He looked like any middle-aged London businessman meeting a colleague in the arrivals hall of Heathrow’s terminal 3. With a dark jacket and open-neck shirt, his brown hair receding at the temples, Christopher Steele was adept at blending in with the crowd.
The copy of the Financial Times under his arm marked him out to the former US government official who had just landed on the red-eye from Washington. No one would have noticed the American, with wire-rimmed glasses and a closely cropped beard flecked with grey, shaking hands with an Englishman he had not met before.
But as the pair drove in Steele’s car towards his comfortable home in Surrey the former MI6 officer must have realised his days of operating in the shadows were numbered. It was late November and the American had come to discuss a dossier about links between Donald Trump, who had been elected president earlier that month, and Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
The dossier had originally been commissioned by a wealthy Republican businessman appalled at the prospect of a crass billionaire property mogul capturing his party’s nomination for the White House.
He employed Fusion GPS, a Washington “research firm” run by former investigative journalists, which in turn went to Steele, a Russian specialist whose Belgravia-based corporate intelligence company Orbis Business Intelligence boasts of its “ability to meld a high–level source network with a sophisticated investigative capability”.
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But what Steele had found had shocked even him: a hard-bitten former spy who had worked undercover in Moscow during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union and had delved into the corrupt activities of Russian oligarchs on behalf of the FBI.
Using his extensive network of contacts, Steele found Putin’s government had been “cultivating, supporting and assisting” Trump for years. Most explosively, his sources told him that Trump had taken part in “perverted sexual acts” that had been “arranged/monitored by the FSB”, the Russian security service in whose predecessor, the KGB, Putin had held the rank of lieutenant-colonel.
On one occasion in 2013, Steele’s sources had told him, FSB-linked prostitutes had performed a “golden showers” show for Trump in the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Moscow, urinating on the bed in which Barack Obama and his wife Michelle had slept during a presidential trip to Russia.
This month a two-page summary of what Steele had originally intended as a secret dossier was attached to a memorandum about Russian attempts to manipulate the US election and delivered to Obama. Ten days ago it was given to Trump and explained to him by James Comey, director of the FBI.
Apparently fearing his identity as the author of the report would emerge, Steele abruptly left his home last Wednesday, taking his wife and children with him. He asked a neighbour to look after their cat without apparently saying where he was going or when he would be back.
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Within hours Steele’s name was on the front pages of newspapers across the world. Trump denounced the dossier as “fake news” and its author as a “failed spy afraid of being sued”. He accused the US intelligence agencies of acting like “Nazi Germany”, adding: “It was a group of opponents that got together, sick people, and they put that crap together.”
Yesterday Trump took to Twitter to declare: “Intelligence insiders now claim the Trump dossier is ‘a complete fraud!’”
Why did Steele decide to break cover? What are the long-term implications of a former British spy taking on an incoming American president? And could Trump really be the ultimate Russian fantasy, a Kremlin agent in the Oval Office?
Some time around 1986 a discreet approach was made on behalf of MI6 to Steele while he was an undergraduate at Girton College, Cambridge. A president of the Cambridge Union debating society, he reportedly described himself as a “confirmed socialist” but was judged to be an ideal recruit to the Secret Intelligence Service.
At the Oxford Union, Balliol College’s Boris Johnson was elected president that same year. But Oxford has always been better known for its politicians and Cambridge for its spies. And while the future foreign secretary was an ebullient bon viveur and showman even then, Steele was content to live a life of relative obscurity.
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By 1990 Steele was officially listed as second secretary (chancery) at the British embassy in Moscow. While there he worked closely with Sir Tim Barrow, the new ambassador to the EU. His MI6 peers included another young recruit, Alex Younger, who now heads the intelligence service and has been left with a giant headache by Steele’s actions.
When Steele arrived in Moscow Putin was still in the KGB and acting as an adviser to Anatoly Sobchak, the then mayor of St Petersburg. Together the two spies on opposite sides of the Cold War divide experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union but drew different conclusions about the way the future of East and West should develop.
Steele lived in Moscow with his wife Laura, whom he had met on a double-date in 1988. His “grey man” persona led her to dub him “Chris Whatsit”. A friend from that time recalled the couple faced “constant harassment” from the KGB, which even included the theft of Laura’s favourite pair of shoes from their flat.
“Steele’s wife called him ‘Chris Whatsit’ and they faced constant harassment from the KGB
An associate of Steele described him as a brilliant linguist and analyst who was “sometimes awkward in his interactions with people” but otherwise the consummate spy, adding: “Chris is an introverted, detail man. He had an impressive network of contacts.”
After three years in Moscow the Steeles returned to Britain where they bought a house in southeast London and had two sons, Matthew and Henry. In 1998 they were posted to Paris where Steele took the title first secretary (financial). Their daughter Georgina was born in France two years later.
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In 2002 they moved back to Britain, eventually settling near Farnham, in Surrey. Steele worked his way up in MI6 to head the Russia desk in London where he had to deal with the fallout from the murder in 2006 of Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB officer assassinated by his old colleagues with a lethal dose of radioactive polonium-210 in his tea during a meeting at a Mayfair hotel.
Steele was profoundly affected by Litvinenko’s death and appears to have concluded that Putin ordered it. Aki Peritz, a former CIA officer, said this could have been a turning point for the MI6 man. “If I had to speculate, I’d say that it became personal. What happened later [with the Trump dossier] might have been payback.”
Some believe Litvinenko’s murder enraged Steele so much he began a vendetta against Russia, which eventually may have led him to take risks such as the decision to circulate the Trump dossier.
A friend of Steele’s, however, dismissed this notion. “The idea he would have gone off on a crusade is excessive,” he said. “He was approached to do a job and he did it. It targeted an old adversary, yes, and the job allowed him to mix business with pleasure, but it was a commercial contract.”
Laura, who had suffered bouts of illness in France, died aged just 43 in September 2009 of cirrhosis of the liver. Steele later married again and had a fourth child with his new wife.
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Shortly before his first wife’s death Steele retired from MI6 and founded Orbis with Christopher Burrows, another former MI6 operative. The company has earned £1m over the past two years and was instrumental in exposing corruption at Fifa, world football’s governing body, with Steele assisting the FBI.
One former associate of Steele described low-key meetings with contacts at an underground wine bar in Mayfair. He maintained links with his old employers and at a centenary party for MI6 he was on a team of former spies who played “University Challenge — intelligence officers vs intelligence historians”, adjudicated by Jeremy Paxman.
Steele produced the first instalment of his Trump dossier in June last year. Five months earlier Trump, whose penchant for boosting Putin had already raised eyebrows, startled American hawks by defending the Russian president after a British judge concluded that he had probably ordered Litvinenko’s murder.
“I don’t think they’ve found him guilty,” Trump said. “They say a lot of things about me that are untrue too. If he did it, fine. But I don’t know that he did it.”
Elements of Steele’s dossier appear unlikely to be true and little in it can be verified. Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, who was named as having met a Russian intelligence official in Prague in August, has denied being out of the country that month or of having visited the Czech Republic.
“But just because not everything in the dossier is true doesn’t mean that nothing in it is,” said one veteran intelligence official with extensive Cold War experience.
“Maybe the source got Cohen’s name wrong. Was the meeting in fact in Budapest in July? It’s easy to get to Prague without getting a stamp in one’s passport. It’s a two-hour drive from Dresden and three hours from Vienna.”
Michael Morell, a former acting CIA director, said after reading the dossier he was “transformed back into an intelligence analyst at CIA and I felt like I was reading raw intelligence reports from sources”.
Some bits of information, he told CNN, he knew were true, other “small bits” he knew to be false and a lot he had no idea about: “This is what you see when you look at raw intelligence. And, very important to remember, sources — even the best CIA sources — get things wrong all the time.”
Although an espionage professional who was used to casting a dispassionate and even cynical eye on human failings and foibles, Steele had been convinced by his experience with Russia that Putin was a real threat to the stability of the West.
If the Russian president had the type of kompromat (compromising material) that could turn the leader of the free world into his puppet, Steele concluded, then his dossier needed a distribution wider than that of Trump’s vanquished political opponents.
Some time in the late summer or early autumn he passed parts of his dossier to the FBI, but grew frustrated that the bureau seemed more interested in investigating Hillary Clinton’s secret email server than looking into Trump’s Russian ties.
Steele also began to circulate his findings among American journalists, meeting one, David Corn, Washington editor of the left-leaning magazine Mother Jones, in New York to urge him to take the report’s “hair- raising” contents seriously.
They spoke on the understanding that Corn would not name Steele. “Someone like me stays in the shadows,” the former spy told the journalist.
Corn did publish some of Steele’s material, but he withheld the most salacious parts of the dossier and it had little impact. A week later Trump was elected.
Steele, however, was so exercised by the potential threat to western security that he continued his campaign to unmask Trump’s alleged ties to Russia, even though he was now out of contract and reportedly working for free.
It was then that he set up his meeting at Heathrow with the former American official to whom he passed the dossier. The official is believed to have given it to Senator John McCain, a prominent critic of both Trump and of Putin.
Some have accused Steele of allowing his personal animus towards Putin to cloud his judgment, opening himself up to the danger of being fed Kremlin disinformation designed to undermine confidence in US democracy.
“You don’t recruit a Russian,” said one intelligence source. “A Russian decides whether he or she wants to trust you with their life and whether the rewards you can give them outweigh the enormous risk of having the Russian secret service at your doorstep.
“So if a Russian talks to you, it will be to either misinform, or to take a massive risk and leak sensitive information for a personal or ideological gain. It will not be because you have charmed or persuaded them to betray the Russian state.”
Despite Trump’s determination to ride out the storm that has erupted over the dossier, the affair has added to concerns about his closeness to Russia — whether in term of his business ties or some of his appointments.
There has been particular concern over Michael Flynn, a retired lieutenant-general Trump has appointed as his national security adviser. Flynn had flown to Moscow in 2015 to attend a gala dinner held by the state broadcaster RT, where he had sat next to Putin.
Last week US intelligence officials leaked that Flynn had spoken by telephone to the Russian ambassador in Washington several times in the past month, including on the day when Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats in retaliation for cyber-attacks during the US election.
Trump is plainly angry about Britain’s role in what he views as an attempt to delegitimise his election. For once, Britain’s close intelligence ties to America appear to be a negative in the eyes of a US president.
Boris Johnson had been briefed on the contents of Steele’s dossier before going to New York and Washington last week to meet Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner, senior advisers to Trump.
The Senate intelligence committee said on Friday it would be investigating Russia’s attempts to influence the presidential election and if necessary would subpoena Trump aides to appear. If he chooses to testify, Steele would be a star witness.
The president-elect, meanwhile, is pressing ahead with plans for a summit with Putin soon after his inauguration.
Representative John Lewis of Georgia, an icon of the civil rights struggle, said the dossier and other revelations indicated that Trump should not be America’s leader.
“I don’t see this president-elect as a legitimate president,” he said. “I think the Russians participated in helping this man get elected.”
Additional reporting: Richard Kerbaj