Chris Whatsit, the brilliant Cambridge spy who spent his life battling the KGB
Top MI6 agent whose wife’s high heels were stolen by Kremlin spooks ... and who first revealed Litvinenko was poisoned by Putin’s thugs
THE strange and fascinating world of the British spy known as ‘Chris Whatsit’ was unravelling yesterday.
Christopher Steele was once MI6’s top spy on Russian affairs and lived in the shadows until being unmasked as the alleged author of the ‘dirty dossier’ on Donald Trump.
He was dubbed ‘Chris Whatsit’ by his late wife on their first date because she could not remember his name – but he revelled in being a man of mystery.
Now the 52-year-old is hoping to return to anonymity after fleeing his £1.5million home in Surrey, telling his neighbour to look after his three cats.
Mr Steele’s Cold War-style vanishing act reflects a career sparring with the KGB and its successor, the FSB.
He joined MI6 after graduating from Cambridge University where he was described as a ‘confirmed socialist’.
As a young intelligence officer in Moscow, he was frequently harassed by the KGB – once even complaining they had stolen his wife Laura’s high-heeled shoes from their flat.
The couple faced down Russian tanks after the fall of the Soviet Union and ‘highly capable’ Mr Steele went on to become
‘Danced like a Cossack’
head of MI6’s Russia desk – meaning he was one of the Secret Intelligence Service’s most senior spies.
It was no wonder he was considered hot property when he quit MI6 in 2009 to set up his own spies-for-hire firm, Orbis Business Intelligence.
Co-founded with another former MI6 officer, Christopher Burrows, it has earned £1million over the past two years and was instrumental in exposing corruption at world football body Fifa.
But it was Mr Steele’s gold-plated contacts in Moscow that led wealthy opponents of Mr Trump to the black door of Orbis’s discreet Belgravia office. They commissioned him to research Mr Trump’s dealings in Russia. The sensational results include claims that the Kremlin keeps a blackmail file on the president-elect which is said to contain a video of Mr Trump with Moscow prostitutes who are engaging in a ‘sexually perverted’ act.
Yesterday a friend of Mr Steele described him as an experienced professional and not the sort to ‘simply pass on gossip’.
Mr Steele was born in 1964 in Aden – his father was in the military – and grew up in Surrey before attending Girton College, Cambridge, and becoming president of the Cam- bridge Union debating society in 1986 – the same year in which Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson was president of the Oxford Union.
Contemporaries recall an ‘avowedly Left-wing student with CND credentials’, while a book on the Union’s history says he was a ‘confirmed socialist’.
In 1988, he met Laura on a double- date with his friend Neil, who became best man at their wedding in Berkshire two years later where Mr Steele ‘danced like a Cossack’.
Recalling the double- date, Neil said: ‘Laura’s diary of that day read “Lunch 12.30 Sue, Neil and Chris Whatsit”. I failed absolutely, but Chris Whatsit was a fast mover – by Christmas he had proposed to Laura and in July 1990 they married.’ Mr Steele was posted to Moscow months after the wedding.
He and his wife lived in an apartment with a pet cat and she took a job with British Airways.
It was a momentous period in the aftermath of perestroika and the run-up to the collapse of the Soviet Union the following year, when Boris Yeltsin became the first president of the Russian Federation. Neil said: ‘The work was hard, the times were tough and there was constant harassment from the KGB. On one occasion, they even stole Laura’s favourite shoes – from their flat – just before an official dinner.
‘On the day Yeltsin stood on the tank to proclaim change, I rang Laura up. I asked how she was. Characteristically, she told me that Chris was fine because he’d been sent on the streets to find out what was going on.
‘What about you,’ I asked? “Fine,” she said, and hesitated slightly before saying she was a little concerned about the tank 500 yards away with its large gun pointing at their block of flats!’ Though he was spying on the Russians, 26-year-old Mr Steele worked under diplomatic cover as Second Secretary (Chancery), working closely with Sir Tim Barrow – now our new ambassador to the EU – in the cramped old British Embassy across the Moskva River from the Kremlin.
After spending three years in the Russian capital, Mr Steele returned to the UK in 1993. The Steeles moved to South Norwood, South-