British spy who exposed Trump prostitute scandal was paid Ksh25 million

 The dossier was compiled by ex British spy [Photo: Courtesy]

Wrapped up for a family snap on a chilly beach, the ex MI6 agent behind the Donald Trump sex dossier looks oceans away from the man described as “a real James Bond”.

Instead, woolly hat pulled down over his ears and anorak collar up, grinning ­Christopher Steele is now more like the spy who can never come in from the cold.

And jaunts like this to Whitley Bay beach in the North East on a New Year’s Day with his children could be over for good after his bombshell report that the US President-elect romped with Russian prostitutes and asked them to urinate on a bed in a Moscow hotel in 2013.

But Steele, 53 – who went into hiding as the scandal broke on Wednesday – does have some compensation for what friends and experts believe will now be a life on the run.

Because we can reveal the ex-Moscow undercover man, who left MI6 to run his own private intelligence agency in London, pocketed Ksh25 million for compiling the Trump dossier.

A friend of Steele, who does not want to be named, says he sold them in instalments at Ksh1.8 million, a time every three weeks to anti-Trump Republicans looking for dirt on the tycoon in the run-up to the presidential nomination.

The pal added: “He was just a hired gun. His motive was money and he knew which side his bread was buttered.”

Trump has strongly denied claims in the documents, said to be based on Russian Secret Service information, that Moscow has “cultivated” him for years and shared intelligence with him – and that Russia’s FSB agency has footage of him with hookers at the capital’s Ritz-Carlton hotel.

Now the ex-spook, who fled his Ksh164 million Surrey home as the story broke, is said to be in hiding from Russia’s notorious Department 13 hit squads.

Married with four children, his career lies in tatters and the lucrative Orbis Business intelligence company he ran from London’s Belgravia is finished.

Steele’s involvement in the dossier has embarrassed Theresa May only weeks before she is due to fly to America to meet Trump face-to-face.

The revelations have also further damaged Britain’s relations with Vladimir Putin’s Russia which believes he is still in the pay of the British secret service.

And the scandal has made Trump even more suspicious of America’s intelligence community than he already was. Last night historian and intelligence author Nigel West said Mr Steele was a target because of his links to Alexander Litvinenko – the Russian dissident who died in London in 2006 after Russian hoods poisoned his tea with deadly polonium-210.

Former MP Mr West first met Steele at a Nato intelligence conference at an RAF base in East Anglia. He was so impressed by him he later introduced him to his wife as “the real James Bond”.

The author told the Sunday Mirror: “If you’ve been managing an agent who was killed in the way Litvinenko was, it’s entirely understandable you may feel nervous about your own prospects.

“I remain in contact with Mr Steele but this is the termination of his career.

“Unless the information in the dossier is proved accurate I would say his ­credibility stands at zero.”

Steele, who quit MI6 in 2009, never told his former bosses, what he was up to. But as his reports also contained allegations of corruption, he needed to approach a law enforcement agency to cover himself. So he handed his dossier to the FBI who passed it up the US ­intelligence chain until a summary landed on Barack Obama’s desk.

Posted undercover to Moscow by his secret service masters in the 1990s, Steele had been an expert at compiling CX – the name given to reports ­exclusively for the Chief, or C as the head of MI6 is still traditionally known.

The section of the Trump dossier detailing a Russian hookers orgy which allegedly happened in 2013 is written in the way a CX report would have been. But what surprised Steele’s friends in the business is that the Trump dossier fell so short of standards.

One said: “It was very amateurish and nothing like the quality of CX. The trouble is Chris didn’t meet the original sources. He could no longer go to Moscow and relied on intermediaries.”

Trump has angrily denied the dossier’s unverified claims as “fake news” and berated American media for repeating them. Republican Senator John McCain got hold of the report in November and passed it to US intelligence chiefs, who briefed outgoing President Barack Obama and Trump.

Defector Boris Karpichkov, a former KGB major, said he does not believe the substance of the Steele dossier. He added: “It is of such poor quality. But he is partially right when he claimed Russians have cultivated Trump for years.”