interesting about Steele:
Steele’s most celebrated job after retiring from the MI6 Russia desk was investigating corruption within FIFA and—just as he would later do with lurid allegations about Trump—Steele took his findings to the FBI.
His reports on soccer helped to ignite a sprawling U.S. investigation that would lead to early-morning raids on the five-star hotel rooms of a clutch of top soccer officials.
How Russia won the World Cup
https://www.theguardian.com/news/201...-the-world-cup
His name was Christopher Steele.
His task, he said, was to help England 2018 “better understand what they were up against, and what they were up against was a completely alien way of doing business”. In the spring of 2010, not long after sources began saying that Putin had suddenly taken a strong personal interest in the bid, Steele began hearing a string of curious and troubling rumours.
In April, Russia’s deputy prime minister, Igor Sechin, went to Qatar to discuss a massive natural gas extraction project. That same month, Russia’s World Cup bid team also travelled there. One of Steele’s best sources said the timing was no coincidence, and that on top of massive gas deals, the emissaries were colluding to swap World Cup votes. Russia, the theory went, would pledge its ExCo member’s vote for 2022 to Qatar, and Qatar would promise that, in exchange, its ExCo member would pick Russia for 2018.
Other sources, meanwhile, began whispering that Russian bid officials had taken valuable paintings from the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg and offered them to ExCo members in exchange for votes.
When Steele reported his findings, members of the bid team were predictably alarmed. England was doomed, Steele felt certain; it was never going to beat a country like Russia, which was clearly prepared to do anything to avoid a humiliating defeat on the world stage. But the former spy then had a second thought. T
he information he had been developing on Russia and Fifa was highly specific, but also unique and potentially valuable – perhaps extremely so. It would be a shame to see it go to waste. And it just so happened that Steele could think of another potential client for that information: the FBI.
Bookmarks