 "Books give insights into possible role of Russia in the US elections")
UNREDACTED: Russia, Trump, and the Fight for Democracy
Author: Christopher Steele
Publisher: Mariner
Pages: 318
Price: $32.50
INTERFERENCE: The Inside Story of Trump, Russia, and the Mueller Investigation
Author: Aaron Zebley, James Quarles and Andrew Goldstein
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Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pages: 259
Price: $28.99
Why is it that this year’s election feels encrusted with such déjà vu? Is it the outsize presence of Nate Silver? Former President Donald Trump’s presence on the ticket? Or maybe it’s because Kremlin interference appears to have been ramping up in recent months. In September, the US State Department announced it was pulling out all the stops, offering $10 million for information on a group called Russian Angry Hackers Did It.
Ah, the bad old days. And while you’re trying to remember how you felt seven or eight years ago, take a moment to pity poor Christopher Steele. The British ex-spook hasn’t had it easy since January 10, 2017, when an explosive dossier he’d prepared alleging Russian interference in the 2016 election was published by BuzzFeed News (“without our knowledge or permission,” he’ll have you know).
As he reminds us in Unredacted, a memoir of his struggles in spycraft, Steele immediately became a man hunted by journalists, excoriated by oligarchs and by Trump, whom the dossier fingered as familiar with Russian sex workers — the accusation has never been confirmed — and a cultivated and supported Kremlin stooge. (Trump denied all of this.)
In Unredacted, Steele is a convincing narrator, taking us through the twists and turns that led him to become a British intelligence officer (though, for arcane reasons, he can’t directly fess up to having been one) and then a spy-for-hire. The final section of the book is given to his work since the publication of the dossier.
It’s an often fascinating account of the mechanics of espionage, how sources are cultivated, developed, evaluated and factored into the writing of reports that are then passed on to politicians to weigh and consider as they make decisions. In Steele’s telling, spies are far from the omniscient figures portrayed by Hollywood: They’re casting around in the dark as much as the rest of us, relying on human sources much in the same way as, say, journalists — indeed, journalistic inquiry is one of the main ways that Russia’s 2016 election interference ended up a public concern.
There is also much that remains redacted in Unredacted, especially about Steele’s work for the British government. Steele insists that in his case it was higher motives that impelled him to forward his reports, indirectly commissioned by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and to the office of Senator John McCain. The former seems to have acted at a snail’s pace to integrate information in the dossier into an investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. A McCain aide leaked it to BuzzFeed.
Many of Steele’s specific allegations have not been substantiated, but he continues to insist that his reporting was never definitively proved false. For the people who actually did have to try claims of coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia in court, Steele’s dossier was immediately put to one side. “We would not chase any unfounded leads in the infamous Steele dossier,” the attorneys Aaron Zebley, James Quarles and Andrew Goldstein write in Interference, a new chronicle of their work for the special counsel Robert S Mueller III, who between 2017 and 2019 investigated claims of Russian interference in Trump’s election.
One of the investigators’ chief targets was the Internet Research Agency, a Russian company built to sow online chaos. Its existence was first revealed by Russian journalists in 2013, reported on by X News and then fleshed out by Adrian Chen in The New York Times Magazine, years before Mueller’s prosecutors brought charges against the agency in 2018.
Many critiques have been levelled against Mueller for being too timid. The authors argue that their hands were tied from the start. Trump’s implicit promise to pardon people convicted in the investigation certainly didn’t help.
A president’s power is especially worrying in light of the question posed by the promotional material of both books: Is Russia trying to hack the 2024 election? Zebley, Quarles and Goldstein are convinced the answer is yes, although they do not go into detail.
Steele has a bit more to say. This time, Russian interference seems to involve colluding with Venezuela and Iran to raise the price of oil and, somehow, worsen the immigration crisis at the southern border, then amplify the resulting political tension on social media platforms.
Steele’s book, however, isn’t a guide to election hacking in 2024. The picture of that campaign is only just emerging. He is also now less disposed to share all he knows. Several of his sources, he says, were burned when BuzzFeed News published the dossier. Our last chance to learn anything might be up to the press. And even if a bigger story emerges from the shadows, you have to wonder whether the damage will have already been done.
The reviewer is a freelance journalist whose writing on international relations has appeared in The Nation and The New Yorker.
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