There’s no doubt that the dossier created enormous political churn in Washington-including murky assertions that haven’t been resolved yet and perhaps never will be. The KGB’s successors are highly adept at assembling disinformation that results in more questions than answers for Western investigators. It’s very much in the habits of Russian intelligence to disseminate a great deal of accurate information, sometimes muddied, in the service of a greater lie. The idea that the Steele dossier represents an exercise in Chekist provokatsiya gets more plausible the more you look at it. It’s very likely that the Kremlin possesses kompromat on the president-senior intelligence sources from several countries have confirmed to me that unpleasant videos of Trump exist-yet there’s no reason to believe Steele’s particular claim here, without corroborating evidence. Indeed it is, and the dossier’s “pee-pee tape” claim is viewed with derision by most Western spies who know the Russians. My entry in Wikipedia was recently changed to say that I was expelled from Russia in 2013 for running a brothel with underage girls. “The description of Trump’s using prostitutes to urinate on the bed in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Moscow, where the Obamas slept, bears a striking resemblance to the work of the ‘novelists’ in the Russian Federal Security Service whose job it is to come up with stories to discredit individuals without much regard for plausibility.
Moreover, Satter made an important observation about the dossier’s best-known claim regarding a pornographic tape allegedly made of Trump during a 2013 visit to Moscow: Its observations about Kremlin atmospherics, while accurate, were mostly pedestrian. Satter noted that the dossier nicely met Vladimir Putin’s overall objectives, in particular making American politics as bitter, divided, and unpleasant as possible, while not revealing very much substance. When the dossier appeared in January, veteran Kremlin-watcher David Satter observed that the whole exercise reeked of a Russian provocation, making a case that’s plausible to those who understand Chekists. While the dossier’s depiction of Kremlin politics-what spies call “atmospherics”-are undeniably true, many of the specifics are unverifiable. Not to mention that there have always been good reasons to doubt some of Steele’s revelations. As a stand-alone report, its uses are limited for any seasoned intelligence analyst. The dossier, being unfiltered intelligence, some of it derived from second-hand sources in Russia, is best considered lead information only, that is, a jumping-off point for additional investigation-not the final word on anything. However, such raw HUMINT reports are unfamiliar to the public, which focused on Steele’s porn-worthy allegations more than the substance of alleged collusion between Trump and Moscow. This is the sort of thing Steele compiled during his MI6 service, so it’s no surprise that he repeated the exercise when he examined Trump’s Kremlin connections.
Steele’s dossier is something rarely seen by the public: a raw, unfiltered human intelligence assessment. Mueller’s investigators want to know more about the dossier’s background, about which there remain questions-even though the essential outline of how it came to be is already clear. A security consultant and former officer of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (popularly known as MI6) with considerable experience in Russian matters, Steele presumably had a lot to say. The matter has taken on renewed urgency with reports that the Steele dossier is being closely examined by Special Counsel Robert Muller, including dispatching investigators to Britain to interview Christopher Steele, the dossier’s complier.
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