The meeting is at a London restaurant, smart but neither grand nor flashy, and quiet but for a few tourists and a couple of parents with prams in the corner. A man with silver hair and of average height appears at the door and makes his way over. The only feature that might make the former spy, Christopher Steele, stand out from the crowds of besuited commuters on the concourse at nearby Victoria Station is his lapel badge, bearing the flags of the UK and Ukraine. I have been asked to find somewhere discreet, so am sat at a table towards the back of the room. If our encounter sounds cloak-and-dagger, it is not – or at least, it is much less cloak-and-dagger than it would have been a few years ago.
Steele joined the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, popularly known as MI6) after graduating from Cambridge University in 1986, and was soon posted under diplomatic cover to Moscow, where he saw the decrepit Soviet order give way to the chaotic Boris Yeltsin presidency. A posting in Paris was followed by a senior job on the SIS Russia desk from 2006 to 2009. He then set up his own firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, in the barely less secretive world of non-state spying. “It was always in the shadows,” Steele tells me of his former existence. “We were never the story, I was never the story.”
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