TRUMP DOSSIER ROW SPREADS
U.K. in middle of spat over spy’s report
L ON D ON • To the passengers on London buses passing it at a crawl, 9-11 Grosvenor Gardens did not merit a second glance Thursday.
T he Georgian office building near Victoria railway station is l i ke thousands of others around the capital, so few would have bothered to wonder what goes on inside.
They might have turned their heads, though, if they had been aware that this was ground zero for the most explosive dirty tricks row to engulf a U.S. president-elect for a generation.
For the past eight years it has been the headquarters of Orbis Business Intelligence, where one of the desks is occupied by Christopher Steele, the former MI6 officer who compiled a toxic dossier on Donald Trump that now threatens Trump’s relationship with Britain, Russia and the U. S. intelligence services.
For more than a year, Steele, a Cambridge- educated father- of- four, worked in the shadows, building up intelligence from sources in Russia on Trump’s dealings with the country, after being hired by anti-Trump Republicans and then Democrats to find mud and make it stick.
By Thursday however, the 52-year-old had fled his Surrey home and was in hiding, while British officials found themselves in the middle of a frantic row over the “dirty dossier” after it was claimed that the British government gave the FBI permission to speak to Steele.
Sources in the U. S. have told The Daily Telegraph that Steele spoke to officials in London before he handed the 35- page dossier to the FBI and met one of its agents.
The document was leaked earlier this week, and Britain now finds itself caught in the crossfire of accusations between Russia and the U.S. The dossier included unsubstantiated claims that the Putin regime had “cultivated, assisted and supported” Trump for at least five years and said Russian spies also possessed a tape of a lurid encounter between the president-elect and prostitutes filmed in a Moscow hotel.
Yesterday Russia accused MI6 of “briefing both ways” against Russia and Trump and suggested Steele was still working for the Secret Intelligence Service.
Trump has angrily rejected the information in the dossier as “fake,” and the involvement of a former MI6 officer is unlikely to help Britain’s intelligence-sharing relationship with the U. S. when he becomes president later this month.
While Steele remains in hiding, possibly in an MI6 safe house with his wife and children, the veracity of the claims made in his dossier, and his own reputation, continue to be fiercely debated. It emerged Thursday that he was the MI6 case officer assigned to Alexander Litvinenko, the former FSB agent murdered i n London with a radioactive substance.
Steele was hired to find information on Trump by a Washington consultancy paid by Republican opponents of the tycoon, reportedly including Jeb Bush, and, later, by Democrats. The consultancy, FusionGPS, in turn hired Orbis in December 2015.
However, Steele decided the information was so sensitive that it should also be passed on to the FBI and to his old colleagues at MI6.
As the row over the dossier continued, U. S. Vice-President Joe Biden said the FBI had felt obliged to tell President Barack Obama about the information it contained because of concerns it would go public and catch the president off guard.
Biden said neither he nor Obama asked U. S. intelligence agencies to try to corroborate the unverified claims that Russia had obtained compromising sexual and financial allegations about Trump. Members of the U. S. intelligence community have said it would have been a “dereliction” of duty not to mention allegations that the Russians had material with which they might try to blackmail Trump.
While Steele’s name was first published Wednesday night by the Wall Street Journal, the British press — not usually known for their restraint — held off for several hours.
In Britain, there is a longstanding tacit agreement between the government and media whereby the media receives a notice — known officially as a “Defense and Security Media Advisory Notice,” but more commonly called a “D- Notice” — and agrees not to publish certain information relating to national security. The system has been in place for decades and is purely voluntary.
The British press received such a notice Wednesday night, just after 6.30 p.m. local time.
But after Steele’s name started appearing in the U. S. media, “it then became increasingly difficult to hold that line,” said Air Vice-Marshal Andrew Vallance, secretary of the government committee that issued the media notice.
He said his committee sent another notice advising the British media to hold off until 10 p. m., thus allowing time for the former agent to “make arrangements for personal security.”
Steele, however, had apparently caught wind that his identity could be made public, and hit the road. But not before arranging for his neighbour to look after his cats.
Coincidentally, while he was attending Cambridge and serving as president of the Cambridge Union debating society, Steele’s opposite number at the Oxford Union was Boris Johnson, now British Foreign Secretary and the minister responsible for MI6.
His contemporaries also included another young recruit, Alex Younger, who rose through the ranks to become the current head of MI6.
As Steele contemplates his next move, MI6 will be conducting a damage assessment of just how badly its reputation, and its relationship with the Trump presidency, has been dented. The fact that its boss, Younger, is a former colleague and reportedly a friend of Steele is unlikely to help.
TRUMP HAS DENIED THE INFO IN THE DOSSIER AS ‘FAKE.’