The greatest geopolitical
catastrophe of the twentieth century.—VLADIMIR PUTIN,
on the breakup of the USSR
Moscow, summer 1991. Mikhail Gorbachev was in power. Official relations with the West may have softened, but the KGB still assumed all Western embassy workers were spooks.
The KGB goons assigned to them were easy to spot. They had a method. Sometimes they pursued targets on foot, sometime in cars. The officers charged with keeping tabs on Western diplomats were never subtle.
One of their specialities was breaking into Moscow apartments. The owners were away, of course. The KGB team would leave a series of clues—stolen shoes, women’s tights knotted together, cigarette butts stomped out and left demonstratively on the floor. Or a surprise turd in the toilet, waiting in grim ambush.
The message, crudely put, was this: We are the masters here! We can do what the fuck we please!
The KGB kept watch on all foreigners, especially American and British ones. The UK mission in Moscow was under close observation. The embassy was in a magnificent mansion built in the 1890s by a rich sugar merchant, on the south bank of the Moskva River. It looks directly across to the Soviet Kremlin. The view was dreamy: a grand palace, gold church domes, and medieval spires topped with revolutionary red stars.
One of those whom it routinely surveilled was a twenty-seven-year-old diplomat, newly married to his wife, Laura, on his first foreign posting, and working as a second secretary in the chancery division.
In this case, the KGB’s suspicions were right.
The “diplomat” was a British intelligence officer. His workplace was a grand affair: chandeliers, reception rooms with mahogany paneling, gilt-framed portraits of the Queen and other royals hanging on the walls. His desk was in the embassy library, surrounded by ancient books. Three colleagues were neighbors. The officer’s actual employer was an invisible entity back in London—SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service.
The officer was Christopher Steele. Steele arrived in Moscow via the usual establishment route for upwardly mobile British spies: the University of Cambridge. Cambridge had produced some of MI6’s most talented Cold War officers. A few of them—it turned out to great embarrassment—had secret second jobs with the KGB. The joke inside M16 was that only those who had never visited the Soviet Union would wish to defect.
Steele studied social and political sciences at Girton College. His views were center-left; he and his elder sister were the first generation of his family to go to university. Steele’s paternal grandfather was a miner from Pontypridd, in south Wales; his great-uncle died in a pit accident. These were the years of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, whose implacable opposition to the striking coal workers killed the industry. Steele wrote for the student newspaper, Varsity. He became president of the Cambridge Union, a debating society dominated by well-heeled and well-connected young men and women.
It’s unclear who recruited Steele. Traditionally, certain Cambridge tutors were rumored to identify promising SIS candidates. Whatever the route, Steele’s timing was good. After three years at MI6, Steele was sent to the Soviet Union in April 1990, soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the communist bloc across Eastern Europe.
It was a tumultuous time. Steele had a front-row seat to history. Seventy years after the Bolshevik revolution, the red empire was crumbling. The Baltic states had revolted against Soviet power; their own national authorities were governing in parallel with Moscow. The Soviet Russian republic had elected a democratic president—Boris Yeltsin. There were lines; food was scarce.
There was still much to enjoy. Like other expatriates, the Steeles visited the Izmailovsky craft market, next to an imperial park where Peter the Great’s father, Tsar Alexei, had established a model farm. Here you could buy lacquered boxes, patchwork quilts, fur hats, and Soviet kitsch. Steele acquired samovars, carpets from central Asia, a papier-mâché Stalin mask, and the Tolstoy doll set—price $150—that adorned his later office.
Much of the Soviet Union was off-limits to diplomats. Steele was the embassy’s “internal traveler” and visited newly accessible cities. One of them was Samara, a wartime Soviet capital. There, he became the first foreigner to see Stalin’s underground bunker. Instead of Lenin, he found dusty portraits of Peter the Great and the imperial commander Mikhail Kutuzov—proof, seemingly, that Stalin was more nationalist than Marxist.
On the weekends, Steele took part in soccer matches with a group of expats in a Russian league. In one game, he played against the legendary Soviet Union striker Oleh Blokhin, who scored from the halfway mark.
The atmosphere was optimistic. It appeared to Steele that the country was shifting markedly in the right direction. Citizens once terrified of interacting with outsiders were ready to talk. The KGB, however, found nothing to celebrate in the USSR’s tilt toward freedom and reform. That August, seven apparatchiks staged a coup while Gorbachev was vacationing in Crimea.
Most of the British embassy was away. Steele was home and in his second-floor apartment in Gruzinsky Pereulok. He left the apartment block, turned right, and walked ten minutes into town. Crowds had gathered outside the White House, the seat of government; thus far the army hadn’t moved against them.
From fifty yards away, Steele watched as a snowy-haired man in a suit climbed on a tank and—reading from notes brushed by the wind—denounced the coup as cynical and illegal. This was a defiant Yeltsin. Steele listened as Yeltsin urged a general strike. And, fist clenched, told his supporters to remain strong.
The coup failed, and a weakened Gorbachev survived. The putschists—the leading group in all the main Soviet state and party institutions—were arrested. In the West, and in the United States in particular, many concluded that Washington had won the Cold War. And that, after decades of ideological struggle, liberal democracy had triumphed.
Steele knew better. Three days after the coup, surveillance on him resumed. Steele’s colleagues in Hungary and Czechoslovakia reported that after revolutions there the secret police vanished, never to come back. But here were the same KGB guys, with the same familiar faces. They went back to their old routines of bugging, apartment break-ins, and harassing.
The regime changed. The system didn’t.
By the time Steele left Moscow in April 1993, the Soviet Union had gone. A new country led by Yeltsin had replaced it: the Russian Federation. The KGB had been dissolved.
But its officers hadn’t exactly disappeared. They loathed the United States still. And were merely biding their time.
One midranking former KGB spy unhappy about this state of affairs was Vladimir Putin. Putin had missed perestroika and glasnost, Gorbachev’s reformist ideas, and had returned from provincial East Germany and Dresden. Putin was now carving out a political career in the new St. Petersburg. He mourned the lost USSR. Its disappearance was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.”
A post-communist spy agency, the Federal Security Service, or FSB, had taken over the KGB’s main functions. Back home, Steele would soon move into MI6’s new purpose-built office—a large, striking postmodern pile of a building overlooking the River Thames. This gaudy Babylonian temple was hard to miss; in 1994, the government acknowledged MI6’s existence. Staff called it Vauxhall Cross. The FSB would become its bitter adversary.
From London Steele continued to work on the new Russia. He was ambitious, keen to succeed, and keen to be seen to succeed. He was part of an SIS team.
And perhaps less posh than some of his upper-class peers. Steele’s family was blue-collar. His father, Perris, and mother, Janet, from London, met when they worked at the UK Meteorological Office. Dad was forecaster to the military and Royal Air Force. The family lived on army bases in Aden, where Steele was born, on the Shetland Islands, and—twice—on Cyprus.
Steele now moved in a small world of Kremlin specialists. There were conferences and seminars in university towns like Oxford; contacts to be made; émigrés to be met, lunched, charmed. In 1998 he got another posting—to the British embassy in Paris. He had a family: two sons and then a daughter, born in France, where Steele was officially “First Secretary Financial.”
At this point his career hit a bump. In 1999 a list of MI6 officers was leaked online. Steele was one of them. He appeared next to Andrew Stafford and Geoffrey Tantum as “Christopher David Steele, 90 Moscow; dob 1964.” His future business partner, Christopher Burrows, was blown, too. Burrows’s entry reads: “82 East Berlin, 87 Bonn, 93 Athens, dob 1958.”
The breach wasn’t Steele’s fault, but it had unfortunate consequences. As an exposed British officer he couldn’t go back to Russia.
In Moscow the spies were staging a comeback. In 1998 Putin became FSB chief, followed by prime minister and, in 2000, president. By 2002, when Steele left Paris, Putin had consolidated his grip. Most of Russia’s genuine political opposition had been wiped out, from parliament, public life, and the evening news.
The idea that Russia might slowly turn into a democracy or that history, as Francis Fukuyama put it, might be ending had proved a late-century fantasy. Rather, the United States’ traditional nuclear-armed adversary was moving in an authoritarian direction.
At first George W. Bush and Tony Blair viewed Putin as a respectable ally in the war against terror. Russia’s leader remained an enigma. As Steele knew better than most, obtaining information from inside the presidential administration was hard.
One former member of the U.S. National Security Council described Putin as a “black box.” “The Brits had slightly better assets than us. We had nothing. No human intelligence,” the source said. And, with the focus on fighting Islamists, Russia was downgraded on the list of U.S.-UK intelligence priorities.
By 2006 Steele held a senior post at MI6’s Russia desk in London. There were ominous signs that Putin was taking Russia in an aggressive direction. The number of hostile Russian agents in the United Kingdom grew, surpassing Cold War levels. Steele tracked a new campaign of subversion and covert influence.
And then the two FSB assassins put a mini-nuclear poison in Litvinenko’s teapot. It was an audacious operation, and a sign of things to come. One reason MI6 picked Steele to investigate was that—unlike colleagues who had known the victim—he wasn’t emotionally involved. Steele’s gloomy view of Russia—that under Putin it was not only domestically repressive but also internationally reckless and revisionist—looked about right. Steele briefed government ministers. Some got it. Others couldn’t believe Russian spies would carry out murder and mayhem on the streets of London.
All told, Steele spent twenty-two years as a British intelligence officer. There were some high points—he saw his years in Moscow as formative—and some low ones. Two of the diplomats with whom he shared a Moscow office, Tim Barrow and David Manning, went on to become ambassadors to the EU and the United States. But Steele didn’t quite rise to the top, in what was a highly competitive service. Espionage might sound exciting, but the civil servant salary was ordinary. And in 2009 there was personal tragedy, when his wife died at age forty-three after a period of illness.
That same year Steele left MI6 and set up Orbis. Making the transition from government to the private sector wasn’t easy. Steele and Burrows were now pursuing the same intelligence matters as before but without any of the support and peer review they had in their previous jobs. MI6’s security branch would often ask an officer to go back to a source, or redraft a report, or remark, “We think it’s interesting. We’d like to have more on this.” This kept up quality and objectivity.
Steele and Burrows, by contrast, were out on their own, where success depended more on one’s own wits. There was no more internal challenge. The people they had to please were corporate clients. The pay was considerably better.
The shabby environs of Victoria were a long way away from Washington and its bitterly contested U.S. presidential election. So how did Steele come to be commissioned in the first place to research Trump and produce his devastating dossier?
At the same moment Steele said good-bye to official spying, another figure was embarking on a new career in the crowded field of private business intelligence. His name was Glenn Simpson. He was a former journalist.
Simpson was an alluring figure: a large, tall, angular, bearlike person, who slotted himself easily onto a bar stool and enjoyed a beer or two. He was a good-humored social companion who spoke in a nasal drawl. Behind small oval glasses was a twinkling intelligence. He excelled at what he did.
Simpson had been an illustrious Wall Street Journal correspondent. Based in Washington and Brussels, he had specialized in post-Soviet murk. He didn’t speak Russian or visit the Russian Federation. This was deemed too dangerous. Instead, from out of country, he examined the dark intersection between organized crime and the Russian state. Very often that meant the same thing.
One of Simpson’s subjects was Semion Mogilevich, a Ukrainian-Russian mafia don and one of the FBI’s ten most wanted individuals. Mogilevich, it was alleged, was behind a mysterious intermediary company, RosUkrEnergo (RUE), that imported Siberian natural gas into Ukraine. The profits were measured in billions of dollars.
Mogilevich wasn’t someone a reporter might meet; he was more myth than man. He lived in Moscow—or was it Budapest? Seemingly, the Russian state and FSB harbored him. Simpson talked to U.S. investigators. Over years, he built up a portfolio of contacts in Hungary, Israel, Cyprus. At home he knew individuals inside the Department of Justice—in particular its Organized Crime and Racketeering Section—the U.S. Treasury, and elsewhere.
By 2009 Simpson decided to quit journalism, at a time when the media industry was in all sorts of financial trouble. He cofounded his own commercial research and political intelligence firm, based in Washington, D.C. Its name was Fusion GPS. Its website gave little away. It didn’t even list an address or the downtown loft from where a team of analysts worked.
Fusion’s research would be similar to what he had done before. That meant investigating difficult corruption cases or the business activities of post-Soviet figures. There would still be a public interest dimension, only this time private clients would pay. Fusion was very good at what it did and—Simpson admitted—expensive.
In 2009 Simpson met Steele. They knew some of the same FBI people and shared expertise on Russia. Fusion and Orbis began a professional partnership. The Washington- and London-based firms worked for oligarchs litigating against other oligarchs. This might involve asset tracing—identifying large sums concealed behind layers of offshore companies.
Later that year Steele embarked on a separate and sensitive new assignment that drew on his knowledge of covert Russian techniques. And of soccer: in Moscow he had played defense as a fullback. The client was the English Football Association, the FA. England was bidding to host the 2018 soccer World Cup. England’s main rival was Russia. There were joint bids, too, from Spain and Portugal, and the Netherlands and Belgium. His brief was to investigate the eight other bidding nations, with a particular focus on Russia.
It was rumored that the FSB had carried out a major influence operation, ahead of a vote in Zurich by the executive committee of FIFA, soccer’s international governing body. A second vote was to take place at the same time for the 2022 World Cup. One of the countries bidding was the desert emirate of Qatar.
According to Steele, Putin was a reluctant backer of Russia’s World Cup bid and only became engaged from mid-2010, when it appeared Moscow might lose. Putin then summoned a group of oligarchs. He instructed them to do whatever was necessary to achieve victory, including striking personal deals with FIFA voters.
Putin’s method, Steele said, was unseen. “Nothing was written down. Don’t expect me or anyone to produce a piece of paper saying please X bribe Y with this amount in this way. He’s not going to do this.” He added: “Putin is an ex-intelligence officer. Everything he does has to be deniable.” The oligarchs were brought in to disguise the Kremlin’s controlling role, Steele said, according to The Sunday Times.
Steele “lit the fuse” of something bigger, as one friend put it.
Steele discovered that FIFA corruption was global. It was a stunning conspiracy. He took the unusual step of briefing an American contact in Rome, the head of the FBI’s Eurasia and Serious Crime Division. This led to a probe by U.S. federal prosecutors. And to the arrest in 2015 of seven FIFA officials, allegedly connected to $150 million in kickbacks, paid on TV deals stretching from Latin America to the Caribbean. The United States indicted fourteen individuals.
By this point, of course, Russia had won its bid to host the World Cup. England—the country that invented soccer—scraped just two votes.
The episode burnished Steele’s reputation inside the U.S. intelligence community and the FBI. Here was a pro, a well-connected Brit, who understood Russian espionage and its subterranean tricks. Steele was regarded as credible.
Between 2014 and 2016, Steele authored more than a hundred reports on Russia and Ukraine. These were written for a private client but shared widely within the State Department and sent up to Secretary of State John Kerry and to Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who was in charge of the U.S. response to the Ukraine crisis. Many of Steele’s secret sources were the same sources who would supply information on Trump.
One former State Department envoy during the Obama administration said he read dozens of Steele’s reports on Russia. The envoy said that on Russia, Steele was “as good as the CIA or anyone.”
Steele’s professional reputation inside U.S. agencies would prove important the next time he discovered alarming material, and lit the fuse again.
Trump’s political rise in the fall of 2015 and the early months of 2016 was swift and irresistible. The candidate was a human wrecking ball who flattened everything in his path, including the Republican Party’s aghast, frozen-to-the-spot establishment. Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz—all were batted aside, taunted, crushed. Scandals that would have killed off a normal presidential candidate made Trump stronger. The media loved it. Increasingly, so did the voters.
Might anything stop him?
The front-runner was Jeb Bush, but he struggled. Trump called him “low-energy.” During the primaries, conservative website The Washington Free Beacon commissioned Fusion to investigate Trump. The Washington Free Beacon was backed by one of Trump’s wealthy opponents, Paul Singer, a New York hedge fund billionaire and Republican donor. Singer dropped out after Trump became the presumptive nominee. Senior Democrats seeking to elect Hillary took over the Trump contract. The new client was the Democratic National Committee. A lawyer working for Hillary’s campaign, Marc E. Elias, retained Fusion and received its reports.
The world of private investigation is morally ambiguous—a sort of open market in dirt. Information on Trump was of no further use to Republicans, but it could be of value to Democrats.
Before this, in early spring 2016, Simpson approached Steele. Steele started to scrutinize Paul Manafort, Trump’s new campaign manager. From April, Steele investigated Trump on behalf of the DNC, Fusion’s anonymous client. All Steele knew at first was that the client was a law firm. He later told Mother Jones: “It started off as a general inquiry.” Trump’s organization owned luxury hotels around the world.
One obvious question for him, Steele said, was: “Are there business ties to Russia?”
Over time, Steele had built up a network of sources. He was fiercely possessive of them: who they were he would never say. A source might mean practically anybody. It could be someone famous: for example, a well-known foreign government official or diplomat with access to secret material. Or it could be someone obscure—a lowly chambermaid cleaning the penthouse suite in a five-star hotel.
Normally an intelligence officer would debrief sources directly. Since Steele could no longer visit Russia, this had to be done by others or in third countries. There were intermediaries, subsources, operators—a sensitive chain. Only one of Steele’s sources on Trump knew of Steele.
Steele put out his Trump-Russia query. He waited for answers. His sources started reporting back. The information was astonishing, “hair-raising.” As he told friends, “For anyone who reads it, this is a life-changing experience.”
Steele had stumbled upon a well-advanced conspiracy that went beyond anything he had discovered with Litvinenko or FIFA. It was the boldest plot yet. It involved the Kremlin and Trump. Their relationship, Steele’s sources claimed, went back a long way. For at least the past five years Russian intelligence had been secretly cultivating Trump. This operation had succeeded beyond Moscow’s wildest expectations. Not only had Trump upended political debate in the United States—raining chaos and confusion wherever he went and winning the nomination—but it was just possible that he might become the next president.
Which opened all sorts of intriguing options for Putin.
In June 2016 Steele typed up his first memo. He sent it to Fusion. It arrived via enciphered mail.
The headline read: “US Presidential Election: Republican Candidate Donald Trump’s Activities in Russia and Compromising Relationship with the Kremlin.”
It said:
Summary
• Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in the western alliance.
• So far TRUMP has declined various sweetener real estate business deals, offered him in Russia to further the Kremlin’s cultivation of him. However he and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.
• Former top Russian intelligence officer claims FSB has compromised TRUMP through his activities in Moscow sufficiently to be able to blackmail him. According to several knowledgeable sources, his conduct in Moscow has included perverted sexual acts which have been arranged/monitored by the FSB.
• A dossier of compromising material on Hillary CLINTON has been collated by the Russian Intelligence Services over many years and mainly comprises bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls rather than any embarrassing conduct. The dossier is controlled by Kremlin spokesman, PESKOV, directly on Putin’s orders. However, it has not yet been distributed abroad, including to TRUMP. Russian intentions for its deployment still unclear.
The memo was sensational. There would be others, sixteen in all, sent to Fusion between June and early November 2016. At first, obtaining intelligence from Moscow went well. For around six months—during the first half of the year—Steele was able to make inquiries in Russia with relative ease. It got harder from late July as Trump’s ties to Russia came under scrutiny. Finally, the lights went out. Amid a Kremlin cover-up, the sources went silent and information channels shut down.
If Steele’s reporting was to be believed, Trump had been colluding with Russia. This arrangement was transactional, with both sides trading favors. It said Trump had turned down “various lucrative real estate development business deals in Russia,” especially in connection with the 2018 soccer World Cup, hosted by Moscow.
But he’d been happy to accept a flow of Kremlin-sourced intelligence material, apparently delivered to him by his inner circle. That didn’t necessarily mean the candidate was a KGB agent. It did signify, however, that Russia’s leading spy agency had expended considerable effort getting close to Trump—and, by extension, to his family, friends, close associates, and business partners, not to mention his campaign manager and personal lawyer.
On the eve of the most consequential U.S. election for generations, one of the two candidates was compromised, Steele’s sources claimed. The memo alleged Trump had unusual sexual proclivities. If true, this meant he could be blackmailed.
Steele’s collaborators offered salacious details. It said that Russian intelligence had sought to exploit “TRUMP’s personal obsessions and sexual perversion” during a trip to Moscow in 2013. The operation had allegedly worked. The tycoon had booked the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel “where he knew President and Mrs OBAMA (whom he hated) had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia.”
There, the memo said, Trump had deliberately “defiled” the Obamas’ bed. A number of prostitutes “had performed a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him.” The memo added: “The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.”
There was another fascinating dimension to this alleged plot, of course categorically denied by Trump. According to Steele’s sources, associates of Trump and Russian spies had held a series of clandestine meetings, in central Europe, Moscow, and elsewhere. The Russians were very good at tradecraft. Nonetheless, could this be a trail that others might later detect?
Steele’s sources offered one final piece of devastating information. They alleged that Trump’s team had coordinated with Russia on the hacking operation against Clinton. And that the Americans had secretly co-paid for it.
Steele wrote up his findings in MI6 house style. The memos read like CX reports—classified SIS intelligence documents. They were marked CONFIDENTIAL/SENSITIVE SOURCE. The names of prominent individuals were in bold—TRUMP, PUTIN, CLINTON. The reports began with a summary. They offered supporting detail. Sources were anonymous. They were merely introduced in generic terms: “a senior Russian foreign ministry figure” or “a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin.” They were given letters, starting with A and proceeding down the alphabet.
How certain was Steele that his sources had got it right and that he wasn’t being fed misinformation? The matter was so serious, so important, so explosive, so far-reaching—this was an essential question.
As spies and former spies knew, the world of intelligence was nonbinary. There were degrees of veracity. A typical CX report would include phrases like: “To a high degree of probability.” Intelligence could be flawed because humans were inherently unreliable. They forgot things. They got things wrong.
One of Steele’s former Vauxhall Cross colleagues likened intelligence work to delicate shading. This twilight world wasn’t black and white—rather it was a muted palette of grays, off-whites, and sepia tones, he told me. He said you could shade in one direction (more optimistically) or in another direction (less optimistically). Steele was generally in the first category.
Steele was adamant that his reporting was credible. One associate described him as sober, cautious, highly regarded, professional, and conservative. “He’s not the sort of person who will pass on gossip. If he puts something in a report, he believes there is sufficient credibility in it,” the associate said. The idea that Steele’s work was fake or a cowboy operation or born of political malice was completely wrong, he added.
The dossier, Steele told friends, was a thoroughly professional job, using professional methods. And—significantly—based on sources who had proven themselves in other areas. Evaluating sources depended on a critical box of tools: What was a source’s reporting record, was he or she credible, what was the motivation?
Steele recognized that no piece of intelligence was 100 percent right. According to friends, he assessed his work on the Trump dossier was 70 to 90 percent accurate. Over eight years, Orbis had produced scores of reports on Russia for private clients and others. A lot of this content was verified or “proven up.” And, Steele said, “I’ve been dealing with this country for thirty years. Why would I invent this stuff?”
Meanwhile, others were confirming his alarming discoveries.
It is known as the Doughnut. This impregnable-looking building, hollow in the middle and with a security fence around its circumference, is situated in the English town of Cheltenham. What goes on inside is secret. Although, thanks to Edward Snowden, the breathtaking scale of its mission is now better known.
The Doughnut is a key part of British intelligence gathering. It is home to the Government Communications Headquarters—the UK’s eavesdropping agency. In 2013 Snowden revealed that GCHQ has the capacity to vacuum up most of the Internet: email traffic, browsing histories, text messages, and other data, stolen in the billions from fiber optic cables or via intercepts of mobile phones.
Snowden’s leak also showed GCHQ’s close relationship with the NSA—the U.S. National Security Agency. The two agencies are practically indistinguishable. They are part of an Anglo-Saxon spying alliance, Five Eyes. This encompasses the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. Collectively, these agencies can surveil the entire planet.
On any day, their targets might include Taliban commanders in Afghanistan, the Iranian leadership, or the Stalinist hermit state of North Korea. GCHQ would routinely listen to the conversations of known or suspected foreign intelligence officers active in the United Kingdom and continental Europe. Especially Russian ones.
In late 2015 GCHQ was carrying out standard “collection” against Moscow targets. These were known Kremlin operatives already on the grid. Nothing unusual here. Except that the Russians were talking to people associated with Trump. The precise nature of these exchanges has not been made public.
According to sources in the United States and the United Kingdom, these interactions formed a suspicious pattern. They continued through the first half of 2016. The intelligence was handed to the United States as part of a routine sharing of information. Other friendly spy agencies supplied similar Trump-Russia electronic material. According to one source, the countries involved included Germany, Estonia, Sweden, Poland, and Australia. A second source suggested that both the Dutch spy agency and the French General Directorate for External Security, or DGSE, were contributors as well.
The FBI and the CIA were slow to appreciate the extensive nature of these contacts between Trump’s team and Moscow. This was in part due to institutional squeamishness—the law prohibits U.S. agencies from examining the private communications of U.S. citizens without a warrant.
The electronic intelligence suggested Steele was right. According to one account, the U.S. agencies looked as though they were “asleep.” “‘Wake up! There’s something not right here!’ The BND [German intelligence], the Dutch, the DGSE, SIS were all saying this,” one Washington-based source told me.
That summer GCHQ’s then head, Robert Hannigan, flew to the United States to personally brief CIA chief John Brennan. The matter was deemed so important it was handled at “director level”—face-to-face between the two agency chiefs. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, later confirmed the stream of intelligence from Europe, declining to give details and adding: “It’s sensitive.”
After an initially slow start Brennan used GCHQ information and tip-offs from other partners to launch a major interagency investigation.
Meanwhile, the FBI was receiving disturbing warnings from a separate direction—Steele.
At this point Steele’s Fusion material was unpublished and unknown. Whatever the outcome of the election, it raised grave questions about Russian interference and the U.S. democratic process. There was, Steele felt, overwhelming public interest in passing his findings to U.S. investigators. The United States’ multiple intelligence agencies had the resources to prove—or disprove—his discoveries. He realized these allegations were—as he put it to a friend—a “radioactive hot potato.” He anticipated a hesitant response, at least at first.
In June Steele flew to Rome to brief his contact from the FBI, with whom he had cooperated over FIFA. His information started to reach the FBI in Washington. It had certainly arrived by the time of the Democratic National Convention in late July, when the website WikiLeaks first began releasing hacked Democratic emails. It was at this moment that FBI director James Comey opened a formal investigation into Trump-Russia.
In September Steele went back to Rome. There he met with an FBI team. It debriefed him. The FBI’s response was one of “shock and horror,” Steele said. After a few weeks, the bureau asked him to explain how he had compiled his reports and to give background on his sources. It asked him to send future copies.
Steele had hoped for a thorough and decisive FBI investigation. Instead, the bureau moved cautiously. It told him that it couldn’t intervene or go public with material involving a presidential candidate. Then it went silent. Steele’s frustrations grew. Simpson decided on an alternative course of action.
Later that month Steele had a series of off-the-record meetings with a small number of American journalists. They included The New York Times, The Washington Post, Yahoo! News, The New Yorker, and CNN. In mid-October he visited New York and met with reporters again. Comey then announced he was reopening an investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server. At this point, Steele’s relationship with the FBI broke down. The excuse given by the bureau for saying nothing on Trump looked invalid. In late October, Steele spoke to Corn via Skype.
The story was of “huge significance, way above party politics,” Steele said. He believed Trump’s own Republicans “should be aware of this stuff as well.” Of his own reputation Steele said: “My track record as a professional is second to no one.” Steele acknowledged his memos were works in progress—and was genuinely worried about the implications of the allegations. “The story has to come out,” Steele told Corn.
Corn wrote about the dossier on October 31. It was the first time its existence was made public. At the same time, The New York Times published a story saying that the FBI hadn’t found any “conclusive or direct link” between Trump and Russian officials.
Steele was at this point anonymous, a ghost. But the ghost’s message was rapidly circulating on Capitol Hill and inside Washington’s spy agencies, as well as among certain journalists and think tanks.
Democratic senators now apprised of Steele’s work were growing exasperated. The FBI seemed unduly keen to trash Clinton’s reputation while sitting on explosive material concerning Trump.
One of those who was aware of the dossier’s broad allegations was Senate minority leader Harry Reid. In August Reid had written to Comey and asked for an inquiry into the “connections between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.” In October Reid wrote to Comey again. This time he framed his inquiry in scathing terms.
In what was a clear reference to Steele, Reid wrote: “In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government….The public has a right to know this information.”
All this frantic activity came to naught. Just as Nixon was reelected during the early stages of Watergate, Trump won the presidential election, to general dismay, at a time when the Russia scandal was small but growing.
Steele had found prima facie evidence of a conspiracy, but by and large the U.S. public knew nothing about it. In November, the dossier began circulating in the top national security echelons of the Obama administration. But it was too late. The Democrats’ “election surprise,” as it were, had failed. It was a cruel defeat.
In Halifax, on Canada’s eastern seaboard, a light drizzle was falling. All sorts of precipitation rolled in from the Atlantic: rain, fog, snow, rain again. From the harbor front the gray sea shaded into a sky of endless white. Georges Island could be seen out in the water, with its lighthouse and eighteenth-century citadel.
It was here in Nova Scotia that millions of passengers from Europe once disembarked in search of a better life in the new world. Cruise ships still pulled up in front of pier 21. There was a railway station, an immigration museum, and a boxy rose-colored hotel next to a park. The hotel was historic—Queen Elizabeth II had stayed there—and had been through several owners. It was now the Westin Nova Scotian.
It was in Halifax that November that a group of international experts gathered. Their objective: to make sense of the world in the aftermath of Trump’s stunning victory. Most were appalled by this. The three-day event was organized by the Halifax International Security Forum. There were sessions on post-Brexit Britain, the “Middle East mess,” ISIS, and relations with Russia.
One of the delegates was Sir Andrew Wood. Wood was the UK’s ambassador to Russia from 1995 to 2000. He was taking part in a Ukraine panel. Its theme was the challenges facing the country after Putin’s cloaked invasion. (Canada has strong Ukraine ties: some 1.3 million citizens are of Ukrainian descent.) Another participant was Senator John McCain.
Wood was a friend of Steele’s and an Orbis associate. Before the election, Steele had gone to Wood and shown him the dossier. He wanted the ambassador’s advice. What should he do, or not do, with it? Of the dossier, Wood told me later: “I took it seriously.”
From London, Wood observed Russian affairs with a cool and critical eye. He wrote articles for Chatham House, the foreign affairs think tank, where he was a fellow in the Russia and Eurasia program. He spoke at conferences and seminars.
On the margins of the Halifax conference Wood briefed McCain about Steele’s dossier—its contents, if true, had profound and obvious implications for the incoming Trump administration, for the Republican Party, and for U.S. democracy.
McCain decided the implications were sufficiently alarming to dispatch a former senior U.S. official to meet with Steele and find out more.
The emissary was another delegate in Halifax, David Kramer, who had hosted Wood’s Ukraine discussion. Kramer was a senior director at the McCain Institute for International Leadership. He had previously worked for the Bush administration in 2008–2009 as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor. He later led Freedom House, the Washington-based pro-democracy think tank.
The dossier’s eventual journey to the Oval Office would take this unlikely route: Moscow to London to Halifax to D.C.
Kramer was troubled sufficiently to get on a transatlantic flight to London. Steele agreed to meet him at Heathrow Airport. The date was November 28. The rendezvous involved some old-fashioned spycraft. Kramer didn’t know what Steele looked like: at this point there were no public photos of him. He was told to watch out for a man with a copy of the Financial Times. After picking up Kramer, Steele drove him to his home in Farnham, Surrey, in London’s suburban commuter belt. They talked through the dossier: how Steele compiled it, what it said.
Less than twenty-four hours later, Kramer returned to Washington. Next, Simpson shared a copy of the dossier confidentially with McCain.
It also went to the British government.
Steele gave a copy of a final memo he had written in December to the top UK government official in charge of national security, a former colleague from his days at SIS. The memo offered fresh details of the hacking operation. An encrypted copy was sent to Fusion, with instructions to pass it to McCain and Kramer.
McCain believed it was impossible to verify Steele’s claims without a proper investigation. He made a call and arranged a meeting with Comey. Their encounter on December 8 lasted five minutes. The venue, according to one source, was the FBI’s headquarters, the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington. Not much was said. McCain gave Comey the dossier. According to the same source, Comey didn’t let on to McCain that the agency had already begun an investigation into Trump’s associates, at this point more than four months old.
McCain’s intervention now made some kind of bureaucratic response inevitable. This was no longer just an FBI affair; it required coordination across the top levels of U.S. intelligence.
A highly classified two-page summary of Steele’s dossier was compiled. It was attached to a longer restricted briefing note on Russian cyber interference in the 2016 election. The United States’ most senior intelligence chiefs mulled what to do.
Their next task was an unenviable one. As former CIA director Michael Hayden put it to me, the situation was “off the map in terms of what intelligence is asked to do.” “I didn’t envy them,” Hayden said. Of the dossier Hayden said: “My gestalt idea when I saw it was that this looks like our stuff.”
A day after Steele met with us in the Shakespeare pub in London, the dossier—or at least its most damning accusation—was on its way to the desk of someone who was still—for a short while—the world’s most powerful person, President Barack Obama.
It was also going to his successor, the next guy in the Oval Office. Comey had the thankless job of briefing President-elect Trump. Trump, it was clear, would dismiss the dossier as a piece of trash. This strategy was problematic for various reasons and would look increasingly ridiculous in the months ahead.
For example, Trump’s team had indeed met with Russians in the run-up to the vote, as Steele’s sources had alleged and GCHQ and others had detected.
One of Trump’s advisers had even conducted an enthusiastic correspondence with a Russian spy. And given him documents. Not in Moscow but in Manhattan.