I regularly attend an annual security conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The only thing unusual about the November 2016 meeting was that it occurred just after the U.S. presidential election, and most of the formal and informal conversations among the conferees were about what to expect from the president-elect, Donald Trump.
That Saturday evening, Sir Andrew Wood, a retired British diplomat who had served as the United Kingdom’s ambassador to Russia during Vladimir Putin’s rapid ascent to the Russian presidency, asked to have a word. He told me he knew a former MI6 officer by the name of Christopher Steele, who had been commissioned to investigate connections between the Trump campaign and Russian agents as well as potentially compromising information about the president-elect that Putin allegedly possessed. Steele had prepared a report that Wood had not read and conceded was mostly raw, unverified intelligence, but that the author strongly believed merited a thorough examination by counterintelligence experts.
