‘The name’s Steele, Christopher Steele.’ That’s the way a former MI6 operative who wrote the notorious dossier alleging collusion between Trump and Putin introduced himself at a debate at the Cambridge Union last October. ‘And as you can see, sir,’ he told the union president to giggles from the audience, ‘tonight I’ve come dressed in my usual work clothes: black dinner jacket and the signature James Bond Omega watch.’

Less than a week later, Steele was denounced as a ‘reputation-mauler for hire’ and faced the prospect of ruinous legal action over allegedly feeding an MP knowingly false claims that a British businessman was a Kremlin agent. His investigations business, Orbis, was already reeling from spending $800,000 to see off a lawsuit from the US president over the dossier, and had recently suffered a huge exodus of staff. But that evening, Steele was determined to have fun. Reminiscing about his presidency of the union as a student in the 1980s, he hammed up his status as spymaster turned democratic crusader. It was an image Steele had perfected over years of largely uncritical media interviews (down to the quip about the watch), and it’s the image he presents in Unredacted, a self-exculpatory and score-settling memoir in which he represents himself as a truth-seeker standing up to a clueless cross-Atlantic establishment.

Steele was born on a UK military base in Aden and spent time as a child at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus – the base for British reconnaissance flights over Gaza, and in the news again after being attacked during the US-Israeli war on Iran – where his father worked as a climatologist for the British army. After studying social and political sciences at Cambridge, he unsuccessfully interviewed for a newspaper job and failed the civil service exam before being recruited into the secret intelligence service. Steele joined MI6’s Russia desk in 1987, just as Gorbachev was launching perestroika. Three years later, at the age of 25, he was posted to Moscow as second secretary at the British Embassy – a Foreign Office cover. The year after that, the Soviet Union collapsed. In 1993 he returned to London.

During his next posting, in Paris, Steele’s cover was blown after a list of more than a hundred MI6 agents working in embassies around the world was leaked on the internet. This public outing put paid to his career as a field agent. After his posting to Paris ended, Steele claims to have been appointed head of the MI6 Russia desk in London. By 2009, he had resigned and founded a business intelligence consultancy called Orbis with Chris Burrows, who was also on the leaked list.

In its first few years, Orbis kept a low profile in London’s crowded field of private intelligence companies. That changed in 2016 when Steele was reportedly paid $168,000 by an American firm called Fusion GPS to investigate Donald Trump, who had recently won the Republican presidential nomination. Fusion GPS was founded by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, former reporters for the Wall Street Journal who had made their careers out of delving into Russian corruption. The project was originally commissioned by a conservative news outlet, the Washington Free Beacon, but ended up being financed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The result was a collection of brief reports asserting links between Trump’s team and Russia. The dossier claimed that the ‘Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years’, and that ‘he and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.’ What made the dossier infamous was its declaration that, as a result of his ‘perverted sexual acts which have been arranged/monitored by the FSB’, the Russian state security service ‘has compromised Trump through his activities in Moscow sufficiently to be able to blackmail him’. But the most damaging allegation by far concerned ‘evidence of extensive conspiracy between TRUMP’s campaign team and [the] Kremlin’ – evidence that the dossier glaringly failed to provide.

In May 2017, Robert Mueller, the former head of the FBI, was appointed special counsel to oversee the official investigation into Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 election. After nearly two years of exhaustive research, the Mueller Report found no evidence that Trump and his team had engaged in conspiracy or co-ordination with Moscow to interfere with the outcome of the 2016 election. However, the investigation did establish that the Russian government ‘perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome’, and that Trump had tried to impede the investigation.

Neither Mueller’s investigation nor any other probe found evidence to support the dossier’s other key allegations: the existence of the so-called ‘pee tape’ of prostitutes supposedly hired by Trump to urinate on the bed Obama had used on a visit to Moscow; that Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen had travelled to Prague for secret briefings with Kremlin officials and hackers; that another Trump staffer had discussed sanctions relief at a meeting with Igor Sechin, the head of Russia’s state-owned oil company, Rosneft; or that Trump had somehow been ‘cultivated’ by the Russian secret services.

Nevertheless, Steele has doggedly stood by the dossier. ‘Our 2016 Trump-Russia reporting has not been “discredited”,’ he writes in Unredacted, quoting his own statement on X. ‘In fact its main tenets continue to hold up well and almost no detail has been disproven.’ But its core assertions remain contested and unproven. Such was the amount of uncorroborated and implausible information in the dossier that many experts, including the former CIA officer Daniel Hoffman and Ben Macintyre, a journalist who has written books on Russian espionage, suspected that it was itself a product of Russian disinformation.

Why was the dossier so shoddy, and why, despite this, did it command such influence? Steele’s own apparent lack of expertise may be relevant here. He makes much of his linguistic prowess, boasting of having read Anna Karenina in the original ‘in two volumes from cover to cover’, yet he has a shakier grasp of Russian than he claims. He mentions, for instance, a chance encounter with Gorbachev he says he had while serving as a junior spy in Moscow. When asked by Gorbachev, who was on his way to a meeting with John Major, what he did for a living, he claims to have answered: ‘I follow you very closely.’ Alas, the formulation he includes in the text, ‘Я следую вас очень близко,’ is a clumsily literal translation that makes little grammatical sense. One former employee of Steele’s I spoke to described his grasp of Russian as ‘tragicomic’.

These are pedantic observations. But they underscore the fact that, for all his purported expertise, Steele possesses no academic background in Russian studies, lived there continuously for just three years of a 22-year career and, by his own admission, hasn’t visited the country since 2009. Significantly, at no point in his government service is he likely to have line-managed Russian field agents to any great extent – he would have been too junior in 1990 and too senior in 2006-9. And it is field agents, whether spies or subcontractors, who provide the critical raw information that differentiates human-led intelligence from the mass of much cheaper open-source research. Others in the business intelligence sector have cast doubt on Steele’s analytic abilities – a shortcoming that may have led him to place unjustified trust in unverified reports from his sources. ‘He’s very bad at distinguishing truth from fiction,’ one industry figure told me. ‘That’s why we didn’t hire him.’

Beyond​ the question of Steele’s competence, the structure of the business intelligence sector shares the blame for the dossier’s deficiencies. Steele frequently writes about the ‘collectors’ or ‘head agents’ whom Orbis hires to conduct its research. Such labels deliberately evoke the hard glamour of spycraft. In fact, these ‘collectors’ are simply subcontractors who, in turn, often pay their own sources for relevant information, which becomes ever more corrupted as it travels down the line. Many firms are founded by former spies, but few subcontractors are former intelligence agents, and those who claim to be are treated with suspicion. Some collectors run their own small firms, creating yet another layer of subcontractors.

At the business intelligence companies where I worked for several years, our subs tended to be bilingual ‘knowledge workers’ from think tanks and NGOs, freelance journalists, PhD students or former PhD students: in other words, those inhabiting the no man’s land between academia and the ‘real world’, between Russia and the West, between youth and adulthood, between journalism and being a gun for hire. They are often highly educated people who for one reason or another have left the paths followed by their friends and university roommates: from the Gubkin University of Oil and Gas to Gazprom, from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations to parliamentary aide or second secretary at a Russian embassy, from the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics to an oligarch-owned tech company. Since the banning of the late Alexei Navalny’s opposition network, many of his former activists, dispersed across Eastern Europe and needing to make a living, have become collectors.

What does the job mean in practice? As soon as a client’s project is taken on, often involving the investigation of a commercial rival, we start calling round the subs to see who has the relevant expertise and capacity. Usually, they receive about a fifth of the amount the company charges to the client. For routine projects, that’s between £2000 and £4000. For that sum, the sub is expected to deliver preferably verbatim commentary from between five and ten sources – known as human intelligence or HUMINT – alongside public records research, such as obtaining court filings and cadastral records.

What happens next varies from sub to sub but tends to involve the following. The sub rings up their contacts – friends, family members, former colleagues, ex or would-be lovers – and potentially offers them a cut of the fee if they or someone they know can say something about the subject of the investigation. Sometimes, the sub uses their income to keep a few people on retainer. Then it’s a race against time for the sub to secure the requisite number of source comments within the usual two to three-week deadline. Because they are generally paid per source, subs are incentivised to pass along all commentary, including things they suspect to be hearsay or even false. The most diligent compensate for shoddy content with detailed caveats. But many do not.

No subcontractor willingly reveals the identities of their primary sources to the analyst at the firm, who in turn often conceals the existence of the subcontractors to the client (though it is an open secret that business intelligence consultants do not usually conduct their own primary source work). The commentary found in business intelligence reports is thus several degrees removed from its original source, which is, in any case, unknowable to the commissioning analyst, just as it is to the client. All this makes such intelligence essentially unverifiable.

When I commissioned a sub to conduct source inquiries, I could never be entirely sure that they hadn’t at least partly made them up. The best way to guard against this is to triangulate the research from several different subs and sense-check it through extensive research in public records. In practice, however, deadlines and budgets are almost always too tight to allow such fastidiousness. It’s sometimes possible to spot signs of sloppiness or subterfuge: one sub became notorious for lifting ‘intelligence’ wholesale from Facebook walls; another would procure quotes from supposedly well-placed sources which, after some research, were more often than not found to resemble parts of articles published in local papers.

But even the most reliable subs aren’t above massaging or padding out their reports, sometimes as a consequence of unreasonable demands by clients. One of our clients once insisted on a minimum of ten sources in a highly complex and urgent report. Against the odds, my sub delivered the work, to the client’s great satisfaction. Months later, he confessed that while all the quotes were real, he had spoken to only four sources and ‘cloned’ the rest to comply with the request. I kept this information to myself.

‘The team at Orbis,’ Steele writes, ‘had acquired – and retains – reliable direct access to Russian sources, allowing us to illuminate the workings of Vladimir Putin’s autocratic and closed regime.’ In reality, for the dossier Steele relied primarily on a single sub, a Russian-American researcher called Igor Danchenko. Before joining Orbis, Danchenko had worked as a senior research analyst at the Brookings Institution, where he distinguished himself by uncovering signs of plagiarism in Putin’s university dissertation in economic science. A lawyer by training, Danchenko is an expert in Russian energy politics and came to Steele highly recommended by Fiona Hill, once Trump’s Russia adviser and now the chancellor of Durham University.

It’s surprising that I had never met Danchenko. We both come from remote Russian cities (Murmansk for me, Perm for him) and served time as researchers at Washington DC think tanks in the 2000s before stumbling into business intelligence, mainly for lack of better options. Iggy, as he is widely known, has worked with several of my former colleagues in London and the US. They praised his diligence and were horrified by the toll the dossier had taken on his life: unmasked by an anonymous blogger in 2017, he was later charged with lying about his sources to the FBI but was eventually acquitted in October 2022. The ordeal left him financially broken and all but unemployable.

Steele ‘supported me after I won’, Danchenko told me. ‘But before that, I was alone. Nobody stood by me, apart from my wife and literally two friends.’ Steele had broken off contact once the dossier was published. ‘My wife thinks that he could have found a way to pass on a small message, to say “Take care, man,” just to do a human thing,’ Danchenko said. ‘But he acted like a true spy. He broke all communication. So as not to expose anyone. And so did I.’ Danchenko spent nearly five hours talking to me on the phone. He spoke in eloquent and profanity-leavened Russian, only occasionally segueing into mildly accented English. He struck me as thoughtful and idealistic, with scabrous humour and a strong sense of personal morality. Describing himself as a ‘typical masochist’ who relishes his ability to endure pressure, Danchenko quoted Joseph Brodsky and Eduard Limonov, invoked the Russian international relations scholar Alexei Bogaturov, recited the lyrics to a song by Grazhdanskaya Oborona, the USSR’s first psychedelic punk band, and riffed on Chomsky’s notion of universal grammar. Although he is not a drinker, talking to Danchenko in the early hours I felt like I was trapped in Venedikt Yerofeyev’s alcoholic fever dream Moskva-Petushki. There was something anachronistic about him, the aura of a Soviet-era intelligent from a previous generation.

By the time Steele asked him to unearth kompromat on Trump, Danchenko had completed, on his estimate, at least a hundred reports for Orbis. Most comprised open-source research for innocuous assignments relating to risk analysis or pre-transactional due diligence, but many also involved HUMINT. Although he had little experience in such a high-profile matter, he took on the job of investigating a US presidential candidate just as he would any other assignment, and wasn’t paid a special rate for it.

Not having any direct high-level Russian contacts of his own, Danchenko got in touch with Olga Galkina, a childhood friend working in PR in Cyprus who had previously served as a spokesperson for various officials in Russia as well as for the country’s nuclear watchdog. In an interview now declassified by the Trump administration, Danchenko told the FBI that it was Galkina who had supplied some of the most damaging allegations in the dossier, including the flimsy claim that Cohen had travelled to Prague to meet Kremlin representatives. According to the Wall Street Journal, Galkina also claimed that her own employer, a tech firm owned by a Russian entrepreneur with whom she was mired in an acrimonious contractual dispute, was involved in the hack of Democratic Party servers (a claim the company denied and for which no evidence has emerged).

Danchenko refuses to comment on Galkina or to confirm the identities of his other sources. But an investigation by the Washington Post revealed that another contact of Danchenko’s, Charles Dolan Jr, an American PR executive, was likely to have been behind the ‘pee tape’ claims. This was also the conclusion of Special Counsel John Durham’s exhaustive report into Russiagate, published in 2023. Dolan worked on Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and advised Hillary during her unsuccessful presidential bid in 2008. In between his stints with the Democrats, he was a senior member of the Russia team at Ketchum, a PR company whose clients included both the Russian government and Gazprom. During that time, he is said to have interacted with Putin’s powerful press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, and other senior officials. Yet the original source for the dossier’s claims of a pee tape wasn’t a highly placed Russian insider but anonymous members of staff at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow; Dolan also admitted to investigators that he had fabricated at least one allegation about the Russia-related activities of Trump’s team. Neither Dolan nor Galkina, who between them are believed to have provided the main claims behind the Trump collusion narrative, can plausibly be said to have had access to major Kremlin secrets.

Danchenko defends his research: he told me he had a duty to pass on to Steele all the information he collected, including apparent gossip and hearsay. But he is adamant that he caveated his findings as to their likely accuracy and the reliability of the sources. No such caveats appear to have made it into the dossier, which Danchenko says he didn’t read before its release and doesn’t accept as his work. Nor has he read Unredacted in its entirety. ‘I have enough problems,’ he said. ‘One day I’ll write my own account and we’ll compare notes.’ I asked him whether he thinks he might have been unwittingly used by the Democrats to launder baseless assertions planted by Clinton insiders such as Dolan to make them look like the products of independent investigative research. ‘I don’t think I was used by Chuck [Dolan],’ he told me. ‘He is a seasoned political operative but I doubt he’s capable of something that sophisticated.’

Many in the sector stand by Danchenko. ‘I always feel sorry for Iggy, who got dragged through the courts,’ one business intelligence analyst told me. ‘He swears that his original reports were enormously caveated. He didn’t believe lots of what he reported.’ Danchenko’s claim not to recognise the text of the dossier rings true: subs don’t see the final reports that incorporate their findings. If nothing else, the dossier’s style and syntax clearly point to Steele’s authorship. After it first appeared in the public domain, published online by BuzzFeed in January 2017 with its origin undisclosed, it took my old schoolfriend Bradley Hope, then working at the Wall Street Journal, less than a day to work out Steele’s identity. ‘I called around – it’s a small world – and immediately I was being told that it’s definitely Chris Steele because this is the kind of tendentious bilge that only he could have produced,’ he told me.

One way in which Steele compensates for his questionable source network and apparent lack of direct expertise involving Russia is by aggressively leveraging his status as a former intelligence officer. It is this at which he truly excels, thanks largely to an outsize capacity for self-promotion – at one point in Unredacted he describes his tenure at the Russia desk (‘a service within the Service. An elite service’) as ‘effectively the professional equivalent of playing in the English (soccer) Premier League or, in US terms, the Super Bowl’.

Steele boasts about having been ‘one of the first’ to conclude that the former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, who died from polonium exposure in 2006, had been the victim of a Russian state plot – even though Litvinenko himself had suggested as much from his hospital bed. He also takes credit for helping the FBI to unearth a massive bribery scandal in Fifa, the international football governing body. Luke Harding, the Guardian’s former Russia correspondent, wrote in his 2017 book Collusion that ‘Steele discovered that Fifa corruption was global.’ However, a review by the US Justice Department later found that none of the material Steele provided to the FBI was used in the subsequent indictments of Fifa officials. As the journalist Barry Meier writes in Spooked: The Secret Rise of Private Spies (2021), an exposé of the business intelligence sector, ‘Steele basically acted as a middleman’, introducing the FBI to the journalist who actually broke the story. Meier describes Steele as having ‘the bravado of a private spy who wanted people to believe that he knew more than he did’, which may explain his decision not to caveat Danchenko’s findings in the dossier.

One of the​ biggest ironies of Russiagate, as it became known after the dossier’s release, is that despite there being no basis to its claim of collusion between Trump and Putin, Steele does have Russian connections of his own, some of them close to the Kremlin. Among his first clients was Oleg Deripaska, founder of Rusal, the world’s second largest aluminium producer. Orbis was hired to produce intelligence and help track down money that Deripaska claims was embezzled from him by Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager for some of the 2016 presidential campaign, who was an associate of Deripaska’s between 2005 and 2009. However, their relationship reportedly soured following a failed business venture in Ukraine. By the time Manafort joined Trump’s team, his dispute with Deripaska had been smouldering for around five years; it came to a head in 2018 when a Deripaska-controlled company sued Manafort and his business partner for $25 million in damages. Even before it was tasked with compiling the Trump dossier, Orbis had been targeting Manafort, possibly on Deripaska’s behalf. It’s unquestionably true that the dossier’s focus on Manafort’s alleged Russia ties as the link between Trump and the Kremlin served not only the interests of anti-Trump Democrats but also those of a Russian oligarch.

Steele has addressed his relationship with Deripaska on several occasions, claiming in Unredacted that ‘in private, we knew Deripaska was contemptuous of Putin,’ an assertion belied by Deripaska’s documented links to companies that produce armoured personnel carriers, infantry fighting vehicles and military-grade armoured cars for the Russian army. Steele also writes that when he began working with Deripaska, ‘the world showed little concern for how Russia’s oligarchs had come by their wealth, nor was there much concern about the degree of political influence they enjoyed in Western countries like Britain.’ Yet Steele maintained a relationship with Deripaska at least as late as 2017, by which time there was widespread speculation in the media that he was soon to be sanctioned. The following year, the US Office of Foreign Assets Control designated him a Specially Designated National for ‘malign activity’. Deripaska has denied any involvement with the dossier, telling reporters that he had ‘absolutely nothing to do with this project’ and ‘certainly wasn’t involved in any activity related to it’.

Deripaska wasn’t the only prominent Russian businessman who paid Steele. Among Orbis’s clients was a global advisory firm working on behalf of the father and son billionaires Vladimir and Sergei Makhlai, controlling shareholders of the ammonia producer TogliattiAzot. According to a former Orbis employee, Steele was tasked with investigating Dmitry Mazepin, whose chemical company Uralchem was mounting a hostile takeover of ToAZ. For the assignment, Steele employed an unorthodox method that leveraged his high-level political contacts. In November 2022 the Labour MP Liam Byrne, a former chief secretary to the Treasury, asked a question in Parliament about the ‘clear risk that oligarchs are using proxies, and that this misbehaviour is washing up on our shores and in Companies House’. As an example, Byrne brought up Mazepin, who he claimed had transferred his corporate interests to a British associate just days after he was sanctioned. According to Intelligence Online and confirmed to me by someone involved in the project, Byrne had received his information about Mazepin from Steele, who was then under contract with Mazepin’s chief rival. Byrne didn’t respond when I approached him for comment; there is no evidence that Steele paid him to ask the question.

Earlier that year, he had made a similar intervention in Parliament, calling attention to the purported ties between a British businessman called Mohamed Amersi, a prominent Tory donor, and Russian intelligence. ‘Information I have seen from well-placed sources in the Kremlin shows that Mr Amersi is an associate and business partner of people with all sorts of friends, including some with close connections to the SVR and FSB,’ Byrne told Parliament in January 2022. ‘Perhaps the most concerning of Mr Amersi’s connections,’ he went on, ‘is Leonard Bogdan, a man with very interesting friends in the FSB and the SVR.’

At the time, Amersi was locked in conflict with the former Tory MP Charlotte Leslie, director of the Conservative Middle East Council. Amersi wanted to set up a rival organisation, Conservative Friends of the Middle East and North Africa. To prevent this, Leslie’s supporters commissioned Orbis to find incriminating material on Amersi and his associates. The former Orbis employee who worked on the report told me that their original research didn’t support the assertions made in the final draft shared with Byrne, which had been embellished by one of Steele’s favoured subcontractors, a spy novelist codenamed Douglas. Amersi described the allegations as ‘drivel’ and publicly denied any links to Russian intelligence.

Byrne soon made further use of parliamentary privilege in a way that benefited Steele’s clients. In March 2023, he asked the following:

Can we have a debate in government time on the activities of short-selling attack group Viceroy Research and its leader, Fraser Perring? I am told that it is working hand in glove with Boatman Capital, which launched the short-selling attack on Babcock International while it was overhauling our nuclear submarines. Mr Perring is a not infrequent visitor to Moscow, and is now targeting Home REIT, which provides homelessness services, including to homeless veterans. We must ensure that short-selling groups are not another weapon in Putin’s arsenal. Where there are links between short-selling attack groups and the Kremlin, we need to know.

Perring vehemently denies working with Boatman Capital and says he has never been to Moscow. But shortly before Byrne asked the question, Viceroy had published negative reports into Texas-based Steward Health Care as part of a short-selling campaign. Leaked documents obtained by Khadija Sharife of the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project showed that Steward had hired a business intelligence company to discredit Perring and Viceroy. That company, Audere International, paid Steele £29,000 to have a question about Viceroy raised in Parliament; Audere sent the proposed text to Steele, who forwarded a version of it to Byrne. In evidence I’ve seen, Audere employees agree that Steele could be provided with ‘further funding’ to expedite the matter, as part of his ‘ongoing anti-Russian interference work’. Audere’s CEO described the whole operation as a ‘false flag’. Neither Audere nor Steele responded when I approached them for comment.

Perring has asked Byrne to provide evidence of the claims he made in Parliament; Byrne has so far failed to do so. Incidentally, Home REIT, the social housing fund Byrne defended, collapsed the following year and is now under SFO investigation over a suspected £300 million fraud. ‘There are no ethics to these people,’ Perring said to me of Steele and senior figures at Audere. ‘They did what they did, they knew it was wrong, and their motivation was the almighty dollar.’ In the days after Byrne asked his question, HSBC suspended Perring’s bank account, as well as that of his 13-year-old daughter. As David Rose reported in UnHerd in October, ‘he was sacked from companies he worked with, ostracised by friends, and ended up £8 million worse off.’ Perring is now planning to file a defamation suit against Steele and others who he alleges were behind the operation to smear him, and has filed a complaint with the parliamentary commissioner for standards, which is still under consideration. Describing Steele as a ‘rogue operator’, Perring says the purpose of his suit is ‘to take out a bad actor and highlight the lack of regulation in the [corporate investigations] sector’.

Steele has already survived several lawsuits, including the one from Trump, whose case was thrown out by a judge in February 2024 without ruling on the truth of the allegations. Trump was ordered to pay £620,000 in legal costs; he has so far failed to comply. In 2018, a defamation case brought against Steele by Mikhail Fridman, Petr Aven and German Khan, whose Alfa Bank the dossier claimed had ties with Putin, was also thrown out, although the judge accepted that the dossier ‘does not present any direct evidence that Alfa interfered in the election’. Although Steele has cited these victories as demonstrating the dossier’s validity, the substance of his claims has never been tested in court.

Steele continues to keep himself in the news, most recently through his unsupported claim in February that Jeffrey Epstein was a Russian spy. Despite the financial and staffing difficulties facing Orbis and his other consulting company, Walsingham Partners, he has maintained a buoyant public face. After all, ‘you have to have style over substance to succeed,’ he told the Cambridge Union. ‘How you present yourself is now more important than what you know.’ It’s a philosophy that has served him well to date.