Christopher Steele

Christopher David Steele (born 24 June 1964) is a British former intelligence officer with the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) from 1987 until his retirement in 2009.

Christopher David Steele was born in the Yemeni city of Aden (then part of the British-controlled Federation of South Arabia), on 24 June 1964.

His parents, Perris and Janet, met while working at the Met Office, the United Kingdom's national weather service.

His paternal grandfather was a coal miner from Pontypridd in Wales.

Steele spent time growing up in Aden, the Shetland Islands, and Cyprus, as well as at Wellington College, Berkshire.

Steele matriculated at Girton College, Cambridge in 1982.

While at the University of Cambridge, he wrote for the student newspaper, Varsity.

In the Easter term of 1986, Steele was President of the Cambridge Union debating society.

He graduated with a degree in Social and Political Sciences in 1986.

Steele was recruited by MI6 directly following his graduation from Cambridge and worked for MI6 for 22 years.

He worked in London at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) from 1987 to 1989.

From 1990 to 1993, Steele worked under diplomatic cover as an MI6 officer in Moscow, serving at the Embassy of the United Kingdom in Moscow.

Steele was an "internal traveller", visiting newly-accessible cities such as Samara and Kazan.

He returned to London in 1993, working again at the FCO until his posting with the British Embassy in Paris in 1998, where he served under diplomatic cover until 2002.

The identity of Steele as an MI6 officer and those of a hundred and sixteen other British spies were revealed in an anonymously published list.

In 2003, Steele was sent to Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan as part of an MI6 team, briefing Special Forces on "kill or capture" missions for Taliban targets, and also spent time teaching new MI6 recruits.

He served as a senior officer under John Scarlett, Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), from 2004 to 2009.

He ran the Russia desk at MI6 headquarters in London between 2006 and 2009.

Steele returned to London and between 2006 and 2009 he headed the Russia Desk at MI6.

Steele was a counterintelligence specialist and was selected as case officer for Alexander Litvinenko and participated in the investigation of the Litvinenko poisoning in 2006.

In 2009, he co-founded Orbis Business Intelligence, a London-based private intelligence firm.

Steele became the centre of controversy after he authored a 35-page series of memos for a controversial political opposition research report later known as the Steele dossier.

Since 2009, Steele has not been to Russia or any other former Soviet states.

In March 2009, Steele and fellow MI6-retiree Chris Burrows co-founded the private intelligence agency Orbis Business Intelligence, Ltd., based in Grosvenor Square Gardens.

In 2010, The Football Association (FA), England's domestic football governing body, organised a committee in the hope of hosting the 2018 or 2022 World Cups.

The FA hired Orbis Business Intelligence to investigate FIFA (International Federation of Association Football).

In 2012, an Orbis informant quoted an FSB-agent describing him as an "enemy of Mother Russia".

Steele has refrained from travelling to the United States since his authorship of the Steele dossier became public, citing the political and legal situation.

In 2012, Orbis was sub-contracted by a law firm representing Oleg Deripaska, who was also a "person of interest" to the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation into Russia's election interference.

Between 2014 and 2016, together with Bruce Ohr, Steele cooperated with the FBI's and Justice Department's unsuccessful efforts to flip Deripaska into an informant.

Between 2014 and 2016, Steele created over 100 reports on Russian and Ukrainian issues, which were read within the United States Department of State, and he was viewed as credible by the United States intelligence community.

The business was commercially successful, grossing approximately $20,000,000 in the first nine years of operation.

Steele ran an investigation dubbed "Project Charlemagne", which noted Russian interference in the domestic politics of France, Italy, Germany, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.

It was prepared for Fusion GPS, a firm hired by an attorney associated with the Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign.

The dossier claims, based on anonymous sources, that Russia collected a file of compromising information on Donald Trump and that his presidential campaign conspired to cooperate with the Russians in their interference in the 2016 presidential elections.

Trump and his allies have falsely claimed the U.S. intelligence community probe into that Russian interference was launched due to Steele's dossier.

In April 2016, Steele concluded that Russia was engaged in an information warfare campaign with the goal of destroying the European Union.

Contrary to these false claims, the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee, among many other sources, concluded in an April 2018 report that the probe had been triggered by previous information from Trump adviser George Papadopoulos, and the February 2018 Nunes memo, written by staff members for that GOP committee, reached the same conclusion.

It was Steele who quickly realised that Litvinenko's death "was a Russian state 'hit. Twelve years later, Russian double agent Boris Karpichkov alleged that Steele himself was included in a hit list of the Russian Federal Security Service, along with Sergei Skripal who was poisoned in 2018 by a binary chemical weapon Novichok in Britain.

In November 2018, Steele sued the German industrial group Bilfinger, alleging that the company owed €150,000 for an investigation into Bilfinger's activities in Nigeria and Sakhalin.