FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
Washington Post Digs Up Old British Ordnance; It Explodes
Feb. 7, 2018 (EIRNS)—In a surprising action yesterday, the never-Trump (and always never-LaRouche) Washington Post unearthed a long interview from 17 months ago in its newsroom with Christopher Steele and Glenn Simpson, and brought it to the surface in an even longer article about Steele, “Hero or Hired Gun? How a Former British Spy Became a Flash Point in the Russia Investigation.”
The result was to drag into the light the leading role in “Russiagate” of the “venerable” Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, and the man whose “dodgy dossier” on Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction pulled George W. Bush into invading Iraq. No one can now doubt the British guiding hand on the coup against Trump—without even mentioning the GCHQ chief Robert Hannigan’s launching visit to Washington in the summer of 2016 to personally tell U.S. CIA Director John Brennan there was a “Russian problem” in Donald Trump’s candidacy.
Sir Andrew Wood, a stalwart Foreign Office diplomat, told Steele in early Fall 2016 to “ ‘alert the authorities. The right sort of people’ needed to be told.”
Steele and his business partner Christopher Burrows had both left MI6 as experienced agents. But the supposedly retired Dearlove “continued to seek his [Steele’s] expertise,” which Sir Richard found “superb.” Steele by 2016 had fans at the U.S. State Department as well, including Victoria Nuland, for his reports on Ukraine and Russia (where he had not been since 1993).
Steele, when hired by Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS chop-shop, “reached out to Russian contacts and others he referred to as ‘collectors’ who had other sources”—including “a close associate of Trump,” “a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure,” etc. But these were not his sources; rather, a network of British intelligence assets was gathering dirt on Trump, from sources who did not know where or to whom it was going, or even, in some cases, that it was going anywhere.
After a while, Steele told Simpson he was going to meet with the FBI,
“describing it as an obligation rooted in his past work for the British government. ‘I’m a former intelligence officer.... You know, I have obligations, professional obligations.’ ”
Presumably, that let Simpson know how low his—for that matter, Hillary Clinton’s—place was in this British counterintelligence operation!
But who really sent Steele to the FBI? Well, when WikiLeaks released the Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails in July 2016, Steele and Burrows had gotten “rattled” by the lack of American seriousness about the threat of Trump. So,
“in early Fall, he and Burrows turned to Dearlove, their former MI6 boss, for advice. Sitting in winged chairs at the Garrick Club, one of London’s most venerable private establishments ... the two men shared their worries about what was happening in the United States. They asked for guidance about how to handle their obligations to their client and the public.”
Which public was that, exactly?
Sir Richard
“said he advised Steele and Burrows to work discreetly with a top British government official [the above-named Sir Andrew Wood, perhaps, or then GCHQ chief Hannigan—ed.] to pass along information to the FBI.”
And off the “hero” was sent, to polish up the handles on a big front door which may be proving too big for him.
