Why is it that this year’s election feels encrusted with such déjà vu? Is it the outsize presence of Nate Silver? Former President Donald Trump’s presence on the ticket? Or maybe it’s because Kremlin interference appears to have been ramping up in recent months. In September, the U.S. State Department announced it was pulling out all the stops, offering $10 million for information on a group called Russian Angry Hackers Did It.
Ah, the bad old days. And while you’re trying to remember how you felt seven or eight years ago, take a moment to pity poor Christopher Steele. The British ex-spook hasn’t had it easy since Jan. 10, 2017, when an explosive dossier he’d prepared alleging Russian interference in the 2016 election was published by BuzzFeed News (“without our knowledge or permission,” he’ll have you know).
As he reminds us in “Unredacted,” a memoir of his struggles in spycraft, Steele immediately became a man hunted by journalists, excoriated by oligarchs and by Trump, whom the dossier fingered as familiar with Russian sex workers — the accusation has never been confirmed — and a cultivated and supported Kremlin stooge. (Trump denied all of this.)
Pity also Steele’s wife, Katherine, who worked for the British government and, according to Steele, was pushed into early retirement out of worry that her connection to Steele might damage British relations with the president. And pity Glen, the handyman whom Katherine sent away before he could finish his tiling work as the Steeles fled their home on Jan. 12.
In “Unredacted,” Steele is a convincing narrator, taking us through the twists and turns that led him to become a British intelligence officer (though, for arcane reasons, he can’t directly fess up to having been one) and then a spy-for-hire. The final section of the book is given to his work since the publication of the dossier.
It’s an often fascinating account of the mechanics of espionage, how sources are cultivated, developed, evaluated and factored into the writing of reports that are then passed on to politicians to weigh and consider as they make decisions. In Steele’s telling, spies are far from the omniscient figures portrayed by Hollywood: They’re casting around in the dark as much as the rest of us, relying on human sources much in the same way as, say, journalists — indeed, journalistic inquiry is one of the main ways that Russia’s 2016 election interference ended up a public concern.
This is far from the first time that Steele has, as the book jacket puts it, “stepped from the shadows”(in the past half-dozen years, he has participated in articles, TV shows and podcasts). But one does learn a fair few things about the spy and his connections. His relationship with the Trumps in the aughts comes into sharper focus. Steele says that he discussed the prospect of helping Ivanka Trump find business partners in Russia or China and almost did some work for her after a 2010 meeting at Trump Tower where he held Donald Trump Jr.’s baby son in his arms.
There is also much that remains redacted in “Unredacted,” especially about Steele’s work for the British government, but a picture of spying as a transactional art does emerge. Information goes to “the people paying for the intelligence to be collected,” whether it be a government or, as in the case of Steele, a paying client. It is so transactional, in fact, that government agencies, he writes, regularly farm out their work to consultants like him. It’s hardly surprising that dossiers produced in such a manner have the tendency to leak.
Steele insists that in his case it was higher motives that impelled him to forward his reports, indirectly commissioned by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and to the office of Senator John McCain. The former seems to have acted at a snail’s pace to integrate information in the dossier into an investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. A McCain aide leaked it to BuzzFeed.
Still, “intelligence reports are not usually evidence to be used in court,” Steele notes. “They contain credible information that either is true or might be true.” Unfortunately, his reports ended up in the court of public opinion, where he and his sources were disparaged and slandered.
Many of Steele’s specific allegations have not been substantiated, but he continues to insist that his reporting was never definitively proved false. Despite federal findings to the contrary, he digs in his heels about an alleged 2016 trip by Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen to meet Kremlin reps in Prague. In any case, Trump’s Putin-praising behavior since leaving office has kept the questions raised in the dossier open for debate. “Setting the record straight here has been one of the reasons I wrote this book,” Steele explains.
For the people who actually did have to try claims of coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia in court, Steele’s dossier was immediately put to one side. “We would not chase any unfounded leads in the infamous Steele dossier,” the attorneys Aaron Zebley, James Quarles and Andrew Goldstein write in “Interference,” a new chronicle of their work for the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who between 2017 and 2019 investigated claims of Russian interference in Trump’s election.
Journalism was a motivating force, even if the Steele dossier wasn’t. One of the investigators’ chief targets was the Internet Research Agency, a Russian company built to sow online chaos. Its existence was first revealed by Russian journalists in 2013, reported on by BuzzFeed News and then fleshed out by Adrian Chen in The New York Times Magazine, years before Mueller’s prosecutors brought charges against the agency in 2018.
Many critiques have been leveled against Mueller for being too timid. The authors of “Interference” argue that their hands were tied from the start. Senator Lindsey Graham apparently told Mueller that his team should not “end up with a blue dress,” a flip reference to the federal investigation of Bill Clinton, which began with allegations of financial impropriety and ended up exposing the president’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. Trump’s implicit promise to pardon people convicted in the investigation certainly didn’t help either.
The justice system has no “traditional or obvious way” to address a president’s criminal conduct, the authors write. “We were investigating the president using what is ultimately the president’s own power.”
A president’s power is especially worrying in light of the question posed by the promotional material of both books: Is it happening again? Is Russia trying to hack the 2024 election? Zebley, Quarles and Goldstein are convinced the answer is yes, although they do not go into detail.
Steele has a bit more to say. By the end of “Unredacted,” we are left with a sense of intense menace and foreboding. Putin’s cabal of intelligence officers is “prepared to use everything — even the global markets — to influence the outcome of the election.” This time, Russian interference seems to involve colluding with Venezuela and Iran to raise the price of oil and, somehow, worsen the immigration crisis at the southern border, then amplify the resulting political tension on social media platforms.
Steele’s book, however, isn’t a guide to election hacking in 2024. The picture of that campaign is only just emerging. He is also now less disposed to share all he knows. Several of his sources, he says, were burned when BuzzFeed News published the dossier. Our last chance to learn anything might be up to the press (or whoever collects on the State Department’s bounty). And even if a bigger story emerges from the shadows, you have to wonder whether the damage will have already been done.
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