How Jeffrey Epstein’s intelligence ties go back decades

Jeffrey Epstein discussed the UAE invading Qatar, obtained intelligence on a €500bn bailout to save the Euro before it happened, and appeared to have information that Russia tipped Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan off about a failed coup d’etat in 2016.

These snippets into the conversations of the disgraced paedophile, who mysteriously died in his New York City jail cell in 2019, raise new questions about his ties to intelligence agencies.

Millions of newly released files do not show Epstein clocking into a Mossad, MI6, or CIA office building. But he did not need to.

Current and former ambassadors, world leaders, and moguls came to him, and his Caribbean island, where he trafficked young women for sexual abuse. The reality is that Epstein floated in a world that was unreachable and more elite than that of intelligence case officers and desk analysts.

If current observers trying to make sense of Epstein’s links to intelligence agencies need an example, the closest might be The Night Manager, a mini-series based on the novel by John Le Carre. The main antagonist of the show is Richard Onslow Roper – a cut-glass, arms-dealing businessman who is an asset for members of British Intelligence and global corporations, even as he is hounded by other factions of MI6.

Of course, Epstein’s emails to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barack reveal such close and continued contact with Israel that even Epstein had to implore Barack to “make clear that i dont work for mossad”.

But Epstein’s murky ties to intelligence circles go back much farther.

Pornographic sci-fi novels and British arms dealers

The earliest known connection Epstein had to the world of intelligence goes back to Donald Barr. This is also the weakest link.

Donald was a former member of the OSS, or Office of Strategic Services, the WWII forerunner to the CIA. Donald hired Epstein, who did not have a college degree, to work as a math and physics teacher at one of New York City’s most elite schools, The Dalton School.

Ironically, Donald wrote pornographic science fiction novels in his spare time. His son Bill was working for the CIA when Epstein was hired by his father. Bill worked in the Reagan and George HW Bush administrations before serving as attorney general during the first Trump administration.

Epstein left the Dalton School in 1976 and took a job with the now-defunct Bear Stearns investment bank, trading options and advising wealthy clients. Epstein’s real links to figures in the world of weapons, the ultra-rich and intrigue started in full force in 1981 when he made a trip to the UK with a former girlfriend.

There, Epstein met Douglas Leese, an aristocratic British arms dealer who would play a key role in introducing Epstein to Mossad agent Robert Maxwell and high-rolling Saudi Arabian arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.

Leese made a fortune brokering the UK’s largest-ever arms deal – the sale of British fighter jets to the Royal Saudi Air Force. According to the New York Times, Leese “mentored” Epstein and “let him tag along for meetings with British and international elites”.

The Iran-Contra affair

Epstein was fired from Bear Stearns around the time he met Leese. Epstein then started a short-lived partnership with J Stanley Pottinger, a former US Department of Justice official who was investigated for his role in dealing arms to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The Iran-Contra affair appears to be a pivotal moment in Epstein’s life. Between 1981 and 1986, the Reagan administration covertly sold arms to Iran, which was at war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Israel, which was also selling arms to Iran separately, served as the US’s intermediary and broker. The profits from illegal US weapons sales were used to fund anti-communist militias in Nicaragua.

Epstein and Pottinger began working together when the former was involved in a plot to ship US-made weapons to Iran with arms dealer Cyrus Hashemi. Ostensibly, Epstein and Pottinger’s business was advising wealthy clients on “tax-avoidance strategies”.

The New York Times, which first reported the partnership, has come under fire for not divulging any of Pottinger’s work on Iranian arms sales around the time he partnered with Epstein.

Leese had his own side gig on arms sales to Iran. He is alleged to have had a role in facilitating a $1.3bn arms sale that China signed with Iran in 1983.

As arms sales to Iran increased in the mid 1980s, bigger players stepped in. The ultimate “whale” was Saudi arms dealer Khashoggi, who was listed as a “client” of Epstein’s consulting firm, Intercontinental Assets Group.

A fraudulent Austrian passport with Epstein’s residence listed in Saudi Arabia was found in a safe in his Manhattan mansion.

The Maxwell-Mossad connection

Had Epstein just appeared as a financial fixer for men like Leese and Khashoggi, he would have been more forgettable.

But Epstein was intimately tied to Israeli intelligence and lobbying circles.

Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s girlfriend, who is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for recruiting and trafficking minors for sex with Epstein, is the daughter of Robert Maxwell.

The beefy, bombastic, jet-setting, press baron was born poor in 1923 to a Hasidic Jewish family in Czechoslovakia. He escaped the Nazi Holocaust and served in the British Army as an intelligence officer.

Robert was a billionaire and an ardent defender of Israel. He was also known to have links with MI6, Mossad and the KGB.

In his book, Profits of War: Inside the Secret US-Israeli Arms Network, former Israeli intelligence officer turned lobbyist, Ari Ben-Menashe, writes that Robert used his newspaper, The Daily Mirror, to facilitate Israeli arms sales to Iran and that he funnelled those profits into banks in the Soviet bloc for safekeeping.

Robert died mysteriously in 1991 after going overboard from his yacht in the Canary Islands following the collapse of Iranian arms sales. Epstein met Ghislaine around 1990, according to The New York Times.

Epstein wrote in an email that Robert worked for the Mossad and threatened to disclose the spy agency’s operations unless he was paid hundreds of millions of dollars to save his crumbling media empire.

In an October 2005 email to Epstein, Ghislaine said she met a CIA operative who “worked” with her father and could “find all, and reveal all (for a price)”.

Ties to Israel

Epstein’s life was defined by his relationship with another billionaire and arch-defender of Israel. Les Wexner is an 88-year-old Jewish-American billionaire and owner of L Brands, a retail empire that included Victoria’s Secret, PINK and Bath & Body Works at its height. Epstein would go on to manage practically all of Wexner’s vast fortune.

Drop Site news reported that some of Epstein’s earliest work with Wexner was repurposing aeroplanes used by the CIA during the Iran-Contra affair to ship clothing for Wexner’s fashion empire based in Columbus, Ohio.

Millions of newly released files show that Epstein’s murky world of business, intelligence and networking continued right through the 2000s, after he was convicted of the sexual trafficking of a child.

He helped facilitate a security deal between Israel and Mongolia. He also worked as a fixer for former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. He arranged meetings between Barak and his friend, UAE billionaire Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, the CEO of Dubai’s international port operator, DP World.

Esptein also tried to facilitate backchannel talks between Barak and Russia during the outbreak of Syria’s civil war. 

Epstein’s focus on the Middle East appeared to continue right up until his death.

In 2018, in an email, he speculates with a man named Anas al-Rashid that UAE ruler Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ) “set up” Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman over the brutal killing of the Middle East Eye contributor and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul.