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An insight into the character, personality and passion of the leading figures in the Investigation and Intelligence industry who have shaped the way we gather, analyse and utilise information and intelligence.
The fundamental skill in an intelligence officer, and I would argue to
some extent a diplomat as well, is the ability to engender
trust. It's the ability to build strong cross cultural
relationships of understanding motivation behind people in other
countries and cultures and to harness that, really.
Democracy is a precious and quite fragile creature
and we've seen in the US how vulnerable. Even the country
which we were all taught at university had the strongest checks and
balances and the strongest constitution is being subverted very
quickly by an authoritarian who is not a democrat and
doesn't believe in the rule of law. So on the Sunday up until about 3
o', clock, we were under surveillance. Then suddenly the surveillance disappeared,
which is extremely odd. So we knew that evening that
something strange was happening around us. We weren't sure what it was.
And then of course, it became clear the next morning that
a coup attempt had happened.
Hello and welcome to the Intelligence Advantage podcast where we talk
to the movers and shapers in the investigation and intelligence
space. My name is Gary Miller, I've been an investigative
lawyer for nearly half a century and I'm also the chairman of the
IfG, a network of international investigative and
asset recovery lawyers. I'm absolutely delighted to
welcome Chris Steele, the founder and CEO of
Orbis Business Intelligence and a good friend
and somebody that I have worked with in the past and
somebody who in a period of 20 odd years
has really created more case studies, real
life cases and excitement and adventure than
almost any other investigator and may I
say, ex spook, has been able to achieve. So
welcome Chris. It's really cool to have you on board.
Thank you for having me, Gary. Pleasure to be here. Now, you won't be
surprised, Chris, that I did a bit of homework and you were kind enough
to send me your latest book, redacted. And
what I did, because I'm also trying my best
to get to terms with modern technology such as ChatGPT.
I fed in a few bits and pieces about
yourself and I said, look, could you present me with a,
not a detail, but a reasonable chronology of
Chris Steele and the cases with references and
my friend, this is what you produce. So you
definitely have got your own little stake
in the history of the investigation and intelligence space and
hopefully we'll get a chance to talk about some of it. I fully appreciate
that there may be questions I ask you that you'll say pass and I will
gently move over to something else. But you are, as I said at
the beginning when I welcomed you, you really have left us, led
and are leading a surreal life I mean, there are not many people
who firstly, who have transitioned
from intelligence into investigation and
made such an impact on the world political stage.
So do you sometimes wake up in the morning and look in the mirror
in the bathroom and think, wtf?
What on earth have I done? Yeah. I mean, some of
it obviously was by design and a lot of it wasn't. A lot of it
is the law of unintended consequences. I mean, my whole career, in
a sense, from the time that I joined the
Foreign Office and the Intelligence Service to the time
I served in Russia, when Russia, Soviet Union, in fact, to begin with,
before it became Russia, started to collapse when I was there.
So there's been a. Nothing to do with your arrival, Chris, I
hope. No, I wanted a quiet life and certainly didn't get
it and never have done since. But, no, there is
a sense, I think about me, that there's a sort of element of
fate involved in all this and that I just happen
to end up in the right place at the right time, or you could argue
the wrong place at the wrong time, but certainly that's the feeling. And I don't
think it's played out entirely yet, either. I don't think so either. And
certainly your book and the material that is referred to
comprehensively in it would certainly lead us to believe,
and current political conditions, that you are far from having played
out your role in this
physical world that you and I currently belong to.
So I want to. I've got so many questions
to ask, but the first one is when, at what stage in your life, was
it when you went to. To Cambridge? Cambridge or Oxford?
Yeah. Did you actually think, you know what, I'm going to
become a spy? The answer is never,
because when I was there, I was obviously reading Social and Political
Sciences as a degree, but it. And I'd lived abroad, so in
a sense I was interested in foreign travel and foreign cultures, but at
no point at university did I think that I would end up as an intelligence
officer. In fact, I was looking at becoming either a journalist or a
lawyer, can you believe? Rather glad that I didn't take
any of those turns, but I could have done. And so it's all
a slightly sort of haphazard way in. And after
I'd graduated, I applied, as I said in my book,
in what was called a disguised advert in those days. So a
real headhunter, advertising jobs abroad, getting
in CVs through the newspaper. Does that still happen, Chris? Or not?
I don't know. It wasn't particularly cost effective.
I tell that only two people were recruited that way, me and somebody else who
remained nameless, of course, who was a peer of mine,
and the operation wasn't seen as a particularly
successful one. Well, a lot of
us, even of my tender
generation, seem to be. I have the impression that the
minute you go to Oxbridge and you're doing something to do
with political science, that it will only be a matter of
time before someone taps you on the shoulder and says, would you
like to come for an interview? And from what you've said,
that didn't happen to you, but did you get the impression that
it was, I say, a breeding ground, it was a fertile
ground for people that would be recruited by the intelligence services?
Yeah. I mean, without sort of naming names or giving numbers?
Certainly when I joined back in 1987, you know,
a substantial proportion of the people on the new entry
courses, in fact, for both Foreign Office and sis, were
Oxbridge graduates. And I'm sure there is a good
reason, and that's why every student that starts off on
their education course in one shape or form thinks
about, even if they don't really want to go to Oxford and Cambridge. But I
just think it's a little bit discriminatory, I think. What about the lse? What about
King's College? Chris, why do the intelligence services
not look there? Is it because the politics course, by definition, is
so damn good at Oxbridge? No, I don't think so.
And I think it's probably changed to some degree actually in
the modern times. And I mean, I think two of the last three
chiefs of SIS have been non Oxbridge, for example. So
I think it is changing. And my own stepdaughter
went to King, certainly for Masters, and then got recruited into the Foreign Office.
So I think that, you know, changing with the times, maybe
it's because people in Oxbridge, back in the day,
there was something about the culture there that was encouraged, self confidence
and things like that, and are being able to present in an
articulate way. And I think those things count when
you're going for interviews for hard jobs, competitive jobs, for sure.
And thinking about that, both personality
profile and skill set,
how much has changed from
25, 30 years ago when you would have
started your journey and do you think now, and I
know you're not directly involved in the
intelligence field, but what's your sense of how training and
personalities have changed? Yeah,
I think the fundamental skills are the same and they're perhaps not the skills that
people would imagine. They are the fundamental skill in an
intelligence officer. And I would argue to some extent a diplomat as well
is the ability to engender trust. It's the ability to build strong
cross cultural relationships of understanding motivation behind people
in other countries and cultures and to harness
that really to support our own country and
its objectives. And I don't think those things fundamentally change. We
refer to something called instrumental relations. Building instrumental relations.
It's not just about building any relations, it's about building relations
that produce results. And that's what is the core
skill, I think, of an intelligence officer and. I guess bearing in
mind relating it back to what are meaningful
relationships is the added advantage of
Oxbridge is that the sons, daughters
of and Future Prime Ministers, etc.
Are often sent there for some period or another. So
it's an obvious place where somebody could
say, oh yes, I was at college for example. You were at
Cambridge with Boris Johnson, were you not? He was at Oxford actually.
Oxford. But, but I, but I was certainly at Cambridge with
the sons and daughters of very significant foreign public
figures. I mean, I remember the daughter of the Chief justice of Pakistan
was in one of my classes, for example. So yeah, I mean
I, I, I, I think it's more, that's more to do with, as I said,
cross cultural understanding and self confidence and
being able to present well. I think the other thing at, at Cambridge probably is
the tutorial system which you maybe, you know,
you have a far sort of greater
personal focus on you as a presenter, as a,
be able to argue your critical thinking and so on is
tested I think a lot more in a smaller group
than it is at other universities and that's the luxury really of what was
called a tutorial system. So I think those things, it's not so much
that, you know, my father was anything significant. My father was a great
guy but he wasn't somebody who was high ranking or high
prestige or high status. That wasn't really what did it, it was more,
I think the culture around the university and around the
tutorial system and the union and other things which, which
developed me perhaps as, as a, as a
wider package of skills than, than other people at that age.
And when you were sitting down with your mom
and dad after you'd done your O levels and were
doing your A's and did you focus particularly
on Oxbridge and did your dad go there or not?
No, no, my dad didn't go to university. I mean my father
did get a degree in the end, but he went as an extra
mural student in fact to one of the, I think it was King's London
again. He was a scientist, so he wasn't even in the same field as
me. So yeah, I mean they didn't,
they weren't kind of. I wasn't following in anyone's footsteps. Although I would
say the fact that I'd lived abroad and in foreign communities did
help a lot and had shown in a sense that I could adapt to living
in foreign countries and foreign cultures. And
Aiden was where. Am I right that you were born in Aiden or not?
Yes, yes. So that was because dad was working over there
at the time, is that it? Yeah, my dad was a meteorologist,
so he, he worked with the air force a lot and that's what he
worked and that's why he was in Aden and that's why he was in Cyprus
later. So yes, quite a lot of integration into
more of an armed forces community than a diplomatic community. But certainly that
was part of my upbringing. So did you. My wife
happens to be the daughter. Sadly he's now
passed of a teacher at British military schools and was in Cyprus, in
Frankfurt, wherever. So were you also an
army brat? Did you go to those schools when you were out in Aden?
Because wasn't much of an international school
structure, was there? No. In Aidan I would have been too young, but certainly
I went. Yeah, I went to the forces school in Cyprus for three years. I
was 14 to 17 years old. And although it was a
forces school, it did have quite a lot of civilians in it and it did
have some locally sort of based
people, including Greek Cypriot. So it was an English speaking school, but it
was, it was more cosmopolitan than most schools would be. Right.
And did your dad have any ranking in the forces or not?
He just worked. Yes, he would have been, he would have been a middle ranking
officer or something like that, but he didn't. He had
the equivalent, but he wasn't actually in uniform. Right. And
either of your folks still around, Chris? Yeah, my mother's still
alive. In fact she turned 86 last week
seven years ago. Wow, okay,
so he wouldn't have been that old when he passed
83. Oh, okay, not bad.
Four score years. Not plus 10, but four score years. Not bad.
And did you, it's. Did you pick up a sense
of nationalism and pride
for and about your country because of that
sort of rubbing shoulders with the armed forces, etc?
I think so. I mean I, I don't think nationalism is
something that I would associate myself with, but patriotism and
patriotism. Sorry, that's what I meant. Well, there is a difference and the two. Yes,
absolutely. But they're not the same and, but I also think
public service in particular was something that's been ingrained in us
growing up and my sister, for example, was a consultant in the
nhs, went on to become that and I, I joined the Crown
Service, civil service. So definitely was that element to, to. The family
and wind the take forward. And
tell me to what extent your patriotic feelings have
changed over the years, if at
all. Yeah, I think they have evolved. I mean, I think what I am
very conscious of having lived in different parts of the world and,
and seen the world how it really is rather than how people think it is.
You get the sense, and particularly at the moment, actually we come on to
this, that we are quite an unusual society. You know,
the fact that we have these freedoms, that we have this strong civil
society, that we have laws to protect us and so on,
that is not the norm in many countries of the world and in some of
the countries I've served and visited and therefore I do get
a sense of, you know, how special it is to live
in a functioning democracy. Yeah, it is
very special. And that's a really interesting thought. And
we're going to talk quite a bit, I hope, because we could spend about eight
hours. I know I could. But you couldn't. Talking about many of the,
the interesting scrapes that you have got in
and are still in, in terms of. I
spent 13 years in Asia and I still travel all
over Southeast Asia, et cetera.
And until you mentioned that, made that comment, I didn't actually
think about how I naturally,
I naturally included, or would have mentally included
America and the uk. When you would talk about
how lucky we are to be in that kind of society
and what a surprise in the last,
certainly in the last year or so you realize
how politically and freedom of speech
and power related issues, how different we are
and how the UK looks like. It is not that
Europe is in a state of anarchy. Of course it's not. But when you go
to Spain, when you go to Greece, you understand because of its political
culture and its background that it doesn't have
the built in protections or at least the freedom that we have. So
we're becoming by definition in the UK
the kind of almost the last man standing.
Yeah, I think democracies have always been the
minority of countries and I certainly think democracy, and
it's been well proven, has been pushed back a lot in the Last sort of
10, 15 years. Quite a lot of countries.
I mean, Russia being the classic case of a country that was a messy
Democracy in the 1990s has reverted to full on
dictatorship. And I think other countries that were emerging, even arguably
China, of course, in 1989 and the evolution of that,
that process. So I think that we are living in a difficult
time for democracy and a difficult time for those of us who believe
in, you know, the liberal international order and civil rights and things like
that, human rights even. And
that's partly why I'm still in the game. You know, I feel that people that
know the world and know what's going on in the world and have means of
finding out what's happening in these countries need to step up to the
plate, they need to be working on it. And that's also
interesting, comes out big time from reading your book, that
you almost, not almost, you feel you have a duty, a responsibility,
a social, civic duty to call people
to account, particularly when
there is such a perceived and actual abuse of
power. Yeah, absolutely. As I say, I think that
democracy is a precious and quite fragile creature.
And we've seen in the US how vulnerable. Even the country which
we were all taught at university had the strongest checks and
balances and the strongest constitution is being subverted very
quickly by an authoritarian who is not a democrat and
doesn't believe in the rule of law. You're not a democrat if you only support
elections or believe in elections when you win some them in the same way that
you don't believe in the rule of law, as I'm sure you know, if you
only support the rule of law when you win. So. So those are
issues that are massive ones. And the risk is of contamination,
I think in the UK from what's happening in America.
Indeed. And going back to
your choice of environment
and language, I do remember from your book that
there was a possibility was there of you learning Mandarin
instead of Russia. And that
decision was made because of what
I think you did say in the book. But I think there were two factors.
One, that although I had a high score on the language aptitude
test, I wasn't a linguist and I understood
that Chinese was an incredibly hard language to learn, which it is, obviously I think
you've got to be able to recognize 5000 characters to
read a newspaper, for example. And the other thing
was that at that time, with the Soviet Union there, particularly on the intelligence side,
I mean to some extent on the diplomatic side as well. But I would say
particularly on the intelligence side, Soviet or
Russian work was the sort of haute de gam. It
was what everyone aspired to be able to do. It was
not the Premier League it was the Champions League of intelligence work.
And so in a sense it was natural that I would want to go in
that direction. And was it fiercely competitive? I mean,
when you started to make your presence
felt in that space, did you have to compete with others who
wanted to be where it's all happening, which was the Soviet Union at that
stage? Yeah, I don't know. I'd put it as strongly as saying
competing. It was very hard work. It was very demanding work, particularly for
a young man. I mean, I'm astonished now looking back on it, that I was
25, I think, when I first went to Moscow, which was pretty
incredible, same age as my youngest daughter now.
It was, yeah, I would say it's almost more collegiate.
I don't think there were big personalities and some big
egos involved, but I think there's still a huge amount of
camaraderie. I mean, I had a meeting last week with a
87 year old former colleague who was a bit of a mentor to me at
the time. And I won't go into what he did, but did some fairly
astonishing things on the Russian and Soviet side
of the house and, you know, as warm and as,
as absorbing as ever all these years later. Well, I, I
was going to ask you at some stage to name at least one
big personality or mentor in your life. I don't know
whether you're able to or willing to, but find somebody that
is not going to get both of us and them into trouble. By telling,
by telling. Is it that apart from your dad, who I assume
had a great impact on you, is there someone else along the way? Yeah,
there's many. Some of them, as I say, have to remain nameless, unfortunately. But there
were people at university, people that taught me
at university and there are people I've worked with since. You
know someone like Sir Andrew Wood, for example, if you know him. I don't
personally, but he was ambassador in Russia after I'd been there. But
I've since over many years built a very strong relationship with
him and he supported us actually through the sort of
the turbulence of 2016, 17, which is a
hallmark of really good people in my view. A lot of people
deserted us, weren't there for us, run away. He
stood firmly with us despite in fact being discouraged from doing so.
I understand and that is something that I will always be
grateful for. And he also appeared
as a defense witness for us in court. You know, she didn't have to do.
And he's like 80 plus, so a huge amount of respect
to him. He was also an excellent Russianist and ambassador.
And your Russian today is a bit
rustier by definition because you're not speaking, but you can pick up a
Russian newspaper and read it without a problem or what? Yeah, yeah. I mean,
it's muscle memory. So, yeah, I can read pretty fluently. I
can understand pretty fluently. Active use is more
difficult, as you know, but it wouldn't take me a long time
to get back into it in that sense. And I still do use it,
but obviously it's just not as fluent actively as it used to
be. I think like anything else in life, in
order to be good at something, you've got to be practicing it all the time.
You know, you can't be a good golfer unless you're playing at least once a
week. You can't speak good Russian unless you're speaking it, you know, for a couple
of hours a week minimum. But it's all there. It's muscle memory.
And tell us a little bit if you can, about
what, 25 years old, you
fly BA or Aeroflot or something into
Moscow. BA into Moscow. You get off the
plane and you look around you and you think, what on
earth have I done? Or are you as excited as you've ever been
in, or at least the beginning of that journey of being
supercharged? Yeah, I mean, you can see from the
book and from what you know of me that I'm a risk taker and I
like doing things that have impact and I like doing things that are difficult.
So for me it was just what I'd been prepared for.
I've been fully prepared for it as far as it was possible.
And it was. It was a professional. It was, as I say, it's like
being a sportsman and running on in your first Champions League game.
That's what it's like. It is daunting in a way, but if you're focused
and professional and you get on with it, you can achieve amazing results. And
that's hopefully what we did. So by comparison,
I'm trying to think where I was at 25.
Funny enough, I'd already got to Hong Kong. But
just trying to think of me at
a similar age. I. E. My first job as a then
article Clark. So I go into the office, I sit down and I wait
for somebody to give me something to do. And
I am, you know, looking at tons of
papers. What is the life of a 25 year old?
I know you were assigned to the embassy. It wasn't until
sometime later that somehow, which we might get on to that
you're. Your participation in the intelligence
services became aware. So subject to the, the
so called, not the un,
the not so secret
secret that everyone that goes to an embassy in a foreign
country must be doing some kind of spying which may or may not
be true. I don't know, you're shaking your head. There's got to be some legitimate
ambassadorial activity going on. But what did life
actually look like? Was it a 9 to 5? You went into
the embassy, you look at the newspapers, just give me a
taste of life as a junior operative.
Well, you had your day job as a diplomat, which was very important
and in fact was, as I've said many times, I think I
learned more about the Soviet Union, Russia from my day job than I did from
other responsibilities, should we say, that I might have had had there.
And that was very important. And what did that comprise
of? It comprises of what you made of it. And of course in those days
it was kind of a slightly Wild east flavor to it. We had an
embassy which was understaffed, under skilled,
under represented really, given the momentous things
that were coming. I mean we had, we only had
10 or 12 fluent Russian speakers in the whole embassy at that point.
And suddenly the world turned on us in terms of its attention and
its focus. And so it was a very challenging. I mean the day
job was a full time job. I mean I can
remember traveling inside the country, for example,
reporting back from the provinces, which was all very
trailblazing. The day job was very exciting.
The other responsibilities I have were of a different order, of course,
but I'm not really allowed to talk about. No, of course not.
And of course as you're there, you were there for how many
years in Moscow? Three years. And what was the most significant
change in either relationship with the world,
with the UK that you witnessed and the impact on you while you were
there? Well, literally the country became a different country.
So it's hard to beat that. Your timing was
immaculate, right? Well, yeah, exactly. I went there, I was
accredited to the Soviet Union when I arrived
and when I left I was accredited to the Russian Federation and the Russian
Russian Federal Federation, as it was called. So we
went through a period about almost halfway through the posting actually,
where we didn't really know which country we're accredited to or whether we had
full diplomatic immunity. So that has to be the biggest change when you're actually
in a country which is completely
transformed effectively geographically and everything else legally.
But I think probably the tipping point was, as you all know,
the attempted coup attempt in 1991, where I
was in situ. A lot of diplomats, it was in August, were on holiday
abroad and either missed it or didn't get back in time or
whatever. We were right in the thick of it. And of course I've said to
you, understaffed really. And in particular during that
period when we had the world's attention on us, the
government's attention on us. So as a 25 year old,
I was probably carrying responsibility on the ground of a 40
year old. So it was. We would call, I was a second
secretary and I was operating like a counsellor. So I
think that's an insight into how much that
impacted on me and was part of my formative professional development.
And it was a case of having to have the
determination and the backbone and the adaptability to just go
about the business and do it as you saw fit and not worry too
much about the consequences if you got it slightly wrong.
And is there one day going back to that time with the
assassination tent, can you that you can talk us through just in how
it impacted you. You woke up one morning and someone told you the X?
Well, yeah, I mean, I woke up one morning and a wife came in and
said, you know, there's been a coup. And
interestingly, the day before we had been under
surveillance, as we often were, until about
3 o' clock in the afternoon. That was a Sunday. The coup happened on a
Monday morning. So on the Sunday up until about 3 o' clock, we were under
surveillance. And then suddenly the surveillance disappeared, which is
extremely odd. So we knew that evening that something strange
was happening around us. We weren't sure what it was. And then of
course it became clear the next morning that
a coup attempt had happened. I think probably that
wasn't the most formative day, the most impressionable day, I think
was probably the day when John
Major and Douglas heard, and this is again is in my book, as you'll have
seen, came as the first foreign dignitaries after the coup had been
defeated to visit Moscow and I was responsible
for their program or parts of their program was
as a 27 year old accompanying a Prime Minister into the Kremlin
St. Catherine's hall was. I mean, it is
surreal actually. And in fact, I think I say in the
book that John Major asked to borrow my comb as he
was combing his hair in the sort of the
Romanov vestibule with the
Romanov mirrors and everything else that none of us had ever seen before,
you know, so it was. That was probably the most bizarre
day. And also because My parents were
in Moscow on that day. Wow. I recount,
I actually recount in the book a very amusing instant
where Major and Heard went for a walkabout and
of course, hoping to meet Russians and talk to Russians. And
first person they spoke to the walkabout was my father,
who they observed, spoke very good English. And he said, yes,
Prime Minister, it's because I'm from Wokingham. Then about.
It was quite clear that John Major dined out on this story because there
was a. There was a documentary about the Queen about two years later
on television and it has, you know, coverage of Major going
out to Balmoral after he'd been to Moscow. And,
you know, he sits down with the Queen and the first thing he says to
her, she says, how did the trip to Moscow go? And he said, so it
was incredible. Only that on the walkabout the first person I met was from
Wokingham. So he was obviously dining out on this.
Absolutely. And I'm sure, and I'm sure that comb
you should have kept. I hope you kept the comb. It was probably worth five
grand. Now, Chris, part of history
now. And incidentally, the other thing that happened that day. Yes.
On the sort of more on the intelligent side, something I can talk about was
that Gordievsky, who'd been his defector
from the KGB to the UK and his wife had been trapped
back at home, was actually released at that point and
was able to come to the embassy, meet the Prime Minister and then get on
his plane going back to UK to be reunited with her husband. So that was
also, you know, a major development that happened on that. That very same day.
Yeah, pretty dramatic stuff. And how long after that did you,
did you leave? Well, it was pretty much halfway through
my posting. So the coup was around August
91st. So, yeah, that was about 18 months into my posting and then
I left about 18 months later. And.
If you are allowed to talk about it, the reason for leaving or is that
a three year period is about. Yeah, I'd completed my
posting without being declared person or grantor or
expelled. So that was good as well. That was. That's a
tick in the right box, I imagine. And now when you
look at the UK or England, rather.
Incidentally, Gary, which is nipoiman nivor, which means
if you're not caught, you're not a thief, you're not a thief. Yeah,
I'm sure there's a few Yiddish and other Lithuanian and
Romanian phrases that are similar.
So now when you look at the British presence in
Moscow, it is a It must be, I
think, much larger than it was when you were there, but has shrunk
since again because of the sanctions and the war and stuff like that.
It's moribund embassy. I mean, it's an embassy under siege, which does
no serious work. And that's very sad. I think.
It's obviously everything that's happened to Russia since
2000 is, is sad and is regrettable.
And I think one of the elements that is very
depressing is the way in which, you know, the bilateral relationship
between Britain and Russia is so bad now. It's worse now than it was in
Soviet times. And, and that is, you know, a lot of it, of course,
is, is Putin's fault and done by design,
but it's still tragic for everyone involved. So
there's nothing more than a skeleton staff left in or base
there? Yeah, it's smaller than it was when I was there. I mean, it kind
of was smaller than. It grew bigger and then it grew smaller anyway
because Russia was sort of slightly downgraded as a post probably
about 15 years ago, but then more of late. It's just
there's not a lot of point in having a top end sort of
skill set of staff there because they're not doing anything. They can't do it.
So a lot of them are in Kiev, obviously in other places now. Yes, I
get it. Okay. So coming back to
training, I have this
vision of at some stage during your
joining the Foreign Office,
that you're taken out for a wonderful dinner
and wined and dined, and as you come out, you're bundled into
the back of a van and, and you are waterboarded until
you reveal everything that you had for dinner that evening, plus
a few secrets. It's not like that.
Your training, how do you, how do they ensure that you are
resilient and tough and that you won't give away the
crown jewels? Chris? Well, I think it is pretty tough, actually. I
mean, the sort of scenario you're depicting there isn't a billion
miles from the truth. And, you know, again,
some of this has all has actually been set out.
The new entry course was described by somebody called Richard Tomlinson in a book
he wrote, which I didn't approve of, but it nevertheless is out
there in the public, public sphere. And yes, you know, you
don't get let loose in these kind of jobs unless you're
thoroughly trained and tested in them to
a very significant degree. And, you know,
I think both the Foreign Office and the intelligence
services used to front load a lot of their Training for that reason
and only if you got through where you then sort of let
loose on the real world and quite a few people didn't go
through. I can imagine. And
looking at the world of Hollywood, I
don't know, are you, are you an aficionado of
spy films or do you stay well away from all of that stuff because
it's so far removed from reality? Well,
again with literature. So you've got spy literature and you've got attached that,
you know, drama and television and, and film.
I mean I, I, I love spy novels. I think there are some very good
ones around at the moment. There are, there are two particular authors around at the
moment who I think are very good. One's
British guy called Charles Beaumont, who is somebody I know personally
has written two spy novels. And then there's an
American guy who's written I think three now, an
ex CIA officer and what's his name? I'm just trying to remember his
name. Okay, but he's written in the Seventh Floor was the most recent one, and
then Damascus Station and so on. And he's actually on a podcast with
Gordon Carrera these days. The
rest is secret or something like that anyway that
people will find it. Right. So, so yeah, I like, I
like, I think Le Carre was a genius. So I think there's been a lot
of good spy literature. I think that the, what you
see, some of the drama you see is not at all accurate.
And I'm just watching this latest one with Saran Jones,
who I think is a very good actress. But I think the,
the, the screenplay is, is just so
ridiculous that I can't take it seriously and we've stopped
watching it. So I think, I think there's a lot of bad spy dramas on,
on television and film. So if you had to pick one that you thought
was as authentic as, as close
as authentic as it can get, what would come to mind in terms of spy
movie or spy series? Well, I think some of them are carry stuff
probably and you know, Tinker Taylor, Soldiers by and
Smiley's people were works of genius in my view. I think the
Perfect Spy is also an excellent novel
and they've all been turned into, you know, as you know,
films or TV series with Alec Guinness in particular
being a genius really in that part of Smiley, George Smiley.
So I think that's where I'd go to. I think as I say, some of
the things I've seen recently, recently on, on television are really just
so ridiculously off, off beam that, you know, you can't you can't
take it seriously and. You can't talk to an ex
intelligence officer without mentioning slow horses.
Yes. Did you ever watch it? Interesting. I've read
the book, but I. I read the Slow Horses, but I haven't seen the TV
series. I'm. I'm broadly aware of what. Sorry, I've got a.
This is the ecology side of the coming out. Excellent.
Yeah. If I don't move, the lights go off.
It's probably a metaphor for my life, actually.
So. So, yes, I'm aware of that. And obviously
that's a very popular drama, quite a powerful drama, but it's
not particularly realistic. I mean, there are. There are obviously parts. There are elements
in the security services where, you know,
it's termed the knacker's yard or it's the duffers or it's the slow, slow
coaches. But to have them all lumped together, I think would be
very dangerous, actually.
You're absolutely right. So you leave Moscow,
you go to Paris. Life is. Is
almost a.
A dream come true when you get to Paris, after all of the.
The hustle and bustle of Russia. Was
it a stimulating post for you, being in France, being in
Paris? Yeah, it was. I mean, it's an important post. There's a lot going on
there at the time. I talk about it in the book, Le
Pen's first success in getting to the second round of the
presidential election. Towards the end of my time there, for example, launching
of the euro and various wars that were going on. So
the cost of a war initially and Serbia and so on. And then finally, of
course, 9, 11, and the aftermath of that. And in fact, there'd been
a plot to do something pretty drastic in Paris just
before that that was uncovered involving Al Qaeda. So,
yeah, it was quite a challenging post. I mean,
the work is what you make it and of course,
doing what you need to do is difficult. To do it well, it's hard, it's
very challenging to get sources on board and things like that from some of these
other countries. And it wasn't helped by the fact that I think
about a year into my posting, as I mentioned the book, I was named in
a list that was. Oh, that's right, it was while you were there. Yeah. On
the Internet, which wasn't at all helpful. How does that happen?
Well, I've got to be careful what I say here. But the assumption at the
time was certainly that a former officer, rogue officer, had
collated that list and. And put it out there. Wow.
Who has since been at least Pointed to
or it's up to everyone else to make that. Yes, no, it's
sort of understood who that might have been. And that person, I don't believe has
ever come back to the uk. So, you know, there we are, right?
Yes, there is, There are certain kinds of leaks that you
feel are in the interests of, of society and
others that you think, hold on a minute, what's the, what was the,
what was the objective of doing that, do you think? Money. Purely and
simply personal vengeance money. I mean, again, you
know, when you look at all the motivation, these things, you have to be highly
motivated to do something which is effectively seriously
criminal like that, from our sort of background
and to know that you're doing immense damage to people that you,
you really have no reason, if you don't like the
establishment or the organization to take it
out on the careers of individuals and risk their physical
safety. Indeed. And
whilst you were in one or other of
the posts, did you ever have any reason to suspect that you may
have had a mole in the House or
are you unable to answer that one? Yeah, it's not a good one
to be drawn into, but I think I was always,
personally I was always satisfied the people I was working with were
loyal and honest and
reliable. And how rigorous, you would hope
very. How rigorous is the
service in terms of, you know, you get the
impression, again, you can't believe virtually anything you see on TV that
people just carry on. And let's be honest, we had quite a few
very high ranking
spies within, moles within the intelligence service.
How rigorous are the intelligence services in terms of
just keeping people and making sure that they're checking up
on them, on some of their behavior, on their expenditure. I
don't know, stuff like that. That would come second nature
to me if someone said to me, look, we've got people dealing with the,
you know, the special source of baked beans. Okay, well
then we need to make sure that. And they have to understand they're constantly
under some kind of observation.
Yeah, I mean, I think you learn from your mistakes, don't you, as an
organization or as a culture. And certainly the Cambridge Five,
as they were called, and they were a mixed bunch, actually. They weren't.
Some of them were sis, some of them were Foreign Office, one was Security Service,
one was Treasury. So they were real kind of mixed bunch.
So it was difficult to make sweeping statements. They
existed in a cultural time when they believed, wrongly
that the Soviet Union was the bulwark against
Nazi fascism and
elements of the British establishment and they're probably right about this at least,
were in cahoots with and supportive of the sort of
Mosleyites and the Nazis and alliance with Germany
against Bolshevism. But I think you still learn that
actually in many cases, it's not really ideology
that drives traitors, it's
egotism, it's narcissism, it's greed,
it's vengeance. It's a cocktail of those things.
It's not ideology. And having seen
so many of these cases play out of one sort or another over the years,
you know where the warning signs are. And I think that the vetting
structures of the security services and the Foreign Office
have to be pretty clear about that. And they are. They study these
things psychologically. They have sort of scientific,
as far as you can, warning signals and frameworks to
look at people in terms of vetting. And that's very important. So
you would expect psychological profiling on a regular basis
and being talked to and etc.
And you would expect to be re vetted every five years. And you would
expect, yes, I mean, not necessarily
to be polygraphed or anything like that, but you would certainly expect it to be
a rigorous check on everything you were doing.
It's intrusive, but you accept that as part of the job. You have to accept
that they have the right to be intrusive into your private life because
it's necessary. And of course you accept by
definition that there's not just one gang, maybe
a whole gang of people like you who are doing
their best to either recruit you or to get into your
life and find your vulnerabilities. So again, I may be
becoming too Hollywoodish, but every
intelligence service seems, on the face of it, to be at
least willing to exploit weaknesses in even friendly
intelligence services. Yeah, I think there are different sort of
carrots and sticks as to how this is done. And I think that we always
believe that carrots and trust and all those, the soft
skills were always the most important in getting the good source at. But
other services don't behave like that. Even some services in
supposedly democratic countries don't behave like that.
And so, yeah, of course, you know, hopefully I never
exhibited vulnerable traits that
attracted sufficient attention to lead anyone to
mount an operation like that against me. But certainly I'd heard of
things that went on and, you know, counteroffers that were made and things like that,
certainly part of the, of the ecosystem.
And yeah, you had to be 100% reliable
and have really good judgment. And
now who would not that you've been trained by Each of them. But on
the face of it, who would you say has got the finest
bunch of intelligence, trained intelligence agents in
the world? Is there a standout? Everyone refers to the Mossad. Is it
the Mossad or they're a group of them? I don't think it's the Mossad.
Mossad have too much
of the stick as well as the carrot, I believe. I mean, I think
culturally the British have been very good at intelligence work. I mean, one of the
points I was going to make actually is that I think what's new about the
current scenario internationally is
that the private sector, the ex officers have gone into the private
sector, are very potent and able
and possibly produce better intelligence in
many ways than people still in government. And I think that's an
issue that needs to be properly managed and debated.
But I think culturally certainly. Do you attract,
does an intelligence service, does a diplomatic service attract the
best graduates, the most talented people? I think traditionally in this
country we have. I'm not so sure it's the case anymore,
and that's open for debate, but I think that a lot of other
countries, like even the us, France,
Germany, Israel, are not really as good at doing what I
would call deep cultivation and recruitment as we are.
And just to reinforce it in my mind
and hopefully some of the people listening, it's all about
relationships, right? It's all about building that trust
and that understanding, knowing what their habits are,
them trusting you and you being consistent. So that's
at the core of, I guess it's the core of everything in life, but in,
in the tradecraft, it's everything.
Well, the case officer relationship with the recruiter is the key
relationship and it's the one that everyone should really, you
know, uses the default for assessing someone and
understanding someone. And if you move away from that and you have
people that standing back reading files or bureaucrats or lawyers
telling you what they think is going on and they prevail, you've got a problem.
And that's one of the things I think that did happen during the Iraq,
the run up to the Iraq War. But that's quite a sensitive area.
And were you in the services? My history, as you can tell, is rubbish.
You were still in the intelligence service at the time. Yeah, that was
an interesting time. So I can see time is running away with
us. And of course I haven't even got to the. The most sensational,
in a way, part of your career so far, you leave the
service, you immediately create orbis or you
have a year off and, and, and sail around the world to
get your sanity back? No, we. We pretty much set
up straight away. I mean, we'd been planning it for a year or 18 months
beforehand. So we were, we. We
transitioned to. Into a bit. That last summer when we were still
on the government's payroll, we. We were given some leeway to.
To prepare ourselves. We were kind of working part time, really, in
government and part time on the business. And the business launched
a week after I left government, technically. And so who was your first
client at Orbis that you can talk about? So
we. I remember we had three initial clients. One
of them was a lawyer working for a Russian oligarch. I'm sure
you are aware of the other two. One was a
confectionary company, and the other was the.
The FAA, the Football Association's 2018
World cup bid, which of course led on to other things later.
Indeed. So we've got to accelerate
things, at least for this conversation and say the beginning of
your exposure to and
involvement in American politics
started with the. Is it GPS fusion?
So just tell us a bit about how you got into that space. I wouldn't
say we were that involved in American politics. And I would actually argue that what
we were doing was, if you like spying on Russia much
more than spying on America. I mean, what we were doing was we were running
Russian sources, and those Russian sources were telling us what they were
trying to do to America, how successful they'd been in doing that,
what their game plan was, who was involved, and so on.
So we, you know, didn't have any
direct exposure to American politicians. We had
our partner firm in America that tasked us on the Trump Russia
relationship in the 2016 election. And we had some contact
with the. The lawyer who was their ultimate
client, but we weren't sort of actively involved with any of the campaign
or the politics of the campaign. And we weren't really in
America either. I think I went over there briefly three times during
the campaign, but only for a couple of days. So our focus is very much
on collecting from Russian sources
and feeding it back to the client and then subsequently. The FBI,
and that
that piece of work culminated in the dossier
that was later exposed or
later appeared on buzzfeed. Yeah,
I mean, I think it's slightly misnomer to call it a dossier.
It was a set of live reports that needed to be processed and fed
in in real time during an election campaign, which is
quite unusual for us. I mean, you'll have seen
how we structure our reports. Normally it's much more of A polished,
finished article. They weren't really meant for written
consumption. They were briefs, effectively, for
Fusion GPS to brief a client on in real time. So, yes,
that was the reporting that eventually became known as the dossier and was eventually
leaked without our knowledge or permission to the media.
Again, thoughts as to how. Why somebody, a mole
within the. Somebody who had
patriotic or other
alignments, etc. Who leads it to the American
media? Yeah, we know who leaked it to the American media. It was a
former senior government official who we had trusted with its
custody on behalf of his boss, who was,
you remember Senator John McCain. So it was quite a shock when it
happened. Wow. And again, forgive me, because I
hadn't gone far enough in the book and I'm sure there are other bits
in it, but anything happened to that person that leaked it?
Apparently not. Never sued, unlike us, by any of the
protagonists, perhaps, because not seem to have any
resources worth suing over and having been merely a
sort of guardian of the material, not producer. So
slightly odd, but yes, and I'm sure leaked for,
you know, in a sense, the right reasons leaked not for money or
out of any wish to expose us, but leaked because they
feared as to what the implications of a Trump presidency would be
and the relationship with Russia would be for the US and the security of
the west. And learn, behold, it's still one of the main issues of the day,
isn't it? Indeed it is. And so just run
me through what happens. It gets leaked.
Then, of course, there is
the Biden presidency. So there's a. There's a hiatus,
but people still very concerned and obviously
very much aware that the. There was a
continuum of infiltration and
penetration of the Trump team,
as it were. So how does that just talk us through that
period from your experience? Well, our experience was that,
you know, initially we were very cooperative with the US Authorities
in their various investigations. But it became quite
clear a few years in, and particularly with the appointment of John Durham
as special counsel by Trump, Trump, who wasn't disbanded by
Biden, which was very disappointing, that actually what they were trying to
do was not get to the bottom of what happened, but really
kind of hit out at those who had reported and
done it and impugn our integrity and our
professionalism and attempt effectively to indict us
for things which we didn't even know existed. Like, for example, the
fact that. That. Not that we had. If you tell a lie to a federal
official in America, you can be charged with a criminal offense.
So there are all sorts of shenanigans going on. It's a real eye opener,
just how cynical and how corrupt, morally corrupt, certainly
a lot of these people were, they never got to the bottom of it. They
never really attempted to. And as time went on, it became more and more
hostile. It was a case of shoot the messenger, not, not the message.
And so we eventually became very wary of it. Once that
fell away, people started suing us and
Trump started suing us because obviously he'd gone nowhere
with the investigations. His allegations of a conspiracy and
a hoax, which are still very prominent, are nonsense, of course.
And that's the problem, that there's no factual basis for any
of his allegations, as there is with a lot of things he says
and does. But the reality is that this is actually at the very core
of the concerns that people have about his administration.
And if you look at what happened in Alaska, is it any
wonder and. Going back to the Fusion
relationship, did you, as a matter of interest, did you meet
Hillary Clinton at the time? Was that part of
or are you unable to comment? No, I am able to comment. I didn't meet
Hillary Clinton at the time. As I was saying too early, we didn't have any
direct contact with any politician or political campaigner.
And what not that I don't know a bit personally
as well. What impacted and has all of
this had on business, on
you personally, Chris, in terms of
stress, in terms of
just continuing what you do on a daily basis? It's had a huge
impact, Gary. I mean, you know, I've become a public figure, which is something that
certainly given my previous jobs, I would never even
imagined. And a regular media contributor. And I've been
a defendant in high court. I've been cross examined by
people in your profession incredibly aggressively in times.
So it's been, you know, a huge change in life. And, you know,
it's something that we've had to embrace. I think, you know, it's a genie that
couldn't be put back in the bottle. And so we tried to make the best
of it. And I think particularly the media platform that I've got now,
which is fairly unique actually, as a former intelligence
officer out there in the public sphere and the public square,
part of the debate is something that we've had to embrace. I've decided to
embrace it. I think that we, and I have
a big contribution to make now on some of the big geopolitical issues
of the day, particularly America, Russia, Trump, Russia,
Putin, the war, et cetera. And we haven't held back from it.
And we try and be as open and as frank as we can be. But
we are aware that we have a lot of enemies and a lot of people
looking to try and knock us back, particularly by using
lawfare, which features quite significantly in this story.
Yes. And it's this whole issue of, of
trying to, of using the legal process
to keep people quiet. I can, I just. Something
flew into my mind. I remember the Maxwell era when
he was. Whenever he didn't like what somebody
might have said about him, he would just issue proceedings. And
in those days, it was almost laughed off, as, you know, what a joke.
But it's not a laughing matter. And
bearing in mind the cost of defending yourself, the consequences,
which you know all too well, of not being
financially able to defend yourself
becomes existential. Yeah, people don't realize
that the impact of this stuff is broader than just defending and winning a
case. You know, the fact is that your insurance policies become
a lot more expensive, a lot more restrictive, such that we were
exposed, in fact, to a direct assault from Trump in
two cases, as you know, particularly the UK case, which has cost us
nearly £900,000 of our own money. And it's not because we weren't
insured, it's because there was a carve out put in our policy.
So, yeah, it's very significant, the impact of
it. And it's been painful and
debilitating to have to fork out for
your own defense costs. So, essentially,
yes, an attempt to silence us and
to dissuade and to deter sources from working with us,
particularly from places like China and Russia, very deliberately so.
And I think that we desperately need to deal with
this scourge and is a scourge.
Lots of friends and colleagues who have been through it as well, the
Catherine Beltons, the Tom Burgesses and so on, that we
need to get some, you know, First
Amendment type rules in place here to
prevent people like Trump coming here as legal tourists and
trying to stifle debate and stifle research. And one of the
worst things, I think, about the situation here at the moment is that that
libel and defamation is one thing. You know, if you choose to make
a public statement about somebody, that's one thing. But if you're
conducting an investigation behind the scenes and you're
attacked under data protection law, I think that is a completely different ball
game. And there's no doubt that data protection law is the weapon of
choice now by bad actors, particularly foreign ones, against
particularly investigative firms. And a lot of the attention,
because journalists shout the loudest go to journalists. And
libel. But actually The Data Protection Acts, the one that we fear the
most as investigators. Yes. I'm not surprised. And
again, it's one of those things is that it just. For my money, it
was rather ambiguously drafted. It's not entirely
clear sometimes what it's trying really to
legislate. And I guess, like with many laws,
people look at it in a particular way and realize
that they might just be able to persuade somebody that
this is a plausible interpretation of
a provision. Yeah, it's a very. The jurisprudence around
is very worrying. We had a case where there were three
times five allegations made at us, only two of
which stacked up in the end and 13 didn't, and we still ended up
paying costs. Yeah. Again, are the
vagaries and the in imbalances in
the English litigation system, which is just horrifically
expensive. And in the cases
that you've been involved in, Chris, have you ever had a judge
find that your. That he did not believe your evidence, or
have you been lucky enough or not lucky enough? Have you been in a position
where judges have assessed your credibility and said,
I believe what this man has said? Yes, I. Very much
so. Justice Warby, who you'll be aware of, who was the judge
on the two high court cases that we fought at trial
here, was very complimentary about my evidence and my reliability as a
witness. He found against us on those two small points. But
in general, I think I wouldn't be critical of
the decisions that have been made by judges. I would be critical of the process
that enables you to be dragged through this for years at huge
expense before the judges do make those decisions. And that's the
problem. Yes. And the period of time and the access
to somebody who
is able to make a decision. What were the two points? As a matter of
interest, what were the two points that you were found responsible
or were your. You won't believe this. So it was an
allegation that there was a corrupt relationship between
two Russian oligarchs and Putin that was
intermediated by a particular individual. And
the report, the source had said that this had started in
1994 or something, and actually the guy didn't start
working for the oligarchs until 1997. So it was, in a
sense, it was sort of splitting hairs, but because it was factually
wrong, and we admitted it was factually wrong in the end, that's why
we got hit with those. But in general, as I say, I think
that the judges in the English system have been very
fair on us and actually have found very largely in our
favor through this process. It's the process itself that's the fault.
And so looking at that process, what
stage is it knowing a teeny bit about
litigation, applying for a strikeout or whatever or
a hearing on a point of law, at what stage? If you
had a magic wand now to introduce something into the English
legal system, what would it be to protect cases from going
on so that 2 out of 20
allegations just make you bankrupt financially?
I think it would be a public figure defense statute like you have in the
US Sullivan against New York Times is the case, isn't it?
That's the key one. Because if somebody's defined as a public
figure, which I am in America, so you know, I mean, I'm in this, in
this pot anyway in America, yes, you want to for
defamation unless you can prove actual malice. And the fact is that
no professional worth their salt is going to be
knowingly lying about anything and certainly not about
something of that magnitude. And so I think that's the key one. And I know
that I talk to politicians about this, they don't like that idea because,
you know, it'll affect them. But it's affected me in America and I still
support it. I would find it very difficult to sue anybody in America even
if I wanted to, because I'm a public figure. And that should be the case
here as well. And it's gone far too much over to the other side where
public interest is not strong enough in these cases and the
reputation of the litigants, the plaintiff is always taken far too
seriously, I believe, by the law. But I think the way you would
deal with that in one fell swoop would be to introduce a public
figure statute. Just interesting you mentioned that and I'm
sure I've missed something here that
parliamentarians, politicians don't like it because surely
they would be protected or they feel they want the right to sue everyone
regardless of whether there was malice. Correct. They
don't like the idea that they would be declared public figures and that would
make it a lot more difficult for them to sue. A bit
hypocritical, but anyway, it's a bit big debate at the moment. It
is indeed. Well, I haven't delved into as
many of the things that I'd hoped to, but I certainly have got
a much better flavor and I hope our listeners have of
the human being. Kristeel, not that you won't get it from reading your book,
but not many people get the opportunity of meeting you or as many people
as probably would like. So I really appreciate the chance to chat with you, Chris.
And who knows, there may be a part two, because your
career so far can at least
fill a half a dozen episodes of something like this.
But who knows? I know your time is. Is limited. Yeah. I think the other
important thing to say about the book, it's part of this problem that we were
just talking about. Talking. You know, I. When I went to write this book,
I insisted that any publisher that published it would have to indemnify it.
And they did that in America and Canada and Germany, but no publisher here
so far has been prepared to do that. And that's precisely because of the
issues in civil law and lawfare and public figure
statute that I'm talking about. So people don't understand
the degree to which there's a problem with freedom of speech here in the UK
as a result of some of these civil laws. Yes, that really is.
I haven't. Because it's only recently, as a result of
looking at the background to our discussion today,
that. And now that you're putting the pieces together, I realise that of
course, it's the insurance industry connected with the
litigation process that is so critical here. Yeah,
absolutely. Well, I wish you all the well, may the force
at least continue to be with you and your colleagues.
And I look forward to many opportunities of speaking to you
in the future. Chris and I'll be quite happy and delighted to come back on
if you want to carry on the conversation. I would love to. So thanks a
lot and thank you very much for spending your time today. Take care.
Take care. Bye bye. Thank you
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