More than seven years after the Steele dossier was made public, former British intelligence operative Christopher Steele can’t confirm whether its most salacious detail, the “pee tape” involving Donald Trump and Russian prostitutes, is real or not. But Steele, who is an expert on Russia, says with confidence that if Trump wins the 2024 election, he would attempt to “run America in the way that Putin runs Russia.”
I spoke to Steele recently for “Salon Talks” about his new book, “Unredacted: Russia, Trump, and the Fight for Democracy,” where he offered a stark warning for all who treasure our democratic republic. Steele described Vladimir Putin as “basically a gangster” who came to power with his gang and is concerned about controlling power and wealth and making sure that his children, and those of his inner circle, are able to inherit that wealth and carry it forward.
That description also fits our former president, who also hopes to be the next one. So it was deeply concerning to hear Steele say that, if Trump wins, a Putin-esque “oligarchy is what might come to America.” The only thing that might prevent that happening is the allegedly solid checks and balances of our system. But Steele expressed concern that those would not hold up, given that the Supreme Court is controlled by justices likely to side with Trump and Republican members of Congress will do whatever he asks of them.
From a geopolitical point of view, Steele said that we can expect Trump to further undermine our relations with Western democratic allies, while enabling Putin to potentially go further than Ukraine. Steele warned that Putin has “his eye on the Baltic states and Poland” and believes that's where the Russian president will seek to strike next. With Trump as president, Putin’s long-held dream of rebuilding the Soviet Union comes closer to reality.
Watch my "Salon Talks" with Christopher Steele to hear more on that and why, if Kamala Harris manages to defeat Trump, there will be “a very big sigh of relief” from our NATO allies.
The following conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
What first interested you in becoming involved in British intelligence?
I had been born abroad and brought up abroad and I was very aware of the world around me and the world outside. My parents had served in some fairly eventful places — in Yemen, initially, where there was a rebellion going on, and subsequently in Cyprus where all sorts of things unfolded, including the division of the island. Cyprus is a big issue in the Middle East, it's very close to Lebanon and Israel and Egypt. I think my interest in international affairs was obvious, it was what I'd lived. I think the interest in politics came through my family and the traditions of my family. Once you mold those two together, you end up in international affairs and diplomacy and intelligence.
There's a moment early in your career where you have a choice between learning Russian or Arabic, and you picked Russian. Did you ever think about how different your life would’ve been if you had picked Arabic instead?
There are a number of moments, crossroads if you like, including where you get posted to as a diplomat which do determine what you then become expert in and how your career progresses. Yes, it could have been very different, but it was what it was. I feel [in] many ways that I've ended up in the right place at the right time, or some might argue the wrong place at the wrong time. There's a fateful element to this, I think.
In your new book, “Unredacted: Russia, Trump, and the Fight for Democracy,” you talk about the rise of Vladimir Putin. What are Putin's goals, with regards to NATO and the EU?
The thing that's important to understand about Putin is he's an opportunist and he's a tactician, not a strategist. I think when he came to power in 2000, he did not have the same objectives and aims and goals that he has now. One of the themes in the book is that it's our failure to engage with Putin and Putin's Russia effectively that has led to this growing ambition that he's got now, where he's interfering in various elections around the world, where he's conducting a major war on European soil for the first time in two or three generations, where he's conducting sabotage and assassination operations.
His goal is effectively a zero-sum game with the West. He realizes that the Western way of life, the rule of law and everything else is inimical to the way he wants to run Russia, and he's determined to get Russia forward at the expense of the West. Ultimately, he would like to go down in history as the Russian leader who effectively rebuilt at least part of the Soviet Union after the liberals like Gorbachev had dismantled it, in what he sees as a disastrous fashion.
In the past, Russian leaders who have failed in military expeditions or wars usually don't have a long life. How much pressure is there on Putin in Ukraine?
Putin will be judged by the Russian people and by history as to what unfolds in Ukraine. There's no question that where we are now, two and a half years into the war, is not where anyone would've expected him to be, including himself. He genuinely believed, because he'd been misinformed by his security and intelligence services, that it would all be over in a week or two.
Frankly, if you'd asked me back at that stage, “If there's a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, how long would it take them to overwhelm the country?” I would have said two or three months. The Ukrainian resistance and the Ukrainian opposition to this has been extraordinary by any standard. I think that anything that gets Putin off the hook in Ukraine, that delivers at least something of a victory, something of a win for him, would be catastrophic for the rest of us and particularly those of us in Europe living in democracies.
How did you first get approached to work on what became known as the Steele dossier, and what was the goal?
It's important to understand that what we do in my business is we look at the world, as it were, through the Russian end of the telescope. We're not looking at American internal politics or British internal politics or even French internal politics. We're looking at those politics from either the Russian end of the telescope or the Chinese end of the telescope. In this case, it was very much obviously the Russian end of the telescope.
What we had done before we did the dossier, and probably the reason we were asked to write the intelligence up and run the intelligence sources, was a prior study of what the Russians were doing in European elections in six countries, including the U.K. It was off the back of that that we realized that we were on something quite big.
When Fusion GPS [a strategic intelligence firm based in Washington], who we were already in touch with and had worked with on other things, came to us and said, “Can you do this work on our election as you've done other work on European elections?” We said, “Yeah, we think we can. We've got the capability.”
So when Glenn Simpson and Fusion GPS comes to you, what was their mandate? What did they want you to gather?
They wanted us to look from the Russian end of the equation down the telescope into the American election. What were the Russians trying to achieve? Who were the main actors? What were their objectives? How far were they being fulfilled? What measures they were taking to cover their tracks? Which is an important thing in all these operations that Russia does, plausible deniability. With our expertise, and particularly my knowledge and experience of dealing with Russia, that was the obvious place to come for us to work on it.
If you ask people about the Steele dossier, they think about the more salacious details, like the alleged video of Donald Trump in a hotel room with prostitutes. Was that true?
We judge that it came from credible sources and not just one source. We also know that this is the Russian modus operandi. This is how the Russian intelligence services work. That wasn't widely known, perhaps, until this particular report became public. Since our work in 2016, as I again detail in the book, there have been other manifestations of this. We're never going to know fully, unless and until this regime in Russia collapses and we get access to the files of its security services. That goes to a lot of the questions that we could talk about at the moment. Hopefully that happens. It may never happen, but certainly it came from credible sources and I felt duty bound to report it because it is part of the Russian intelligence playbook. If they have leverage over a political leader in the West of any sort, that is significant and a concern for our national security. That was the thinking behind sharing that with the client.
We're in the middle of the 2024 campaign right now. In all the gathering of intelligence that you've seen, is there a concern that Putin has blackmail material on Donald Trump?
Absolutely. If you look, for example, at the history of the Trump Tower project and other things, it's clear that Trump was quite heavily engaged with Russia in the period before he entered really active politics. That has to be a concern, I think. Also, he wasn't honest about it. The fact that negotiations on Trump Tower in Moscow were going on well into the 2016 campaign was never avowed. I think there are a lot of things in the past — and the thing about Russian intelligence is they never forget anything. They never lose anything. They store things up, they use things. They have a very patient approach to these things. They don't rush it, and therefore what they have on any politician or any leader can pop up years later and be used against them.
It's difficult to explain why Trump has only really been consistent about one thing in politics, which is that he won't criticize Putin. Every other world leader he will express different views about over time, whether it's Xi Jinping or even the North Korean leader, and that of course is the natural way with politics. There is something very odd going on here. I actually think that Donald Trump probably wants to run America in the way that Putin runs Russia, if the truth were known, and that probably underlies a lot of this.
There are significant concerns. It's very clear that Putin wants Trump to win in each of the elections he's running. That can only mean that he thinks he's going to benefit from it, and would explain why an American president would be so concerned about what a Russian leader thinks about him. I think Helsinki [in 2018]was an extraordinary moment in the history of American foreign policy, but even a couple of weeks ago when Volodymyr Zelenskyy was here from Ukraine, Trump made it very clear that he has a good personal relationship with Putin. Putin is now an indicted war criminal and he's conducting an illegal war in European soil against allies of the United States. How would you explain that without there being something odd going on in the background?
Vice President Harris said that if Trump was president, Putin would be in Kyiv right now. Is that fair to say?
I think Putin would be in Washington right now, sadly. Whether Putin would be in Kyiv, I think, is another matter because I genuinely believe that what we've seen in Ukraine suggests that Russia is not capable of defeating Ukraine in a whole-scale way. I certainly think any peace settlement that came about would result in Ukraine losing a lot of its territory and really being scragged as a country. That's the way I see it.
The United States is a leader in democracy. If Trump were to win again, in your expertise as an intelligence officer, what are your concerns for the United States?
Commenting on what happens inside the United States is not really my business as a foreigner, but obviously what is my business, and our business in Britain, is looking at how close an alliance we have. This has been an amazing alliance that's been so effective for generations since the Second World War. Anything that puts that trust and that sharing and that alliance in danger is of major concern to us in Britain, particularly those of us with a national security-type background.
Western politicians can't discuss this in the way that I'm discussing it, but I know what they think. They are very fearful of an isolationist America, that all the things that we’ve worked on with America since World War II, which have been so successful — peace and stability and wealth creation and everything else — would be up for grabs. It's not just the NATO alliance and guarantees of mutual defense. Don't forget that the only time that NATO’s Article 5 has been invoked was by the United States, when we came to your support after 9/11. That's the sort of thing that could be flushed away if Trump gets back in.
I also think that things like trade tariffs would be hugely damaging to our wealth and to our trade and to our societies at the moment, particularly when economic competition with China is so great. I don't talk about climate change because I'm not an expert in it, but it's probably the single most important thing facing the world today. The people around Trump and Trump himself are climate change deniers, so that's another terrifying prospect.
Given what you’ve seen in Russia, what would happen if Trump blossomed into a Putin-like character and elevated the oligarchs, cracked down on dissent and the like?
Putin's not a normal politician in the way that we regard politicians. One of the mistakes I think that people like Angela Merkel and others made was to regard him as thinking in the same way that they did. He's basically a gangster who's come to power with his gang and all they're concerned about really is controlling power, controlling wealth, making sure that their children are able to inherit that wealth and carry on with that wealth. That sort of oligarchy is what might come to America if Trump were to be re-elected.
Obviously there are huge safeguards here and one would hope that they held out, but the evidence so far is probably that only the judicial system, not the Congress and not the executive, are capable of keeping a president in check. When you look at the decision that was made by the Supreme Court recently, that makes this a whole lot worse were you to get someone in the supreme office of president with those sorts of powers and with that intent.
You had to flee for your life, in a way, when you got outed as the author of the dossier. Donald Trump sued you. If Trump were to win, would you come back and visit the United States?
I'm not sure I would. It's interesting that you raise those court cases because one thing that is very important to understand is that Trump has already sued me and my company twice, once in Florida in a class-action suit, a racketeering suit, which is absurd on its face. The second was in London, where he used a law that doesn't exist in the United States to try and sue us there and failed. He had a cost order declared against him by our high court, which he hasn't paid and shows no sign of paying, which I think tells us what he really thinks about the U.K. This is a country where he declares his love for the queen, and his mother came from the U.K., yet he has no respect whatsoever for our legal system or paying his dues when he loses in court. It's extraordinary, really.
Our presidential election is going to be a tight race. In Europe, are Western democratic leaders paying close attention, and do they have the same concerns that you've been articulating about where this country can go?
You bet. I mean, particularly those in Eastern Europe, which Putin would have his eye on — the Baltic States and Poland. The problem for Western politicians, obviously, is that they can't say anything about this. This is the elephant in the room, literally the Republican elephant in the room. This is the dog that isn't barking in the night. But I know from conversations with people in government and in the intelligence services in Europe that they are petrified of the prospect of Trump coming back to office. The idea that he would do some geopolitical deal with Putin in quick-step after an election victory. He was already talking with Zelenskyy about doing this before he even takes office if he wins — which I think is another crime, isn't it? There's an act that you can only have one foreign policy running at one time, but he doesn't seem to care about that. I can tell you that whilst you will not hear anything from Western politicians and European politicians and government ministers at the moment, were Trump to lose there'll be a very big sigh of relief.
Vice President Harris is now the Democratic party’s presidential nominee. How is a potential Harris presidency viewed in Europe?
I think Harris is a bit of an unknown in Europe, to be fair. We're looking very closely at what she says and what she talks about. She was speaking about Ukraine just a couple of days ago on television, that was very encouraging. She seemed to be wholeheartedly in favor of supporting Zelenskyy and Ukraine against Russian aggression.
The problem you've got is that Harris would be, I'm sure, a good president, but you've got to get things through Congress as well. You can't get aid packages through without having the House of Representatives. The strange thing there is that you've got the chair of the Intelligence Committee in the House and the chair of the Armed Services Committee saying, “We've got to stand up to Russia, we've got to give Ukraine the aid it needs.” Yet over half the Republicans in the House of Representatives voted against the aid package and at least half the Republican senators did, sometimes twice: cnce when it came to the Senate and once when it came back for approval.
You've got a massive problem, in that it's not just the candidates for president. Trump's effect and impact on the Republican Party is such that at least half of the Republicans in Congress are prepared to back things which Putin wants, which is absolutely extraordinary given the national security history of the Republican Party, the party of George H.W. Bush and Eisenhower and all the others. It is extraordinary that we've reached this point, and it's very concerning.
