The spy who came in with axes to grind
Stung by the murder of his agent, the author of the Trump file was a man with a mission, says
EVEN intelligence professionals well used to reading CX, the secret “finished” intelligence circulated within Whitehall by the Secret Intelligence Service, were surprised by the poor quality of the Trump dossier compiled by one of the organisation’s retirees, Chris Steele.
Across 16 separate reports are unsubstantiated allegations, some quite lurid, all gossip attributed to six individual sources identified only as “A”, “B” and “F”, et cetera, devoid of any assessment of their reliability or past performance.
Steele is a man with a mission. He has excellent contacts within the Russian émigré community in London, and remains bitter that soon after his resignation one of the agents for whom he had responsibility as case officer, Alexander “Sasha” Litvinenko, was murdered in London on orders from the Kremlin.
Case officers inevitably develop relationships of trust with their assets and Steele lectured on the issues involved when he ran a course for recruits to the British spy service.
Recruits are taught not to “fall in love” with their agents but, contrary to the movies, few ever experience the trauma of an assassination. After the end of the Cold War, an event at which Steele was a first-hand witness in Moscow, the Russians tore up the unwritten rule book dealing with the convention that neither side physically attacked each other’s personnel.
Having studied the Russian kleptocracy, and documented numerous cases of corruption, Steele has acquired a jaundiced view of President Vladimir Putin’s regime, but relies heavily on what is alleged to have been said by two people, described as a former Foreign Ministry official and a former senior intelligence officer, to a “trusted compatriot”.
It is this third party, the trusted Russian intermediary, who retailed the claim that Moscow has been engaged with US president-elect Donald Trump over the past five years.
Two problems arise. First, the dossier’s author does not claim to have had direct contact with A or B. Second, there is no indication of the extent to which the middleman can be regarded as an authentic conduit.
What is his agenda? By the nature of their overseas residency, many Russian expatriates are hostile to the government and can easily mistake a combination of wishful thinking and deliberate misinterpretation for insider gossip from the fringes of the leadership.
In the bad old days the KGB routinely fed its political masters information it believed they wanted to hear. This was not out-and-out fabrication, but fell far short of the intellectual rigour with which British CX and CIA National Intelligence Estimates have been associated, at least until the Gulf War.
It may be that Trump was honey-trapped in his Ritz Carlton suite: he would hardly have been the first Western diplo-
The evidence in Steele’s dossier amounts to pretty thin gruel
mat, businessman or politician to have succumbed.
Ambassadors from Britain, Norway and Canada have been so entrapped. So was the first CIA officer sent to the Moscow embassy. Famously, a French attaché asked for extra copies when a KGB officer threatened to publish compromising photos.
However sinister a view is taken of the ubiquitous Russian security and intelligence apparatus, and however ruthless Putin’s administration, the evidence in Steele’s dossier amounts to pretty thin gruel, with some confusion over the precise roles played by Source D and Source E.
Intelligence analysts are taught not to trim their sails to suit their paymasters, but this may indeed be the exception.