Behind the dossier: How Christopher Steele penned his reports -- and the fallout from his unmasking
ABC News
Five years after the "Steele dossier" made explosive claims about Donald Trump, ex-spy Christopher Steele discusses how he compiled the report -- and its personal toll.
In early June of 2016, when Christopher Steele arrived for lunch at London's Heathrow International Airport, he could not have known that this meeting with an old friend would lead him down the path to international notoriety.
Steele, a retired British spy who was duty-bound to maintain his cover, was unaccustomed to public attention. That day he would meet Glenn Simpson, a former journalist and founder of the corporate intelligence firm Fusion GPS. Simpson had a proposal: He wanted to bring Steele's source network and Russia expertise to a high-stakes investigation into the Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump.
Steele said he had never investigated an American political candidate before. But he was immediately intrigued.
"We realized it was potentially quite a big project and potentially quite a controversial project," Steele said in an exclusive interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos. "Normally, when you do these things, you might find some business deals that might be questionable, et cetera. But you wouldn't really, and we certainly didn't, expect to find what we did."
