As Manafort, Page, Papadopoulos, and Flynn came on board, the Trump campaign’s entanglements with Russia—and questions about their purpose—intensified. The search for answers would eventually occupy U.S. intelligence agencies, committees in Congress, and a team of FBI agents and prosecutors led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Before those organizations were fully engaged, however, there was a far smaller, independent inquiry under way.
CHRISTOPHER STEELE HAD PERSONAL EXPERIENCE WITH THE ruthless side of the Kremlin that Trump could not bring himself to see, stationed in Moscow in the early 1990s under diplomatic cover for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service.
Steele and Putin were nearly espionage contemporaries, Steele in Moscow, after the Soviet Union collapsed, while the future Russian leader was based in East Germany for the KGB when the Eastern Bloc began to unravel. Putin was permanently scarred by what had happened when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Crowds stormed the Dresden offices of the East German secret police and then turned their attention to the nearby headquarters of the KGB. Putin, by his own account, radioed a Red Army tank unit to ask for protection. “We cannot do anything without orders from Moscow,” came the reply. “And Moscow is silent.” Putin, sickened by the fecklessness of his government, returned to Russia and had begun pursuing a career in St. Petersburg politics when Steele arrived in Moscow. Their paths would intersect several times in the ensuing decades.
THE SOVIET UNION WAS IN ITS DEATH THROES AT THE START OF Steele’s Moscow assignment, and he would witness the hammer-and-sickle flag lowered for the last time, opening a chaotic new era for Russia and the former Soviet republics. Steele had joined MI6 after graduation from the University of Cambridge, where his success as a student allowed him to transcend his family’s working-class roots. His father worked for the United Kingdom’s weather service; a Welsh grandfather had mined coal. Steele excelled at Cambridge and became president of the prestigious debating society, the Cambridge Union. His path to espionage began when he saw a newspaper ad seeking applicants interested in overseas adventure. Only when he responded did Steele learn the ad had been posted by MI6.
Steele had seemed poised for a series of foreign assignments when his undercover career was derailed. During a four-year posting in Paris in the late 1990s, he was one of dozens of British spies whose true identities were published online by a disgruntled former MI6 agent.[4] Steele came back to MI6 headquarters in London and rose up the intelligence service’s ranks until, in 2006, he was placed in charge of its Russia desk.
He was soon greeted with a brutal demonstration of the Russian intelligence service’s resurgence under Putin, then in his sixth year as president. That November, Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB officer and Putin critic who had defected to Britain, was taken to a hospital with a mysterious ailment. British authorities concluded that he had been poisoned by a cup of tea laced with radioactive polonium. Three weeks later he was dead. Putin issued a statement of mock remorse, saying, “Mr. Litvinenko is, unfortunately, not Lazarus.”
Steele was put in charge of the MI6 investigation. His findings contributed to a broader official UK inquiry that took nearly a decade to finish and release to the public. It concluded that Litvinenko’s murder had “probably” been ordered by Putin. To Steele, there was never any doubt.
For all of his expertise and accomplishments, Steele had his detractors, and his departure from MI6 in 2009 was interpreted by some as a sign that he had realized that he was not likely to rise any higher in the spy agency. He also faced a personal crisis: his wife, with whom Steele had three children, was gravely ill—British press reports said she had cirrhosis of the liver—and died later that year.
After his retirement, Steele launched a London-based consulting firm, Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd., an increasingly common path for ex-spies whose contacts and inside knowledge of foreign governments and markets were in demand among corporate clients. One of Steele’s first contracts had him working for the English Football Association on an investigation into corruption at FIFA, soccer’s global governing body. U.S. investigators were also involved, eventually filing corruption charges against fourteen soccer executives. As a result of this partnership, Steele found himself working closely with FBI agents and sharing his research with the Justice Department—developing relationships that he would turn to again as troubling Russia connections began to surface in an American presidential election.
Steele’s involvement with that election began with a June 2016 call from Glenn Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who had founded his own private research company in Washington, Fusion GPS. Steele and Simpson had met years earlier when Simpson was an investigative reporter for the Journal based in Brussels and pursuing stories about Russian organized crime and its spread into Europe. One of Fusion’s business lines was opposition research, a euphemism for digging up dirt on political candidates.
Fusion had initially been hired in late 2015 to investigate Trump’s business record—including any ties to Russia—by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative paper. It was an unusual move for a news organization: media outlets generally don’t pay for stories, let alone hire private investigative firms to root around in politicians’ or celebrities’ lives. But the Beacon in this case was doing the bidding of one of its prominent funders, Paul Singer, a wealthy New York investor and major GOP donor who at the time was determined to stop Trump from winning the party’s nomination.
The money for Fusion dried up as Trump racked up wins in major primaries and establishment candidates including Jeb Bush and Rubio were forced from the race, but Simpson found a new source of support: Perkins Coie, the law firm representing the DNC as well as the Clinton campaign. With Trump’s praise of Putin already an issue, Perkins Coie was intrigued by Fusion’s tantalizing early reports and eager to pick up the tab, via DNC funds, to see what else the company could find on the Republican candidate and the Kremlin.
The new funding stream enabled Fusion to expand its probe. The firm’s research typically involves scouring public records, court filings, and media reports to produce a comprehensive profile of a subject—much the way Simpson had worked as an investigative journalist. To scrutinize Trump’s ties to Russia, public records searches wouldn’t be enough. Simpson needed sourcing that could get him closer to the Kremlin, and turned to the ex-British spy he had met in Brussels.
Steele signed on with Fusion in early June 2016. “I didn’t hire him for a long-term engagement,’’ Simpson later testified before Congress. “I said take thirty days, twenty or thirty days, and we’ll pay you a set amount of money, and see if you can figure out what Trump’s been up to over there, because he’s gone over a bunch of times, he said some weird things about Putin, but doesn’t seem to have gotten any business deals.” Steele was told the client was a law firm but not which one or its connection to the DNC. The ex-spy, his biography undoubtedly known to Russian intelligence, never entered Russia himself as part of the investigation. Instead, he worked through a collection of cutouts— intermediaries used to relay communications without raising suspicion. Among them were native Russians both in and out of the country who were already on contract with Orbis and in position to make contact with their own sources, some of them close to influential oligarchs or the Kremlin.
Steele and Simpson expected to turn up information tying Trump to shady business operatives, accessing unsavory sources of money, or otherwise entangled in Moscow’s ubiquitous corruption. But from the start, the information that flowed back to Orbis from Steele’s network of sources was more fundamentally unnerving, alleging that the Kremlin had spent years cultivating Trump, not necessarily as a future presidential candidate but an influential American sympathetic to Moscow; that Russia was providing helpful information to the Trump campaign; and that Russian intelligence possessed compromising information on Trump and episodes of sexual perversion during his 2013 Miss Universe trip to Moscow.
Verifying some of the most salacious leads would prove elusive for legions of reporters and investigators for the next two years. But in some ways the most alarming report from Steele’s sources proved accurate and prescient: in one of the first entries of what became known as the “Steele dossier,” he warned that Russia was waging a covert influence campaign aimed at disrupting the 2016 election and defeating Clinton.