Christopher Steele

Christopher Steele

Christopher David Steele is a British former intelligence officer with the Secret Intelligence Service. He ran the Russia desk at MI6 headquarters in London between 2006 and 2009. In 2009, he co-founded Orbis Business Intelligence, a London-based private intelligence firm. Steele authored a dossier that claims Russia collected a file of compromising information on U.S. President Donald Trump.

About Christopher Steele in brief

Summary Christopher SteeleChristopher David Steele is a British former intelligence officer with the Secret Intelligence Service. He ran the Russia desk at MI6 headquarters in London between 2006 and 2009. In 2009, he co-founded Orbis Business Intelligence, a London-based private intelligence firm. Steele authored a dossier using anonymous sources that claims Russia collected a file of compromising information on U.S. President Donald Trump. Trump and his supporters have falsely claimed that U. S. intelligence community probes into Russian interference in the 2016 election were launched due to Steele’s dossier. Steele has refrained from travelling to the United States since his identity became public, citing the political and legal situation. In November 2018, Steele sued the German industrial group Bilfinger, claiming they engaged in an information warfare campaign with the goal of destroying the European Union. In April 2016, Steele concluded that Russia was engaged in a campaign of information warfare with the aim of destroying European Union membership. In March 2009, Steele and fellow MI6-retiree Chris Burrows co-founder the private intelligence agency Orbis Intelligence, Ltd based in Grosvenor Square Gardens. Between 2014 and 2016, he created reports on Russian and Ukrainian issues, which were viewed as credible by the United State intelligence community. In 2017, Steele established a new company called Chawton Holdings, again with Burrows, with Steele again as an executive director. The identity of Steele’s as an MI6 officer and those of a hundred and sixteen other British spies were revealed in an anonymously published list that Her Majesty’s Government attempted to suppress through a DSMA-Notice in 1999.

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. Steele has not been to Russia, or visited any former Soviet states and in 2012, an Orbis informant quoted an FSB-agent describing him as an \”enemy of Mother Russia\”. He has not travelled to Russia since 2009 and has not visited any ex-Soviet states since he retired from MI6 in 2009. Steele was a counterintelligence specialist and was selected as case officer for Alexander Litvinenko and participated in the investigation of his death in 2006. Twelve years later 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. He worked in London at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office from 1987 to 1989. 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. In 2003, Steele was sent to Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan as part of a MI6 team, briefing Special Forces onkill or capture missions for Taliban targets, and also spent time teaching new MI6 recruits. He was an internal traveller visiting newly-accessible cities such as Samara and Kazan.