My wife Katherine called me up to the bedroom and told me that BuzzFeed had published our memos: The so-called “dossier” on Donald Trump and Russia.
It was the night of January 10, 2017. The publication of the news story was the first that any of us knew about it at Orbis, the business intelligence consultancy I co-founded with my colleague Chris Burrows.
There had been some indications earlier in the day that CNN were onto a story involving the legendary journalist Carl Bernstein.
And there had clearly been some kind of leak out of the U.S. intelligence community that our memos had been attached to its assessment of Russian interference ahead of the presidential election in 2016.
We weren’t named at first, but my wife Katherine thought it was only a matter of time.
Seeing the memos published without our knowledge or permission—with all the potential damage that could cause to sources—was a shocking moment, even for me as an experienced intelligence professional.
In our household, we differentiate between stress and strain. Stress is something that’s there most of the time because of all that has happened since we began investigating Trump and Russia.
Strain is something different; it has a physical impact on you. Thumping headaches, lack of appetite, inability to sleep. And this was a moment of strain.
Real-Time Source Reporting
What we had gathered in those memos was source information, which is usually assessed and filtered before it is put out in a public forum.
The difference here is that our project was run in real-time. So, it was real-time reporting produced almost like a live commentary on what was happening.
That is not the way we work if we have a project over the course of several months and then produce a report at the end of that period. The Trump-Russia project wasn’t that kind of project.
What did happen, and which isn’t visible in the raw document, is we gave a whole lot of context, a set of assertions about sources and their motivations, and other relevant information we had heard when we briefed our clients in America and the FBI.
We briefed more to them than is contained in the document alone, which ends up somewhat mischaracterized by people without access to all of the appropriate information and context.
The surrounding context is a lot richer, more diverse, and supportive of our work than is made out by our adversaries.
Photo-illustration by Newsweek/Getty
Some of our critics have questioned our credibility and processes because of the memos. But my response to them is simply this: I go about my work in a thoroughly objective and professional way.
We were looking at the U.S. election down the Russian end of the telescope, so to speak. It was, in fact, continuing work we had done earlier on exploring Russian interference in European elections, our “Project Charlemagne”.
I don’t think it was much different to that. It may have been a bit more dramatic than the European investigation, but a lot of the sources and sub-sources were the same. They were tried and tested over many years and client feedback on their reporting previously had always been positive. So, I feel quite confident about the work we did.
Because it was so controversial, it has drawn a lot of ire, particularly from people who aren’t either Russia experts or professional intelligence officers.
The views of those experts and intelligence officers would, I suspect, be very different to those of the politically-biased and partisan figures surrounding Trump.
There are a few things I might have done differently if I could start the Trump-Russia project again, but not a great deal.
I perhaps would have handled my conversation with David Corn at Mother Jones before the 2016 election differently.
It, in a way, aided the breakdown of our relationship with the FBI. Not because of anything in terms of our sources or our intelligence, but simply the fact that I’d had that conversation.
I had my reasons, which were to do with then-FBI Director James Comey’s decision to re-announce the Hillary Clinton email investigation, which I believe breached the Hatch Act.
I also put a lot of trust and confidence into a representative of the late Sen. John McCain, which seems to have been misplaced, though given his background and that the senator put him in charge of liaising with me, I probably wouldn’t have done anything differently.
Dealing With the FBI and U.S. Intelligence
My longstanding relationship with the FBI, which went back years, eventually broke down when it became clear they could not protect the highly-sensitive information we had shared with the agency.
We had no idea, despite being seasoned intelligence professionals, that the U.S. president had the power to declassify any intelligence they wished. We learned about that power because of Trump’s intention to use it.
Over time, we’ve had to be more selective and careful in what we are prepared to share with the U.S. intelligence community and the U.S. government.
We hope future U.S. presidents, Trump or otherwise, never use that power again.
It is so critical for sources and associates abroad to have confidence in the confidentiality of the information they are disclosing. The whole system collapses otherwise, which is only of benefit to our enemies and our adversaries like China and Russia.
Today, we are far more cautious and sober in our assessment of this risk. We are fully aware that were someone like Trump in office, and particularly him, then there would be a lot more declassification activity that is purely partisan and political in its nature.
There is still some information we passed on that is in the U.S. government system and hasn’t yet come out, and is vulnerable, particularly with projects that we’ve worked on since the dossier, and relating to source identities, methods, and so on.
But our engagement with these people has changed over time and we’ve deliberately built in more defensive mechanisms against that potential eventuality.
Ukraine and the Ongoing Russian Threat
Orbis is still active in this area of Russian interference. We work a lot around Ukraine for our commercial clients since Russia’s full invasion in February 2022. And Ukraine runs through this whole Trump-Russia story as a kind of anchor issue.
Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort had been ex-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s advisor. Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian political operator who worked with Manafort, has all sorts of Ukrainian ties. Ukraine is there when you look at the Hunter Biden laptop story. It’s there with Trump’s first impeachment.
Ukraine is, I believe, a kind of obsession for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.
When you look at the war now, you realize that it’s actually the main foreign policy objective of Putin’s Russia: To divide the West, reduce support for Ukraine, and discredit President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Anybody working on the war sees that the disinformation is often focused upon those issues, which are intrinsically linked to Putin’s war in Ukraine.
So, our work pattern is rather different to before, but we still end up coming to the same sorts of conclusions about the nature of Russian interference in America and other politics.
GAVRIIL GRIGOROV/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Since the Trump-Russia project, our business has, overall, done well despite the controversy. Orbis has prospered, and is still prospering, even with all the distractions and disruptions that have come from spurious legal cases brought against us.
People have continued to come back to us as clients. We have a very loyal and significant client base of major corporations, banks, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and more. So I feel very upbeat about the business.
Now, though, I lead a sort of dual life. I have my business interests and my clients, but also my media and campaigning role, which has come almost unexpectedly and unplanned out of the events of 2016 and 2017.
Countering Russia
There are all sorts of things the U.S. could and should be doing to counter the Russian threat.
Their posture on aiding Ukraine and clamping down on sanctions evasion is not what it should be. There’s a brilliant fellow at the Brookings Institution called Robin Brooks who puts out all these graphs showing huge increases in trade since 2022 between countries such as Germany and Kyrgyzstan, for example.
Those western goods are obviously not going to Kyrgyzstan.
On the 2024 election, the FBI and CIA need to be more aggressive in protecting the system against influence operations so that voters can have greater confidence in their democratic process.
The agencies seem a little reluctant at the moment to aggressively investigate this stuff, such as the FBI whistleblower relating to Rudy Giuliani, particularly when it travels into the area of partisan politics.
But I think they’ve got to do it because it’s getting worse, not better. The techniques being used by adversaries are becoming more subtle and harder to track. Some elements of the U.S. government are trying hard, but they’re behind the curve, as are other western governments.
For journalists, there is going to be a temptation to publish factual material they come across even if it has dubious origins, such as the recent dossier on Trump’s vice presidential candidate JD Vance, reportedly acquired via an Iranian hack.
But context is all important. When people talk about disinformation, it’s a bit of a misnomer. A lot of disinformation is true and factual, but it’s slanted, or it leaves things out, or emphasizes some things at the expense of others.
This is a complicated world. My fear—and I don’t wish to sound condescending about it—is that your average journalist, even your average investigative journalist, really doesn’t have the depth of knowledge and skill to deal with these things properly.
I condemn all hostile authoritarian state interference in our elections in the west, regardless of where it comes from and who it benefits at the ballot box. Anything that is not a legitimate part of the election process is not right and should be opposed.
You could look at this stuff as a journalist or as an intelligence professional, and you must be very, very careful and skeptical about deploying it. Because it is designed to be deployed as interference. The motivation behind it is key.
Life Under Pressure and Why I Won’t Retire
In my book, Unredacted, I tell a mysterious story about a vacation to Antigua with my wife amidst wealthy Russians and their superyachts.
We had been out snorkeling for the day and returned to our locked hotel room to find a strange pair of wedding bands in my wife’s washbag. They weren’t ours. And nobody at the hotel could tell us how they got there.
I suspect it could have been a Russian calling card; a warning of sorts. But I’ll probably never know for sure.
I’ve been in the Russia business all my adult life across diplomacy and intelligence, starting with the Soviet Union. I’m used to living with this kind of psychological pressure and a level of paranoia.
It’s a matter of degree rather than of kind. It’s like any other stressful job. Jet pilots, police officers, doctors. You just adapt to it.
The fact that I’m married to somebody from the same sort of milieu helps. My wife is a very strong and important advisor to me and on the way we live. We live carefully, but we live well. I don’t have any great complaints.
I haven’t been back to the U.S. since 2016. But I’ll be there to promote my new book. There’s no sensible reason I shouldn’t enter the U.S. My ESTA—a U.S. entry visa—was approved.
But that would change were Trump to be re-elected. I think it would be unwise for me to go back to America for all sorts of reasons. At the moment, though, it’s perfectly okay, and I’m looking forward to it.
I have no plans to retire from all this, though my wife would like me to. The problem is, this issue of Russian interference isn’t going away. And not just Russia. It’s China too.
It’s incumbent on people like me and my associates to stand up and be counted at this time for the good of future generations, and our own society and democracy.
I’d much rather that we were back in the 1990s when we all had a much greater peace of mind about the world. But it’s in a very dangerous place at the moment.
Bad, rushed analysis, and rushed, biased reporting is feeding into the incendiary atmosphere. We have to be absolutely clear as experts and professionals about what the threat is and how it is best countered.
If we leave the battlefield, as it were, others who are less competent and less well-motivated will take our place. And that will not be a good thing.
Christopher Steele is co-founder and director of Orbis Business Intelligence. He is the intelligence officer behind the “Steele Dossier” and author of the book UNREDACTED: Russia, Trump, and the Fight for Democracy (Mariner Books, October 8, 2024).
All views expressed are the author’s own.
As told to Shane Croucher.
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