Ex-Spy Who Reportedly Assembled Trump Dossier Appears To Be In Hiding
In the closing weeks of 2016, an explosive document was floating around in media and security circles. Reporters tried, and failed, to verify the claims it contained — that Donald Trump colluded with Russia, and the Kremlin held lurid blackmail material as leverage over Trump. Reporting on the document, which was first compiled as opposition research, was rare and carefully vague.
Meanwhile, a man named Christopher Steele was living quietly outside London. He was "eating his favorite tapas and pottering around Victoria, home to his newly refurbished office," The Guardian reports. He ran a private intelligence company, but aside from a spare LinkedIn page, had almost no presence on the Internet; searching for his name would bring up hits on a porn actor, a musician and a TV doctor instead.
This week, everything changed.
On Tuesday, CNN reported on the dossier's existence and said it had been put together by a former British intelligence agent. Hours later, BuzzFeed published the document in whole (and Trump and the Kremlin issued prompt and furious denials).
On Wednesday, one outlet after another — first The Wall Street Journal, then The New York Times and NBC and The Telegraph and The Guardian — identified Christopher Steele as the former MI6 agent and Moscow expert who assembled the dossier.
The U.K. government asked the British media not to report the name, saying it put Steele's personal security "directly at risk," but it was too late.
Steele's name was everywhere, and the man himself nowhere to be found.
On Wednesday, he asked a neighbor to look after his cat, The Telegraph reports. He said he'd be gone for a "few days."
The BBC reports that it was either Tuesday or Wednesday — and that it was actually three cats.
Either way, Steele left his house early this week and "hasn't been seen publicly since," NPR's Frank Langfitt reports from London.
"No one showed up for work this morning at the offices of Orbis, the private intelligence consultancy Steele co-owns in central London," Frank reported Thursday.
The Telegraph, citing an anonymous source, says Steele was "horrified" when his nationality was made public. Now, the source tells the newspaper, Steele fears a Kremlin backlash and is "terrified for his safety."
npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/01/12/509493584/ex-spy-who-reportedly-assembled-trump-dossier-appears-to-be-in-hiding