The attempted Clinton-CIA coup against Donald Trump

[Paul Rigby]

Christopher Steele, Ex-British Intelligence Officer, Said to Have Prepared Dossier on Trump

Former spy is director of London-based Orbis Intelligence Ltd.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/christopher-...1484162553

By BRADLEY HOPE, MICHAEL ROTHFELD and ALAN CULLISON
Updated Jan. 11, 2017 4:20 p.m. ET

A former British intelligence officer who is now a director of a private security-and-investigations firm has been identified as the author of the dossier of unverified allegations about President-elect Donald Trump's activities and connections in Russia, people familiar with the matter say.

Christopher Steele, a director of London-based Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd., prepared the dossier, the people said. The document alleges that the Kremlin colluded with Mr. Trump's presidential campaign and claims that Russian officials have compromising evidence of Mr. Trump's behavior that could be used to blackmail him. Mr. Trump has dismissed the dossier's contents as false and Russia has denied the claims.

Mr. Steele, 52 years old, is one of two directors of the firm, along with Christopher Burrows, 58.

Mr. Burrows, reached at his home outside London on Wednesday, said he wouldn't "confirm or deny" that Orbis had produced the report. A neighbor of Mr. Steele's said Mr. Steele said he would be away for a few days. In previous weeks Mr. Steele has declined repeated requests for interviews through an intermediary, who said the subject was "too hot."

A LinkedIn profile in Mr. Burrows's name says he was a counselor in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, with foreign postings in Brussels and New Delhi in the 2000s. The Foreign Office declined to comment. A LinkedIn profile for Mr. Steele doesn't give specifics about his career. Intelligence officers often use diplomatic postings as cover for their espionage activities.

Orbis Business Intelligence was formed in 2009 by former British intelligence professionals, it says on its website. U.K. corporate records say Orbis is owned by another company that in turn is jointly owned by Messrs. Steele and Burrows. It occupies offices in an ornate building overlooking Grosvenor Gardens in London's high-end Belgravia neighborhood.

The firm relies on a "global network" of experts and business leaders to provide clients with strategic advice, mount "intelligence-gathering operations" and conduct "complex, often cross-border investigations," its website says.

The dossier consists of a series of unsigned memos that appear to have been written between June and December 2016. Beyond creating the document, Mr. Steele also devised a plan to get the information to law-enforcement officials in the U.S. and Europe, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to a person familiar with the matter.

"We have no political ax to grind," Mr. Burrows said, speaking about corporate-intelligence work in general terms. He said when clients asked a firm like Orbis to investigate something, you "see what's out there" first and later "stress test" your findings against other evidence.

No presidential campaigns or super PACs reported payments to Orbis in their required Federal Election Commission filings. But several super PACs over the course of the campaign reported that they paid limited liability companies, whose ultimate owners may be difficult or impossible to discern.

The dossier's emergenceit was published online and widely circulated Tuesdayhas generated a firestorm less than 10 days before Mr. Trump's inauguration. U.S. officials have examined the allegations but haven't confirmed any of them. The Wall Street Journal also hasn't corroborated any of the allegations in the dossier.

"It's all fake news," Mr. Trump said in a news conference Wednesday. "It's all phony stuff. It didn't happen."

The dossier contains lurid and hard-to-prove allegations. The FBI has found no evidence, for example, supporting the dossier's claim that an attorney for Mr. Trump went to the Czech Republic to meet Kremlin officials, U.S. officials said. The attorney has also denied the claim.

The allegations in the document, while unsubstantiated, provoked concern in official circles in Washington. Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he received a copy of the document late last year and forwarded it to the FBI.

"Upon examination of the contents, and unable to make a judgment about their accuracy, I delivered the information to the director of the FBI," Mr. McCain said.

The author of the report had a good reputation in the intelligence world and was stationed in Russia for years, said John Sipher, who retired in 2014 after 28 years in the CIA's clandestine service, where he specialized in Russia and counterintelligence. Mr. Sipher is now director of client services at CrossLead Inc., a Washington-based technology company set up by retired U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

Private-intelligence firms like Orbis have a growing presence. Major corporations use them to conduct due diligence on potential business partners in risky areas, but quality control can be loose when it comes to high-level political intrigue, executives of private intelligence companies say.

When government intelligence agencies produce clandestine political reports, they often include thick sections about sources, possible motivations behind their information and the methods used to approach them. Such background helps decision makers determine how reliable the information is.

Andrew Wordsworth, co-founder of London-based investigations firm Raedas, who often works on Russian issues, said the memos in the Trump dossier were "not convincing at all.""It's just way too good," he said. "If the head of the CIA were to declare he got information of this quality, you wouldn't believe it."Mr. Wordsworth said it wouldn't make sense for Russian intelligence officials to expose state secrets to an ex- former MI-6 officer. "Russians believe once you are an agent, you're an agent forever," he said.

Jenny Gross and Jason Douglas contributed to this article.

By the way, MI6 will not be terribly unhappy if all this sours relations between a Trump White House and May's No 10, as it significantly curtails the latter's options and buys time for regime change in Washington the better to restore the status quo ante.

Britain dragged into Donald Trump 'dirty dossier' row amid claims Whitehall knew of the file

By Gordon Rayner, chief reporter Claire Newell Ruth Sherlock
12 JANUARY 2017 10:00PM

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/...whitehall/

Britain has been dragged into the frantic row over the "dirty dossier" on Donald Trump after it was claimed that the Government gave the FBI permission to speak to the former MI6 officer who compiled it.

Sources in the US have told The Telegraph that Christopher Steele, a former spy, spoke to officials in London before he handed the document to the FBI and met one of its agents.

The document, which contained allegations of lurid sexual behaviour by Mr Trump in Russian hotels, was leaked earlier this week, and Britain now finds itself caught in the crossfire of accusations between Russia and the US.

On Thursday Russia publicly accused MI6 of "briefing both ways" against Russia and Mr Trump and suggested Mr Steele was still working for the Secret Intelligence Service.

The Russian embassy in London used its official Twitter account to say: "Christopher Steele story: MI6 officers are never ex: briefing both ways against Russia and US President."

Mr Trump has angrily rejected the information in the dossier as "fake" and the involvement of a former MI6 officer is unlikely to help Britain's intelligence-sharing relationship with the US when he becomes president later this month.

Mr Steele, who friends say fears for his safety, has gone into hiding while the veracity of the claims made in his dossier, and his own reputation, continue to be fiercely debated.

It emerged that he was the MI6 case officer assigned to Alexander Litvinenko, the former FSB agent murdered in London with a radioactive substance.

Mr Steele was hired to find information on Mr Trump by a Washington-based consultancy that was being paid by Republican opponents of the president-elect the BBC claimed they were acting on behalf of fellow nominee Jeb Bush and, later, by Democrats.

However, he decided the information was so sensitive that it should also be passed on to the FBI and to his old colleagues at MI6.

The Daily Telegraph was told during a meeting with a highly-placed source in Washington DC last October that the FBI had contacted Mr Steele asking if they could discuss his findings with him. The source said that Mr Steele spoke to officials in London to ask for permission to speak to the FBI, which was duly granted, and that Downing Street was informed.

Downing Street and the Foreign Office refused to comment, while security sources said that it would have been a "professional courtesy", though not an absolute requirement, for Mr Steele to seek permission for a meeting with the FBI.

Once he had been given the all-clear, he met an FBI agent in another European country, where he discussed the background to the file he had compiled. His contact with the FBI reportedly began in July last year and ended in October, after he became frustrated by the bureau's slow progress.

Dominic Grieve, chairman of the Commons intelligence and security committee, said he expected the committee to discuss the fallout from the dossier and the question of whether British intelligence agencies had been involved in handling it.

The FBI declined to comment, and the US embassy in London did not respond to requests for comment.

As the row over the dossier continued, the US vice-president Joe Biden said the FBI had felt obliged to tell President Barack Obama about the information it contained because of concerns it would go public and catch the president off guard.

Mr Biden said neither he nor Mr Obama asked US intelligence agencies to try to corroborate the unverified claims that Russia had obtained compromising sexual and financial allegations about Mr Trump.

Members of the US intelligence community have said it would have been a "dereliction" of duty not to mention allegations that the Russians had material with which they might try to blackmail Mr Trump.

Christopher Steele: A career in the shadows

Christopher Steele, who wrote reports on compromising material Russian operatives allegedly had collected on US President-elect Donald Trump, is a former officer in Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, according to people familiar with his career.

Former British intelligence officials said Steele spent years under diplomatic cover working for the agency, also known as MI6, in Russia and Paris and at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London.

After he left the spy service, Steele supplied the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with information on corruption at FIFA, international soccer's governing body.

It was his work on corruption in international soccer that lent credence to his reporting on Trump's entanglements in Russia, US officials said on Wednesday.

Emails seen by Reuters indicate that, in the summer of 2010, members of a New York-based FBI squad assigned to investigate "Eurasian Organized Crime" met Steele in London to discuss allegations of possible corruption in FIFA, the Swiss-based body that also organizes the World Cup tournament.

People familiar with Steele's activities said his British-based company, Orbis Business Intelligence, was hired by the Football Association, Britain's domestic soccer governing body, to investigate FIFA. At the time, the Football Association was hoping to host the 2018 or 2022 World Cups. British corporate records show that Orbis was formed in March 2009.

Amid a swirl of corruption allegations, the 2018 World Cup was awarded to Moscow and Qatar was chosen to host the 2022 competition.

The FBI squad whose members met Steele subsequently opened a major investigation into alleged soccer corruption that led to dozens of US indictments, including those of prominent international soccer officials.

Senior FIFA officials, including long-time president Sepp Blatter, were forced to resign.

Steele was initially hired by FusionGPS, a Washington, DC-based political research firm, to investigate Trump on behalf of unidentified Republicans who wanted to stop Trump's bid for the GOP nomination. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reported that Steele was initially hired by Jeb Bush, one of Trump's 16 opponents in the 2016 Republican primary. It was not immediately possible to verify the BBC's report.

He was kept on assignment by FusionGPS after Trump won the nomination and his information was circulated to Democratic Party figures and members of the media.

Steele's dealings with the FBI on Trump, initially with the senior agent who had started the FIFA probe and then moved to a post in Europe, began in July. However, Steele cut off contact with the FBI about a month before the Nov. 8 election because he was frustrated by the bureau's slow progress.

The FBI opened preliminary investigations into Trump and his entourage's dealings with Russians that were based in part on Steele's reports, according to people familiar with the inquiries.

However, they said the Bureau shifted into low gear in the weeks before the election to avoid interfering in the vote. They said Steele grew frustrated and stopped dealing with the FBI after concluding it was not seriously investigating the material he had provided.

Steele's reports circulated for months among major media outlets, including Reuters, but neither the news organizations nor US law enforcement and intelligence agencies have been able to corroborate them.

BuzzFeed published some of Steele's reports about Trump on its website on Tuesday but the President-elect and his aides later said the reports were false. Russian authorities also dismissed them.

Associates of Steele said on Wednesday he was unavailable for comment. Christopher Burrows, a director and co-founder of Orbis with Steele, told The Wall Street Journal, which first published Steele's name, that he could not confirm or deny that Steele's company had produced the reports on Trump.