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Secret Sharers: The Hidden Ties Between Private Spies and Journalists
A booming, renegade private intelligence industry is increasingly shaping (and misshaping) the news.
By Barry Meier
May 15, 2021
About the author:
Barry Meier is a former reporter for The New York Times and the author of the forthcoming book Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube and the Rise of Private Spies, from which this article is adapted.
Excerpts:
Some journalists are happy to knock on the doors of strangers. I was never one of them, but Christopher Steele, the ex-British spy behind the infamous Trump dossier, left me no choice.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Mr. Steele had been hired by an investigative firm called Fusion GPS to gather dirt about Donald J. Trump and Russia. The firm’s founders, two former Wall Street Journal reporters, made it clear they would not talk to me for a book I was writing about the business of private intelligence. So on an early summer morning in 2019, I arrived at Mr. Steele’s home in Farnham, a picturesque English village.
[...]
Now the glow has faded — from both the dossier and its promoters. Russia, as Mr. Steele asserted, did try to influence the 2016 election. But many of the dossier’s most explosive claims — like a salacious “pee” tape featuring Mr. Trump or a supposed meeting in Prague between Michael Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former attorney, and Russian operatives — have never materialized or have been proved false. The founders of Alfa Bank, a major Russian financial institution, are suing Fusion GPS, claiming the firm libeled them. (Fusion has denied the claims.) Plans for a film based on Mr. Steele’s adventures appear dead.
Beneath the dossier’s journey from media obsession to slush pile lies a broader and more troubling story. Today, private spying has boomed into a renegade, billion-dollar industry, one that is increasingly invading our privacy, profiting from deception and manipulating the news.
[...]
After BuzzFeed posted the contents of the dossier in early 2017, countless articles, television shows, books, tweets and blog posts about it appeared. Then the music started to stop. Robert S. Mueller III, who led a Justice Department inquiry into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow, barely mentioned the dossier in his 2019 report. A separate review that year by the inspector general of the Justice Department, Michael E. Horowitz, also threw cold water on the dossier and raised the possibility that Russian agents might have fed disinformation to Mr. Steele’s sources, a suggestion the former British agent rejected.
[...]
The dossier’s latest blow came last year when the identity of Mr. Steele’s collector was revealed. He turned out to be a Russian-born lawyer, Igor Danchenko, who now lived in the United States. Mr. Danchenko, like others in the private intelligence business, had stumbled into it after other pursuits failed. His contacts within Russia appeared to be not Kremlin A-listers but instead childhood friends, college buddies or drinking pals.
In 2017, Mr. Danchenko claimed to the F.B.I. during a secret interview that Mr. Steele had “misstated” the information and had “exaggerated” its reliability. But after that interview was released in 2020, Mr. Danchenko flip-flopped. He told one newspaper that he stood by the dossier; he told another newspaper that he wasn’t so sure about it.
By then, a few reporters who had written about the dossier had backed away from it. “Some people have wanted to maintain that the dossier is checking out when, as far as I can tell, it hasn’t,” said Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News. He was in the minority. When Erik Wemple of The Washington Post wrote a series of columns about the media infatuation with the dossier, most journalists he contacted either defended their work or ignored his inquiries.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Mr. Steele had been hired by an investigative firm called Fusion GPS to gather dirt about Donald J. Trump and Russia. The firm’s founders, two former Wall Street Journal reporters, made it clear they would not talk to me for a book I was writing about the business of private intelligence. So on an early summer morning in 2019, I arrived at Mr. Steele’s home in Farnham, a picturesque English village.
[...]
Now the glow has faded — from both the dossier and its promoters. Russia, as Mr. Steele asserted, did try to influence the 2016 election. But many of the dossier’s most explosive claims — like a salacious “pee” tape featuring Mr. Trump or a supposed meeting in Prague between Michael Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former attorney, and Russian operatives — have never materialized or have been proved false. The founders of Alfa Bank, a major Russian financial institution, are suing Fusion GPS, claiming the firm libeled them. (Fusion has denied the claims.) Plans for a film based on Mr. Steele’s adventures appear dead.
Beneath the dossier’s journey from media obsession to slush pile lies a broader and more troubling story. Today, private spying has boomed into a renegade, billion-dollar industry, one that is increasingly invading our privacy, profiting from deception and manipulating the news.
[...]
After BuzzFeed posted the contents of the dossier in early 2017, countless articles, television shows, books, tweets and blog posts about it appeared. Then the music started to stop. Robert S. Mueller III, who led a Justice Department inquiry into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow, barely mentioned the dossier in his 2019 report. A separate review that year by the inspector general of the Justice Department, Michael E. Horowitz, also threw cold water on the dossier and raised the possibility that Russian agents might have fed disinformation to Mr. Steele’s sources, a suggestion the former British agent rejected.
[...]
The dossier’s latest blow came last year when the identity of Mr. Steele’s collector was revealed. He turned out to be a Russian-born lawyer, Igor Danchenko, who now lived in the United States. Mr. Danchenko, like others in the private intelligence business, had stumbled into it after other pursuits failed. His contacts within Russia appeared to be not Kremlin A-listers but instead childhood friends, college buddies or drinking pals.
In 2017, Mr. Danchenko claimed to the F.B.I. during a secret interview that Mr. Steele had “misstated” the information and had “exaggerated” its reliability. But after that interview was released in 2020, Mr. Danchenko flip-flopped. He told one newspaper that he stood by the dossier; he told another newspaper that he wasn’t so sure about it.
By then, a few reporters who had written about the dossier had backed away from it. “Some people have wanted to maintain that the dossier is checking out when, as far as I can tell, it hasn’t,” said Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News. He was in the minority. When Erik Wemple of The Washington Post wrote a series of columns about the media infatuation with the dossier, most journalists he contacted either defended their work or ignored his inquiries.
Full article: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/business/media/spooked-private-spies-news-media.html