Christopher David Steele (born 24 June 1964) is a British former intelligence officer with the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) 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 falsely claimed the Crossfire Hurricane FBI probe into Russian interference was launched due to Steele's dossier. The Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee concluded in an April 2018 report that the FBI probe had been triggered by previous information from Trump adviser George Papadopoulos; the February 2018 Nunes memo reached the same conclusion.
Early life Christopher David Steele was born in the Yemeni city of Aden (then part of the British-controlled Federation of South Arabia), 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 (FCO) 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",Podcast: Sweeney Talks: Christopher Steele: The ex-spy who took on Trump. 31/10/2022 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 (MI6). 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 (FA), 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 (OCCRP), 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 (CHS) 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.
Post-election work on the dossier Steele continued to work for Fusion GPS on the dossier without a client to pay him. After the election, Steele's dossier "became one of Washington's worst-kept secrets, and journalists worked to verify the allegations". On 18 November 2016, Sir Andrew Wood, British ambassador to Moscow from 1995 to 2000, met with U.S. Senator John McCain at the Halifax International Security Forum in Canada, and told McCain about the existence of the dossier. Wood vouched for Steele's professionalism and integrity. In early December, McCain obtained a copy of the dossier from David J. Kramer, a former U.S. State Department official working at Arizona State University. On 9 December 2016, McCain met with FBI Director James Comey to pass on the information.
In a second memo Steele wrote in November 2016, after the termination of his contract with Fusion GPS, he reported that Russian officials had claimed that Russia had blocked Donald Trump from nominating Mitt Romney to be his Secretary of State, due to Romney's hawkishness on Russia.
Revealed identity On 11 January 2017, The Wall Street Journal revealed that Steele was the author of the dossier about Trump, citing "people familiar with the matter". Although the dossier's existence had been "common knowledge" among journalists for months at that point and had become public knowledge during the previous week, Steele's name had not been revealed. The Telegraph asserted that Steele's anonymity had been "fatally compromised" after CNN published his nationality.
The Independent reported that Steele left his home in England several hours before his name was published as the author of the dossier, as he was fearful of retaliation by Russian authorities. In contrast, The Washington Post reported that he left after he had been identified earlier in the day by the initial The Wall Street Journal report.
On 7 March 2017, as some members of the United States Congress were expressing interest in meeting with or hearing testimony from Steele, he re-emerged after weeks in hiding, appearing publicly on camera and stating, "I'm really pleased to be back here working again at Orbis's offices in London today".
Disclosure and reactions In early January 2017, a two-page summary of the dossier was presented to US President Barack Obama and incoming US President Donald Trump in meetings with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers.