Contemporaries remember him as an "avowedly left-wing student with CND credentials." CND is shorthand for "Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament," a British organization that was particularly active when Steele arrived at Cambridge in the early 1980s. At the time, MI5 monitored CND for its reported communist ties.

As the British Guardian observed in an article on Steele, "Cambridge had produced some of MI6's most talented cold war officials. A few of them, it turned out – to great embarrassment – had secret second jobs with the KGB."

he was described as a "confirmed socialist"