Christopher Steele
Christopher David Steele is a British former intelligence officer with the Secret Intelligence Service from 1987 until his retirement in 2009. He ran the Russia desk at MI6 headquarters in London between 2006 and 2009. In 2009, he co-founded Orbis Business Intelligence, a London-based private intelligence firm.
Steele became the focus of controversy after he authored a 35-page series of memos for a controversial political opposition research report known as the Steele dossier. It was prepared for Fusion GPS, a firm hired by an attorney associated with the Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign. The dossier claims, based on anonymous sources, that Russia collected a file of compromising information on Donald Trump and that his presidential campaign conspired to cooperate with Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.
Trump and his allies have claimed the Crossfire Hurricane FBI probe into Russian interference was launched due to Steele's dossier. However, the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee concluded in an April 2018 report that the FBI probe had been triggered by information from Trump adviser George Papadopoulos, and the February 2018 Nunes memo reached the same conclusion.
Early life
Christopher David Steele was born in the Yemeni city of Aden, on 24 June 1964. His parents, Perris and Janet, met while working at the Met Office, the United Kingdom's national weather service. His paternal grandfather was a coal miner from Pontypridd in Wales. Steele was raised in Aden, the Shetland Islands, and Cyprus, attending a British forces school in Cyprus, a sixth form college in Berkshire, and then spending a 'seventh' or additional term at Wellington College, Berkshire.Steele matriculated at Girton College, Cambridge in 1982. While at the University of Cambridge, he wrote for the student newspaper, Varsity. In the Easter term of 1986, Steele was president of the Cambridge Union debating society. He graduated with a degree in social and political sciences in 1986.
Career
Steele was recruited by MI6 directly following his graduation from Cambridge, and initially worked in London at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office from 1987 to 1989. From 1990 to 1993, Steele worked under diplomatic cover as an MI6 officer in Moscow, serving at the Embassy of the United Kingdom in Moscow. Steele was an "internal traveller", visiting newly-accessible cities such as Samara and Kazan.He returned to London in 1993, working again at the FCO until his posting with the British Embassy in Bangkok in 1998 and then shortly after to Paris in the same year, where he served under diplomatic cover until 2002. The identity of Steele as an MI6 officer and those of a hundred and sixteen other British spies were revealed in an anonymously published list.
Steele spent time teaching new MI6 recruits. From 2004 to 2009, he served as a senior officer under John Scarlett, Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service. Steele was a counterintelligence specialist and was selected as case officer for Alexander Litvinenko, participating in the investigation of the Litvinenko poisoning in 2006. Between 2006 and 2009, he headed the Russia Desk at MI6. Steele worked for MI6 for a total of 22 years.
Since 2009, Steele has avoided travel to Russia. In 2012, an Orbis informant quoted an FSB agent describing him as an "enemy of Mother Russia". Steele has also refrained from travelling to the United States since his authorship of the Steele dossier became public, citing the political and legal situation. In 2018, Russian double agent Boris Karpichkov alleged that Steele was included on a hit list of the Russian Federal Security Service, along with Sergei Skripal who was poisoned that year.
Private sector career
In March 2009, Steele and fellow MI6-retiree Chris Burrows co-founded the private intelligence agency Orbis Business Intelligence, Ltd., based in Grosvenor Square Gardens.In 2010, The Football Association, England's domestic football governing body, organised a committee in the hope of hosting the 2018 or 2022 World Cups. The FA hired Orbis to investigate FIFA. In advance of the FBI launching its 2015 FIFA corruption case, members of the FBI's Eurasian Organized Crime Task Force met with Steele in London to discuss allegations of possible corruption in FIFA. Steele's research indicated that Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin had rigged the bidding of the 2018 World Cups by employing bribery.
In 2012, Orbis was subcontracted by a law firm representing Oleg Deripaska. Between 2014 and 2016, Steele cooperated with the FBI and Justice Department in unsuccessful efforts to recruit Deripaska as an informant.
Between 2014 and 2016, Steele created over 100 reports on Russian and Ukrainian issues, which were read within the United States Department of State, and he was viewed as credible by the United States intelligence community. The business was commercially successful, grossing approximately $20,000,000 in the first nine years of operation.
Steele ran an investigation dubbed "Project Charlemagne", which noted Russian interference in the domestic politics of France, Italy, Germany, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. In April 2016, Steele concluded that Russia was engaged in an information warfare campaign with the goal of destroying the European Union.
In November 2018, Steele sued the German industrial group Bilfinger, alleging that the company owed €150,000 for an investigation into Bilfinger's activities in Nigeria and Sakhalin.
According to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, in 2023, Texas-based Steward Health Care hired Audere International, a London-based private intelligence firm, to target Fraser Perring, a critic of Steward and the founder of Viceroy Research, a short-selling firm. Audere paid Steele 29,000 British pounds to advise British Member of Parliament Liam Byrne on how to ask a parliamentary question about Perring and alleged Russian short-selling attacks. According to the OCCRP, Audere provided text for a proposed question to Steele, who confirmed he had sent the question to Byrne with minor changes. The OCCRP wrote:
Steele dossier
Background and Fusion GPS
In September 2015, The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication, retained Fusion GPS, a Washington D.C. political research firm, to conduct research on Republican primary candidates including Trump. The research was not primarily related to Russia and ended once Trump secured the nomination.Fusion GPS was subsequently hired by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee through their attorney Marc Elias at Perkins Coie. Fusion GPS then hired Steele to investigate possible Russia-related activities by Trump. This investigation produced what became known as the Steele dossier.
In July 2016, Steele provided a report to an FBI agent in Rome, the same agent with whom he had worked on the FIFA investigation. Two individuals affiliated with Russian intelligence were also aware of Steele's election investigation at this time.
In September 2016, Steele held off-the-record meetings with journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Yahoo! News, The New Yorker, and CNN. In October 2016, Steele spoke with David Corn of Mother Jones; Corn's October 31 article was the first to publicly reference information from the dossier, though it did not identify Steele or publish the dossier itself.
Stated motivations
Steele said he provided the dossier to both British and American intelligence officials because he believed the material represented a national security concern for both countries. According to Glenn Simpson, the Fusion GPS co-founder who hired Steele, Steele approached the FBI because he was concerned that Trump was being blackmailed by Russia.In a 2018 procedural ruling in the Gubarev defamation case, Senior Master Barbara Fontaine said Steele was "in many respects in the same position as a whistle-blower" in his actions sharing the dossier with Senator John McCain and briefing sections to the media.
End of cooperation with FBI
Steele first became a confidential human source for the FBI in 2013 in connection with the FIFA corruption case, though he considered the relationship contractual rather than a formal CHS arrangement. The Inspector General report on the Crossfire Hurricane investigation noted "divergent expectations about Steele's conduct," as Steele considered his first duty to his paying clients rather than to the FBI.At the Durham trial in October 2022, FBI supervisory counterintelligence analyst Brian Auten testified that, shortly before the 2016 election, the FBI offered Steele "up to $1 million" if he could corroborate allegations in the dossier, but that Steele could not do so. Steele disputed this characterization, stating on Twitter that the funds were offered to resettle sources willing to testify publicly, not to "prove up" the reporting.
In November 2016, after Steele discussed his findings with the press, the FBI formally closed him as a confidential human source, though the FBI continued contact with Steele through DOJ official Bruce Ohr.