was no substance to any of it.

Cohen, Trump’s lawyer, sounded almost sorrowful. This was an ugly and fantastical plot, he told Mic. “It’s so ridiculous on so many levels,” Cohen said. “Clearly, the person who created this did so from their imagination or did so hoping the liberal media would run with this fake story for whatever rationale they might have.”

This pushback must have been expected. Team Trump’s position was unequivocal: the dossier was fake, a confection, a hit job, baloney, partisan, an ugly liberal smear. Or—to use the slang of Steele’s London—complete bollocks.

Smith, BuzzFeed’s editor, said he had no regrets. He pointed to the fact that America’s own spy chiefs took the material seriously. Otherwise why bother to brief the president? Smith argued that the dossier was already affecting the way elected politicians behaved, prompting Reid and others to raise serious public questions for the FBI. “Sunlight is a disinfectant,” he observed.

There was plenty of material to debate here for a newspaper ethics class and for future historians from the late twenty-first century and beyond. No doubt aspiring journalism students will eternally ponder whether BuzzFeed was correct in its decision to relay unverified material or had taken reporting to new and shabby lows.

The identity of the dossier’s author was, briefly, a mystery. Rumor had it that he was a former British spy. In London, Nick Hopkins and I wondered if that might be Steele. Hopkins sent Steele a text. There was no answer.

On the evening of January 11, I was on a panel on U.S.-Russian relations and cyber espionage. The venue—the Frontline Club—was where Litvinenko had in 2006 denounced Putin after the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, the critical opposition journalist. (Litvinenko was poisoned three weeks later.) Another Frontline panelist was Nigel Inkster, a former deputy director of SIS.

Halfway through our discussion, we saw that The Wall Street Journal outed Steele as the author.

Among established media organizations there was resentment at BuzzFeed’s decision to publish. Rivals said they had the dossier but had chosen not to reveal it. Columnists bashed BuzzFeed. Margaret Sullivan, of The Washington Post, wrote that there was never a case for spreading rumor and innuendo. Smith had plunged down “a slippery ethical slope from which there is no return.” Ditto John Podhoretz, of the New York Post. Podhoretz said that journalists should be skeptical of all sources, especially “intelligence” ones.

This theme was shared by critics from the left, including Glenn Greenwald, the former Guardian journalist who collaborated with Edward Snowden and published in 2013 Snowden’s revelations of NSA mass surveillance. It was, they said, intelligence sources who had confidently asserted ahead of the benighted 2003 Iraq War that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. They had lied. Why believe them now? Trump tweeted to the same effect.

Still, there were interesting admissions that the media had failed in its prime duty: to inform the public. Newspapers had run the easy story—the underwhelming scandal of Hillary’s emails!—and ducked the hard one—Trump, Russia, sex, and the murky premise that Russia had sought to tip the scale during a presidential election.

The New York Times’ public editor, Liz Spayd, recounted how the paper’s reporters had spent much of early autumn 2016 trying to chase down the Trump rumors. They were aware the FBI was investigating a covert server channel with Moscow. They met with Steele. They even drafted a story. According to Spayd, senior sources inside the FBI persuaded the Times not to publish. After heated internal discussion, and a casting intervention by executive editor Dean Baquet, it didn’t do so.

Spayd’s conclusion: the paper had been too timid. “I don’t believe anyone suppressed information for ignoble reasons.…But the idea that you only publish once every piece of information is in and fully vetted is a false construct,” she wrote.

There was a paradox at work. On the one hand Trump made it clear that he loathed the mainstream media. Not only were they purveyors of fake news; they were also “enemies of the American people,” according to another of his tweets. The enemies included the “failing” New York Times, NBC News, ABC, and CNN. On the campaign trail Trump called reporters “dishonest,” “disgusting,” and “the lowest form of humanity.” Reporters were, he suggested, amoebas with legs and arms, “human garbage.”

Mark Singer, the author of a riotously amusing Trump profile in The New Yorker, wrote that the press deserved some of this: “Much of the Fourth Estate, first by not taking Trump seriously and then by taking him seriously, assumed roles as his witless enablers. For months, Trump played them like suckers at a sideshow. The more airtime and ink they gave him, the more he vilified them.”

No matter how much invective Trump chucked at the media, “the cameras kept running,” Singer observed correctly. He admitted that he, too, was a sucker. “On the distant sideline (specifically my living room sofa), my shaming secret was that I couldn’t look away.”

Trump’s anti-press tone may have been hysterical but his claims post-election were not without a certain logic. The Democratic Party was weak and beaten. Trump’s main adversary—if not that of Americans per se—was the liberal media, and in particular the investigative teams now busy pursuing his connections with Russia. The Fourth Estate now occupied an elevated role in the nation’s shambling real-life version of the TV drama House of Cards. They were not merely observers but protagonists. They were, from Trump’s perspective, villains, plotters, enemies, and wreckers.

On the other hand, the forty-fifth president of the United States had a remarkable and beneficial impact on the news media. Previously, morale had been low or, at best, mixed. The advertising model that supported once-great U.S. titles—The Baltimore Sun, The Philadelphia Inquirer—was bust. The early part of the twenty-first century had been characterized by newsroom layoffs, a diminution in foreign bureaus, and a decline in print sales.

Now new digital subscribers were piling in. Journalists found themselves reinvigorated by what was undoubtedly the biggest story of their professional lives. “It’s the most upbeat newsroom I have seen in my entire career,” Marty Baron, the executive editor of The Washington Post, told me. The insults, the dehumanizing language, and the fact that the Post together with other major titles were barred from Trump’s campaign rallies, well…this made his staff work harder, Baron said.

For the first time in a while, The Washington Post was in profit. Trump’s election had been a boon: the paper that uncovered the Watergate scandal was now hiring sixty reporters and eight investigative journalists. The president had a healthy impact on fact-checking. Trump told so many lies that the fact-checking desk had doubled in size, from one to two people. The paper even got itself a jaunty new slogan: Democracy Dies in Darkness.

As Baron correctly noted, Trump loved the “enemies of the people.” Every morning he pored over his press clippings, delivered to him the old-fashioned way: on paper. His preferred interface with reality was TV—in particular Fox News, which presented Trump back to himself in absurdly flattering terms.

At this point he was the most media-accessible president ever. He gave more than twenty hours of interviews to Post reporters, who produced an engrossing biography of the candidate, Trump Revealed. (Mitt Romney, by contrast, offered forty-five minutes and declined to be interviewed for a similar candidate profile book.)

From the Oval Office, Trump even called individual reporters on their cell phones. He called The Washington Post’s Robert Acosta, an old-time confidant. The identity of the number was blocked, so Acosta thought the caller was a nutty reader with a complaint. “Hello, Bob,” Trump began. You never quite knew when Trump would call. Reporters would be away from their desks—in Starbucks, in the corridor, at the kitchen table—when the Great Man wanted to speak.

There were other consequences. The Trump-Russia story was so multifarious and so complex that it made sense to cooperate. It was bigger than any individual scoop.

At The Guardian we were pursuing leads from both sides of the Atlantic. Among them, how UK spy agencies had first picked up suspicious interactions between the Russians and the Trump campaign and the role played by Deutsche Bank, Trump’s principal lender. We made an investigative pod—Harding, Hopkins, Borger, and Stephanie Kirchgaessner, a talented former Washington correspondent, now based in Rome. We built up a portfolio of sources.

There was healthy competition still, but reporters on different titles began working together on some stories. There were formal press consortiums and ad hoc conversations between onetime rivals. I talked to The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Financial Times in London, Reuters, Mother Jones, The Daily Beast, CNN, and others. Such conversations took place in New York, Washington, London, Munich, and Sarajevo. Some happened in glossy conference rooms, others in the corners of pubs over warm ale.

Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of The New York Times, argued that the “gravity of the matter” called for a change in the press’s behavior. Trump meant a new era. And new post-tribal thinking.

Abramson wrote: “Reputable news organizations that have committed resources to original reporting on the Russia story should not compete with one another, they should cooperate and pool information.”

Trump’s Republican colleagues showed little interest in investigating whether the dossier’s allegations were true. So it was left to the media to carry out this civic function. CNN’s Fareed Zakaria noted that in the era of Trump journalism had a renewed elemental purpose. “Our task is simply to keep alive the spirit of U.S. democracy,” he said.

—

Reporters may have fancied themselves as foot soldiers of the Enlightenment, but they had one other important role. They would become the recipients of leaks from what would turn out to be the leakiest White House since Nixon’s second administration. The more Trump decried leakers and leaking, like a petulant child unable to get his own way, the more his enemies leaked against him.

Steele had intended his work to be read by a small, discerning audience of intelligence pros. People like him, in fact, whom he respected. Now everybody had it. For reporters, the dossier was rocket fuel—enough to blast them off on a renewed investigative mission whose final destination (impeachment? a scandal that fizzled out through lack of evidence?) was unknown. It wasn’t clear how long the journey might last. Months certainly, and years possibly. Here there were plenty of leads and not so many hard facts.

Meanwhile, over in Moscow the language used by the Kremlin echoed that of Trump. It was left to Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press spokesman, to denounce the contents of the report. Peskov played a role in the affair himself. According to Steele, he controlled the “dossier of compromising material on Hillary Clinton” collated by Russia’s intelligence services over many years. This, Steele wrote, was done “directly on Putin’s orders.”

First, Peskov denied the Trump allegations. “This information does not correspond to reality and is no more than fiction,” he said. Then he insisted that the Kremlin “does not engage in collecting compromising material.” Political motives were behind the release—to halt an improvement in the U.S.-Russian relationship, which was currently “degraded,” Peskov said. Adopting Trump’s own phrase, Peskov called the dossier “a complete fake.” It wasn’t “worth the paper it was written on.”

Anyone familiar with Russian espionage could only crack a wry smile at Peskov’s solemn denials. True, nobody outside the FSB could know if the spy agency did indeed have a Trump video. But there was a rich history of the FSB, and its KGB predecessor, collecting compromising material. And on many occasions filming targets when they engaged in sexual activity, even if this was with a wife or husband.

As I myself knew.

During my time in Russia as a correspondent, the FSB broke into our family apartment as part of a low-level campaign of harassment. Typically, as with the KGB in Steele’s day, they left demonstrative clues. The British embassy in Moscow gave us advice. It said U.S. and UK diplomats, plus their Russian embassy support staff, suffered from similar “house intrusions.” These psychological games dated from KGB times. Probably they featured in Putin’s training manual from the 1970s when he went to spy school. Our apartment was now bugged, British diplomats said.

Returning from a holiday in Berlin, I discovered the FSB had visited us again. During this, their latest break-in, they had left a book by the side of the marital bed. It was in Russian. Its title: “Love, freedom, aloneness.”

It was a sex and relationships manual.

Putin’s guys had helpfully inserted a bookmark on page 110. I turned the pages curiously. The page offered guidance on orgasms. This was a surreal moment: dark, awful, and ridiculous. The FSB’s present was—contemplated after a couple of glasses of vodka—almost hilarious. Was there a technical problem? Or a frequency issue with our lovemaking?

Either way, the FSB’s message was clear: we are watching you.

Putin was well aware of what his spy service did in the bedroom. Especially when it came to filming targets in the company of what the Russian press calls “girls of easy behavior.”

Back in 1999, Russia’s prosecutor general, Yuri Skuratov, fell out with Boris Yeltsin. Skuratov’s corruption investigations were going down badly with influential people inside the Kremlin, including the oligarch Boris Berezovsky. (At this point Berezovsky was at the zenith of his powers, a fixer and backroom player who was deputy head of Yeltsin’s security council.) A government-controlled TV channel released a video of Skuratov in bed with two prostitutes. The video isn’t flattering: it shows a flabby, middle-aged man reclining on a sofa with two blondes. The time stamp shows that it’s 2:04 a.m.

The episode ended Skuratov’s career. He resigned on health grounds soon afterward. One senior official played a prominent role in the prosecutor’s demise and national humiliation. The official—then head of the FSB—testified that he believed the video to be genuine. This was Putin. Putin came up with a memorable quote that stuck with the Russian public.

The figure in the film was “a person similar [in appearance] to the Prosecutor General,” Putin said dryly.

Once Putin became president, the FSB continued to film targets in their intimate moments. Covert surveillance was so widespread that UK diplomats arriving to take up a posting in Moscow were briefed about the dangers of honey traps.

In the past even illustrious officials had succumbed to them. In 1968 Britain’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, Sir Geoffrey Harrison, had an affair with a maid working at the embassy. The maid, Galya Ivanova, was a KGB employee, as Sir Geoffrey might have known. The KGB sent him the photos; Harrison told London and was immediately recalled. “I let my defenses drop,” the ambassador admitted.

The attractive young women used to entice Western diplomats had a name—“swallows.” In Soviet times the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate sent them.

In 2009 James Hudson—the UK’s deputy consul in Yekaterinburg, the principal city in the Urals—was filmed in a local massage parlor. Like Skuratov, Hudson cut a louche figure on the tape and was wearing a dressing gown. There is a kiss, champagne, explicit bedroom moments with two women. The FSB leaked the video to the tabloid newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, which published it under the playful headline “The Adventures of Mr. Hudson in Russia.” Hudson quietly quit Russia and the UK foreign office.

A month later the FSB caught another apparent victim, this time an American. The same news outlet released video that it said showed the U.S. diplomat Kyle Hatcher calling up a prostitute. The production values are distinctly amateurish. There is cheesy saxophone music. Hatcher allegedly asks Inna, Sonya, and Veronica in U.S.-accented Russian: “Will you be free in an hour?” Veronica replies: “In an hour and a half.”

The Russian paper claimed Hatcher was a CIA officer. His official job was to liaise with Russia’s religious communities, including Christians and Muslims, it said, justifying publication on the grounds that Hatcher was something of a hypocrite. The U.S. ambassador John Beyrle said the footage was fake. Beyrle filed a complaint with the Russian foreign ministry.

The FSB’s sex stings hadn’t changed much since earlier Cold War times. They were carried out for classic secret service reasons: to entrap, recruit, embarrass, and blackmail.

Its operatives were able to carry out such operations with relative ease. Hidden cameras were a lot smaller than in the KGB’s heyday. The picture quality was better, too—good enough to broadcast on state TV, if you wanted.

Mostly, victims of sex stings were Russians. In April 2016 the Russian opposition leader Mikhail Kasyanov was filmed from a concealed camera sitting on a dressing table. Kasyanov had been Putin’s prime minister for four years, until he got fired in 2004. He then joined the opposition. Now he was seen stripping off with an aide from his Republican Party of Russia–People’s Freedom Party, Natalia Pelevine. The NTV channel—used for a series of hit jobs on Putin’s critics—screened the footage taken from inside a private Moscow apartment.

It even used the same stiff phrasing that Putin had employed with Skuratov eighteen years earlier. The voiceover intoned: “A person similar in appearance to Mikhail Kasyanov.”

—

From Moscow, Putin’s reaction to the Trump dossier was a master class in how to send several messages at once. Why, he asked, would Trump arrive in Russia and immediately take up with the city’s prostitutes? Trump was a “grown man” and moreover one used to spending time with beautiful women at pageants and competitions all over the world. Trump was, Putin implied, proofed against temptation.

Putin continued: “You know it’s hard for me to imagine that he went to a hotel to meet with women with a low level of social responsibility, although without a doubt they [Russian prostitutes] are the best in the world, without a doubt. But I doubt that Trump would have got hooked on that.”

At face value, this looked like Putin defending Trump, the soon-to-be leader of a mighty superpower. In fact, Putin was signaling that Russian prostitutes were irresistible (“the best in the world”). There was also a note of equivocation: (“I doubt that”). And an uncomfortable image in which Trump—the fish—was suckered into taking the bait (“hooked,” by hookers, in fact).

With his trademark sardonic humor, Putin may have been delivering a second message, darkly visible beneath the choppy translucent waters of the first. It said: we’ve got the tape, Donald! If this was Putin’s submerged meaning, the president-elect would surely have noticed it.

Moving from light to dark, Russia’s president said prostitution wasn’t the fault of the young women who engaged in it. They had few options. They were merely trying to earn an income, he said. The real prostitutes were those who had ordered up “hoaxes” against Trump. They were “worse than prostitutes.” They had “no moral limitations,” Putin added. He meant Steele. And Western spies generally.

It was an effective little speech. One felt sorry for the visiting president of Moldova, Igor Dodon, who had flown in to Moscow for talks with Putin. They had emerged for a joint press conference. Dodon had newly won his country’s election on a pro-Russian platform, and here he was, overshadowed by surreal international events. He tapped the side of his lectern nervously. He stared at his microphone. He rearranged his pen.

Putin and Trump were united in their repudiation of Steele’s work. They were using the same phrases, the same angry rhetoric, the same nyet—as if a baton were being passed from New York to Moscow and back again to New York.

In his tweets the president-elect cited the fact that Russia had dismissed the dossier:

Russia just said the unverified report paid for by political opponents is A COMPLETE AND TOTAL FABRICATION, UTTER NONSENSE. Very unfair!

And:

Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA—NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!

And:

Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to “leak” into the public. One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?

Trump’s strategy of flat denial was problematic for two reasons. One, favorably quoting Putin merely reinforced the idea that the two leaders were working in tandem. Two, the Kremlin’s track record in telling the truth about anything was extremely poor. Putin lied about big things (undercover Russian troops in Crimea in 2014; the Kremlin plot to murder Litvinenko) and small things. Putin was a “specialist in lying,” according to the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, murdered in Moscow in 2015; his habit of deceit was “pathological.”

Western politicians told lies sometimes, too, of course. But deceit and falsification had a long history in Russia, stretching back to tsarist times and the Potemkin villages erected for Catherine the Great. In literature surreal mendacity was rife, notably in Gogol’s The Government Inspector and Dead Souls. And according to Lenin, the truth was subordinate to the class struggle.

For Putin, lying was an operational KGB tactic. Russia’s twenty-first-century postmodern media strategy borrowed something from Lenin’s relativist ideas. The actual truth was unimportant. What was important was the Kremlin’s “sovereign” version of it. This was energetically disseminated inside Russia and increasingly abroad via Russia Today (later, RT) and other state news platforms.

—

Behind the scenes the FBI was establishing that much of the Steele dossier was true. At several key moments it was uncannily accurate. It laid out a dynamic relationship between the Trump campaign and the Russians—with politically helpful material offered by Moscow, and something given in return. There was, Steele wrote, a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation.”

What exactly might the Americans offer?

One key area of U.S.-Russian tension was Ukraine. According to Steele’s sources, the Trump team agreed to sideline Russia’s intervention in Ukraine during the campaign. Instead, and in order to “deflect attention,” Trump would raise U.S.-NATO defense commitments in the Baltics and Eastern Europe. This would help Putin, “who needed to cauterize the subject.”

So there was a deal. In return for Kremlin assistance, Trump would soften the GOP’s stance on Ukraine and turn his fire on the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. These NATO countries on Russia’s doorstep had fraught relations with Moscow. They also had a significant minority ethnic Russian population. These people got much of their information from Russian state TV. The Baltic nations were therefore uniquely vulnerable: from external aggression and from subversion within.

Trump’s apparent task was to change the subject—away from Putin’s illegal land grabs and military incursions, toward the undeniable fact that few European states were meeting their minimum NATO spending commitments, pegged at 2 percent of GDP. The policy reflected Trump’s own isolationist agenda. It also served the Kremlin’s interests.

Steele was right. On July 18, Republican Party leaders and delegates arrived in Cleveland, Ohio. Their official task: to nominate Trump as the party’s presidential candidate. Those who attended included Mike Pence, the Indiana governor and Trump’s new running mate; former senator and presidential candidate Bob Dole; and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. Plus campaign chief Paul Manafort, Carter Page, and Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s previous campaign manager, now covering the convention as a CNN pundit. And Sergey Kislyak.

The week before Trump’s coronation, delegates met to agree on a new national security platform. One of the delegates was Diana Denman, a Texan platform committee member who had supported Ted Cruz. Denman was a veteran party stalwart and avid Reaganite. She proposed a platform amendment that previously would have caused little controversy.

It said a future Republican administration should maintain or increase sanctions on Russia, boost aid to Ukraine’s pro-Western government, and hand “lethal defensive weapons” to the embattled Ukrainian army. “Today, the post–Cold War ideal of a ‘Europe whole and free’ is being severely tested by Russia’s ongoing military aggression in Ukraine,” Denman wrote, adding that Ukrainians were deserving of “our admiration and support.”

After this, something peculiar happened.

Members of Trump’s team working with Trump-supporting delegates got the amendment rewritten. A Trump campaign official, J. D. Gordon, told Denman he had to “clear” her language “with New York.” According to USA Today, Gordon spoke with Kislyak on the sidelines of the convention. New York made alterations. Out was lethal hardware for Ukraine. In was something vaguer, meaningless even: “appropriate assistance.”

Denman told The Washington Post she had tried to salvage her original language, telling Trump staffers: “What’s your problem with a country that wants to remain free?” Her efforts were in vain. The new watered-down statement was adopted as policy. Denman argued that this meant an abandonment of the Reaganite idea of peace through strength—supporting struggling democracies around the world, especially those facing down Russian or (as Reagan did in the 1980s) Soviet aggression.

It was unclear who was responsible for the alteration. It was one of a few significant changes to the party’s platform. Trump later claimed he knew nothing about it. There had been further clues that spoke of collusion. Trump had earlier described NATO as “obsolete” and “disproportionately too expensive (and unfair) for the U.S.” Now Trump—or those around him—was sending encouraging signals to Moscow.

The next week Trump made his notorious appeal to Putin at a press conference in Florida: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand [Clinton] emails that are missing.” A day later he returned to the theme of flaky Europeans stiffing the United States. He told a rally in Scranton, Pennsylvania: “I want to keep NATO, but I want them to pay.” Trump also floated the possibility that the United States might legally recognize Russia’s occupation of Crimea.

This was too much for Carl Bildt, Sweden’s former foreign minister. He summed up the mood of Europe’s horrified foreign policy establishment. Watching Trump’s speech in Scranton, Bildt tweeted: “I never thought a serious candidate for US President could be a serious threat against the security of the West. But that’s where we are.”

In real time, via speeches and tweets, Trump was refashioning U.S. foreign policy and blatantly undermining NATO, the bedrock of U.S. postwar relations with Europe, and an organization Putin had reviled since his days as a junior KGB spy. In this context, Trump’s hacking appeal to Russia made sense.

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In the weeks following BuzzFeed’s publication, Steele vanished. He no longer visited his office in London. He disappeared from his home in Surrey, where he lived with his second wife, children, and stepchildren, now staked out by the paparazzi. Tabloid newspapers in Britain speculated that he had “fled,” fearing for his life. The Daily Mail reported that Steele may have gone abroad. Or was holed up in an “MI6 safe-house.” They quoted neighbors saying he’d left in a hurry and had asked them to look after his three cats.

In fact, Steele hadn’t fled anywhere. “He’s fine. He’s lying low,” one person close to Steele told me that January. He wasn’t on the run from a Kremlin hit squad, the friend added, and was merely trying to avoid the press photographers camped out on his drive. With no new images, picture editors improvised. They found a blurry shot of Steele taken from a 2015 Cambridge Union debate event. It was indeed Steele, wearing a tuxedo.

Clearly this public clamor was unwelcome. In the community of spies and former spies people were not supposed to see what you were doing. Becoming the story—the trigger for a global political scandal—was acutely embarrassing. “If there is one professional standard for people from the intelligence world, it’s that you shouldn’t be seen. Nothing should be visible,” the friend said. Steele hadn’t wanted his dossier to be published. BuzzFeed were “tossers,” his friend added.

There was a UK political dimension, too. In the wake of Brexit, some considered it imperative that Prime Minister Theresa May strike up a good relationship with Trump in the hope that this might lead to an early UK-U.S. trade deal. As the Steele dossier went online, Downing Street was seeking to arrange a Trump-May meeting soon after the inauguration. It was even ready to offer Trump a full state visit, complete with red carpet and dinner with the Queen at Buckingham Palace.

It was understandable, then, that May stressed that her government had nothing to do with Steele. “It’s absolutely clear that the individual who produced this dossier has not worked for the UK government for years,” May said.

Within Steele’s old service there was disquiet at May’s approach. Some believed that Trump was a temporary aberration. By sucking up to him, the government risked damaging its key intelligence-sharing partnership, they felt. One former officer told me the Trump administration was an “existential threat” to Western intelligence.

Meanwhile, Conservative pro-Brexit newspapers were eager to tarnish Steele and his track record. The former spy was a “confirmed socialist”; his claims were “unsubstantiated” and “far-fetched.” London’s Financial Times offered a more sophisticated view. It said that the Steele affair demonstrated one of the laws of the crepuscular world of private business intelligence. “It might be called the Frankenstein principle: once you dig up information, it can gain a life of its own,” the paper said.

Whitehall was evidently terrified that the Trump administration would blame it for the dossier—and think British intelligence was behind it, pulling the strings. The Russian embassy in London saw it that way. For the FSB, there was no distinction between the CIA, MI6, and Steele: they were a single hostile entity. The dossier, in the embassy’s view, was a useful way of driving a wedge between London and the nascent administration in Washington.

In a tweet adorned with enigmatic black question marks, the Russian embassy said:

Christopher Steele story: MI6 officers are never ex: briefing both ways against Russia and US President.

Steele, meanwhile, believed there was little point in talking to journalists. Inevitably they would want to ask him about three things: his sources, his clients, and his methods. He couldn’t discuss any of these. There were also legal worries. Steele wasn’t responsible for the dossier’s publication—that was BuzzFeed—but Orbis might now face litigation from third parties.

Already, a Russian venture capitalist, Aleksej Gubarev, was taking legal action. Gubarev was the owner of a global computer technology company, XBT, and a Dallas-based subsidiary, Webzilla. He vehemently denied any involvement in the hacking operation, as set out in Steele’s December memo.

Despite these challenges, Steele was in good spirits, according to friends. He wasn’t downcast. The lurid and inaccurate reporting didn’t greatly bother him. One said: “He doesn’t have to rebuild his credibility. There’s plenty of stuff in the public domain which is negative. His relationship with the people he’s bothered about is still okay. He cares about a very small number of people. He doesn’t care about public opinion.”

This group included Steele’s clients and his professional peers—intelligence officers on both sides of the Atlantic, including those in the FBI now pursuing Steele’s Trump-Russia threads. Orbis’s email box filled up with messages. Most were supportive. Well-to-do friends found somewhere for him to live. Steele made only one concession to his fugitive status, as claimed by the tabloids: he grew a beard.

Steele understood perfectly how the FSB operated. He therefore knew that he probably wasn’t in any imminent physical danger. Russia’s secret services didn’t generally kill foreign spies. They might harass, disrupt, and entrap them; bug and surveil them; send “swallows” to seduce them; expel them from the country, as in Cold War times, or humiliate them on state television. But not murder. Murder was reserved for Russians. For those deemed traitors.

The people at risk were Steele’s anonymous sources. Whoever they were, they were now in great danger.