In 2016 Christopher Steele, a former MI6 operative who had moved into business intelligence, compiled a now notorious dossier alleging collusion between Donald Trump, then a US presidential candidate, and the Kremlin. Its claims proved unfounded. Nevertheless, Steele defends his conclusions in Unredacted. a memoir that, inadvertently, lifts the veil on business intelligence, an industry dealing in ambiguity, half-truths and lies.

Steele spent time as a child at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, where his father worked as a climatologist. After reading social and political sciences at Cambridge, he unsuccessfully interviewed for a newspaper job and failed the civil service exam before being recruited into the secret intelligence service, MI6. Steele joined the Russia desk in 1987, just as Gorbachev was launching perestroika.

Three years later, aged 25, he was posted to Moscow as second secretary at the British embassy – a Foreign Office cover. The year after, the Soviet Union collapsed, and in 1993 he returned to London. During his next posting, in Paris, Steele’s cover was blown after a list of more than a hundred MI6 agents working in embassies around the world was leaked online. This public outing put paid to his career as a field agent. By 2009 he had resigned and co-founded the business intelligence consultancy Orbis.

In its early years, Orbis kept a low profile in London’s crowded field of private intelligence companies. That changed in 2016, when Steele was reportedly paid $168,000 to investigate Donald Trump, who had recently won the Republican presidential nomination. The project was originally commissioned by a conservative news outlet, the Washington Free Beacon, but ended up being financed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The result was a collection of brief reports asserting links between Trump’s team and Russia. The dossier claimed that the ‘Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump for at least 5 (…)

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