Spy’s link to the Trump secret dossier
DOUBLE agent Sergei Skripal had links to former British spy Christopher Steele who compiled a secret dossier on Donald Trump, it was claimed yesterday.
Mr Skripal is said to have kept in close touch with an unnamed security consultant who works for Orbis Business Intelligence, a company founded by Mr Steele.
Former MI6 spy Mr Steele was hired to compile the Trump dossier before the US election.
It claimed Mr Trump consorted with prostitutes while visiting Russia on business while he was a property magnate before entering politics, an allegation the President has categorically denied.
Cambridge graduate Steele, 52, wrote that Moscow agents had filmed Mr Trump watching prostitutes perform sex acts on each other.
Russian counter-espionage officials claimed the unnamed security consultant linked to Mr Steele, also an ex-intelligence officer, worked as a British agent in the 1990s and recruited Mr Skripal in Tallinn, Estonia.
The consultant lives just two miles from Mr Skripal, a former Russian military intelligence officer, in Salisbury.
The colonel was given refuge in the UK in 2010 as part of a spy swap.
One theory being examined is that he was targeted by a would-be assassin this week because of his alleged continued involvement with British intelligence.
It is thought he gave lectures at British military academies. He is also said to have acted as an adviser to intelligence agencies, providing insights into the GRU – the most powerful and secret of Russia’s three spy agencies.
In his book A Devil’s Counterintelligence Dozen, historian Nikolai Luzan claims Mr Skripal provided details of more than 300 Russian agents in exchange for £72,000.
He claims the colonel regularly travelled to the Turkish city of Izmir, where he met British agents.
He said that his wife accompanied him on trips but had no idea about the nature of his activities.
After retiring from the GRU in the late 1990s on health grounds Mr Skripal took a position in the Russian Foreign Ministry’s General Affairs Department, stepping down in 2003.
He was arrested and jailed in Russia in December 2004 but freed in the spy swap.
The Steele dossier caused a sensation in the US in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election in which Mr Trump defeated Hillary Clinton.
The future president was said in it to have deliberately chosen to meet the prostitutes in a suite previously slept in by President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle. The dossier also claimed Mr Trump had multiple contacts with Moscow officials during US election campaign.
The FBI is investigating links between Mr Trump’s campaign team and the Kremlin.
And according to the Republican Party, the dossier compiled by Mr Steele is forming part of the FBI’s investigation.
An explosive party memo – released with President Trump’s consent – alleged the FBI used unsubstantiated evidence from the Steele dossier to damage him.
It claimed Mr Steele was a “longtime FBI source who was paid £113,000 by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign”.
Mr Trump branded Mr Steele a “failed spy”, adding: “It now turns out that the phoney allegations against me were put together by my political opponents and a failed spy afraid of being sued.”