Durham report shows how Christopher Steele forgot Fort Monckton
Tom Rogan
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There are many embarrassing findings concerning the FBI in special counsel John Durham’s just-published report into the bureau’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia. Still, the FBI isn’t the only one feeling the heat Monday. The report will also make for unpleasant reading at the central London headquarters of Britain’s MI6.
The Secret Intelligence Service, also known as SIS or MI6, is the United Kingdom’s primary foreign human intelligence service. It is extremely well regarded by its foreign counterparts, both allied and hostile. U.K. SIS is viewed with particular esteem for the independent initiative of its officers and their ambitious skill at recruiting valuable agents within foreign governments and terrorist groups. SIS officers pride themselves on their ability to recruit valuable agents without the supporting resources of other far larger intelligence services such as the CIA or China’s MSS. Alongside its GCHQ signal intelligence sister service, SIS has, in recent years, been at the forefront of particularly high-value intelligence operations targeting ISIS, Iran, China, and Russia.
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Where does the Durham report come in?
Because Christopher Steele, author of the infamous Steele dossier, is a former SIS officer. He was well regarded during his time at SIS, serving in Moscow for several years just after the end of the Cold War. He also served on several other prestigious SIS assignments, including as head of SIS’s “Russia House,” focused on Russia-related associated operations. Following his retirement from SIS in 2009, Steele continued to deliver valuable products in the private intelligence sector. Steele was particularly successful at assisting with government investigations into the endemically corrupt FIFA world soccer body.
The Durham report offers a very different testament to Steele’s later record. Indeed, it shows that Steele either willfully or ignorantly forgot many of the most important lessons he learned at SIS’s Fort Monckton intelligence officer school on England’s south coast.
Take this line from the report: “The FBI learned that Steele relied primarily on a U.S.-based Russian national, Igor Danchenko, to collect information that ultimately formed the core allegations found in the reports. Specifically, our investigation discovered that Danchenko himself had told another person that he (Danchenko) was responsible for 80% of the ‘intel’ and 50% of the analysis contained in the Steele Dossier.”
While Danchenko’s central role in the Steele report is not new news, the Durham report does clarify how inordinately significant he was.
If not in explicit language, Durham shows that Danchenko was either a bon vivant fantasist or a Russian intelligence useful idiot. We’re told that during his time as a researcher at the Brookings Institution, for example, “another Brookings colleague recalled that in 2008 Danchenko informed her that he (Danchenko) had been absent from work at Brookings because he had been in South Ossetia fighting Georgians. Danchenko also bragged to this colleague about vandalizing the Georgian embassy in Belarus.” Durham later adds, “As relevant to this investigation, [Danchenko’s former employer], an ethnic Russian, described Danchenko as someone who was ‘boastful … having low credibility, and a person who liked to embellish his purported contacts with the Kremlin.'”
To be fair to Danchenko, he told the FBI that his Steele dossier-related material wasn’t all that credible. As Durham puts it, “when interviewed by the FBI in January 2017, Danchenko also was unable to corroborate any of the substantive allegations in the Reports. Rather, Danchenko characterized the information he provided to Steele as ‘rumor and speculation’ and the product of casual conversation.”
But here’s the issue for SIS headquarters.
A formerly serving senior SIS officer, one with supposedly extensive counterintelligence experience, utilized a patently unreliable human intelligence agent as his keystone source for what was always going to be a highly controversial report on a U.S. presidential candidate, Donald Trump. Put another way, a former SIS officer allowed his ideological antipathy for Trump and/or greed to trump the basic lessons of intelligence asset handling. In sum, he ignored the key lessons taught at Fort Monckton.
Namely, the lesson is that even agents with validated access-to-target and established bona fides are still likely to have hidden biases, agendas, and vulnerabilities to external manipulation. That Steele relied on Danchenko, without due diligence or corroboration from other sources, to produce a seemingly damning report on the prospective, then actual, leader of the U.K.’s most “special” ally was always a terrible choice. Especially so, being that Steele was a Russia-focused officer who should have known full well the wilderness of deceptions, half-truths, and fictions in which Russian intelligence services reside.
Top line: The Durham report shows how Steele jeopardized the special relationship and broke with the fundamental tenets of that which makes U.K. SIS such an exceptional organization. The lessons of Fort Monckton should abide even in retirement.