The Unpleasant Truth About the Steele Dossier…At Last

The notorious opposition research dossier on Donald J. Trump and his reputed ties to Russia compiled by the former British spy Christopher Steele back in 2016 continues to generate headlines almost four years after BuzzFeed published it. Indeed, it’s never been out of the news for long since that fateful day in January 2017, ten days before President Trump’s inauguration, when the world learned what that detailed dossier contained.

Its sensational allegations, particularly lurid claims of sexual excess by the new president, created a media firestorm that’s never died down. Nobody in Western intelligence circles wanted to be too critical of Steele, a former senior officer in Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, popularly known as MI6, with a solid reputation in Kremlin matters. After all, he headed his service’s Russia desk for three years before he retired from SIS in 2009.

Thereafter, Steele founded a private intelligence firm which has worked for various political and corporate clients, including a prominent Kremlin oligarch. His background meant that Steele couldn’t dig up dirt in Russia himself, so his research depended on people who could, in other words sub-sources. Given Muscovite acumen in counterintelligence and the ever-watching eye of the Federal Security Service, it was always likely that some of Steele’s sub-sources might be influenced by the FSB, and perhaps under its control.

There was the rub. From the moment it appeared publicly, Western counterintelligencers felt queasy about the Steele Dossier. It simply seemed off to those acquainted with Russian spy agencies and their modus operandi. As I explained back in 2017, its largely pedestrian claims about Kremlin atmospherics were mostly true, while the more sensational assertions were unverifiable and suspect. They inevitably reminded veterans of the SpyWar of past Russian disinformation campaigns. As I summed it up:

The idea that the Steele dossier represents an exercise in Chekist provokatsiya gets more plausible the more you look at it. It’s very much in the habits of Russian intelligence to disseminate a great deal of accurate information, sometimes muddied, in the service of a greater lie. The KGB’s successors are highly adept at assembling disinformation that results in more questions than answers for Western investigators. There’s no doubt that the dossier created enormous political churn in Washington—including murky assertions that haven’t been resolved yet and perhaps never will be.

None of this was criticism of Steele, per se, who faced an impossible collection problem: how do you get sensitive intelligence out of Russia, a place you can’t visit, where the FSB knows all about you? It wasn’t just counterspies who had reservations about the Steele Dossier. Some of the savviest Kremlin-watchers in the West expressed doubts too. David Satter, author of several perceptive books on Russia and Putinism, dismissed the dossier when it appeared as “a deliberate Russian provocation” and “a carefully constructed attempt to disrupt American political life for years to come.”

While Western counterspies, who viewed Steele as a friend and had no desire to criticize his work, didn’t speak as forthrightly as Satter, their private comments followed similar lines. To be fair, Steele never presented his work as anything other than the raw HUMINT reporting it was. Yet, nearly four years later we can confirm that the suspicions of Satter and Western counterintelligencers regarding the dossier were correct.

First, we recently learned the identity of Steele’s main sub-source, Igor Danchenko, a 42-year-old Russian national who lived in the United States for several years. Danchenko, a political risk analyst, was known and well-regarded in Washington, DC think-tank circles but he was hardly a public figure until Trump-friendly Internet sleuths outed him two months ago.

Questions arose immediately since Danchenko, who had worked for Steele since 2014, wasn’t a Kremlin insider much less any sort of Russian super-spy. How, then, had he heard all those salacious rumors about Trump that were circulating in Moscow power-circles? Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a staunch ally of the president, wanted to know too. Some of those questions were answered in mid-July by the Senate Judiciary Committee’s release of a redacted 57-page FBI file on Danchenko, including the Bureau’s interviews with him in late January 2017 shortly after BuzzFeed published the Steele Dossier.

Danchenko told the FBI about the six sub-sources he used to compile intelligence for Steele back in 2016. From any counterintelligence viewpoint, this was an amateurish operation that was highly vulnerable to exploitation by the FSB. Not to mention that at times during his interviews with the FBI, Danchenko couldn’t exactly recall where some of the dossier’s allegations came from. He had little light to shed on one of Steele’s most sensational claims, that Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, visited Prague in the summer of 2016 to parlay with Kremlin officials regarding clandestine Russian assistance to his client’s presidential run. Worst of all, Danchenko told the FBI that he felt Steele oversold some of his findings, presenting rumor as fact, adding that the dossier’s supremely clickbait-y claim regarding the alleged “pee-pee tape” involving President Trump was based on “rumor and speculation” from staff at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton hotel.

These revelations created further doubts about the Steele Dossier and its bona fides, just as Trump’s Senate supporters intended. This week we learned that Danchenko himself was once suspected by the FBI of being a Russian spy. Thanks again to questions raised by Senator Graham, Attorney General Bill Barr yesterday released an FBI memo which reveals that the Bureau had Danchenko under counterintelligence investigation between May 2009 and March 2011 over his ties to Russian spies.

Specifically, the FBI established that Danchenko acted in certain ways that looked suspicious from a counterintelligence viewpoint. In 2005-2006, he was in touch with the Russian Embassy in Washington, DC, and had multiple contacts with known Russian intelligence officers. According to the Bureau, Danchenko and one of these Russian spies “seemed very familiar with each other.” Interviews with Danchenko’s coworkers revealed that one of them thought that the think-tanker “might actually be a Russian spy.”

None of this is conclusive, and the FBI’s look at Danchenko, which included an effort to obtain a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to monitor his electronic communications, was curtailed because he left the United States in September 2010. Significantly, the FBI memo states that the Bureau’s subsequent counterintelligence investigation into Trump’s Russian ties, codenamed CROSSFIRE HURRICANE, learned of the previous investigation into Danchenko only in December 2016, after Trump’s election.

Predictably, Trump’s supporters are now having a field day with the revelation that the FBI investigated Steele’s main source for being a Russian spy. However, it should be noted that the Bureau never determined that Danchenko actually was working clandestinely for the Kremlin. The memo released by Barr cryptically notes, “The 2009 investigation remains closed to this day.” Which means that nobody in the FBI was all that suspicious of Danchenko, in the end. Surely if the Bureau had more recent information establishing that Danchenko was a confirmed Kremlin asset, Barr would have been certain to have released that to the public alongside this memo.

Think-tankers are known to have vaguely spy-like chats with intelligence officers from many countries, Russia very much included. They swim in the same conference-and-cocktail-party circles around Washington, DC, that combine wonkishness and conspiracy. This is why several of the Kremlin’s deep-cover Illegal spies arrested by the FBI back in 2010 in the GHOST STORIES counterintelligence roll-up were masquerading as think-tank denizens.

Moreover, connections to the Kremlin and its spy agencies would be exactly the relationships anyone would want for a sub-source compiling a dossier on Russian intelligence matters. Here, Danchenko’s knowing some Russian spies, preferably senior ones, would have been a boon to Steele’s efforts to establish what Trump’s relationship with Moscow really was.

All the same, there’s no getting around the fact that this latest counterintelligence revelation will permanently change perceptions of the Steele Dossier. That the FBI once investigated Steele’s main source on espionage grounds unavoidably alters how his findings will be perceived. It makes suspicions that the dossier was influenced by Russian intelligence seem firmly grounded, indeed likely. For any counterintelligence veteran who knows Chekists, it’s evident that if someone was getting played in Danchenko’s 2016 amateurish spy-games to get Trump-related information out of Russia, it wasn’t the Kremlin.

Added into this controversy is the recent massive report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence regarding Russian interference in our 2016 election, which explained that Steele had a long-term business relationship with Oleg Deripaska, one of Putin’s favorite oligarchs, a billionaire with deep connections to Russian intelligence. That Steele worked for Deripaska, via the oligarch’s lawyers, from 2012 to 2017, as the SSCI established, raises more questions about possible Kremlin influence on Steele’s research. As the SSCI report noted, this half-decade relationship with Deripaska provided “a potential direct channel for Russian influence on the dossier.” This matter demands deeper investigation.

It’s unfortunate that the Steele Dossier now appears indelibly tainted. It contained significant truths, salaciousness and unverified claims aside. There remains good reason to think that President Trump has Russian secrets he wants kept under wraps, just as it’s more than plausible that Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin know things about Trump that would upset the public if they leaked. Nevertheless, the warnings from myself and other counterintelligence cognoscenti back in 2017 that the Steele Dossier reeked of Kremlin provocation now appear accurate. If the intent of that secret Russian intelligence operation was to permanently muddy the waters surrounding questions about President Trump and the Kremlin, it succeeded masterfully.