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 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, Southembassy
East London, and had two sons, Matthew and Henry, before the couple were posted to Paris in 1998, where Mr Steele took the title First Secretary (Financial).
Their daughter Georgina was born in France two years later.
Their friend Neil recalled: ‘They lived with the boys for a while in [the pop singer] Annie Lennox’s apartment on Rue Bonaparte before decamping to the beautiful village of Bougival up the Seine.’
While they were living in France, Laura began suffering bouts of illness, and the couple moved back to England in 2002, settling in Surrey, first in Epsom and later in Farnham. Around this time, Mr Steele’s work took him to Afghanistan, following the ousting of the Taliban following the 9/11 attacks on New York.
Sources said he was part of an MI6 team at Bagram Airbase briefing Special Forces on ‘kill or capture’ missions for high-value Taliban targets.
But Mr Steele’s interest and expertise in Russia did not diminish as he rose up the ranks.
He was a friend and contemporary of Alex Younger – now head of MI6. He moved back to London where he became head of MI6’s Russia desk.
When Alexander Litvinenko was assassinated in 2006, the then head of MI6, Sir John Scarlett turned to Mr Steele, who handled the case with ‘expert professionalism’.
But at home, events took a tragic turn. Beset with health problems, Laura died in September 2009, aged just 43, at Frimley Park Hospital of cirrhosis of the liver.
At a memorial service, Mr Steele described his late wife as ‘a liberal in every sense of the word and always on the progressive side of the argument’.
He added: ‘She had a dry sense of humour – often at my expense.’
Mourners were told by one of the couple’s friends: ‘The Chris and Laura romance was a great love story that led to over 19 years of marriage and three beautiful children.’
In any event, Mr Steele had decided to quit MI6 shortly before her death, and set up Orbis Business Intelligence with Mr Burrows. Company accounts signed off last month show it made £401,000 profit in 2015 and £621,000 profit in 2016.
The business thrived after Steele fed the FBI with information on corruption at FIFA.
He had been commissioned by the Football Association. US officials even met Mr Steele at his Belgravia office shortly before senior football officials were arrested over ‘rampant and systemic’ corruption and long-time president Sepp Blatter resigned.
It was the FIFA work which is said to have led to the lucrative deal to dig for dirt on Mr Trump’s dealings with Russia.
Mr Steele was an ideal choice. During his years in Moscow, he had established personal contacts with KGB, then FSB, operatives, some of whom went into the private sector in Russia’s equivalent of companies like Orbis.
Mr Steele would likely have subcontracted some of his Trump investigation to trusted intermediaries in Moscow.
One former Foreign Office official, who has known him for 25 years and considers him a friend, said: ‘The idea his work is fake or a cowboy operation is false, completely untrue. Chris is a very straight guy.
‘He could not have survived in the job if he had been prone to flights of fancy.’
Someone else who once worked with him said: ‘He is rather an oddball. Hard to get to know and somewhat introverted. ‘Certainly he did not present the image of the gregarious or flamboyant spy.’
Nonetheless, Mr Steele is not shy either. Dressed up in a James Bondstyle tuxedo, he was seen laughing with old friends at a bicentenary debate at the Cambridge Union in 2015, while listening to speakers including former Tory leader Michael Howard.
At a centenary party for MI6, he was on a team of ex-spies who played ‘University Challenge – Intelligence officers v Intelligence historians’ hosted by Jeremy Paxman.
Neighbours at Mr Steele’s Surrey home say he has another woman in his life. But he remains close to the family of his late wife.
Her father David Hunt, 79, said yesterday: ‘We last spoke to him two weeks ago at our Christmas get together, he was with us just after Christmas. He was fine.
‘We’ve just heard the news this morning and we are just a little concerned about it.’
Mr Steele’s neighbour Mike Hopper said he had left on Wednesday, asking him to feed the family’s three cats while he was away.
He could be in an MI6 safe house, as senior British security sources have said emergency measures are in place to protect him.