The Christopher Steele dossier is the 2016 opposition-research document alleging ties between Donald Trump and Russia, compiled by Christopher Steele, a former MI6 officer. John Kiriakou says he worked directly with Steele on an operation together in London in the 1990s, and that Steele’s standing inside MI6 at the time was exceptional: “he was like the guy at MI6 that all the other MI6 guys wanted to be like. That’s how highly respected he was.”[1]
Elsewhere he specifies the operation. He worked with Steele “nearly twenty years ago on Greek terrorism, after the assassination of the British defence attaché in Athens” — that is, in the aftermath of Stephen Saunders’ killing — and found him “an absolutely outstanding officer: smart, suave, analytic.”[2]
Why the dossier went unvetted
Kiriakou’s explanation for how the dossier’s uncorroborated claims — including the allegation that Trump paid Russian prostitutes to urinate on a Moscow hotel bed once used by the Obamas — reached print rests on the difference between Steele’s old institutional role and his later private one. Inside MI6, a raw source report would be passed to analysts who would judge whether it was credible, corroborated, or publishable nonsense. By the time Steele compiled the dossier he had left the service and was working in private practice, where “there is no team of analysts to go over the intelligence” to vet or corroborate a claim before it moves forward.[3]
He states the same point as a division of labour, and uses it to exonerate Steele personally: “you can’t blame Chris Steele for this complete screw-up on the American side, because Chris Steele was a collector. He was a case officer, and his job is to just cast a wide net, ask his sources questions A, B, C and D, and then report back on what their answers are. And then it’s the analyst’s job to vet the answers and present the final analysis to whomever the consumer happens to be. In this case it was the Clinton campaign.” Cherry-picking the raw product is, he adds, “exactly what they teach you at the Farm in the analytic tradecraft course not to do.”[4][5]
Who commissioned it
Kiriakou’s account of the funding has not been constant, and the two versions contradict each other.
In one telling he reports that Steele’s work was initially commissioned by the Ted Cruz presidential campaign, which then walked away from the project, after which the Clinton campaign took over funding him.[6] Earlier, he had rejected that story outright: the FBI and the Justice Department “knew that the Steele dossier had begun as opposition research,” the funder “was the Clinton campaign,” and “in the very beginning the Clinton campaign put out this rumour that it actually originated with a Republican campaign, and they hinted that it was Ted Cruz. That was nonsense.” On this account “there was a relationship between Christopher Steele and the Clinton people, and that resulted in the Steele dossier” — and the client knew what it had bought: “they knew that it was just unvetted raw intelligence, the purpose of which was to make Donald” Trump look bad.[7][8]
He has also placed the dossier alongside a second product of the same operation: Fusion GPS produced the Steele dossier and the law firm Perkins Coie produced the Alfa Bank allegation. What he finds telling is a single orphaned passage — a section naming Alfa Bank and a Putin associate said to handle and distribute cash, “Putin’s bag man” — connected to nothing else in the document. “You look at that and you’re saying, well, what the hell is that doing in the Steele dossier?”[9][10]
His first reading of it
Kiriakou’s initial suspicion, expressed in 2017, was institutional rather than commercial. MI6 is the CIA’s sister and liaison service, “and no MI6 officer, past or present, would initiate such a dossier, such an investigation, without the direct input of the CIA. I think that the CIA’s fingerprints were all over that whole operation.”[11][2]
Kiriakou situates the episode within the broader media pattern he calls Russiagate, in which he says outlets treated uncorroborated Trump-Russia claims as established fact.