Christopher Steele: reputation-mauler for hire Russiagate was just the start

On 17 March 2023, Fraser Perring, a financial analyst and entrepreneur who lives near Lincoln, received a call from a journalist asking him to comment on the fact that he had just been denounced in Parliament as a Russian spy.

“I thought it was so absurd that no one would take it seriously,” Perring recalls. Then he received a notification from HSBC that his bank account was being suspended — and so too was that of his 13-year-old daughter.

Over the days that followed the allegations, Perring learned just how serious an accusation of espionage can be. He was sacked from companies he worked with, ostracised by friends, and ended up £8 million worse off.

Perring’s case isn’t unique, with other prominent people finding themselves suddenly accused of conniving with the Kremlin. Yet if the specifics of each case are different, they’re all united by a single man: Christopher Steele. A former spook himself, he has form when it comes to claims involving Russian spies, with consequences that lead all the way to the White House.

On 17 March 2023, Fraser Perring, a financial analyst and entrepreneur who lives near Lincoln, received a call from a journalist asking him to comment on the fact that he had just been denounced in Parliament as a Russian spy.

“I thought it was so absurd that no one would take it seriously,” Perring recalls. Then he received notification from HSBC that his bank account was being suspended — and so too was that of his 13-year-old daughter.

Over the days that followed the allegations, Perring learned just how serious an accusation of espionage can be. He was sacked from companies he worked with, ostracised by friends, and ended up £8 million worse off.

Perring’s case isn’t unique, with other prominent people finding themselves suddenly accused of conniving with the Kremlin. Yet if the specifics of each case are different, they’re all united by a single man: Christopher Steele. A former spook himself, he has form when it comes to claims involving Russian spies, with consequences that lead all the way to the White House.

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The broad narrative of Perring’s debanking didn’t take long to untangle. He was first denounced by the Labour MP Liam Byrne, who rose to his feet in the House of Commons to demand a debate on “the activities of short-selling attack group Viceroy Research and its leader Fraser Perring”. Byrne said that Perring — whom he had never met, and twice referred to as “Pelling” — was “a not infrequent visitor to Moscow”, while his firm was a “weapon in Putin’s arsenal” whose links to the Kremlin must be exposed.

Byrne claimed that Perring had worked “hand-in-glove” with a firm named Boatman Capital to “attack” the British defence firm, Babcock International, at a moment that it was attempting to overhaul Britain’s nuclear submarine fleet. As such, he represented a threat to national security.

Not one of Byrne’s damning claims was true. Perring had never been to Russia, and had all his old passports to prove it. He was not working with Boatman Capital, nor short-selling shares in Babcock. Perring’s firm, Viceroy Capital, did specialise in short-selling, a species of money making that is not universally admired. But the activity is perfectly legal and a long way from espionage. Perring had no idea why Byrne named him, at least until he discovered his links with Christopher Steele.

That may not quite be a household name — but if the words “Donald Trump” and “Russian hotel room” and “golden shower” set any bells ringing, you will be familiar with his greatest hit.

Steele, who did not respond to requests for comment on this article, is the former head of MI6’s Russia desk. Later, he set up his own boutique intelligence firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, and in 2016 came up with one of the most consequential political documents of the century: the dossier that was supposed to derail Trump’s initial presidential bid.

Steele’s 35-page compendium of what he called “raw intelligence” was one of the key sources of the claim that Trump had actively conspired with Russia in order to win the election. It was also where the idea that the Russians held kompromat on Trump emerged: namely a video purporting to show Moscow prostitutes, hired by Trump, urinating on a hotel bed that Barack and Michelle Obama had once slept in.

The document, which was later seized on by Democrats and eventually published on Buzzfeed in 2017, was later found by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee to be largely a work of fiction. Steele himself later admitted that the dossier’s contents may only be “70% accurate”. While subsequent investigations showed that Russia did indeed want Trump to win, no evidence has come to light that he colluded with them. Its main source, Igor Danchenko, had been suspected by the FBI of being a Russian spy for years and was later charged with lying about his own sources (he was found not guilty in 2022).

But none of this stopped his fictions from having an enormous real-world impact. Trump has said the dossier continues “to cause me significant damage and distress” and has attempted, unsuccessfully, to harass Orbis through the British courts. The consequences for former FBI director James Comey could be far worse. He used the dossier while he was investigating Trump’s campaign, claiming he thought Steele was a “credible source”. Comey was indicted last month for lying to Congress at a 2020 hearing related to the dossier, and may yet face further charges.

Somehow, against the backdrop of this chaos, Steele has positioned himself as a free speech champion — even a victim. In 2024, when a British judge threw out Trump’s libel case against him on a technicality (it had not been bought within the limitation period), Steele presented it as a victory for free speech: “Orbis stands by its sources and work and will not be deflected by such ‘lawfare’ practices”, read an official statement.

However, Steele’s argument that this was a private document, never intended for publication, is somewhat undermined by his own admission last year that he tried hard to get the news media to publish its contents — at one stage, even renting a room at a Washington, DC hotel to arrange a series of meetings with journalists, staggering their entrances to ensure rival reporters didn’t bump into each other. He was, of course, also briefing the Democrats, who were paying him.

Moreover, the Trump dossier was not the last time Steele would compile and distribute damaging allegations about individuals he claimed were working for Russia. I have now seen two secret dossiers drawn up by Orbis since the Trump files. Both rely on barely credible sources, including an author of spy novels. Both contain overblown and inaccurate information, including outright lies. One, codenamed “Project Fish”, claims to rely on sources with access to a KGB file on Boris Johnson, opened while he was still a student at Oxford, when a clandestine Russian agent supposedly wrote that he “might be useful to us”.

The Fish dossier, which was drawn up in October 2022, also ludicrously claims that Peter Mandelson has had dealings with the KGB since 1990, and as a “privileged contact for Russian intelligence” has guided British and European Union policy to benefit Russia ever since. Apparently this long career in espionage was missed by MI5 and MI6 when he was chosen to become UK ambassador to Washington — though not by Steele.

What Steele offers is not only his imagination but his contacts book. In the Perring case, the bogus allegations were originally supplied not by Steele but another private intelligence firm, Audere, whose client was a now-defunct healthcare firm whose financial shortcomings Perring had exposed. Audere’s CEO, Charles Blackmore, was heard boasting about the damage he had inflicted on Perring in a secret recording, first published by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project: “We have done the best offensive false flag operation you could ever want to do… he is so offensively false-flagged that he’s fucked.” (Blackmore has not responded to requests for comment.)

However, Steele’s role was critical — thanks to his link to Byrne. I’ve seen text messages in which Steele ran his draft of Byrne’s parliamentary question falsely accusing Perring past Blackmore, suggesting that the “most interesting angle” was how Perring had supposedly served to “weaken our capabilities” against the Russians. Steele was also in touch with Byrne after he asked the question too. Byrne passed him on a letter from Penny Mordaunt, then the Leader of the House, in which she asked the then security minister, Tom Tugendhat, to investigate Perring.

Steele then shared this proof of his effectiveness with Blackmore who responded: “From client: Great letter from Penny Mordant [sic]… Thanks and great work.” Other texts refer to Steele’s fee, £30,000, and contain the banking details of a firm where he is a director, Walsingham Partners Ltd, into which it was paid — though listed as a “donation”. The texts also show Audere offered Steele a bonus for getting Byrne to expedite his question, with the money ultimately coming from its client, the defunct healthcare firm.

There is no suggestion that either Mordaunt or Byrne was paid for their actions, nor that any of these individuals has done anything illegal. In July, however, Perring submitted a complaint to the Commissioner for Parliamentary Standards, saying that Byrne had breached MPs’ rules which require them to act with openness and accountability. To date, the commissioner has not taken action.

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Another figure who was surprised to learn that Steele had identified them as a Russian operative — more specifically, a Russian arms dealer — was Mohamed Amersi, the multi-millionaire entrepreneur and Conservative Party donor. In 2021, Amersi was the subject of “Project Delta”, a document produced by Orbis, which I have seen, and which purports to set out his Russian business links. Amersi was also falsely accused in the Project Fish dossier too.

Back in 2020, Amersi became involved in a bitter dispute with the former Tory MP Charlotte Leslie, then director of the Conservative Middle East Council, which aims to promote trade between Britain and countries in the Middle East. Leslie claimed that Amersi was attempting to use his wealth and influence to take over the council, and wrote to Tory MPs and others in an attempt to stymie his political influence. Amersi later attempted to sue Leslie for defamation over these letters. He lost the case in 2023 because the judge ruled he had not proved the letters caused him “serious harm”.

What the judge did not see was the Project Delta dossier prepared by Steele, who met with Leslie numerous times during this period, say sources who were then close to him. (Leslie has not responded to my requests for comment.)

The dossier names several individuals whom Amersi insists he has never met, claiming they too worked for Russian intelligence, including one who had been on “special training courses” to enable him to operate in the Middle East. That led to the most serious false allegations of all: that Amersi had for years been in business with this individual to supply Russian-made weapons to Syria and Iran, a trade in which he was “still involved”.

The result, says the dossier, was that the Kremlin itself had “forbidden” any mention of Amersi’s role in the Conservative Party and his dispute with Leslie in the Russian media, in order to protect his espionage contacts.

No shred of evidence to support these claims has ever been produced. The dossier claims to have benefited from unrestricted access to files held by the FSB and SVR (Russia’s heirs to the KGB), as well as to some of their current operatives. Intelligence veterans who have seen the dossier have called these assertions “sheer fantasy”. I have also seen leaked text messages from Steele which suggest he often spoke to Guardian reporter Tom Burgis when he was researching his book Cuckooland, an investigation into the influence of extremely wealthy individuals like Amersi on British politics. Burgis told me he could not discuss the sources he used for his book, but it is notable that it does not contain the merest hint that Amersi had ever been an arms dealer. It is reasonable to assume that if Steele claimed he was, Burgis could find no corroboration.

This lack of evidence did not appear to bother Byrne. On 17 January 2022, he repeated all of Project Delta’s most scurrilous claims in the Commons, using wording almost identical to that in the dossier. As with Perring, he refused to retract his allegations, and declined to answer questions from UnHerd. Amersi says everything Byrne said was “an absolute lie”. But the protection provided by parliamentary privilege means that unless Byrne repeats these allegations outside the House, he has no means of redress.

So who was Steele’s well-connected source with such good access to Kremlin archives? Last year, the specialist subscription service Intelligence Online identified him as Simon Bell, a former partner of the TV presenter Anneka Rice and friend of the screenwriter Richard Curtis, who writes spy thrillers set in Russia under the pseudonym Alex Dryden.

Two sources who were close to Steele confirmed this to me, saying Steele refers to him by the codename “Douglas” and that much of his vaunted “information” is “neither true nor reliable”. (Bell’s literary agent initially agreed to pass on my questions to him, but the following day said his client did not wish to comment.)

It seems, then, that Steele was following the playbook he developed with the Trump dossier. Compile damaging allegations via dubious sources; disseminate them via the media and his political contacts; use the shield provided by parliamentary privilege to evade scrutiny; watch others bear the consequences.

For now, at least. Perring is consulting lawyers and plans to sue Steele. The leading criminal barrister Anthony Metzer KC told me this may be possible under the Fraud Act, on the basis that he was allegedly paid to put false information into the public domain. “As always, the available evidence, in particular relating to any payments, will be key,” Metzer explained.

Meanwhile, international legal experts say Steele is likely to be drawn into the case against Comey, and may be subpoenaed as a witness. If so, the details of his post-Trump dossier career will come to assume a new and dangerous relevance.