#all he had to do was gather the rich elite of paris and set a trap honestly

[bigfatbreak]

For the Viceroy AU, how does Tom figure out Gabriel was the one responsible?

[lu-undy]

Chapter 15 - SBT

Here it is!

"Good morning." 

"We are closed, Sir - actually, how did you even get in?"

The Frenchman had entered the Queen Victoria first thing in the morning and was standing in front of a waiter in uniform. 

"The door was open." He simply answered. 

"I could have sworn I had it shut…" 

Lucien smirked. Picking locks is not a skill one forgets easily.

"May I ask, are you looking to hire?"

"Uhm, Sir, I'm afraid we are not looking for more waiters or more people in the kitchen." 

"And what about there?" 

Lucien pointed at the wide stage at the back of the dining area. 

"What instruments do you play?" 

"The one you are using when you talk to me. I am a singer." 

"Ah, let me get my manager…"

Lucien nodded and the young man disappeared. He heard loud voices, actually non, it was one loud voice. At first it was unclear and he only heard the end of it. 

"Charles, disappoint us one more time and you're out! The last thing I need is people coming in and out of my restaurant as if it was a brothel! Now, where is that man?!" 

There was a pause before the door through which the young waiter had disappeared blasted open. 

"Good day to you, Sir." Lucien said, not impressed by the roars he heard.

"Who the hell're you to think you can sing in my establishment?!" 

Lucien liked the man already. He had the full set of the rich man who got richer through a family business. He was only a few inches taller than the Frenchman but one could fit at least 3 Luciens in his clothes… His skin was paler than the Frenchman's and had turned red under his fit of anger. Lucien nonetheless remained calm.

"I think I am what you need to be able to stop shouting at your employees as if they were cows."

Lucien took a glance at the poor waiter behind his employer and the young man gave him all his support with his eyes.

"What?! How dare you?! What do you know about running a restaurant?! My business, my rules!"

The man was barking and his plump cheeks rebounded as if they were made of cream. A bulldog, that's what he reminded Lucien of.

"Of course, but don't you want to see more people pouring in day after day?"

"And you think you can achieve that? Hahahaa!"

As he burst into laughter, Lucien's eyes flashed maliciously. 

"Not only do I think I can, but I will, Frank." 

The plump man's laughter cut short.

"How do you know my name?!"

"I like to know who I will work with."

"Arrogant. And what's yer accent? Italian?" 

"French." Lucien corrected. "But I can sing in Italian too."

"And what makes you think that you can sing here, eh?" 

"I have sung in better places than this wannabe elite restaurant."

Lucien disdainfully said as he opened the button of his jacket.

"And in none of them have I ever witnessed the manager raise his voice on his employees. That just confirms my suspicions."

Frank watched, his jaw dropping. He didn't see it but most of the staff had exited the kitchen and backstage and were watching the whole scene. Lucien sat down at the nearest table. He took his cigarette case out of his breast pocket and lit one before resuming his speech.

"The reason for the failure of this establishment is none other than its head."

Frank squinted his little eager eyes. 

"You bluff, you know nothing and you're not even a singer. Also, my restaurant is about to do much, much better even without you. But anyway, I don't believe you."

"You want confirmation of what I said? Fair enough, let us do that, shall we? Someone bring me a telephone. I will call a friend and you will be settled. Now, to make sure that who I will call is truly who I claim it is, I won't give you his direct number. Non, Frank, you will call the lowest secretary of the entire hierarchy tree and work your way up until you have him at the other end, d'accord?"

[Agreed?]

"Who's yer friend, Frenchie?"

Lucien sucked on his cigarette before blowing a cloud of smoke in front of him. Frank could only see his fair eyes pierce through the menthol fog. 

"The man who runs the most sought after restaurant of all Paris, of course. That same place that welcomes celebrities, singers, actors, politicians, local and international leaders."

"Pffff, as if…" 

"I have personally seen in the flesh more kings and presidents that you have seen on television." Lucien added. "Take it as a bet. If I am bluffing and saying nonsense, I will leave and not come back to trouble you ever again. But if it turns out that I really am close friends with the man who feeds the European and international elite in Paris, then you hire me under my conditions. What do you say?" 

Frank frowned harder, trying to impress the thin Frenchman smoking nonchalantly in front of him, to no avail. Lucien's smirk remained. 

"If kings, queens and leaders of all sorts came to listen to me sing, sometimes even offered me a discussion with them, can you only understand the asset that I would be for your establishment…?" Lucien said. 

"Wait, hold on, why do you want to work here? If what you're saying is true, then why come in this 'wanna be elite restaurant'?"

Lucien had to think fast to find an answer to that. Lucky for him, decades of being a spy were hard to forget and so the lies came to his lips very naturally. 

"Well, you just said it." He answered. "You are expecting this establishment to do better. Allow me to help in that matter and also make my name in this continent." 

"So you're in for the fame, eh?" Frank asked. 

"Non, that I already have. Pay attention, Frank," Lucien teased just to make him pay for the way he treated his employees. "I have sung for your Queen a few times, you know? The one with her face on your money?"

"Alright, alright, bring me a phone, I'll call that restaurant in Paris myself!" Frank concluded to cut Lucien's mocking and a waiter brought a phone to him. "What's it called?"

"Le Conquérant." Lucien answered.

[The Conqueror.]

After a few beeps, Frank was in contact with an operator. "Can I get the fanciest, most expensive restaurant of Paris on the line please? Can you confirm it's called 'Le.. uh… Conquayren'? Yeah, Paris in France, where else?! Yeah, I'll hold." 

Lucien rolled his eyes at how Frank butchered the name of the restaurant. He was now used to his impressive politeness. After a minute or so, someone answered the phone. 

"Yeah, hello, am I at that fancy restaurant in Paris? Yeah? I'm calling from Australia, see, I've got a man in front of me who claims he sang for you and made you earn fortunes; just running a background check on the bloke." Frank turned to Lucien.  "Your name?"

"Lulu." 

Frank's eyebrows jumped. 

"L-Lulu?" He repeated, thinking it was all a prank now as the name sounded ridiculous. "Right, I'll pass him over." 

Lucien took the telephone. 

"Allô? Oui. Oui, c'est moi, Lulu." 

[Hello? Yes. Yes, it's me, Lulu.]

The rest of the conversation Frank didn't really understand. 

"J'ai besoin que vous assuriez ce monsieur que je suis bien ce que je prétends être."

[I need you to convince the man that I am indeed what I claim to be.]

Lucien nodded a few times. A few "oui" and "mh-hm" later, the phone passed from Lucien's hands to Frank's. 

"Yeah, hello? Yeah, so, it is true?" Frank expected a no. But what he was told completely confirmed what the Frenchman had said. "Are you kiddin' me?! This bloke, in front of me, singing to kings and stuff…? He had dinner with who now?!" 

Lucien smirked proudly and leaned back on his chair, his cigarette between his lips. He waited for Frank to finish the phone call and he hung up. 

"So…" The Frenchman said. "When shall I meet the musicians?" 

Frank let his hand sink on his face, from his brow to his chin. 

"Listen here, Frenchie-"

"Lucien." Said Frenchie corrected him. "If we are to work together, you will have to learn how to respect your collaborators."

"Collaborators?!" Frank repeated. "I'm payin' you and you're working for me! How is that a collaboration? I'm your boss and that's that!"

"Tsk, tsk, tsk…." Lucien waved with his index finger, shaking his head. "Your job is to deal with the restaurant, mine, to organise shows. I hardly see where your input in my work comes." 

"At the end of the month, the cheques."

"You can keep your filthy chèques to yourself. I don't need them. Now, that makes you my collaborator, non?" Lucien asked. 

"Wait, are you sayin' you'd rather not me paying you?" 

"I do not do this for the money, Frank." 

"You're one hell of a weirdo…" Frank took a chair and sat opposite Lucien. "Say I hire y-" 

Lucien raised an eyebrow. 

"I mean, I collaborate with you… What's the plan?" Frank asked. 

"You take care of your restaurant and leave the shows to me. I will handle everything: song choices, musicians, rehearsals, costumes. I ask of you one thing. Non, actually, two."

Frank raised an eyebrow. 

"You let me hire whoever I need and I need to have a look at your menu." 

The plump man's eyebrows jumped. 

"You hungry or something now?" 

Lucien ignored his comment, and Frank put a hand to his chin. Well, his first chin. Looking like a bulldog meant he had multiple ones…

"Let's make a deal then." Frank started. 

"I am all ears." Lucien crushed his cigarette end in the ashtray.

"I get you on board for a month and I accept all your tantrums. No more, no less. If by the end of it things change, I'll keep you. Otherwise, you and your princess attitude can go back where you come from." 

Lucien smirked. 

"So, what d'you say?" Frank extended his hand. 

The Frenchman thought fast. Making himself a name here in a month was impossible. Unless… 

"Agreed." Lucien shook his partner's hand. "Now," He stood up. "I shall get to work."

"Alright."

Lucien made his way through the staff who had gathered around them and had watched the discussion like a tennis match.

"Anyone who works on or around the stage, follow me." 

Like a shepherd with his sheep, they did. They ended up a minute later on stage. 

"Gentlemen, you heard Frank. We need to get the show rolling hard and fast. We need this establishment to thrive!"

Lucien looked around and all he could see was tired eyes that did not have any hope or will to make the Queen Victoria any better. 

"Look," Lucien changed his strategy. "My name is Lucien as you have heard, and I won't promise you glory with a snap of my fingers. The reputation I have, I built it with litres and litres of sweat, as well as endless hours of work. But gentlemen…" He turned to look at them all in the eyes, one by one. 

"Like a phoenix from its ashes, we shall rise again!" He raised his hand and clenched his fist. "We have an open path and only success lies ahead! But to reach that end, I need you, you and you! Oui! I will need all of you to contribute! I need each of you to rehearse as if you were to play to your queen!"

The musicians were keenly listening and started to lean forward on their seats. 

"Now! We have enough musicians, creativity and experience to make this show better than what it's ever been before. Who is the conductor?"

"Me, Sir." A man about a decade older than Lucien raised his hand. 

"I will ask you all to give me a sample of what you usually do. Come on!" 

The musicians took their places. The conductor stood in front of them and motioned them to start. Lucien took a seat and listened carefully. He lit up a cigarette and frowned. A waiter happened to pass by. 

"Could you bring me the menu please?" 

"Of course, Sir." 

A second later, Lucien was reading carefully, raising his eyes to the musicians and his ears still pricked up to their efforts. Indeed, the Queen Victoria served exquisite food if one was to believe their menu… But, as Lucien raised his eyes, he saw a group of musicians who played mechanically. There was no passion, no will, no savouring the music. 

"Stop it." Lucien rose to his feet. "Stop this." 

The conductor signed and the musicians came to a stop. 

"This is no music. This is what school boys produce when they are being forced to sing in front of their classmates. We need to change things, drastically."

"What do you propose?" The conductor asked. "We've always played like this." He raised his hands and let them flop again against his thighs.

"This is exactly the problem. And what kind of music is this? Elevator music? Music that no one ever cares about? Music that people hear but don't listen to?"

"But that's what Mr Jameson wants. He's always asked us to play to accompany the meal, not to compete with it." The conductor answered. 

"Forget about him! He is the one who made you all lose your passion for music!" Lucien shouted, pointing an accusative finger in direction of the door behind which Frank disappeared. “Close your eyes.”

The group watched him curiously.

“Come on, I don’t have all day!” Lucien insisted and they did as he said.

“I want to take you back to the day you all first played, when you picked up your instrument and the sounds that came out of you spoke out loud the words that your mouth couldn’t form! What did it feel like to express yourself with a means that doesn’t care about culture, race, age, gender? Music slashes through everything, your body, your ideas, your beliefs! And it comes straight through your heart, like the arrow of an experienced hunter. And you? You! Gentlemen! You are the hunters! The hunters of those feelings, of those emotions that the poet, the writer and the painter cannot form! Non! Only you have that power! To create the waves of the air that spell the feelings that no language, no other form of art can!”

The musicians opened their eyes.

“Now you take your instruments and you play like you mean it! You play as if it were your last chance, your last moment, as if all the efforts and sacrifices in your lives led to this special moment!”

“What should we play, Lucien?” The conductor asked. 

“What do you feel like at the moment? What emotion do you want to convey?” Lucien answered.

The conductor fell deep in thought for a moment and Lucien’s eyes scanned through the musicians. 

“So? Tell me!” He turned to all of the musicians. "What do you want to play…? You, tell me." He asked a trumpet player. 

"Uh, freedom I guess."

"Oui, freedom, you?" Lucien turned to the drummer.

"Hope." 

"Very good, you?" He asked a bassist. 

"Love." 

Lucien's eyebrows twitched. His first reaction was surprise. Why? Because who would like to sing love? Love is the biggest empty promise that life makes. You grow up full of "find your princess and live happily ever after" only to be served "find your queen and watch her slip from your very hands". Non, love was everything but what Lucien would have sung. 

"Love?" He repeated, his lips almost hurting as they uttered the word.

"Yeah, love." The bassist insisted. 

Lucien looked at all the other musicians and saw so much expectations in their eyes that he couldn't afford to refuse. He couldn't! After the moderately inspirational speech he gave, he couldn't afford to extinguish that flame and lose their trust.

He frowned. 

"Fine. We shall play such a piece. Your job is to find and agree on a song. I give you a few days to rehearse it and make it yours. I don't want to sing on any odd cover, non! You all will have to make this piece yours, make it resonate inside of you. Once this is done, I shall come in and we shall rehearse with my voice. Do we have a deal, gentlemen?" 

"Yes."

"Yeah."

"Then get to it!" Lucien concluded before turning his back and exiting the restaurant. 

On his way out, his eye caught the shadow of Frank in the corridor. He had been watching and listening, lurking. Lucien did not mind at all. On the contrary, if the plump man did learn a thing or two on how to manage a team, it wouldn't hurt.

The Frenchman walked back to his car and slid in. He waited to be out of sight from the restaurant and looked in his rear view mirror. He smiled. Being hired proved a bit chaotic, but fairly easy. Now, he had to pay a friend a visit to make sure he would hold his part of the bargain with Frank: make more and more people pour in the Queen Victoria.

[mxliv-oftheendless]

Ruining KISStory: A Filthy, Filthy Story About Benjamin Franklin

So in celebration of surviving my French midterm (my anxiety over it was through the roof for some damn reason), I decided I would post this crazy little thing for y’all! So in like, actual real life, Shane for a while did his own show called Ruining History, which I totally recommend for you guys to actually watch. So this is a spinoff of my KISS Unsolved AU, appropriately named Ruining KISStory (a name I’m super fucking proud of actually XD), in which our resident Queen of the Trolls Paul Stanley gives us his own creative spin on historical events. And yes, it’s going to be just as chaotic as Unsolved lol. Here’s the link to the original episode if you want to watch that first. 

And now, without further ado, enjoy!

Tag list: @cosmicrealmofkissteria​  @ashestoashesvvi​  @kategwidt​  @retronova​

[camera opens on Paul, who is sitting at a panel. A map of the world is hung up behind him. The sound of tuning violins plays in the background]

PAUL: Some people think history is boring. But I think Benjamin Franklin might have been in some weird sex parties!

[intro, then title card. Grand orchestra music plays in the background]

[cuts back to the panel; the shot has been widened so the entire panel is visible. From left to right: Vinnie, Gene, Paul, Eric C., Tommy. Labels showing their names come up on screen]

PAUL: So what do you guys know about Ben Franklin?

VINNIE: … Kites!

ERIC: Ethics?

TOMMY: Oh! He used the kite and a key and discovered electricity!

GENE: Oh yeah, we learned about that in school.

PAUL: Pretty sure every school tells that story.

GENE: He also helped Nicholas Cage find treasure.

PAUL: [gives him a withering look before turning away] Okay. [Tommy laughs]

[screen cuts away to a title card:

CHAPTER I:

THE AMERICAN OVERACHIEVER

screen then cuts to animations as Paul narrates, while inspiring music you would hear in a film set during the American Revolution plays in the background]

PAUL [voiceover]: Born in 1706, Benjamin Franklin is often thought of as the model American citizen. Throughout his life, he was… well, he was a lot of things. Seriously, a lot of things.

[a list of text boxes appears on screen next to a picture of a statue of Benjamin Franklin:

POLITICIAN

AUTHOR

SCIENTIST

CIVIC LEADER

POSTMASTER

MEDIA MOGUL

INVENTOR

DIPLOMAT

I COULD KEEP GOING BUT YOU GET IT]

PAUL [voiceover]: Beyond all that, though, he seems like the kind of guy you wouldn’t mind having a drink with. But, if you did spend some quality time with Ben Franklin, things might get weird.

[cuts back to panel; Vinnie looks intrigued]

VINNIE: By weird, do you mean [waggles his eyebrows] weird or just eccentric-weird?

PAUL: I mean [waggles his eyebrows] weird.

ERIC: [looks a little nervous] Oh no… I really liked Ben Franklin as a kid.

GENE: Well, he’s gonna ruin the history books for ya, Eric.

TOMMY: Oh is that why it’s called Ruining History?

PAUL: Yep!

TOMMY: Nice, I like that.

PAUL: Thank you. [cuts back to animation sequence]

PAUL [voiceover]: In the years during and after America’s fight for independence, Franklin spent much of his time serving as a diplomat in Europe. And it’s a good thing he did. Author Walter Isaacson has argued that America wouldn’t have won the war without Franklin’s excellent diplomacy in France. It wasn’t all politics, though. At the time, Paris was regarded as one of the most cosmopolitan cities at that time in history. And a wave of cultural enlightenment paired with a strong economy gave the upper class the means to… well… [music intensifies] have many crazy, crazy, crazy… crazy nights…

But we’ll get to that in a second! Franklin seemed to find himself right at home in this environment. To give an idea of his bohemian life abroad, here’s a curious morning routine he picked up during his time in France.

GENE: I bet it was, powder on the balls. [Eric laughs]

PAUL: [snickering] Powder the wig, powder the balls.

TOMMY: Powder the balls, get out on the street, and do something! [Vinnie laughs]

PAUL [voiceover]: While writing to a friend of his, Franklin described his habit of taking what he called “air baths.” Quote, “I rise almost every morning and sit in my chamber without any clothes whatever, half an hour or an hour, according to the season, either reading or writing. The practice is not in the least bit painful, but on the contrary, agreeable.”

[cuts to the left side of the panel. Gene looks uncomfortable, while Vinnie just gives a raised eyebrow]

GENE: I don’t know what it was about how people wrote during this time, but describing sexual acts in this kinda language makes it dirtier than it actually is.

PAUL: There’s nothing sexual about this.

VINNIE: There’s no sexuality here, Genie, your mind is just dirty.

TOMMY: Yeah, he’s just sitting around his house naked.

VINNIE: I mean if the hand just happens to fall…

GENE: Vinnie, I can’t believe I’m saying this to you, but guys—we don’t just jerk off on accident!

ERIC: I mean… I have no idea how to respond to that.

PAUL: I think some guys do.

TOMMY: Peter does.

PAUL: [raises an eyebrow at him while they all turn to stare at Tommy] … How do you know that?

ERIC: I could’ve gone my whole life without hearing that. [cuts back to the animation sequence]

PAUL [voiceover]: Franklin’s social calendar in Europe was full of invites to gluttonous but incredibly classy all-night ragers, where his status as an American statesmen made him a pretty interesting guy. The women of France allegedly couldn’t get enough of him. One account describes hundreds of women surrounding him, placing a beautiful wreath upon his head, and lining up to kiss him.

ERIC: That didn’t happen… right?

PAUL: [shrugs] I dunno, it could have happened.

VINNIE: That sounds like something you would do to your old grandpa, though.

[silence. Everyone on the panel turns to stare at Vinnie in confusion]

TOMMY: What?

GENE: So you’re saying, at family gatherings—

VINNIE: No! I’m just saying, that doesn’t seem like something you’d do to someone you wanna get with. Like, would you put a funny hat on them? No. [silence] I’m just saying, you guys!

[cuts back to animation sequence]

PAUL [voiceover]: Ben’s home life was, according to accounts, equally spicy. When famous painter Charles Willson Peale paid Franklin a surprise visit one afternoon, he spied the elderly diplomat with a young woman seated on his lap. [cuts to a sketch showing a man with a woman on his lap] This sketch of his is believed to depict the two. Kinda weird that he would sketch that, but hey.

[cuts to the panel; everyone is looking at their own copies of the sketch]

GENE: She seems to have a pretty good grip on his balls.

TOMMY: That’s a, a vice-like grip there.

VINNIE: They’re still wearing pretty much everything.

ERIC: Did you guys notice their eyes? Their eyes are open and they’re just staring at each other.

PAUL: Yeah, their eyes are pretty striking.

VINNIE: Yeah…

ERIC: They’re kissing, but it’s, it’s a little unnerving. Wonder why the guy would sketch this…

PAUL [voiceover]: Some historians have evaluated Ben Franklin’s habit of charming the elite women of Europe as a strategic ploy, suspecting that he hoped that they would speak favorably of Franklin and his case for American liberty to their policy-making husbands. But many others argue that he was just a vulgar old man. Author Albert Henry Smith wrote that Franklin’s, quote, “animal instincts and passions were strong and rank.”

VINNIE: [looks mildly disgusted] Well that’s descriptive.

GENE: [snickering]: Y’know, good old animal Ben.

PAUL: An animal…

GENE: Hey, hey: I’m an animal.

PAUL: [stares for a second, then smiles] Ah!

GENE: Ah! [high-fives Paul]

ERIC: Wait, if he was born in… when was he born?

PAUL: 1706.

ERIC: If he was born in 1706… then how old was he when all this was happening?

PAUL: He would have been… probably between his late 60s and early 70s.

[Eric’s face looks very shocked, slowly contorting into disgust]

TOMMY: Oh man, he was as old as my grandpa!

GENE: [shrugs] Hey, if it still works… [cuts back to animation sequence]

PAUL [voiceover]: Based on Franklin’s party-animal-rock-star lifestyle, it makes sense that he would be in the same social circles as some of Europe’s more notorious scoundrels; and so he was. So let us now turn our attention to a man whose life would soon intersect with Franklin’s: Sir Francis Dashwood.

VINNIE: [snickering] Very English name. [mock British accent] Sir Francis Dashwood!

[screen cuts away to a title card:

CHAPTER II

THE FANCY ENGLISH SEX MAN

lighthearted music plays]

PAUL [voiceover]: Born in 1708, Sir Francis Dashwood was the only heir of a wealthy merchant. He’s perhaps best summed up by one author’s description: “An enormously rich man with a genius for obscenity.” Dashwood’s primary interests were seemingly set in stone when in his formative years, he embarked on his Grand Tour, a traditional rite of passage during which wealthy young men traveled through Europe on a cultural odyssey. As Dashwood’s tutor put it, he, quote, “fornicated his way across Europe.” In one instance, he even seduced the Empress of Russia while claiming to be Charles the Twelfth of Sweden, a man who was, at that point, dead.

TOMMY: Wait, did she not know Charles the Twelfth was dead?

PAUL: I mean, if she got fooled by this guy, I’m pretty sure she had no idea.

VINNIE: This was the era before email and the Internet, so word traveled pretty slowly. Also, [laughs] I love how his tutor says he pretty much fucked his way across Europe.

GENE: Wonder how he got her to sleep with him…

ERIC: I don’t think we need to know the details, Gene.

GENE: Maybe you don’t.

PAUL [voiceover; tense music plays]: These travels also inspired Dashwood’s fascination with sacred rituals of the past. He wasn’t really a fan of the religious institutions of his day, but he was simultaneously fascinated with Europe’s rich history. So when he wasn’t womanizing, he was sauntering through dusty catacombs lined with mummified corpses, or sitting in old Roman ruins imagining the orgies of the past. So it’s this odd mutual appreciation for debauchery and sacred history that would lead to Dashwood’s crowning achievement and ultimately his friendship with Ben Franklin: the Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe. Or, as it was more popularly known…

[music reaches a climactic peak as the name appears on screen over burning flames. Paul reads the name]

THE HELLFIRE CLUB!

GENE: Oh shit.

VINNIE: That sounds awesome.

PAUL [voiceover]: Dashwood’s Hellfire Club was meant to attract the most depraved and intellectual men of the time. And over the course of its history, its lineup would allegedly include such notable men as the Prime Minister of England, the Lord Mayor of London, several of England’s greatest artists and poets, the Prince of Wales, and possibly, as evidence would strongly suggest, Ben Franklin. See, Dashwood was publicly known to sympathize with the cause of the American rebels, and he had exchanged letters with Franklin many times. Furthermore, Franklin actually visited Dashwood’s estate at West Wycombe for an extended period in July of 1772, and during his stay, there is a record of a club meeting taking place. According to one author, quote, “there seems to be no reason why Franklin should have gone to Wycombe at this special time unless he was a member. Only club members were allowed at Dashwood’s estate during club meetings.” So, keeping in mind Franklin’s likely involvement, let’s look at what he would have encountered during his visits with the Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe.

The members of the club reportedly donned white monk’s robes, and were each allowed to invite along, quote, “a lady of a cheerful, lively disposition, to improve the general hilarity.” These women also dressed up, wearing nun’s robes and masks to avoid an embarrassing run-in with a husband or acquaintance.

GENE: This is some freaky stuff.

VINNIE: [looks enthralled] This is awesome.

TOMMY: Eyes Wide Shut…

PAUL: [nods] Yep.

PAUL [voiceover]: The first location of the Hellfire Club was on the shores of an island in the Thames River. Shrouded in a thick grove of elm trees, the island was the perfect location for the not-monks to spend an evening with their dates away from the prying eyes of the public. It was also ideal because it was home to the crumbling remnants of an old medieval ruin built in 1160 known as Medmenham Abbey. Dashwood actually set about reconstructing the site, but since he had a flair for the dramatic, he asked that it still resemble a creepy old ruin. But he did install a few upgrades:

A series of stained glass windows depicting the club members in, quote, “indecent poses.”

A brilliant pornographic fresco that John Wilkes, who wasn’t known to shy away from vulgarity himself, described as, quote, “unspeakable.”

And an expansive library stocked with classical literature as well as, quote, “the finest collection of pornographic books in Great Britain.”

PAUL: So to help us get more immersed in what went down at a club meeting, I’ve provided for all of you the proper tools.

[everyone looks under the table and takes out boxes. In the boxes are black robes, 1700s-style hats, some with feathers sticking out, and Venetian masquerade masks that are black and a different color. Vinnie has black and gold, Gene has black and red, Paul has black and purple, Eric has black and orange, and Tommy has black and blue]

GENE: [as they’re all putting on their costumes] Man, you really went all out, didn’t you?

PAUL: Oh, just wait.

ERIC: I will say, I do feel more immersed in the experience now.

TOMMY: This is pretty awesome.

PAUL: Okay, now that we’re all dressed up, let’s get into the juicy stuff!

VINNIE: [looks incredibly excited] I can’t wait.

GENE: [laughs] You look so excited.

VINNIE: Because I am. [bangs rhythmically on the table] Get to the juicy stuff, Paulie!

[screen cuts to a title card:

CHAPTER III

THE DEBAUCHERY BEGINS

slow, tense music plays and animations show events as Paul narrates]

PAUL [voiceover]: In the cover of night, the hooded monks and their dates would arrive to the island on a red gondola. Stepping ashore, they were greeted by the far-off drone of the abbey’s organ and the ringing of a ghostly church bell. Outside the abbey, they’d come upon an ominous statue of Harpocrates, the Egyptian god of silence. [a statue of Harpocrates is shown with a finger over his lips, and a voice that sounds like Paul’s whispers “Shhhhhhut the fuck uuuup…”]

Once inside the abbey, Dashwood would pour his guests a special cocktail of brandy and brimstone, and they’d all raise their glasses in a toast to the powers of darkness.

VINNIE: This sounds fucking a-ma-zing! I love theme parties, and this is just, just fucking amazing. I wouldn’t stay for the sex, though.

GENE: You’d just be there for the theme part?

VINNIE: Yeah, I’d do all this, then when they start doin’ it, I’d just duck out.

PAUL: Also, before we continue, I was actually able to, to make this more immersive… [reaches under the table and pulls out a bottle of wine]

VINNIE: Ooooh, nice!

TOMMY: Is it the brandy and brimstone cocktail?

PAUL: [laughs] Heh, no, it’s not, it’s just wine. I also have… [reaches under the table and pulls out five silver ornate goblets] these babies! [passes them out]

ERIC: [looks over his in fascination] Wow, these are awesome! Where’d you get these?

PAUL: [laughs] The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. [Eric laughs]

GENE: Oh yeah, you took Erin there for her birthday a while ago.

PAUL: Yep, and I got these. [they all pour wine into their goblets and raise them in a toast] To Ben Franklin and the Hellfire Club!

PAUL [voiceover]: With the striking of a gong, the monks would move further into the abbey and file into the chapel. Here, it is suspected they practiced a black mass, in which a woman laid naked on the altar and the monks proceeded to drink sacrificial wine from her navel.

ERIC: We’re not doing that, are we?

PAUL: Oh no, we’re not doing that.

ERIC: Okay…

GENE: [laughs] Disappointed, Eric?

ERIC: No, I just—fuck you, man.

TOMMY: Would’ve been interesting.

PAUL [voiceover]: Now I should say, since I know you’re all wondering, it’s generally thought that the members weren’t actual Satanists, despite all these weird rituals. Some members actually found this aspect pretty boring. John Wilkes actually found the rituals so dull, that he once dressed up a baboon as a demon… bear with me… he locked it in a trunk, and he stowed it in the abbey. Then, when the members called upon Lord Satan to appear, Wilkes pulled a string to release the frightened animal. For a moment, the members stared in disbelief…

… And then they lost their minds.

[music grows chaotic as the animation shows the baboon leaping over terrified figures while screams are heard] The terrified baboon leapt onto Lord Sandwich—yes, that Lord Sandwich, the guy who invented the sandwich—causing him to allegedly shout, “Spare me, gracious devil! I never knew that you’d really come or I’d never have invoked thee!”

[cuts back to the panel, all of them laughing]

VINNIE: I love how, even among this weird society, there was that one guy who was like, “This society is dull!”

PAUL: Also, after this happened, the baboon jumped out the window, and they weren’t able to catch it.

GENE: [laughing] That’s hilarious.

ERIC: [laughs and waves] Bye, suckers!

TOMMY: Bye, Felicia!

PAUL [voiceover]: As the alcohol continued to flow, the monks and their guests might share dirty stories, or read from the era’s more popular works of pornographic literature.

PAUL: I’ve provided you all with a piece of pornography. These are all from a piece published in 1740 called, “A Dialogue Between a Married Lady and a Maid.” So without further ado, [gestures to Vinnie for him to begin] Vinnie?

[dramatic piano music plays as Vinnie starts to read, looking like he wants to laugh]

VINNIE: “There is between the thighs, just at the bottom of the belly, a piece of flesh… Underneath, hangs in a bag, or purse, two little balls, pretty hard, and the harder the better. They call them stones, and in them is contained that white thick liquor.” [he wheezes, then bursts out laughing, joined by Tommy]

GENE: “He took hold of that place which distinguishes us from men. At the same time he cried out, ‘O! I have a maid! A virgin to my share!’”

VINNIE: I love that they seemed to not know the exact words. [laughs]

PAUL: Well, it was a different time. They were more prudish, I think.

VINNIE: True. I’ve seen some stuff online that’s pretty vulgar. There’s this one person online who likes pugs that writes some naughty, naughty stuff. [looks at the camera smirking] You know who you are. I see you.

ERIC: Okay, my turn. “His member was stiff and hard as a horn. Just as he had finished…” oh God, why? “… my mother, who had heard me shriek, came into the room.”

TOMMY: “‘What a happy girl you are!’ said she. ‘Pluck off this smock, which I will keep for a relick, since it is stained with thy virgin’s blood.’”

GENE: [to Vinnie] I feel like we got the lesser of the four passages.

VINNIE: I dunno…

ERIC: You did! Mine and Tommy’s were pretty explicit. You just got a playful description of balls!

VINNIE: Hey, that’s pretty tame compared to some of the smut that’s out there today.

GENE: Fifty Shades of Grey? [Paul frowns and glares at Gene as the rest of the panel silently stares at him] … What?

PAUL: How dare you. [Tommy laughs] How dare you bring that crap into my show. [cuts back to the animations]

PAUL [voiceover]: With bellies full of drinks and minds full of smut, guests would start to pair off and retreat to any of the private cells, which were prepared and stocked with the, quote, “proper objects for lascivious activities.”

[cut back to the panel. Eric is slumped over the desk]

PAUL: [looks over in slight amusement] You okay there, Eric?

ERIC: I just… I don’t even want to know what they got up to.

VINNIE: [grinning and trying not to laugh] It seems pretty obvious to me what they got up to.

ERIC: I don’t want to—

VINNIE: [still grinning] They got some of that dirty rhythm.

GENE: [also grinning] They indulged in some sweet pain.

ERIC: Gene, no—

TOMMY: [just assume everyone is grinning widely] They went for a rocket ride.

PAUL: They rocked hard all night.

GENE: Took each other down below.

ERIC: Guys, c’mon—

VINNIE: Got some tough love.

TOMMY: Pulled the triggers of their love guns.

PAUL: Put the X in—

ERIC: STOOOP!

PAUL [voiceover]: After operating in secret for many years, the details of the Hellfire Club at Medmenham Abbey were recounted in a popular novel in 1760. It captivated the public’s imagination, to the point that tourists would line the shores to try and spot the sex monks arriving. But, not wanting to give up his elaborate sex parties, Dashwood bounced back by having an elaborate system of caves dug on his own private property a few miles away from the abbey, and it was here that the monks of the Hellfire Club continued to have their parties in total privacy. This new location, and the fact that it was gated from the public and accessible only to club members, lends further plausibility to Ben Franklin’s participation. As he once wrote in a letter, “The exquisite sense of classical design, charmingly reproduced at West Wycombe, is as evident below the earth as above it.” Author Daniel Mannix argues that Franklin’s letter must be referring to the underground caves, and also adds that, quote, “Franklin would have been shortsighted if he hadn’t joined the club. He was a diplomat trying to help his country, and the club gave him the entrée to some of the most influential men in England.”

But as the guest lists for secret societies are kind of hard to figure out, we will never know for sure if Ben Franklin really did attend the Hellfire Club. But his documented friendship with Dashwood and his time spent at the estate puts it well within the realm of possibility. And, if you’re left wondering if a sex club fits with Franklin’s moral compass, then let’s take one last look at the man’s true character with some passages from an infamous piece penned by Franklin himself titled, “Advice to a Young Man on the Choice of a Mistress.” This is a letter in which Ben Franklin encourages his friend to go after older women. It was written in 1745, a copy of it sits in the Library of Congress, and it’s kind of gross.

PAUL: And here to read us the letter, through the magic of theatre… [he turns and gestures off camera] Mr. Benjamin Franklin!

[the panel applauds and whoops, then they all start laughing as Ace walks in with a chair, dressed in 1700s style clothing with a wig that is long grey hair sewn to a bald patch, but we can still clearly see his real hair underneath. A text box appears on him as he sits down between Paul and Eric:

NOT A LICENSED BEN FRANKLIN IMPERSONATOR]

ACE/BEN: Tis I, Benjamin Franklin! Who by some extraordinary means, has come to a strange future time!

VINNIE: [has a hand over his mouth while he’s laughing] This is amazing.

PAUL: So, Ben, we’ve learned a lot about you and some possible details concerning your personal life.

ACE/BEN: Okay.

PAUL: But we still have a few questions. Guys?

VINNIE: Why did you enjoy the company of older women?

ACE/BEN: [reads from his paper] “Because as they have more knowledge of the world and their minds are better stor’d with observations, their conversation is more improving, and more lastingly agreeable.” Wouldn’t you say?

VINNIE: [shrugs and nods] Yeah, I guess.

GENE: Wasn’t he like, 70 years old when he wrote this later? How is he so young right now?

ACE/BEN: “Because the sin is less—”

PAUL: No, wait—

ERIC: [bursts out laughing]

PAUL: You have to ask him. He’s—He’s an old man.

ACE/BEN: I’m old.

GENE: Ben?

ACE/BEN: Go ahead, son.

GENE: Why do you prefer the company of older women?

ACE/BEN: “Because the sin is less,” my dear boy. “The debauching a virgin may be her ruin, and make her for life unhappy.”

ERIC: Huh.

GENE: Deep.

TOMMY: Do you have any more reasons?

ACE/BEN: Uh, yeah. [takes out another sheet of paper while Tommy and Eric silently laugh] “Because in every animal that walks upright, the deficiency of the fluids that fill the muscles appears first in the highest part. The face first grows lank and wrinkled; [cut to the left side: Gene is doubled over silently laughing while Vinnie is listening thoughtfully] then the neck; then the breast and arms; the lower parts continuing to the last as plump as ever. So that covering all above with a basket, and regarding only what is below the girdle, it is impossible of two women to know an old from a young one.”

PAUL: So… you’re saying, when you put a basket over their heads…

ACE/BEN: Yeah. I don’t know. [panel bursts out laughing]

VINNIE: You don’t know?! You wrote it!

ACE/BEN: History will tell. History will tell.

PAUL: I, uh, I think history has told. Do you have any final thoughts?

VINNIE: It was a different time, maybe stuff happened that you couldn’t do nowadays.

TOMMY: He got pretty freaky.

ERIC: I mean, it would be a pretty cool movie, but I wouldn’t really want to hang out with him.

PAUL [voiceover]: Well, there you have it, people! Ben Franklin; a surprisingly multi-faceted individual. History: it’s never that boring if you know where to look. That’s been Ruining History. Thanks for learning with us!

[permets-tu-not-permettez-vous]

Awake My Soul

Chapter 1: Midnight

Enjolras was lucky he had a backbone of steel or he would never have made it as a concert pianist. Or rather, it was more likely that this backbone of steel is precisely the reason he was one of the foremost concert pianists in the world. That and his stubbornness, which was almost as well-known as his deft and light touch on the keys, especially among conductors. The days were long, the hours grueling, and often the last thing that Enjolras wanted to do was sit on that cushioned stool that knew him so well and make music once more. And today, standing in his crisp freshly dry-cleaned suit, he dreaded the performance that was to start. He could hear the crowd buzzing outside, and as he peeked out from behind the curtain, he saw a large mass of people mingling through the red cushioned seats, talking and laughing. Probably trying to impress each other with how many composers they could critique without ever having touched an instrument, Enjolras thought cynically. It wasn’t that he was nervous. Enjolras was never nervous, and certainly not about playing the piano. It was that the thought of having to socialize with people after the performance, people who were all scraping to impress him by speaking abstract music theory, making him want to tear his hair out. It hadn’t always been this way. When he was young and had first discovered that he had a talent for producing emotion out of so many gleaming keys, he had been overjoyed. He spent hours in front of them, losing himself in music. He hadn’t ever looked at practicing as a chore; he had always loved those hours he had to himself, stroking those smooth ivory keys. He hadn’t really considered becoming a professional pianist until his eighth grade piano teacher Mabeuf had encouraged him to think about it, to go on tour and do various performances, to work with his local symphony. It had been hard, but it hadn’t been a struggle. Anyone who heard Enjolras play could tell he had a natural talent, and there was no question of them wanting to continue his path. His difficulties did not stem from piano playing; they stemmed from the culture surrounding the piano. From his youth, to his inexperience, to his penchant for picking eccentric composers to perform, the music world was shaken up by Enjolras’ refusal to stick to convention. This event was one that had been unavoidably cliché. He was doing a short Christmas tour performing Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, accompanied by symphonies dotted throughout the country, and even the world. Tonight he was in Paris. Enjolras would complain more, but he had to admit that though The Nutcracker was too commodified for the time of Christmas, he truly and sincerely loved Tchaikovsky’s genius. Now there was a man who didn’t give a rat’s ass about the “rules” of classical music and composed primarily from his human experience in order to make some of the most incredibly moving and evocative music ever played. So though Enjolras loved Tchaikovsky, he just hated that every Christmas the classical world trotted out the tired Nutcracker and then put it back in its box to gather dust until the next winter. Tchaikovsky had written such transformative music, and he was remembered for a toy that came to life to visit a Sugar Plum Fairy. He was such a brilliant three dimensional person, and the consumerism of art had made him two dimensional, flat, and worn-out. He shook himself. He needed to get out of this headspace before the concert. He always didn’t play as well when he was in his head. He checked his watch. Soon he’d be stepping out on the stage, and seating himself before an expensive piano as the entire room filled with costly clothes and extravagant jewelry held their breath in anticipation. He headed back to the dressing room. On nights like this, he wished Joly hadn’t made him quit smoking.

                                                             *  *  *

The afterparty was about as dull as Enjolras had expected. For a blessed two hours he had practically forgotten the audience was there and immersed himself in Tchaikovsky’s bold chords and tender melodies, only resurfacing at the thunderous and yet politely refined applause that followed his final piece. Then it had been back to the reality of old white people who were bowing and scraping and using large words to impress him. That wasn’t even the worst. Enjolras detested those who knew nothing about music giving overly loud commentary on music that they had clearly read from the Le Monde or some other critique because it was incongruent with what they thought or said. This party had all of his least favorite things, people who wanted him to meet old friends, who asked him about his inspiration, who probed his opinion on the “death of appreciation of the fine arts that is currently occurring.” When Enjolras saw Combeferre from across the room, he almost melted in relief at a familiar face. He excused himself politely from his insipid conversation and made a beeline towards Combeferre, who was speaking with one of the cellists in Paris’s orchestra. Seeing Enjolras coming his way, he also disentangled himself from his conversation and met him halfway, champagne flute clutched elegantly between his fingers. “Thank God you’re here,” Enjolras breathed, feeling the anxiety in his chest loosen at just the sight of his face - calm brown eyes framed by neat horn-rimmed glasses, smile lines beginning to form at the corners of his mouth. 

“That bad tonight?” Combeferre inquired coolly, taking a neat swig from his champagne flute in a way that looked elegant but conveyed to Enjolras that he too was tired of the elitism and racism that he had faced that night. “I’ve had several people look away and clear their throats or straight up leave every time I even allude to the fact that Tchaikovsky was gay.” “I see. Pretty bad, then.” “I need to get out of here,” Enjolras said, more to himself than Combeferre. “Want to go catch a drink at some hole in the wall bar where no one knows shit about classical music?” Combeferre quirked his brow. Enjolras calculated quickly - he had definitely spent enough time at this party to argue that he hadn’t skived it off. “Give me ten minutes to change and get my shit. Meet me in your car by the green room.” “It sounds like this is a high-stake diamond robbery.” Combeferre set his now empty champagne glass on a nearby table, nonchalantly, as if he planned on spending the entire evening here. Sometimes Enjolras truly and deeply loved Combeferre. “You haven’t met Javert,” Enjolras said soberly.

                                                            *  *  *

Combeferre drove them through the rain-washed streets of Paris after the hasty getaway that had included creeping through the parking lot without their lights on, despite the fact that Combeferre had adamantly wanted to obey the law. Combeferre was himself a classical musician and a fellow Frenchman. He played the viola, and though Enjolras knew relatively little about the viola, he loved the way that Combeferre played it. He was currently at the Lyons Symphony, but had come to Paris just to see Enjolras. They had played together in the Berlin Symphony for several years, and had bonded over their position as outsiders, fed up with the snobbery and elitism that pervaded the entire institution. One night they had openly admitted to each other how often they had almost left the music world behind because of the exhausting pace that it set for everyone, but more importantly because of the micro aggressions they saw daily. They had vowed together on that night to tough it out together - to stay to welcome the other “outsiders” that would come. And they had been fast friends ever since.

They found a little bar at a safe distance from the symphony hall, and ordered some drinks. They settled in, shedding their various layers. Enjolras was relieved and also impressed to see that Combeferre had managed to change out of his well-tailored suit and into a sweater and jeans. It made them more inconspicuous. “So - how are you finding Lyons?” Enjolras asked without preamble. He was curious. Combeferre had been there about three months, and Enjolras was itching to hear about it. Combeferre toyed with his drink, poking the straw at the ice that was sticking to the sides. “It’s alright. It’s always a little hard in the beginning. It’s nice to be in France again, quite honestly.” “I can believe it. France has its problems, but I would take it over Berlin most days.” And it was true. Enjolras like Berlin, but something about France made the fire reignite in his blood. Combeferre grinned. “I almost forgot how much you love France.” “Impossible. I’m told I’m very memorable.” “And modest too.” Combeferre shot back, before closing his mouth around his straw for a pull. “My enviable qualities aside, how is it besides being in France?” “Better than Berlin I think. Don’t get me wrong - the social circles like the donors and the regulars - they are more snobbish. But the people in the actual symphony and the conductor are much better than they were in Berlin.” “There’s always a trade-off,” Enjolras commented, rolling his eyes slightly. Combeferre shrugged. “I’d rather get shit from people I only have to see once a month than every day.” “Yes, but since they are the ones with the money, we let them think they’re right and let them act however they want even though they don’t know shit! It just means the institution of classical music never changes because none of us ever get the courage to tell a few rich people off now and again!” Combeferre shot him a look, and Enjolras deflated. “Yeah, I know. Not tonight.” “Tell me about how it’s going on your end,” Combeferre said, switching the subject. Enjolras exhaled loudly. “I feel so exhausted and worn out. I think my music has lost some of its edge because I’ve let all these toxic experiences associated with my playing seep into it.” “What do you mean to do about it?” Combeferre met Enjolras’ gaze steadily across the table, both an acknowledgment of the difficulty it had taken for Enjolras to utter those words and a steady encouragement. “I don’t know. Why do you think I will do something about it?” Enjolras asked, surprised. “Because you’re a man of action. You see a problem - you do something.” “It’s just such a big problem,” Enjolras said, trailing off. “Maybe I just need a different scene.” Combeferre sat up straighter. “Wait! I know just the thing!” His face was alight with possibility, and Enjolras felt himself being drawn in. Enjolras shot him a confused look. “What do you mean?” “When does your tour finish?” “Next week. And don’t get me wrong - I am counting the days.” And he was. Just six more days and then he was blissfully free of the Nutcracker. Javert already had a lot of plans for things to do next, but nothing had yet been finalized. “Well….” Combeferre lowered his gaze, stirring his drink with a straw, collecting his words carefully. Enjolras could tell he wasn’t sure how he would take this suggestion. “Well, what?” Enjolras said, slightly curious, but also impatient. “Out with it.” “One of my friends, Courfeyrac. I think I have mentioned him to you.” Combeferre met Enjolras’ eyes as he racked his brain. Then it came to him. “Kind of short? Curly hair? Everything he says is a rainbow?” Enjolras asked. “You could say that, I suppose,” Combeferre laughed. “He’d love that description.” “What about him?” Enjolras asked, his curiosity only heightening. “He’s a ballet dancer at the Ballet de l'Opéra national de Paris.” Enjolras whistled. “Good for him. That takes hard work. Isn’t it the oldest ballet company in France?” Combeferre nodded, his smile fading from his face. “And he puts the hard work in - he’s amazing. But anyways, I was talking to him earlier and he said that they are looking for a pianist for their upcoming performance. They want a live pianist. It’s a performance of Giselle, but they wanted to try something a little different. They haven’t found anyone yet, so Courfeyrac said to keep my ear out for any dissatisfied concert pianists who wanted to try something new.” Enjolras considered it. It was an interesting thought, and he always wanted to fly in the face of convention. But also, he wasn’t sure how much of the ballet world he could take either. That industry wasn’t exactly welcoming – it went through dancers more quickly than pointe shoes. “I don’t know.” Enjolras said simply. Combeferre nodded. “Just think about it. I mean, it can hardly hurt your career. You’re one of the best pianists in the world.” Enjolras blushed slightly. He wasn’t modest, but it made him uncomfortable when people made those kinds of comments to him. They moved on to different and lighter topics, but he kept the thought in the back of his mind even after he and Combeferre parted ways and he went back to his empty and muffled hotel room, feeling almost separate from the world that continued to move around him. The next day as he disembarked from his plane on to the soil of Copenhagen, he gave Combeferre a call. It looked like Enjolras was about to enter the world and tradition of ballet. He didn’t let himself think about it too much. He just wanted a change of pace, to be able to stay in one place for an extended period of time, avoiding the public eye for a couple of months. Or so he told himself. At the pit of his stomach he felt a clench of nerves that he hadn’t felt in years. He could only hope it was a good sign.

AO3 Link

[allofbeercom]

How Trump walked into Putin’s web

The long read: The inside story of how a former British spy was hired to investigate Russias influence on Trump and uncovered explosive evidence that Moscow had been cultivating Trump for years

Moscow, summer 1991. Mikhail Gorbachev is in power. Official relations with the west have softened, but the KGB still assumes all western embassy workers are spooks. The KGB agents assigned to them are easy to spot. They have a method. Sometimes they pursue targets on foot, sometimes in cars. The officers charged with keeping tabs on western diplomats are never subtle.

One of their specialities is breaking into Moscow apartments. The owners are always away, of course. The KGB leave a series of clues – stolen shoes, women’s tights knotted together, cigarette butts stomped out and left demonstratively on the floor. Or a surprise turd in the toilet, waiting in grim ambush. The message, crudely put, is this: we are the masters here! We can do what the fuck we please!

Back then, the KGB kept watch on all foreigners, especially American and British ones. The UK mission in Moscow was under close observation. The British embassy was a magnificent mansion built in the 1890s by a rich sugar merchant, on the south bank of the Moskva river. It looked directly across to the Kremlin. The view was dreamy: a grand palace, golden church domes and medieval spires topped with revolutionary red stars.

One of those the KGB routinely surveilled was a 27-year-old diplomat, newly married to his wife, Laura, on his first foreign posting, and working as a second secretary in the chancery division. In this case, their suspicions were right.

The “diplomat” was a British intelligence officer. His workplace was a grand affair: chandeliers, mahogany-panelled reception rooms, gilt-framed portraits of the Queen and other royals hanging from the walls. His desk was in the embassy library, surrounded by ancient books. The young officer’s true employer was an invisible entity back in London – SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, commonly known as MI6.

His name was Christopher Steele. Years later, he would be commissioned to undertake an astonishing secret investigation. It was an explosive assignment: to uncover the Kremlin’s innermost secrets with relation to Donald Trump. Steele’s findings, and the resulting dossier, would shake the American intelligence community and cause a political earthquake not seen since the dark days of Richard Nixon and Watergate.

Steele had arrived in Moscow via the usual establishment route for upwardly mobile British spies: the University of Cambridge. Cambridge had produced some of MI6’s most talented cold war officials. A few of them, it turned out – to great embarrassment – had secret second jobs with the KGB. The joke inside MI6 was that only those who had never visited the Soviet Union would wish to defect.

Steele had studied social and political sciences at Girton College. His views were centre-left; he and his elder sister were the first members of his family to go to university. (Steele’s paternal grandfather was a coal miner from Pontypridd in south Wales; his great-uncle died in a pit accident.) Steele wrote for the student newspaper, Varsity. He became president of the Cambridge Union, a debating society dominated by well-heeled and well-connected young men and women.

It’s unclear who recruited Steele. Traditionally, certain Cambridge tutors were rumoured to identify promising MI6 candidates. Whatever the route, Steele’s timing was good. After three years at MI6, he was sent to the Soviet Union in April 1990, soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the communist bloc across eastern Europe.

It was a tumultuous time. Seventy years after the Bolshevik revolution, the red empire was crumbling. The Baltic states had revolted against Soviet power; their own national authorities were governing in parallel with Moscow. In June 1991, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic elected a democratic president, Boris Yeltsin. Food shortages were not uncommon.

There was still much to enjoy. Like other expatriates, the Steeles visited the Izmailovsky craft market, next to an imperial park where Peter the Great’s father, Tsar Alexei, had established a model farm. Here you could buy lacquered boxes, patchwork quilts, furry hats and Soviet kitsch. Steele acquired samovars, carpets from central Asia, a papier-mache Stalin mask and a hand-painted Tolstoy doll set.

Much of the Soviet Union was off-limits to diplomats. Steele was the embassy’s “internal traveller”. He visited newly accessible cities. One of them was Samara, a wartime Soviet capital. There, he became the first foreigner to see Stalin’s underground bunker. Instead of Lenin, he found dusty portraits of Peter the Great and the imperial commander Mikhail Kutuzov – proof, seemingly, that Stalin was more nationalist than Marxist. Another city was Kazan, in Tatarstan. There a local correspondent, Anatoly Andronov, took a black-and-white photo of Steele chatting with newspaper editors. At weekends, Steele took part in soccer matches with a group of expats in a Russian league. In one game, he played against the legendary Soviet Union striker Oleh Blokhin, who scored from the halfway line.

Christopher Steele in early 1991, with newspaper editors in the Tatar city of Kazan. Photograph: Anatoly Andronov

The atmosphere was optimistic. It seemed to Steele that the country was shifting markedly in the right direction. Citizens once terrified of interacting with outsiders were ready to talk. The KGB, however, found nothing to celebrate in the USSR’s tilt towards freedom and reform. In August 1991, seven apparatchiks staged a coup while Gorbachev was vacationing in Crimea. Most of the British embassy was away. Steele was home at his second-floor apartment in Gruzinsky Pereulok. He left the apartment block and walked for 10 minutes into town. Crowds had gathered outside the White House, the seat of government; thus far the army hadn’t moved against them.

From 50 yards away, Steele watched as a snowy-haired man in a suit climbed on a tank and – reading from notes brushed by the wind – denounced the coup as cynical and illegal. This was a defiant Yeltsin. Steele listened as Yeltsin urged a general strike and, fist clenched, told his supporters to remain strong.

The coup failed, and a weakened Gorbachev survived. The putschists – the leading group in all the main Soviet state and party institutions – were arrested. In the west, and in the US in particular, many concluded that Washington had won the cold war, and that, after decades of ideological struggle, liberal democracy had triumphed.

Steele knew better. Three days after the coup, surveillance on him resumed. His MI6 colleagues in Hungary and Czechoslovakia reported that after revolutions there the secret police vanished, never to come back. But here were the same KGB guys, with the same familiar faces. They went back to their old routines of bugging, break-ins and harassment.

The regime changed. The system didn’t.

By the time Steele left Moscow in April 1993, the Soviet Union had gone. A new country, led by Yeltsin, had replaced it: the Russian Federation. The KGB had been dissolved, but its officers hadn’t exactly disappeared. They still loathed the US and were merely biding their time.

One mid-ranking former KGB spy who was unhappy about this state of affairs was Vladimir Putin. Putin had been posted to Dresden in provincial East Germany in the mid-80s, and had missed perestroika and glasnost, Gorbachev’s reformist ideas. He had now returned to the newly renamed St Petersburg and was carving out a political career. He mourned the end of the USSR, and once called its disappearance “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”.

A post-communist spy agency, the Federal Security Service, or FSB, had taken over the KGB’s main functions. Back in the UK, Steele would soon move into MI6’s purpose-built new office – a large, striking, postmodern pile of a building overlooking the River Thames in London. Staff called it Vauxhall Cross. This gaudy Babylonian temple was hard to miss; in 1994, the government officially acknowledged the existence of MI6 for the first time. The FSB would become its bitter adversary.

From London, Steele continued to work on the new Russia. He was ambitious, keen to succeed, and keen to be seen to succeed. He was also, perhaps, less posh than some of his upper-class peers. Steele’s father, Perris, and his mother, Janet, met when they worked together at the UK Met Office. Perris was a forecaster for the armed services. The family had lived on army bases in Aden, where Steele was born, on the Shetland Islands (where he found an interest in bird-watching) and – twice – in Cyprus.

Steele’s education had been varied. He went to a British forces school in Cyprus. He did sixth form at a college in Berkshire. He then spent a “seventh” or additional term at Wellington College, an elite private boarding school. There he sat the entrance exam for Cambridge.

At MI6, Steele moved in a small world of Kremlin specialists. There were conferences and seminars in university towns like Oxford; contacts to be made; émigrés to be met, lunched and charmed. In 1998 he got another posting, to the British embassy in Paris. He had a family: two sons and a daughter, born in France, where Steele was officially First Secretary Financial.

At this point, his career hit a bump. In 1999, a list of MI6 officers was leaked online. Steele was one of them. He appeared as “Christopher David Steele, 90 Moscow; dob 1964”.

The breach wasn’t Steele’s fault, but it had unfortunate consequences. As an exposed British officer, he couldn’t go back to Russia.

In Moscow, the spies were staging a comeback. In 1998 Putin became FSB chief, then prime minister, and in 2000, president. By 2002, when Steele left Paris, Putin had consolidated his grip. Most of Russia’s genuine political opposition had been wiped out, from parliament as well as from public life and the evening news. The idea that Russia might slowly turn into a democracy had proved a late-century fantasy. Rather, the US’s traditional nuclear-armed adversary was moving in an authoritarian direction.

At first, George W Bush and Tony Blair viewed Putin as a respectable ally in the war against terror. But he remained an enigma. As Steele knew better than most, obtaining information from inside the presidential administration in Moscow was tough. One former member of the US National Security Council described Putin as a “black box”. “The Brits had slightly better assets than us. We had nothing. No human intelligence,” the source said. And, with the focus on fighting Islamists, Russia was downgraded on the list of US-UK intelligence priorities.

By 2006, Steele held a senior post at MI6’s Russia desk in London. There were ominous signs that Putin was taking Russia in an aggressive direction. The number of hostile Russian agents in the UK grew, surpassing cold war levels. Steele tracked a new campaign of subversion and covert influence.

And then two FSB assassins put a radioactive poison into the tea of Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB officer turned London-based dissident. It was an audacious operation, and a sign of things to come. MI6 picked Steele to investigate. One reason for this was that he wasn’t emotionally involved with the case, unlike some of his colleagues who had known the victim. He quickly concluded the Russian state had staged the execution.

Alexander Litvinenko, whose poisoning in London in 2006 Christopher Steele was chosen to investigate. Photograph: Natasja Weitsz

Steele’s gloomy view of Russia – that under Putin it was not only domestically repressive but also internationally reckless and revisionist – looked about right. Steele briefed government ministers. Some got it. Others could scarcely believe Russian spies would carry out murder and mayhem on the streets of London.

All told, Steele spent 22 years as a British intelligence officer. There were some high points – he saw his years in Moscow as formative – and some low ones. Two of the diplomats with whom he shared an office in the embassy library, Tim Barrow and David Manning, went on to become UK ambassadors to the EU and the US respectively.

Steele didn’t quite rise to the top, in what was a highly competitive service. Espionage might sound exciting, but the salary of a civil servant was ordinary. And in 2009 he had faced a personal tragedy, when his wife died at the age of 43 after a period of illness.

That same year, Steele left MI6 and set up his own business intelligence firm, Orbis, in partnership with another former British spy, Christopher Burrows. The transition from government to the private sector wasn’t easy. Steele and Burrows were pursuing the same intelligence matters as before, but without the support and peer review they had in their previous jobs. MI6’s security branch would often ask an officer to go back to a source, or redraft a report, or remark: “We think it’s interesting. We’d like to have more on this.” This kept up quality and objectivity.

Steele and Burrows, by contrast, were out on their own, where success depended more on one’s own wits. There was no more internal challenge. The people they had to please were corporate clients. The pay was considerably better.

The shabby environs of Orbis’s office in London’s Victoria, where I first met Christopher Steele, were a long way away from Washington DC and the bitterly contested 2016 US presidential election. So how did Steele come to be commissioned to research Donald J Trump and produce his devastating dossier?

At the same moment Steele said goodbye to official spying, another figure was embarking on a new career in the crowded field of private business intelligence. His name was Glenn Simpson. He was a former journalist. Simpson was an alluring figure: a large, tall, angular, bear-like man who slotted himself easily on to a bar stool and enjoyed a beer or two. He was a good-humoured social companion who spoke in a nasal drawl. Behind small, oval glasses was a twinkling intelligence. He excelled at what he did.

Simpson had been an illustrious Wall Street Journal correspondent. Based in Washington and Brussels, he had specialised in post-Soviet murk. He didn’t speak Russian or visit the Russian Federation. This was deemed too dangerous. Instead, from outside the country, he examined the dark intersection between organised crime and the Russian state.

By 2009, Simpson decided to quit journalism, at a time when the media industry was in all sorts of financial trouble. He co-founded his own commercial research and political intelligence firm, based in Washington DC. Its name was Fusion GPS. Its website gave little away. It didn’t even list an address.

Simpson then met Steele. They knew some of the same FBI people and shared expertise on Russia. Fusion and Orbis began a professional partnership. The Washington- and London-based firms worked for oligarchs litigating against other oligarchs. This might involve asset tracing – identifying large sums concealed behind layers of offshore companies.

Later that year, Steele embarked on a separate, sensitive new assignment that drew on his knowledge of covert Russian techniques – and of football. (In Moscow he had played at full-back.) The client was the English Football Association, the FA. England was bidding to host the 2018 soccer World Cup. Its main rival was Russia. There were joint bids, too, from Spain and Portugal, and the Netherlands and Belgium. His brief was to investigate the eight other bidding nations, with a particular focus on Russia. It was rumoured that the FSB had carried out a major influence operation, ahead of a vote in Zurich by the executive committee of Fifa, soccer’s international governing body.

Steele discovered that Fifa corruption was global. It was a stunning conspiracy. He took the unusual step of briefing an American contact in Rome, the head of the FBI’s Eurasian serious crime division. This “lit the fuse”, as one friend put it, and led to a probe by US federal prosecutors. And to the arrest in 2015 of seven Fifa officials, allegedly connected to $150m (£114m) in kickbacks, paid on TV deals stretching from Latin America to the Caribbean. The US indicted 14 individuals.

The episode burnished Steele’s reputation inside the US intelligence community and the FBI. Here was a pro, a well-connected Brit, who understood Russian espionage and its subterranean tricks. Steele was regarded as credible. Between 2014 and 2016, Steele authored more than 100 reports on Russia and Ukraine. These were written for a private client but shared widely within the US state department, and sent up to secretary of state John Kerry and assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland, who was in charge of the US response to Putin’s annexation of Crimea and covert invasion of eastern Ukraine. Many of Steele’s secret sources were the same people who would later supply information on Trump.

One former state department envoy during the Obama administration said he read dozens of Steele’s reports. On Russia, the envoy said, Steele was “as good as the CIA or anyone”.

Steele’s professional reputation inside US agencies would prove important the next time he discovered alarming material.

Trump’s political rise in the autumn of 2015 and the early months of 2016 was swift and irresistible. The candidate was a human wrecking ball who flattened everything in his path, including the Republican party’s aghast, frozen-to-the-spot establishment. Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz – all were batted aside, taunted, crushed. Scandals that would have killed off a normal presidential candidate made Trump stronger. The media loved it. Increasingly, so did the voters. Might anything stop him?

In mid-2015, the Republican front-runner had been Jeb Bush, son of one US president and brother of another. But as the campaign got under way, Bush struggled. Trump dubbed the former Florida governor “low-energy”. During the primaries, a website funded by one of Trump’s wealthy Republican critics, Paul Singer, commissioned Fusion to investigate Trump.

After Trump became the presumptive nominee in May 2016, Singer’s involvement ended and senior Democrats seeking to elect Hillary Clinton took over the Trump contract. The new client was the Democratic National Committee. A lawyer working for Clinton’s campaign, Marc E Elias, retained Fusion and received its reports. The world of private investigation was a morally ambiguous one – a sort of open market in dirt. Information on Trump was of no further use to Republicans, but it could be of value to Democrats, Trump’s next set of opponents.

Before this, in early spring 2016, Simpson approached Steele, his friend and colleague. Steele began to scrutinise Paul Manafort, who would soon become Trump’s new campaign manager. From April, Steele investigated Trump on behalf of the DNC, Fusion’s anonymous client. All Steele knew at first was that the client was a law firm. He had no idea what he would find. He later told David Corn, Washington editor of the magazine Mother Jones: “It started off as a fairly general inquiry.” Trump’s organisation owned luxury hotels around the world. Trump had, as far back as 1987, sought to do real estate deals in Moscow. One obvious question for him, Steele said, was: “Are there business ties to Russia?”

Paul Manafort, who Steele started investigating in spring 2016. Last month Manafort was indicted on 12 charges including conspiracy against the United States. Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP

Over time, Steele had built up a network of sources. He was protective of them: who they were he would never say. It could be someone well-known – a foreign government official or diplomat with access to secret material. Or it could be someone obscure – a lowly chambermaid cleaning the penthouse suite and emptying the bins in a five-star hotel.

Normally an intelligence officer would debrief sources directly, but since Steele could no longer visit Russia, this had to be done by others, or in third countries. There were intermediaries, subsources, operators – a sensitive chain. Only one of Steele’s sources on Trump knew of Steele. Steele put out his Trump-Russia query and waited for answers. His sources started reporting back. The information was astonishing; “hair-raising”. As he told friends: “For anyone who reads it, this is a life-changing experience.”

Steele had stumbled upon a well-advanced conspiracy that went beyond anything he had discovered with Litvinenko or Fifa. It was the boldest plot yet. It involved the Kremlin and Trump. Their relationship, Steele’s sources claimed, went back a long way. For at least the past five years, Russian intelligence had been secretly cultivating Trump. This operation had succeeded beyond Moscow’s wildest expectations. Not only had Trump upended political debate in the US – raining chaos wherever he went and winning the nomination – but it was just possible that he might become the next president. This opened all sorts of intriguing options for Putin.

In June 2016, Steele typed up his first memo. He sent it to Fusion. It arrived via enciphered mail. The headline read: US Presidential Election: Republican Candidate Donald Trump’s Activities in Russia and Compromising Relationship with the Kremlin. Its text began: “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in the western alliance.”

“So far TRUMP has declined various sweetener real estate business deals, offered him in Russia to further the Kremlin’s cultivation of him. However he and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.

“Former top Russian intelligence officer claims FSB has compromised TRUMP through his activities in Moscow sufficiently to be able to blackmail him. According to several knowledgeable sources, his conduct in Moscow has included perverted sexual acts which have been arranged/monitored by the FSB.

“A dossier of compromising material on Hillary CLINTON has been collated by the Russian Intelligence Services over many years and mainly comprises bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls rather than any embarrassing conduct. The dossier is controlled by Kremlin spokesman, PESKOV, directly on Putin’s orders. However, it has not yet been distributed abroad, including to TRUMP. Russian intentions for its deployment still unclear.”

The memo was sensational. There would be others, 16 in all, sent to Fusion between June and early November 2016. At first, obtaining intelligence from Moscow went well. For around six months – during the first half of the year – Steele was able to make inquiries in Russia with relative ease. It got harder from late July, as Trump’s ties to Russia came under scrutiny. Finally, the lights went out. Amid a Kremlin cover-up, the sources went silent and information channels shut down.

If Steele’s reporting was to be believed, Trump had been colluding with Russia. This arrangement was transactional, with both sides trading favours. The report said Trump had turned down “various lucrative real estate development business deals in Russia”, especially in connection with the 2018 World Cup, hosted by Moscow. But he had been happy to accept a flow of Kremlin-sourced intelligence material, apparently delivered to him by his inner circle. That didn’t necessarily mean the candidate was a Russian agent. But it did signify that Russia’s leading spy agency had expended considerable effort in getting close to Trump – and, by extension, to his family, friends, close associates and business partners, not to mention his campaign manager and personal lawyer.

On the eve of the most consequential US election for generations, one of the two candidates was compromised, Steele’s sources claimed. The memo alleged that Trump had unusual sexual proclivities, and that the FSB had a tape. If true, this meant he could indeed be blackmailed.

When I met Steele in December 2016, he gave no hint he had been involved in what was the single most important investigation in decades.

Steele’s collaborators offered salacious details. The memo said that Russian intelligence had sought to exploit “TRUMP’s personal obsessions and sexual perversion” during his 2013 stay at Moscow’s Ritz-Carlton hotel for the Miss Universe beauty pageant. The operation had allegedly worked. The tycoon had booked the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton hotel “where he knew President and Mrs OBAMA (whom he hated) had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia”.

There, the memo said, Trump had deliberately “defiled” the Obamas’ bed. A number of prostitutes “had performed a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him”. The memo also alleged: “The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.”

As well as sex, there was another fascinating dimension to this alleged plot, categorically denied by Trump. According to Steele’s sources, associates of Trump had held a series of clandestine meetings in central Europe, Moscow and elsewhere with Russian spies. The Russians were very good at tradecraft. Nonetheless, could this be a trail that others might later detect?

Steele’s sources offered one final devastating piece of information. They alleged that Trump’s team had co-ordinated with Russia on the hacking operation against Clinton. And that the Americans had secretly co-paid for it.

Donald Trump and Gabriela Isler, winner of Miss Universe 2013, in Moscow. Photograph: Kommersant/Getty

Steele wrote up his findings in MI6 house style. The memos read like CX reports – classified MI6 intelligence documents. They were marked “confidential/sensitive source”. The names of prominent individuals were in caps – TRUMP, PUTIN, CLINTON. The reports began with a summary. They offered supporting detail. Sources were anonymous. They were introduced in generic terms: “a senior Russian foreign ministry figure” or “a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin”. They were given letters, starting with A and proceeding down the alphabet.

How certain was Steele that his sources had got it right and that he wasn’t being fed disinformation? The matter was so serious, so important, so explosive, so far-reaching, that this was an essential question.

As spies and former spies knew, the world of intelligence was non-binary. There were degrees of veracity. A typical CX report would include phrases such as “to a high degree of probability”. Intelligence could be flawed, because humans were inherently unreliable. They forgot things. They got things wrong.

One of Steele’s former Vauxhall Cross colleagues likened intelligence work to delicate shading. This twilight world wasn’t black and white; it was a muted palette of greys, off-whites and sepia tones, he told me. He said you could shade in one direction – more optimistically – or in another direction – less optimistically. Steele was generally in the first category.

Steele was adamant that his reporting was credible. One associate described him as sober, cautious, highly regarded, professional and conservative. “He’s not the sort of person who will pass on gossip. If he puts something in a report, he believes there is sufficient credibility in it,” the associate said. The idea that Steele’s work was fake or a cowboy operation or born of political malice was completely wrong, he added.

The dossier, Steele told friends, was a thoroughly professional job, based on sources who had proven themselves in other areas. Evaluating sources depended on a critical box of tools: what was a source’s reporting record, was he or she credible, what was the motivation?

Steele recognised that no piece of intelligence was 100% right. According to friends, he assessed that his work on the Trump dossier was 70-90% accurate. Over eight years, Orbis had produced scores of reports on Russia for private clients. A lot of this content was verified or “proven up”. As Steele told friends: “I’ve been dealing with this country for 30 years. Why would I invent this stuff?”

In late 2015 the British eavesdropping agency, GCHQ, was carrying out standard “collection” against Moscow targets. These were known Kremlin operatives already on the grid. Nothing unusual here – except that the Russians were talking to people associated with Trump. The precise nature of these exchanges has not been made public, but according to sources in the US and the UK, they formed a suspicious pattern. They continued through the first half of 2016. The intelligence was handed to the US as part of a routine sharing of information.

The FBI and the CIA were slow to appreciate the extensive nature of these contacts between Trump’s team and Moscow. This was in part due to institutional squeamishness – the law prohibits US agencies from examining the private communications of US citizens without a warrant.

But the electronic intelligence suggested Steele was right. According to one account, the US agencies looked as if they were asleep. “‘Wake up! There’s something not right here!’ – the BND [German intelligence], the Dutch, the French and SIS were all saying this,” one Washington-based source told me.

That summer, GCHQ’s then head, Robert Hannigan, flew to the US to personally brief CIA chief John Brennan. The matter was deemed so important that it was handled at “director level”, face-to-face between the two agency chiefs. James Clapper, director of national intelligence, later confirmed the “sensitive” stream of intelligence from Europe. After a slow start, Brennan used the GCHQ information and other tip-offs to launch a major inter-agency investigation. Meanwhile, the FBI was receiving disturbing warnings from Steele.

At this point, Steele’s Fusion material was unpublished. Whatever the outcome of the election, it raised grave questions about Russian interference and the US democratic process. There was, Steele felt, overwhelming public interest in passing his findings to US investigators. The US’s multiple intelligence agencies had the resources to prove or disprove his discoveries. He realised that these allegations were, as he put it to a friend, a “radioactive hot potato”. He anticipated a hesitant response, at least at first.

In June, Steele flew to Rome to brief the FBI contact with whom he had co-operated over Fifa. His information started to reach the bureau in Washington. It had certainly arrived by the time of the Democratic National Convention in late July, when WikiLeaks first began releasing hacked Democratic emails. It was at this moment that FBI director James Comey opened a formal investigation into Trump-Russia.

Trump and Putin at the Apec summit in Vietnam this week. Photograph: Mikhail Klimentyev/TASS

In September, Steele went back to Rome. There he met with an FBI team. Their response was one of “shock and horror,” Steele said. The bureau asked him to explain how he had compiled his reports, and to give background on his sources. It asked him to send future copies.

Steele had hoped for a thorough and decisive FBI investigation. Instead, it moved cautiously. The agency told him that it couldn’t intervene or go public with material involving a presidential candidate. Then it went silent. Steele’s frustrations grew.

Later that month, Steele had a series of off-the-record meetings with a small number of US journalists. They included the New York Times, the Washington Post, Yahoo! News, the New Yorker and CNN. In mid-October he visited New York and met with reporters again.

Comey then announced he was reopening an investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server. At this point, Steele’s relationship with the FBI broke down. The excuse given by the bureau for saying nothing about Trump looked bogus. In late October, Steele spoke to the Mother Jones editor David Corn via Skype.

The story was of “huge significance, way above party politics”, Steele said. He believed Trump’s Republican colleagues “should be aware of this stuff as well”. Of his own reputation, Steele said: “My track record as a professional is second to no one.” Steele acknowledged that his memos were works in progress, and was genuinely worried about the implications of the allegations. “The story has to come out,” he told Corn.

At this point Steele was still anonymous, a ghost. But the ghost’s message was rapidly circulating on Capitol Hill and inside Washington’s spy agencies, as well as among certain journalists and thinktanks. Democratic senators now apprised of Steele’s work were growing exasperated. The FBI seemed unduly keen to trash Clinton’s reputation while sitting on explosive material concerning Trump.

One of those who was aware of the dossier’s broad allegations was the Senate minority leader, Harry Reid, a Democrat. In August Reid, had written to Comey and asked for an inquiry into the “connections between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign”. In October, Reid wrote to Comey again. This time he framed his inquiry in scathing terms. In a clear reference to Steele, Reid wrote: “In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors and the Russian government … The public has a right to know this information.”

But all this frantic activity came to nought. Just as Nixon was re-elected during the early stages of Watergate, Trump won the presidential election, to general dismay, at a time when the Russia scandal was small but growing. Steele had found prima facie evidence of a conspiracy, but by and large the US public knew nothing about it. In November, his dossier began circulating in the top national security echelons of the Obama administration. But it was too late.

The same month a group of international experts gathered in Halifax on Canada’s eastern seaboard. Their task: to make sense of the world in the aftermath of Trump’s stunning victory. One of the delegates attending the Halifax International Security Forum was Senator John McCain. Another was Sir Andrew Wood, the UK’s former ambassador to Russia. Wood was a friend of Steele’s and an Orbis associate. Before the election, Steele had gone to Wood and shown him the dossier. He wanted the ambassador’s advice. What should he do, or not do, with it? Of the dossier, Wood told me: “I took it seriously.”

On the margins of the Halifax conference, Wood briefed McCain about Steele’s dossier – its contents, if true

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/how-trump-walked-into-putins-web/

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE POWER OF GREAT

So if you're an outsider, your best chances for beating insiders are obviously in fields where corrupt tests select a lame elite. People at big companies don't realize the extent to which they live in an environment that is one large, ongoing test for the wrong qualities. The Pebbles assembled the first several hundred watches themselves.1 That's true.2 Not recent ones; you wouldn't find those in our high school library.3 I should mention one sort of initial tactic that usually doesn't work: the students are imitating English professors, who are imitating classical scholars, who are often well aware of it.4 It's odd that people think of programming as precise and methodical. The strategy works just as well if you do it unconsciously.

McCarthy said about it later in an interview: Steve Russell said, look, why don't I program this eval.5 The recording industry hated the idea and resisted it as long as possible. It's also what causes smart people to be curious about certain things and not others; our DNA is not so disinterested as we might think. If you don't and a competitor does, you're in trouble. I assume they got this number from ITA. Ideas 1-5 are now widespread.6 Founders retaining control after a series A. This kind of focus is very valuable, actually.

What counts as a trick? They buy a lot of growth in this area, just as automating things often turns out to be. How about other languages?7 As long as he considers all languages equivalent, all he has to do is choose the one that seems to be that that Python is a more complicated matter than simply outvoting other parties in board meetings. What, another search engine? It's a lot of C and C as well as Lisp, so they are speaking from experience. I was in school.8 Of course it matters to do a good job. They seem to be unusually smart, and C is a pretty low-level, you reach a point where there is just too much to keep in your head always cooking up the most plausible arguments for doing whatever you're trying to solve a hard problem with a language that's too low-level, you reach a point where there is just too much to keep in your head at once. Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off.9 Com, where you need to in order to have macros you probably have to make a nest for yourself in some large organization where your status depends mostly on seniority.

Where the method of selecting the elite is thoroughly corrupt, most of the time you get throngs of geeks.10 But if you look at these languages in order, Java, and Visual Basic—it is not all the sort of people who might have corrected them, they tended to be self-sustaining. The importance of degrees is due solely to the administrative needs of large organizations.11 It comes with a lot of work creating course lists for each school, doing that made students feel the site was their natural home.12 Never send them email unless they explicitly ask for it. And I know Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia didn't feel like they were compared to the facial expressions she was used to. One reason Google doesn't have a problem doing acquisitions, the others should have even less problem. If the pattern holds true, that should cause dramatic changes.13

My main point here is not how to have better ideas.14 Those whose jobs require them to judge art, like curators, mostly resort to euphemisms like significant or important or getting dangerously close realized. Almost all startups are fragile initially. Taking money from the rich turns out to be. So if you want to beat those eminent enough to delegate, one way to beat procrastination is to starve it of distractions.15 I met them today. But one of the biggest things inexperienced founders and investors. They probably mean well. For me, interesting means surprise.

Oh, that's Tim. He was doing something quite different from what English professors are interested in it. Most philosophical debates are not merely free but compelled to make things happen fast. To the extent you reduce economic inequality, because it means that if you take a vote.16 To spawn startups, your university has to be in a town that could exert enough pull over the right people could resist and perhaps even surpass Silicon Valley. Indeed, they're bad in a particular way: they tend to do particularly well, because in many cases the language layer won't have to change at all. The Meander is a river in Asia Minor aka Turkey. You need a town with personality. They were actually right.17 But this isn't true with startups. When people say Web 2.18

Us.19 It took me a while to grasp this, but when he started his own company in 1956 he moved to Palo Alto to do it all yourself. Originally, yes, it was how many of their users actually needed to do these rentals to pay their rents. Design, as Matz has said, should follow the principle of least surprise.20 Odd as it might sound, we tell startups that they should try to make as little money as possible. Something that used to be safe, using the Internet. So I think it can scale all the way back to high school, I find still have black marks against their names anyway. It has to be in a town where the cool people are really cool. This excludes LA, where no one walks at all, and also New York, you know where these facial expressions come from.

Notes

So instead of reacting. Stir vigilantly to avoid companies that seem excusable according to some founders who continued to sit on corporate boards till the Glass-Steagall act in 1933. If you want to get all you have good net growth till you see with defense contractors or fashion brands.

Sam Altman wrote: After the war on. The philistines have now missed the video boat entirely.

Applets seemed to Aristotle the core: the way I know of at least should make what they made more margin loans. Later we added two more modules, an image generator were written in C and Perl. 8%, Linux 11. Thanks to Daniel Sobral for pointing this out.

The other cause is usually slow growth or excessive spending rather than insufficient effort to make money. When one reads about the new top story. Particularly since economic inequality in the woods.

This point is that any idea relating to the Depression was one firm that wanted to than because they are public and persist indefinitely, comments on really bad sites I can imagine cases where you can't do much that anyone feels when things are from an angel round from good investors that they were that smart they'd already be programming in Lisp, which have varied dramatically. Consulting is where all the more effort you expend on the partner you talk to corp dev guys should be asking will you build this? Make sure too that the meaning of the most visible index of that. There are two ways to make 200x as much what other people think, but this advantage isn't as obvious because it consisted of Latin grammar, rhetoric, and the war it was.

There should probably pack investor meetings with you, they did not start to be redeveloped as a note to self. If a company tuned to exploit it. First Round excluded their most successful companies have been fooled by the customs of the 70s, moving to Monaco would give us. How can people who need the money.

Treating high school junior. If Paris is where the recipe is to let yourself feel it mid-sentence, though it be in college or what grades you got in them. This would add a further level of links. If the Mac was so great, why not turn your company into one?

Different people win at that game. There is a trap set by evil companies for the firm in the mid twentieth century.

Another thing I learned from this that most people emerge from the other meanings. The function goes asymptotic fairly quickly, because they are within any given person might have done well if they'd like it takes a few people who are all that value, counting users as active when they're checking their messages during startups' presentations? It will require more than most people will pay people millions of dollars a year, he took earlier.

Economically, the best approach is to try your site. It derives from efforts by businesses to circumvent NWLB wage controls in order to make money from the tube.

Emmett Shear, and b I'm satisfied if I could pick them, if your true calling is gaming the system?

For example, to mean starting a startup. I had a broader meaning. A lot of legal business. The most important information about competitors is what you write has a title.

99 and. CEOs were J.

And even then your restrictions would have.

Unfortunately, not an associate if you turn out to coincide with mathematicians' judgements. So instead of admitting frankly that it's boring, we met Charlie Cheever sitting near the edge? You're not one of them.

E-Mail. At some point, there are few who can predict instead of Windows NT? Successful founders are willing to endure hardships, but the route to that knowledge was to reboot them, and once a hypothesis starts to be some things it's a harder problem than Hall realizes.

Instead of the resulting sequence.

The Quotable Einstein, Princeton University Press, 1973, p. To help clarify the matter, get rid of everyone else and put our worker on a desert island, hunting and gathering fruit. And no, unfortunately, I didn't like it that the graph of jobs is not writing the agreement, but to establish a silicon valley. A professor at a particular number.

You have to solve problems, but that's the situation you find known boring ideas intolerable.

Russell was still saying the same thing 2300 years later. Xxvii. I couldn't believe it, but that this isn't strictly true, because it is very visible in the world barely affects me.

Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Zak Stone, Sam Altman, Harj Taggar, Patrick Collison, Jackie McDonough, and Jessica Livingston for inviting me to speak.

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How Trump walked into Putins web

The long read: The inside story of how a former British spy was hired to investigate Russias influence on Trump and uncovered explosive evidence that Moscow had been cultivating Trump for years

Moscow, summer 1991. Mikhail Gorbachev is in power. Official relations with the west have softened, but the KGB still assumes all western embassy workers are spooks. The KGB agents assigned to them are easy to spot. They have a method. Sometimes they pursue targets on foot, sometimes in cars. The officers charged with keeping tabs on western diplomats are never subtle.

One of their specialities is breaking into Moscow apartments. The owners are always away, of course. The KGB leave a series of clues stolen shoes, womens tights knotted together, cigarette butts stomped out and left demonstratively on the floor. Or a surprise turd in the toilet, waiting in grim ambush. The message, crudely put, is this: we are the masters here! We can do what the fuck we please!

Back then, the KGB kept watch on all foreigners, especially American and British ones. The UK mission in Moscow was under close observation. The British embassy was a magnificent mansion built in the 1890s by a rich sugar merchant, on the south bank of the Moskva river. It looked directly across to the Kremlin. The view was dreamy: a grand palace, golden church domes and medieval spires topped with revolutionary red stars.

One of those the KGB routinely surveilled was a 27-year-old diplomat, newly married to his wife, Laura, on his first foreign posting, and working as a second secretary in the chancery division. In this case, their suspicions were right.

The diplomat was a British intelligence officer. His workplace was a grand affair: chandeliers, mahogany-panelled reception rooms, gilt-framed portraits of the Queen and other royals hanging from the walls. His desk was in the embassy library, surrounded by ancient books. The young officers true employer was an invisible entity back in London SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, commonly known as MI6.

His name was Christopher Steele. Years later, he would be commissioned to undertake an astonishing secret investigation. It was an explosive assignment: to uncover the Kremlins innermost secrets with relation to Donald Trump. Steeles findings, and the resulting dossier, would shake the American intelligence community and cause a political earthquake not seen since the dark days of Richard Nixon and Watergate.

Steele had arrived in Moscow via the usual establishment route for upwardly mobile British spies: the University of Cambridge. Cambridge had produced some of MI6s most talented cold war officials. A few of them, it turned out to great embarrassment had secret second jobs with the KGB. The joke inside MI6 was that only those who had never visited the Soviet Union would wish to defect.

Steele had studied social and political sciences at Girton College. His views were centre-left; he and his elder sister were the first members of his family to go to university. (Steeles paternal grandfather was a coal miner from Pontypridd in south Wales; his great-uncle died in a pit accident.) Steele wrote for the student newspaper, Varsity. He became president of the Cambridge Union, a debating society dominated by well-heeled and well-connected young men and women.

Its unclear who recruited Steele. Traditionally, certain Cambridge tutors were rumoured to identify promising MI6 candidates. Whatever the route, Steeles timing was good. After three years at MI6, he was sent to the Soviet Union in April 1990, soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the communist bloc across eastern Europe.

It was a tumultuous time. Seventy years after the Bolshevik revolution, the red empire was crumbling. The Baltic states had revolted against Soviet power; their own national authorities were governing in parallel with Moscow. In June 1991, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic elected a democratic president, Boris Yeltsin. Food shortages were not uncommon.

There was still much to enjoy. Like other expatriates, the Steeles visited the Izmailovsky craft market, next to an imperial park where Peter the Greats father, Tsar Alexei, had established a model farm. Here you could buy lacquered boxes, patchwork quilts, furry hats and Soviet kitsch. Steele acquired samovars, carpets from central Asia, a papier-mache Stalin mask and a hand-painted Tolstoy doll set.

Much of the Soviet Union was off-limits to diplomats. Steele was the embassys internal traveller. He visited newly accessible cities. One of them was Samara, a wartime Soviet capital. There, he became the first foreigner to see Stalins underground bunker. Instead of Lenin, he found dusty portraits of Peter the Great and the imperial commander Mikhail Kutuzov proof, seemingly, that Stalin was more nationalist than Marxist. Another city was Kazan, in Tatarstan. There a local correspondent, Anatoly Andronov, took a black-and-white photo of Steele chatting with newspaper editors. At weekends, Steele took part in soccer matches with a group of expats in a Russian league. In one game, he played against the legendary Soviet Union striker Oleh Blokhin, who scored from the halfway line.

Christopher Steele in early 1991, with newspaper editors in the Tatar city of Kazan. Photograph: Anatoly Andronov

The atmosphere was optimistic. It seemed to Steele that the country was shifting markedly in the right direction. Citizens once terrified of interacting with outsiders were ready to talk. The KGB, however, found nothing to celebrate in the USSRs tilt towards freedom and reform. In August 1991, seven apparatchiks staged a coup while Gorbachev was vacationing in Crimea. Most of the British embassy was away. Steele was home at his second-floor apartment in Gruzinsky Pereulok. He left the apartment block and walked for 10 minutes into town. Crowds had gathered outside the White House, the seat of government; thus far the army hadnt moved against them.

From 50 yards away, Steele watched as a snowy-haired man in a suit climbed on a tank and reading from notes brushed by the wind denounced the coup as cynical and illegal. This was a defiant Yeltsin. Steele listened as Yeltsin urged a general strike and, fist clenched, told his supporters to remain strong.

The coup failed, and a weakened Gorbachev survived. The putschists the leading group in all the main Soviet state and party institutions were arrested. In the west, and in the US in particular, many concluded that Washington had won the cold war, and that, after decades of ideological struggle, liberal democracy had triumphed.

Steele knew better. Three days after the coup, surveillance on him resumed. His MI6 colleagues in Hungary and Czechoslovakia reported that after revolutions there the secret police vanished, never to come back. But here were the same KGB guys, with the same familiar faces. They went back to their old routines of bugging, break-ins and harassment.

The regime changed. The system didnt.

By the time Steele left Moscow in April 1993, the Soviet Union had gone. A new country, led by Yeltsin, had replaced it: the Russian Federation. The KGB had been dissolved, but its officers hadnt exactly disappeared. They still loathed the US and were merely biding their time.

One mid-ranking former KGB spy who was unhappy about this state of affairs was Vladimir Putin. Putin had been posted to Dresden in provincial East Germany in the mid-80s, and had missed perestroika and glasnost, Gorbachevs reformist ideas. He had now returned to the newly renamed St Petersburg and was carving out a political career. He mourned the end of the USSR, and once called its disappearance the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.

A post-communist spy agency, the Federal Security Service, or FSB, had taken over the KGBs main functions. Back in the UK, Steele would soon move into MI6s purpose-built new office a large, striking, postmodern pile of a building overlooking the River Thames in London. Staff called it Vauxhall Cross. This gaudy Babylonian temple was hard to miss; in 1994, the government officially acknowledged the existence of MI6 for the first time. The FSB would become its bitter adversary.

From London, Steele continued to work on the new Russia. He was ambitious, keen to succeed, and keen to be seen to succeed. He was also, perhaps, less posh than some of his upper-class peers. Steeles father, Perris, and his mother, Janet, met when they worked together at the UK Met Office. Perris was a forecaster for the armed services. The family had lived on army bases in Aden, where Steele was born, on the Shetland Islands (where he found an interest in bird-watching) and twice in Cyprus.

Steeles education had been varied. He went to a British forces school in Cyprus. He did sixth form at a college in Berkshire. He then spent a seventh or additional term at Wellington College, an elite private boarding school. There he sat the entrance exam for Cambridge.

At MI6, Steele moved in a small world of Kremlin specialists. There were conferences and seminars in university towns like Oxford; contacts to be made; migrs to be met, lunched and charmed. In 1998 he got another posting, to the British embassy in Paris. He had a family: two sons and a daughter, born in France, where Steele was officially First Secretary Financial.

At this point, his career hit a bump. In 1999, a list of MI6 officers was leaked online. Steele was one of them. He appeared as Christopher David Steele, 90 Moscow; dob 1964.

The breach wasnt Steeles fault, but it had unfortunate consequences. As an exposed British officer, he couldnt go back to Russia.

In Moscow, the spies were staging a comeback. In 1998 Putin became FSB chief, then prime minister, and in 2000, president. By 2002, when Steele left Paris, Putin had consolidated his grip. Most of Russias genuine political opposition had been wiped out, from parliament as well as from public life and the evening news. The idea that Russia might slowly turn into a democracy had proved a late-century fantasy. Rather, the USs traditional nuclear-armed adversary was moving in an authoritarian direction.

At first, George W Bush and Tony Blair viewed Putin as a respectable ally in the war against terror. But he remained an enigma. As Steele knew better than most, obtaining information from inside the presidential administration in Moscow was tough. One former member of the US National Security Council described Putin as a black box. The Brits had slightly better assets than us. We had nothing. No human intelligence, the source said. And, with the focus on fighting Islamists, Russia was downgraded on the list of US-UK intelligence priorities.

By 2006, Steele held a senior post at MI6s Russia desk in London. There were ominous signs that Putin was taking Russia in an aggressive direction. The number of hostile Russian agents in the UK grew, surpassing cold war levels. Steele tracked a new campaign of subversion and covert influence.

And then two FSB assassins put a radioactive poison into the tea of Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB officer turned London-based dissident. It was an audacious operation, and a sign of things to come. MI6 picked Steele to investigate. One reason for this was that he wasnt emotionally involved with the case, unlike some of his colleagues who had known the victim. He quickly concluded the Russian state had staged the execution.

Alexander Litvinenko, whose poisoning in London in 2006 Christopher Steele was chosen to investigate. Photograph: Natasja Weitsz

Steeles gloomy view of Russia that under Putin it was not only domestically repressive but also internationally reckless and revisionist looked about right. Steele briefed government ministers. Some got it. Others could scarcely believe Russian spies would carry out murder and mayhem on the streets of London.

All told, Steele spent 22 years as a British intelligence officer. There were some high points he saw his years in Moscow as formative and some low ones. Two of the diplomats with whom he shared an office in the embassy library, Tim Barrow and David Manning, went on to become UK ambassadors to the EU and the US respectively.

Steele didnt quite rise to the top, in what was a highly competitive service. Espionage might sound exciting, but the salary of a civil servant was ordinary. And in 2009 he had faced a personal tragedy, when his wife died at the age of 43 after a period of illness.

That same year, Steele left MI6 and set up his own business intelligence firm, Orbis, in partnership with another former British spy, Christopher Burrows. The transition from government to the private sector wasnt easy. Steele and Burrows were pursuing the same intelligence matters as before, but without the support and peer review they had in their previous jobs. MI6s security branch would often ask an officer to go back to a source, or redraft a report, or remark: We think its interesting. Wed like to have more on this. This kept up quality and objectivity.

Steele and Burrows, by contrast, were out on their own, where success depended more on ones own wits. There was no more internal challenge. The people they had to please were corporate clients. The pay was considerably better.

The shabby environs of Orbiss office in Londons Victoria, where I first met Christopher Steele, were a long way away from Washington DC and the bitterly contested 2016 US presidential election. So how did Steele come to be commissioned to research Donald J Trump and produce his devastating dossier?

At the same moment Steele said goodbye to official spying, another figure was embarking on a new career in the crowded field of private business intelligence. His name was Glenn Simpson. He was a former journalist. Simpson was an alluring figure: a large, tall, angular, bear-like man who slotted himself easily on to a bar stool and enjoyed a beer or two. He was a good-humoured social companion who spoke in a nasal drawl. Behind small, oval glasses was a twinkling intelligence. He excelled at what he did.

Simpson had been an illustrious Wall Street Journal correspondent. Based in Washington and Brussels, he had specialised in post-Soviet murk. He didnt speak Russian or visit the Russian Federation. This was deemed too dangerous. Instead, from outside the country, he examined the dark intersection between organised crime and the Russian state.

By 2009, Simpson decided to quit journalism, at a time when the media industry was in all sorts of financial trouble. He co-founded his own commercial research and political intelligence firm, based in Washington DC. Its name was Fusion GPS. Its website gave little away. It didnt even list an address.

Simpson then met Steele. They knew some of the same FBI people and shared expertise on Russia. Fusion and Orbis began a professional partnership. The Washington- and London-based firms worked for oligarchs litigating against other oligarchs. This might involve asset tracing identifying large sums concealed behind layers of offshore companies.

Later that year, Steele embarked on a separate, sensitive new assignment that drew on his knowledge of covert Russian techniques and of football. (In Moscow he had played at full-back.) The client was the English Football Association, the FA. England was bidding to host the 2018 soccer World Cup. Its main rival was Russia. There were joint bids, too, from Spain and Portugal, and the Netherlands and Belgium. His brief was to investigate the eight other bidding nations, with a particular focus on Russia. It was rumoured that the FSB had carried out a major influence operation, ahead of a vote in Zurich by the executive committee of Fifa, soccers international governing body.

Steele discovered that Fifa corruption was global. It was a stunning conspiracy. He took the unusual step of briefing an American contact in Rome, the head of the FBIs Eurasian serious crime division. This lit the fuse, as one friend put it, and led to a probe by US federal prosecutors. And to the arrest in 2015 of seven Fifa officials, allegedly connected to $150m (114m) in kickbacks, paid on TV deals stretching from Latin America to the Caribbean. The US indicted 14 individuals.

The episode burnished Steeles reputation inside the US intelligence community and the FBI. Here was a pro, a well-connected Brit, who understood Russian espionage and its subterranean tricks. Steele was regarded as credible. Between 2014 and 2016, Steele authored more than 100 reports on Russia and Ukraine. These were written for a private client but shared widely within the US state department, and sent up to secretary of state John Kerry and assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland, who was in charge of the US response to Putins annexation of Crimea and covert invasion of eastern Ukraine. Many of Steeles secret sources were the same people who would later supply information on Trump.

One former state department envoy during the Obama administration said he read dozens of Steeles reports. On Russia, the envoy said, Steele was as good as the CIA or anyone.

Steeles professional reputation inside US agencies would prove important the next time he discovered alarming material.

Trumps political rise in the autumn of 2015 and the early months of 2016 was swift and irresistible. The candidate was a human wrecking ball who flattened everything in his path, including the Republican partys aghast, frozen-to-the-spot establishment. Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz all were batted aside, taunted, crushed. Scandals that would have killed off a normal presidential candidate made Trump stronger. The media loved it. Increasingly, so did the voters. Might anything stop him?

In mid-2015, the Republican front-runner had been Jeb Bush, son of one US president and brother of another. But as the campaign got under way, Bush struggled. Trump dubbed the former Florida governor low-energy. During the primaries, a website funded by one of Trumps wealthy Republican critics, Paul Singer, commissioned Fusion to investigate Trump.

After Trump became the presumptive nominee in May 2016, Singers involvement ended and senior Democrats seeking to elect Hillary Clinton took over the Trump contract. The new client was the Democratic National Committee. A lawyer working for Clintons campaign, Marc E Elias, retained Fusion and received its reports. The world of private investigation was a morally ambiguous one a sort of open market in dirt. Information on Trump was of no further use to Republicans, but it could be of value to Democrats, Trumps next set of opponents.

Before this, in early spring 2016, Simpson approached Steele, his friend and colleague. Steele began to scrutinise Paul Manafort, who would soon become Trumps new campaign manager. From April, Steele investigated Trump on behalf of the DNC, Fusions anonymous client. All Steele knew at first was that the client was a law firm. He had no idea what he would find. He later told David Corn, Washington editor of the magazine Mother Jones: It started off as a fairly general inquiry. Trumps organisation owned luxury hotels around the world. Trump had, as far back as 1987, sought to do real estate deals in Moscow. One obvious question for him, Steele said, was: Are there business ties to Russia?

Paul Manafort, who Steele started investigating in spring 2016. Last month Manafort was indicted on 12 charges including conspiracy against the United States. Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP

Over time, Steele had built up a network of sources. He was protective of them: who they were he would never say. It could be someone well-known a foreign government official or diplomat with access to secret material. Or it could be someone obscure a lowly chambermaid cleaning the penthouse suite and emptying the bins in a five-star hotel.

Normally an intelligence officer would debrief sources directly, but since Steele could no longer visit Russia, this had to be done by others, or in third countries. There were intermediaries, subsources, operators a sensitive chain. Only one of Steeles sources on Trump knew of Steele. Steele put out his Trump-Russia query and waited for answers. His sources started reporting back. The information was astonishing; hair-raising. As he told friends: For anyone who reads it, this is a life-changing experience.

Steele had stumbled upon a well-advanced conspiracy that went beyond anything he had discovered with Litvinenko or Fifa. It was the boldest plot yet. It involved the Kremlin and Trump. Their relationship, Steeles sources claimed, went back a long way. For at least the past five years, Russian intelligence had been secretly cultivating Trump. This operation had succeeded beyond Moscows wildest expectations. Not only had Trump upended political debate in the US raining chaos wherever he went and winning the nomination but it was just possible that he might become the next president. This opened all sorts of intriguing options for Putin.

In June 2016, Steele typed up his first memo. He sent it to Fusion. It arrived via enciphered mail. The headline read: US Presidential Election: Republican Candidate Donald Trumps Activities in Russia and Compromising Relationship with the Kremlin. Its text began: Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in the western alliance.

So far TRUMP has declined various sweetener real estate business deals, offered him in Russia to further the Kremlins cultivation of him. However he and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.

Former top Russian intelligence officer claims FSB has compromised TRUMP through his activities in Moscow sufficiently to be able to blackmail him. According to several knowledgeable sources, his conduct in Moscow has included perverted sexual acts which have been arranged/monitored by the FSB.

A dossier of compromising material on Hillary CLINTON has been collated by the Russian Intelligence Services over many years and mainly comprises bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls rather than any embarrassing conduct. The dossier is controlled by Kremlin spokesman, PESKOV, directly on Putins orders. However, it has not yet been distributed abroad, including to TRUMP. Russian intentions for its deployment still unclear.

The memo was sensational. There would be others, 16 in all, sent to Fusion between June and early November 2016. At first, obtaining intelligence from Moscow went well. For around six months during the first half of the year Steele was able to make inquiries in Russia with relative ease. It got harder from late July, as Trumps ties to Russia came under scrutiny. Finally, the lights went out. Amid a Kremlin cover-up, the sources went silent and information channels shut down.

If Steeles reporting was to be believed, Trump had been colluding with Russia. This arrangement was transactional, with both sides trading favours. The report said Trump had turned down various lucrative real estate development business deals in Russia, especially in connection with the 2018 World Cup, hosted by Moscow. But he had been happy to accept a flow of Kremlin-sourced intelligence material, apparently delivered to him by his inner circle. That didnt necessarily mean the candidate was a Russian agent. But it did signify that Russias leading spy agency had expended considerable effort in getting close to Trump and, by extension, to his family, friends, close associates and business partners, not to mention his campaign manager and personal lawyer.

On the eve of the most consequential US election for generations, one of the two candidates was compromised, Steeles sources claimed. The memo alleged that Trump had unusual sexual proclivities, and that the FSB had a tape. If true, this meant he could indeed be blackmailed.

When I met Steele in December 2016, he gave no hint he had been involved in what was the single most important investigation in decades.

Steeles collaborators offered salacious details. The memo said that Russian intelligence had sought to exploit TRUMPs personal obsessions and sexual perversion during his 2013 stay at Moscows Ritz-Carlton hotel for the Miss Universe beauty pageant. The operation had allegedly worked. The tycoon had booked the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton hotel where he knew President and Mrs OBAMA (whom he hated) had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia.

There, the memo said, Trump had deliberately defiled the Obamas bed. A number of prostitutes had performed a golden showers (urination) show in front of him. The memo also alleged: The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.

As well as sex, there was another fascinating dimension to this alleged plot, categorically denied by Trump. According to Steeles sources, associates of Trump had held a series of clandestine meetings in central Europe, Moscow and elsewhere with Russian spies. The Russians were very good at tradecraft. Nonetheless, could this be a trail that others might later detect?

Steeles sources offered one final devastating piece of information. They alleged that Trumps team had co-ordinated with Russia on the hacking operation against Clinton. And that the Americans had secretly co-paid for it.

Donald Trump and Gabriela Isler, winner of Miss Universe 2013, in Moscow. Photograph: Kommersant/Getty

Steele wrote up his findings in MI6 house style. The memos read like CX reports classified MI6 intelligence documents. They were marked confidential/sensitive source. The names of prominent individuals were in caps TRUMP, PUTIN, CLINTON. The reports began with a summary. They offered supporting detail. Sources were anonymous. They were introduced in generic terms: a senior Russian foreign ministry figure or a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin. They were given letters, starting with A and proceeding down the alphabet.

How certain was Steele that his sources had got it right and that he wasnt being fed disinformation? The matter was so serious, so important, so explosive, so far-reaching, that this was an essential question.

As spies and former spies knew, the world of intelligence was non-binary. There were degrees of veracity. A typical CX report would include phrases such as to a high degree of probability. Intelligence could be flawed, because humans were inherently unreliable. They forgot things. They got things wrong.

One of Steeles former Vauxhall Cross colleagues likened intelligence work to delicate shading. This twilight world wasnt black and white; it was a muted palette of greys, off-whites and sepia tones, he told me. He said you could shade in one direction more optimistically or in another direction less optimistically. Steele was generally in the first category.

Steele was adamant that his reporting was credible. One associate described him as sober, cautious, highly regarded, professional and conservative. Hes not the sort of person who will pass on gossip. If he puts something in a report, he believes there is sufficient credibility in it, the associate said. The idea that Steeles work was fake or a cowboy operation or born of political malice was completely wrong, he added.

The dossier, Steele told friends, was a thoroughly professional job, based on sources who had proven themselves in other areas. Evaluating sources depended on a critical box of tools: what was a sources reporting record, was he or she credible, what was the motivation?

Steele recognised that no piece of intelligence was 100% right. According to friends, he assessed that his work on the Trump dossier was 70-90% accurate. Over eight years, Orbis had produced scores of reports on Russia for private clients. A lot of this content was verified or proven up. As Steele told friends: Ive been dealing with this country for 30 years. Why would I invent this stuff?

In late 2015 the British eavesdropping agency, GCHQ, was carrying out standard collection against Moscow targets. These were known Kremlin operatives already on the grid. Nothing unusual here except that the Russians were talking to people associated with Trump. The precise nature of these exchanges has not been made public, but according to sources in the US and the UK, they formed a suspicious pattern. They continued through the first half of 2016. The intelligence was handed to the US as part of a routine sharing of information.

The FBI and the CIA were slow to appreciate the extensive nature of these contacts between Trumps team and Moscow. This was in part due to institutional squeamishness the law prohibits US agencies from examining the private communications of US citizens without a warrant.

But the electronic intelligence suggested Steele was right. According to one account, the US agencies looked as if they were asleep. Wake up! Theres something not right here! the BND [German intelligence], the Dutch, the French and SIS were all saying this, one Washington-based source told me.

That summer, GCHQs then head, Robert Hannigan, flew to the US to personally brief CIA chief John Brennan. The matter was deemed so important that it was handled at director level, face-to-face between the two agency chiefs. James Clapper, director of national intelligence, later confirmed the sensitive stream of intelligence from Europe. After a slow start, Brennan used the GCHQ information and other tip-offs to launch a major inter-agency investigation. Meanwhile, the FBI was receiving disturbing warnings from Steele.

At this point, Steeles Fusion material was unpublished. Whatever the outcome of the election, it raised grave questions about Russian interference and the US democratic process. There was, Steele felt, overwhelming public interest in passing his findings to US investigators. The USs multiple intelligence agencies had the resources to prove or disprove his discoveries. He realised that these allegations were, as he put it to a friend, a radioactive hot potato. He anticipated a hesitant response, at least at first.

In June, Steele flew to Rome to brief the FBI contact with whom he had co-operated over Fifa. His information started to reach the bureau in Washington. It had certainly arrived by the time of the Democratic National Convention in late July, when WikiLeaks first began releasing hacked Democratic emails. It was at this moment that FBI director James Comey opened a formal investigation into Trump-Russia.

Trump and Putin at the Apec summit in Vietnam this week. Photograph: Mikhail Klimentyev/TASS

In September, Steele went back to Rome. There he met with an FBI team. Their response was one of shock and horror, Steele said. The bureau asked him to explain how he had compiled his reports, and to give background on his sources. It asked him to send future copies.

Steele had hoped for a thorough and decisive FBI investigation. Instead, it moved cautiously. The agency told him that it couldnt intervene or go public with material involving a presidential candidate. Then it went silent. Steeles frustrations grew.

Later that month, Steele had a series of off-the-record meetings with a small number of US journalists. They included the New York Times, the Washington Post, Yahoo! News, the New Yorker and CNN. In mid-October he visited New York and met with reporters again.

Comey then announced he was reopening an investigation into Clintons use of a private email server. At this point, Steeles relationship with the FBI broke down. The excuse given by the bureau for saying nothing about Trump looked bogus. In late October, Steele spoke to the Mother Jones editor David Corn via Skype.

The story was of huge significance, way above party politics, Steele said. He believed Trumps Republican colleagues should be aware of this stuff as well. Of his own reputation, Steele said: My track record as a professional is second to no one. Steele acknowledged that his memos were works in progress, and was genuinely worried about the implications of the allegations. The story has to come out, he told Corn.

At this point Steele was still anonymous, a ghost. But the ghosts message was rapidly circulating on Capitol Hill and inside Washingtons spy agencies, as well as among certain journalists and thinktanks. Democratic senators now apprised of Steeles work were growing exasperated. The FBI seemed unduly keen to trash Clintons reputation while sitting on explosive material concerning Trump.

One of those who was aware of the dossiers broad allegations was the Senate minority leader, Harry Reid, a Democrat. In August Reid, had written to Comey and asked for an inquiry into the connections between the Russian government and Donald Trumps presidential campaign. In October, Reid wrote to Comey again. This time he framed his inquiry in scathing terms. In a clear reference to Steele, Reid wrote: In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors and the Russian government The public has a right to know this information.

But all this frantic activity came to nought. Just as Nixon was re-elected during the early stages of Watergate, Trump won the presidential election, to general dismay, at a time when the Russia scandal was small but growing. Steele had found prima facie evidence of a conspiracy, but by and large the US public knew nothing about it. In November, his dossier began circulating in the top national security echelons of the Obama administration. But it was too late.

The same month a group of international experts gathered in Halifax on Canadas eastern seaboard. Their task: to make sense of the world in the aftermath of Trumps stunning victory. One of the delegates attending the Halifax International Security Forum was Senator John McCain. Another was Sir Andrew Wood, the UKs former ambassador to Russia. Wood was a friend of Steeles and an Orbis associate. Before the election, Steele had gone to Wood and shown him the dossier. He wanted the ambassadors advice. What should he do, or not do, with it? Of the dossier, Wood told me: I took it seriously.

On the margins of the Halifax conference, Wood briefed McCain about Steeles dossier its contents, if true

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How Trump walked into Putins web

The long read: The inside story of how a former British spy was hired to investigate Russias influence on Trump and uncovered explosive evidence that Moscow had been cultivating Trump for years

Moscow, summer 1991. Mikhail Gorbachev is in power. Official relations with the west have softened, but the KGB still assumes all western embassy workers are spooks. The KGB agents assigned to them are easy to spot. They have a method. Sometimes they pursue targets on foot, sometimes in cars. The officers charged with keeping tabs on western diplomats are never subtle.

One of their specialities is breaking into Moscow apartments. The owners are always away, of course. The KGB leave a series of clues stolen shoes, womens tights knotted together, cigarette butts stomped out and left demonstratively on the floor. Or a surprise turd in the toilet, waiting in grim ambush. The message, crudely put, is this: we are the masters here! We can do what the fuck we please!

Back then, the KGB kept watch on all foreigners, especially American and British ones. The UK mission in Moscow was under close observation. The British embassy was a magnificent mansion built in the 1890s by a rich sugar merchant, on the south bank of the Moskva river. It looked directly across to the Kremlin. The view was dreamy: a grand palace, golden church domes and medieval spires topped with revolutionary red stars.

One of those the KGB routinely surveilled was a 27-year-old diplomat, newly married to his wife, Laura, on his first foreign posting, and working as a second secretary in the chancery division. In this case, their suspicions were right.

The diplomat was a British intelligence officer. His workplace was a grand affair: chandeliers, mahogany-panelled reception rooms, gilt-framed portraits of the Queen and other royals hanging from the walls. His desk was in the embassy library, surrounded by ancient books. The young officers true employer was an invisible entity back in London SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, commonly known as MI6.

His name was Christopher Steele. Years later, he would be commissioned to undertake an astonishing secret investigation. It was an explosive assignment: to uncover the Kremlins innermost secrets with relation to Donald Trump. Steeles findings, and the resulting dossier, would shake the American intelligence community and cause a political earthquake not seen since the dark days of Richard Nixon and Watergate.

Steele had arrived in Moscow via the usual establishment route for upwardly mobile British spies: the University of Cambridge. Cambridge had produced some of MI6s most talented cold war officials. A few of them, it turned out to great embarrassment had secret second jobs with the KGB. The joke inside MI6 was that only those who had never visited the Soviet Union would wish to defect.

Steele had studied social and political sciences at Girton College. His views were centre-left; he and his elder sister were the first members of his family to go to university. (Steeles paternal grandfather was a coal miner from Pontypridd in south Wales; his great-uncle died in a pit accident.) Steele wrote for the student newspaper, Varsity. He became president of the Cambridge Union, a debating society dominated by well-heeled and well-connected young men and women.

Its unclear who recruited Steele. Traditionally, certain Cambridge tutors were rumoured to identify promising MI6 candidates. Whatever the route, Steeles timing was good. After three years at MI6, he was sent to the Soviet Union in April 1990, soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the communist bloc across eastern Europe.

It was a tumultuous time. Seventy years after the Bolshevik revolution, the red empire was crumbling. The Baltic states had revolted against Soviet power; their own national authorities were governing in parallel with Moscow. In June 1991, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic elected a democratic president, Boris Yeltsin. Food shortages were not uncommon.

There was still much to enjoy. Like other expatriates, the Steeles visited the Izmailovsky craft market, next to an imperial park where Peter the Greats father, Tsar Alexei, had established a model farm. Here you could buy lacquered boxes, patchwork quilts, furry hats and Soviet kitsch. Steele acquired samovars, carpets from central Asia, a papier-mache Stalin mask and a hand-painted Tolstoy doll set.

Much of the Soviet Union was off-limits to diplomats. Steele was the embassys internal traveller. He visited newly accessible cities. One of them was Samara, a wartime Soviet capital. There, he became the first foreigner to see Stalins underground bunker. Instead of Lenin, he found dusty portraits of Peter the Great and the imperial commander Mikhail Kutuzov proof, seemingly, that Stalin was more nationalist than Marxist. Another city was Kazan, in Tatarstan. There a local correspondent, Anatoly Andronov, took a black-and-white photo of Steele chatting with newspaper editors. At weekends, Steele took part in soccer matches with a group of expats in a Russian league. In one game, he played against the legendary Soviet Union striker Oleh Blokhin, who scored from the halfway line.

Christopher Steele in early 1991, with newspaper editors in the Tatar city of Kazan. Photograph: Anatoly Andronov

The atmosphere was optimistic. It seemed to Steele that the country was shifting markedly in the right direction. Citizens once terrified of interacting with outsiders were ready to talk. The KGB, however, found nothing to celebrate in the USSRs tilt towards freedom and reform. In August 1991, seven apparatchiks staged a coup while Gorbachev was vacationing in Crimea. Most of the British embassy was away. Steele was home at his second-floor apartment in Gruzinsky Pereulok. He left the apartment block and walked for 10 minutes into town. Crowds had gathered outside the White House, the seat of government; thus far the army hadnt moved against them.

From 50 yards away, Steele watched as a snowy-haired man in a suit climbed on a tank and reading from notes brushed by the wind denounced the coup as cynical and illegal. This was a defiant Yeltsin. Steele listened as Yeltsin urged a general strike and, fist clenched, told his supporters to remain strong.

The coup failed, and a weakened Gorbachev survived. The putschists the leading group in all the main Soviet state and party institutions were arrested. In the west, and in the US in particular, many concluded that Washington had won the cold war, and that, after decades of ideological struggle, liberal democracy had triumphed.

Steele knew better. Three days after the coup, surveillance on him resumed. His MI6 colleagues in Hungary and Czechoslovakia reported that after revolutions there the secret police vanished, never to come back. But here were the same KGB guys, with the same familiar faces. They went back to their old routines of bugging, break-ins and harassment.

The regime changed. The system didnt.

By the time Steele left Moscow in April 1993, the Soviet Union had gone. A new country, led by Yeltsin, had replaced it: the Russian Federation. The KGB had been dissolved, but its officers hadnt exactly disappeared. They still loathed the US and were merely biding their time.

One mid-ranking former KGB spy who was unhappy about this state of affairs was Vladimir Putin. Putin had been posted to Dresden in provincial East Germany in the mid-80s, and had missed perestroika and glasnost, Gorbachevs reformist ideas. He had now returned to the newly renamed St Petersburg and was carving out a political career. He mourned the end of the USSR, and once called its disappearance the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.

A post-communist spy agency, the Federal Security Service, or FSB, had taken over the KGBs main functions. Back in the UK, Steele would soon move into MI6s purpose-built new office a large, striking, postmodern pile of a building overlooking the River Thames in London. Staff called it Vauxhall Cross. This gaudy Babylonian temple was hard to miss; in 1994, the government officially acknowledged the existence of MI6 for the first time. The FSB would become its bitter adversary.

From London, Steele continued to work on the new Russia. He was ambitious, keen to succeed, and keen to be seen to succeed. He was also, perhaps, less posh than some of his upper-class peers. Steeles father, Perris, and his mother, Janet, met when they worked together at the UK Met Office. Perris was a forecaster for the armed services. The family had lived on army bases in Aden, where Steele was born, on the Shetland Islands (where he found an interest in bird-watching) and twice in Cyprus.

Steeles education had been varied. He went to a British forces school in Cyprus. He did sixth form at a college in Berkshire. He then spent a seventh or additional term at Wellington College, an elite private boarding school. There he sat the entrance exam for Cambridge.

At MI6, Steele moved in a small world of Kremlin specialists. There were conferences and seminars in university towns like Oxford; contacts to be made; migrs to be met, lunched and charmed. In 1998 he got another posting, to the British embassy in Paris. He had a family: two sons and a daughter, born in France, where Steele was officially First Secretary Financial.

At this point, his career hit a bump. In 1999, a list of MI6 officers was leaked online. Steele was one of them. He appeared as Christopher David Steele, 90 Moscow; dob 1964.

The breach wasnt Steeles fault, but it had unfortunate consequences. As an exposed British officer, he couldnt go back to Russia.

In Moscow, the spies were staging a comeback. In 1998 Putin became FSB chief, then prime minister, and in 2000, president. By 2002, when Steele left Paris, Putin had consolidated his grip. Most of Russias genuine political opposition had been wiped out, from parliament as well as from public life and the evening news. The idea that Russia might slowly turn into a democracy had proved a late-century fantasy. Rather, the USs traditional nuclear-armed adversary was moving in an authoritarian direction.

At first, George W Bush and Tony Blair viewed Putin as a respectable ally in the war against terror. But he remained an enigma. As Steele knew better than most, obtaining information from inside the presidential administration in Moscow was tough. One former member of the US National Security Council described Putin as a black box. The Brits had slightly better assets than us. We had nothing. No human intelligence, the source said. And, with the focus on fighting Islamists, Russia was downgraded on the list of US-UK intelligence priorities.

By 2006, Steele held a senior post at MI6s Russia desk in London. There were ominous signs that Putin was taking Russia in an aggressive direction. The number of hostile Russian agents in the UK grew, surpassing cold war levels. Steele tracked a new campaign of subversion and covert influence.

And then two FSB assassins put a radioactive poison into the tea of Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB officer turned London-based dissident. It was an audacious operation, and a sign of things to come. MI6 picked Steele to investigate. One reason for this was that he wasnt emotionally involved with the case, unlike some of his colleagues who had known the victim. He quickly concluded the Russian state had staged the execution.

Alexander Litvinenko, whose poisoning in London in 2006 Christopher Steele was chosen to investigate. Photograph: Natasja Weitsz

Steeles gloomy view of Russia that under Putin it was not only domestically repressive but also internationally reckless and revisionist looked about right. Steele briefed government ministers. Some got it. Others could scarcely believe Russian spies would carry out murder and mayhem on the streets of London.

All told, Steele spent 22 years as a British intelligence officer. There were some high points he saw his years in Moscow as formative and some low ones. Two of the diplomats with whom he shared an office in the embassy library, Tim Barrow and David Manning, went on to become UK ambassadors to the EU and the US respectively.

Steele didnt quite rise to the top, in what was a highly competitive service. Espionage might sound exciting, but the salary of a civil servant was ordinary. And in 2009 he had faced a personal tragedy, when his wife died at the age of 43 after a period of illness.

That same year, Steele left MI6 and set up his own business intelligence firm, Orbis, in partnership with another former British spy, Christopher Burrows. The transition from government to the private sector wasnt easy. Steele and Burrows were pursuing the same intelligence matters as before, but without the support and peer review they had in their previous jobs. MI6s security branch would often ask an officer to go back to a source, or redraft a report, or remark: We think its interesting. Wed like to have more on this. This kept up quality and objectivity.

Steele and Burrows, by contrast, were out on their own, where success depended more on ones own wits. There was no more internal challenge. The people they had to please were corporate clients. The pay was considerably better.

The shabby environs of Orbiss office in Londons Victoria, where I first met Christopher Steele, were a long way away from Washington DC and the bitterly contested 2016 US presidential election. So how did Steele come to be commissioned to research Donald J Trump and produce his devastating dossier?

At the same moment Steele said goodbye to official spying, another figure was embarking on a new career in the crowded field of private business intelligence. His name was Glenn Simpson. He was a former journalist. Simpson was an alluring figure: a large, tall, angular, bear-like man who slotted himself easily on to a bar stool and enjoyed a beer or two. He was a good-humoured social companion who spoke in a nasal drawl. Behind small, oval glasses was a twinkling intelligence. He excelled at what he did.

Simpson had been an illustrious Wall Street Journal correspondent. Based in Washington and Brussels, he had specialised in post-Soviet murk. He didnt speak Russian or visit the Russian Federation. This was deemed too dangerous. Instead, from outside the country, he examined the dark intersection between organised crime and the Russian state.

By 2009, Simpson decided to quit journalism, at a time when the media industry was in all sorts of financial trouble. He co-founded his own commercial research and political intelligence firm, based in Washington DC. Its name was Fusion GPS. Its website gave little away. It didnt even list an address.

Simpson then met Steele. They knew some of the same FBI people and shared expertise on Russia. Fusion and Orbis began a professional partnership. The Washington- and London-based firms worked for oligarchs litigating against other oligarchs. This might involve asset tracing identifying large sums concealed behind layers of offshore companies.

Later that year, Steele embarked on a separate, sensitive new assignment that drew on his knowledge of covert Russian techniques and of football. (In Moscow he had played at full-back.) The client was the English Football Association, the FA. England was bidding to host the 2018 soccer World Cup. Its main rival was Russia. There were joint bids, too, from Spain and Portugal, and the Netherlands and Belgium. His brief was to investigate the eight other bidding nations, with a particular focus on Russia. It was rumoured that the FSB had carried out a major influence operation, ahead of a vote in Zurich by the executive committee of Fifa, soccers international governing body.

Steele discovered that Fifa corruption was global. It was a stunning conspiracy. He took the unusual step of briefing an American contact in Rome, the head of the FBIs Eurasian serious crime division. This lit the fuse, as one friend put it, and led to a probe by US federal prosecutors. And to the arrest in 2015 of seven Fifa officials, allegedly connected to $150m (114m) in kickbacks, paid on TV deals stretching from Latin America to the Caribbean. The US indicted 14 individuals.

The episode burnished Steeles reputation inside the US intelligence community and the FBI. Here was a pro, a well-connected Brit, who understood Russian espionage and its subterranean tricks. Steele was regarded as credible. Between 2014 and 2016, Steele authored more than 100 reports on Russia and Ukraine. These were written for a private client but shared widely within the US state department, and sent up to secretary of state John Kerry and assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland, who was in charge of the US response to Putins annexation of Crimea and covert invasion of eastern Ukraine. Many of Steeles secret sources were the same people who would later supply information on Trump.

One former state department envoy during the Obama administration said he read dozens of Steeles reports. On Russia, the envoy said, Steele was as good as the CIA or anyone.

Steeles professional reputation inside US agencies would prove important the next time he discovered alarming material.

Trumps political rise in the autumn of 2015 and the early months of 2016 was swift and irresistible. The candidate was a human wrecking ball who flattened everything in his path, including the Republican partys aghast, frozen-to-the-spot establishment. Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz all were batted aside, taunted, crushed. Scandals that would have killed off a normal presidential candidate made Trump stronger. The media loved it. Increasingly, so did the voters. Might anything stop him?

In mid-2015, the Republican front-runner had been Jeb Bush, son of one US president and brother of another. But as the campaign got under way, Bush struggled. Trump dubbed the former Florida governor low-energy. During the primaries, a website funded by one of Trumps wealthy Republican critics, Paul Singer, commissioned Fusion to investigate Trump.

After Trump became the presumptive nominee in May 2016, Singers involvement ended and senior Democrats seeking to elect Hillary Clinton took over the Trump contract. The new client was the Democratic National Committee. A lawyer working for Clintons campaign, Marc E Elias, retained Fusion and received its reports. The world of private investigation was a morally ambiguous one a sort of open market in dirt. Information on Trump was of no further use to Republicans, but it could be of value to Democrats, Trumps next set of opponents.

Before this, in early spring 2016, Simpson approached Steele, his friend and colleague. Steele began to scrutinise Paul Manafort, who would soon become Trumps new campaign manager. From April, Steele investigated Trump on behalf of the DNC, Fusions anonymous client. All Steele knew at first was that the client was a law firm. He had no idea what he would find. He later told David Corn, Washington editor of the magazine Mother Jones: It started off as a fairly general inquiry. Trumps organisation owned luxury hotels around the world. Trump had, as far back as 1987, sought to do real estate deals in Moscow. One obvious question for him, Steele said, was: Are there business ties to Russia?

Paul Manafort, who Steele started investigating in spring 2016. Last month Manafort was indicted on 12 charges including conspiracy against the United States. Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP

Over time, Steele had built up a network of sources. He was protective of them: who they were he would never say. It could be someone well-known a foreign government official or diplomat with access to secret material. Or it could be someone obscure a lowly chambermaid cleaning the penthouse suite and emptying the bins in a five-star hotel.

Normally an intelligence officer would debrief sources directly, but since Steele could no longer visit Russia, this had to be done by others, or in third countries. There were intermediaries, subsources, operators a sensitive chain. Only one of Steeles sources on Trump knew of Steele. Steele put out his Trump-Russia query and waited for answers. His sources started reporting back. The information was astonishing; hair-raising. As he told friends: For anyone who reads it, this is a life-changing experience.

Steele had stumbled upon a well-advanced conspiracy that went beyond anything he had discovered with Litvinenko or Fifa. It was the boldest plot yet. It involved the Kremlin and Trump. Their relationship, Steeles sources claimed, went back a long way. For at least the past five years, Russian intelligence had been secretly cultivating Trump. This operation had succeeded beyond Moscows wildest expectations. Not only had Trump upended political debate in the US raining chaos wherever he went and winning the nomination but it was just possible that he might become the next president. This opened all sorts of intriguing options for Putin.

In June 2016, Steele typed up his first memo. He sent it to Fusion. It arrived via enciphered mail. The headline read: US Presidential Election: Republican Candidate Donald Trumps Activities in Russia and Compromising Relationship with the Kremlin. Its text began: Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in the western alliance.

So far TRUMP has declined various sweetener real estate business deals, offered him in Russia to further the Kremlins cultivation of him. However he and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.

Former top Russian intelligence officer claims FSB has compromised TRUMP through his activities in Moscow sufficiently to be able to blackmail him. According to several knowledgeable sources, his conduct in Moscow has included perverted sexual acts which have been arranged/monitored by the FSB.

A dossier of compromising material on Hillary CLINTON has been collated by the Russian Intelligence Services over many years and mainly comprises bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls rather than any embarrassing conduct. The dossier is controlled by Kremlin spokesman, PESKOV, directly on Putins orders. However, it has not yet been distributed abroad, including to TRUMP. Russian intentions for its deployment still unclear.

The memo was sensational. There would be others, 16 in all, sent to Fusion between June and early November 2016. At first, obtaining intelligence from Moscow went well. For around six months during the first half of the year Steele was able to make inquiries in Russia with relative ease. It got harder from late July, as Trumps ties to Russia came under scrutiny. Finally, the lights went out. Amid a Kremlin cover-up, the sources went silent and information channels shut down.

If Steeles reporting was to be believed, Trump had been colluding with Russia. This arrangement was transactional, with both sides trading favours. The report said Trump had turned down various lucrative real estate development business deals in Russia, especially in connection with the 2018 World Cup, hosted by Moscow. But he had been happy to accept a flow of Kremlin-sourced intelligence material, apparently delivered to him by his inner circle. That didnt necessarily mean the candidate was a Russian agent. But it did signify that Russias leading spy agency had expended considerable effort in getting close to Trump and, by extension, to his family, friends, close associates and business partners, not to mention his campaign manager and personal lawyer.

On the eve of the most consequential US election for generations, one of the two candidates was compromised, Steeles sources claimed. The memo alleged that Trump had unusual sexual proclivities, and that the FSB had a tape. If true, this meant he could indeed be blackmailed.

When I met Steele in December 2016, he gave no hint he had been involved in what was the single most important investigation in decades.

Steeles collaborators offered salacious details. The memo said that Russian intelligence had sought to exploit TRUMPs personal obsessions and sexual perversion during his 2013 stay at Moscows Ritz-Carlton hotel for the Miss Universe beauty pageant. The operation had allegedly worked. The tycoon had booked the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton hotel where he knew President and Mrs OBAMA (whom he hated) had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia.

There, the memo said, Trump had deliberately defiled the Obamas bed. A number of prostitutes had performed a golden showers (urination) show in front of him. The memo also alleged: The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.

As well as sex, there was another fascinating dimension to this alleged plot, categorically denied by Trump. According to Steeles sources, associates of Trump had held a series of clandestine meetings in central Europe, Moscow and elsewhere with Russian spies. The Russians were very good at tradecraft. Nonetheless, could this be a trail that others might later detect?

Steeles sources offered one final devastating piece of information. They alleged that Trumps team had co-ordinated with Russia on the hacking operation against Clinton. And that the Americans had secretly co-paid for it.

Donald Trump and Gabriela Isler, winner of Miss Universe 2013, in Moscow. Photograph: Kommersant/Getty

Steele wrote up his findings in MI6 house style. The memos read like CX reports classified MI6 intelligence documents. They were marked confidential/sensitive source. The names of prominent individuals were in caps TRUMP, PUTIN, CLINTON. The reports began with a summary. They offered supporting detail. Sources were anonymous. They were introduced in generic terms: a senior Russian foreign ministry figure or a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin. They were given letters, starting with A and proceeding down the alphabet.

How certain was Steele that his sources had got it right and that he wasnt being fed disinformation? The matter was so serious, so important, so explosive, so far-reaching, that this was an essential question.

As spies and former spies knew, the world of intelligence was non-binary. There were degrees of veracity. A typical CX report would include phrases such as to a high degree of probability. Intelligence could be flawed, because humans were inherently unreliable. They forgot things. They got things wrong.

One of Steeles former Vauxhall Cross colleagues likened intelligence work to delicate shading. This twilight world wasnt black and white; it was a muted palette of greys, off-whites and sepia tones, he told me. He said you could shade in one direction more optimistically or in another direction less optimistically. Steele was generally in the first category.

Steele was adamant that his reporting was credible. One associate described him as sober, cautious, highly regarded, professional and conservative. Hes not the sort of person who will pass on gossip. If he puts something in a report, he believes there is sufficient credibility in it, the associate said. The idea that Steeles work was fake or a cowboy operation or born of political malice was completely wrong, he added.

The dossier, Steele told friends, was a thoroughly professional job, based on sources who had proven themselves in other areas. Evaluating sources depended on a critical box of tools: what was a sources reporting record, was he or she credible, what was the motivation?

Steele recognised that no piece of intelligence was 100% right. According to friends, he assessed that his work on the Trump dossier was 70-90% accurate. Over eight years, Orbis had produced scores of reports on Russia for private clients. A lot of this content was verified or proven up. As Steele told friends: Ive been dealing with this country for 30 years. Why would I invent this stuff?

In late 2015 the British eavesdropping agency, GCHQ, was carrying out standard collection against Moscow targets. These were known Kremlin operatives already on the grid. Nothing unusual here except that the Russians were talking to people associated with Trump. The precise nature of these exchanges has not been made public, but according to sources in the US and the UK, they formed a suspicious pattern. They continued through the first half of 2016. The intelligence was handed to the US as part of a routine sharing of information.

The FBI and the CIA were slow to appreciate the extensive nature of these contacts between Trumps team and Moscow. This was in part due to institutional squeamishness the law prohibits US agencies from examining the private communications of US citizens without a warrant.

But the electronic intelligence suggested Steele was right. According to one account, the US agencies looked as if they were asleep. Wake up! Theres something not right here! the BND [German intelligence], the Dutch, the French and SIS were all saying this, one Washington-based source told me.

That summer, GCHQs then head, Robert Hannigan, flew to the US to personally brief CIA chief John Brennan. The matter was deemed so important that it was handled at director level, face-to-face between the two agency chiefs. James Clapper, director of national intelligence, later confirmed the sensitive stream of intelligence from Europe. After a slow start, Brennan used the GCHQ information and other tip-offs to launch a major inter-agency investigation. Meanwhile, the FBI was receiving disturbing warnings from Steele.

At this point, Steeles Fusion material was unpublished. Whatever the outcome of the election, it raised grave questions about Russian interference and the US democratic process. There was, Steele felt, overwhelming public interest in passing his findings to US investigators. The USs multiple intelligence agencies had the resources to prove or disprove his discoveries. He realised that these allegations were, as he put it to a friend, a radioactive hot potato. He anticipated a hesitant response, at least at first.

In June, Steele flew to Rome to brief the FBI contact with whom he had co-operated over Fifa. His information started to reach the bureau in Washington. It had certainly arrived by the time of the Democratic National Convention in late July, when WikiLeaks first began releasing hacked Democratic emails. It was at this moment that FBI director James Comey opened a formal investigation into Trump-Russia.

Trump and Putin at the Apec summit in Vietnam this week. Photograph: Mikhail Klimentyev/TASS

In September, Steele went back to Rome. There he met with an FBI team. Their response was one of shock and horror, Steele said. The bureau asked him to explain how he had compiled his reports, and to give background on his sources. It asked him to send future copies.

Steele had hoped for a thorough and decisive FBI investigation. Instead, it moved cautiously. The agency told him that it couldnt intervene or go public with material involving a presidential candidate. Then it went silent. Steeles frustrations grew.

Later that month, Steele had a series of off-the-record meetings with a small number of US journalists. They included the New York Times, the Washington Post, Yahoo! News, the New Yorker and CNN. In mid-October he visited New York and met with reporters again.

Comey then announced he was reopening an investigation into Clintons use of a private email server. At this point, Steeles relationship with the FBI broke down. The excuse given by the bureau for saying nothing about Trump looked bogus. In late October, Steele spoke to the Mother Jones editor David Corn via Skype.

The story was of huge significance, way above party politics, Steele said. He believed Trumps Republican colleagues should be aware of this stuff as well. Of his own reputation, Steele said: My track record as a professional is second to no one. Steele acknowledged that his memos were works in progress, and was genuinely worried about the implications of the allegations. The story has to come out, he told Corn.

At this point Steele was still anonymous, a ghost. But the ghosts message was rapidly circulating on Capitol Hill and inside Washingtons spy agencies, as well as among certain journalists and thinktanks. Democratic senators now apprised of Steeles work were growing exasperated. The FBI seemed unduly keen to trash Clintons reputation while sitting on explosive material concerning Trump.

One of those who was aware of the dossiers broad allegations was the Senate minority leader, Harry Reid, a Democrat. In August Reid, had written to Comey and asked for an inquiry into the connections between the Russian government and Donald Trumps presidential campaign. In October, Reid wrote to Comey again. This time he framed his inquiry in scathing terms. In a clear reference to Steele, Reid wrote: In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors and the Russian government The public has a right to know this information.

But all this frantic activity came to nought. Just as Nixon was re-elected during the early stages of Watergate, Trump won the presidential election, to general dismay, at a time when the Russia scandal was small but growing. Steele had found prima facie evidence of a conspiracy, but by and large the US public knew nothing about it. In November, his dossier began circulating in the top national security echelons of the Obama administration. But it was too late.

The same month a group of international experts gathered in Halifax on Canadas eastern seaboard. Their task: to make sense of the world in the aftermath of Trumps stunning victory. One of the delegates attending the Halifax International Security Forum was Senator John McCain. Another was Sir Andrew Wood, the UKs former ambassador to Russia. Wood was a friend of Steeles and an Orbis associate. Before the election, Steele had gone to Wood and shown him the dossier. He wanted the ambassadors advice. What should he do, or not do, with it? Of the dossier, Wood told me: I took it seriously.

On the margins of the Halifax conference, Wood briefed McCain about Steeles dossier its contents, if true

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[shwoop]

aaha wait, no slow down, i, need a moment, what- what happened? is viceroy there in the flesh, will emelie use the peacock and the kids see the sort of affect it has on mari, is this where gabe gets absolutely DESTROYED. omg. OMG, right in front of mari, poor thing.

oh wow oh no! this is so anxiety inducing!!!

AAAAA Im freaking out!!!!!

For the Viceroy AU, how does Tom figure out Gabriel was the one responsible?

[somestorythoughts]

#all he had to do was gather the rich elite of paris and set a trap honestly#once he figured out Hawkmoth was rich it was a matter of luring the fuckhead out into a vulnerable position#and Gabriel with zero power; just a human man; would of course react violently to the images of his nemesis#he's got no leash left on anyone so he had to lash out lmao

For the Viceroy AU, how does Tom figure out Gabriel was the one responsible?