INVESTIGATING FIFA WOULD BE GOOD PREP:

He is a British former intelligence officer who operated in Moscow in the early 1990s, later served as MI6's chief expert on Russia in London, and resigned in 2009 to set up his own company, Orbis Business Intelligence.

In his early fifties and quietly spoken, Mr Steele has a reputation among colleagues for integrity, discretion and for selecting his clients with care. Always keen to keep a low profile, he left his Belgravia office and Surrey home after his dossier on Mr Trump was published and he was unmasked as the author. His present whereabouts are not known and attempts to reach him were unsuccessful.

 

Orbis is part of London's lucrative business intelligence industry -- a shadowy sector that stretches from dry political-risk analysis and due diligence research to digging dirt on competitors and, in its murkiest corners, a few operators who go as far as hacking, bugging and intimidating a client's rivals. There is no suggestion that Orbis used any illegal methods to conduct its research.

The former MI6 agent and Cambridge graduate was hired in June to investigate the ties between Mr Trump and the Russian regime by Fusion GPS, a Washington DC research firm he had worked with previously, according to a person who knows Mr Steele.

To conduct his research, Mr Steele drew on a longstanding network of contacts in Russia. As the work developed, the person who knows him said, Mr Steele became increasingly alarmed. He even believed that what he was being told could be potentially bigger than Watergate, the scandal which brought down President Richard Nixon. This was especially so against a backdrop of what was believed to be extensive Russian hacking -- not just in the Democratic National Committee but across Washington.

By early August, Mr Steele had handed some of his report to a senior FBI official with whom he had worked previously, including on an investigation into bribery at Fifa, football's governing body.

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