Since 2019, many in mainstream and alternative media, including Public, have speculated about financier Jeffrey Epstein’s apparent links to the intelligence community (IC), particularly Mossad and the CIA, his alleged involvement in sexual blackmail, and the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death. The picture that emerged for many of us was of Epstein filming powerful men in compromising situations with underage girls, for the purpose of collecting kompromat at the behest of a foreign or domestic intelligence agency.
Several key pieces of evidence stood out. One of Epstein’s early clients was Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi arms dealer who brokered arms shipments from Israel to Iran during the CIA’s illegal Iran-Contra scandal. The father of Epstein’s partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, was Robert Maxwell, who some believe was a “superspy” for Israel. Epstein met twice with former CIA Director William Burns and tried to meet with former CIA Director John Brennan.
Journalist Vicky Ward once claimed that Alex Acosta, then a federal prosecutor, let Epstein off easy with a 2007 federal non-prosecution agreement because he was told Epstein “belonged to intelligence” and was “above [his] paygrade.” Newly released files show Epstein requested his CIA file.
The files also show he sent an email to himself, apparently in the voice of Bill Gates advisor Boris Nikolic, describing Gates’ philandering and STD, and alleging that he secretly gave his wife antibiotics. Epstein had many photos and videos of powerful men with young women. There are emails of Epstein ordering hidden motion-detection cameras be placed in Kleenex boxes. And the newly released files show UK Labour politician Peter Mandelson, the former UK ambassador to the US, in his underwear.
But after having spent several weeks reading through the files and related investigations, it’s clear to us that the totality of available evidence does not support the picture of a government-backed sex blackmail operation. Rather, it suggests that Epstein primarily served his own interests. If Epstein was a slave to anything, it was to his passions and perversions. Ward’s claim that Epstein “belonged to intelligence” is not reliable. She said she heard it third-hand from an anonymous source. Her former Vanity Fair editor and colleagues told the New Yorker that her reporting was not trusted, and said that she had provided inaccurate quotations in the past.
Epstein may have worked for governments as a deal “fixer” or financial advisor with a unique ability to win and maintain trust while overseeing complex legal schemes. But that does not mean a government controlled what he did. There is not sufficient evidence to claim that his sexual exploitation of girls and women was forthe CIA or for Israeli intelligence. Epstein’s request for his CIA file does not prove he had a relationship with the agency at the time; if he did, he would not have needed to make such a request. Nor did his two meetings with Burns, who was then at the State Department, prove that Epstein worked for the IC. There is no currently available evidence that Epstein met with Brennan. As for Robert Maxwell, he vehemently denied working for Mossad, and it’s not necessarily the case that his connections to Israeli intelligence would implicate Epstein.
Epstein’s emails about camera installation, and his email concerning compromising information about Gates, suggest, if anything, amateur methods, not a sophisticated intelligence operation. If Epstein was secretly filming his guests having sex, it could have been to fulfill his large appetite for pornography, or he could have been photographing them to simply gain leverage for his own purposes. And if any of what Epstein did was truly for the IC, then his emailing of a consultant to put cameras in Kleenex boxes would be far below the IC’s standards for operational security. And it’s not the case that Epstein’s photos all imply sexual blackmail. Epstein’s photo of Mandelson standing in his underwear next to a woman, for instance, is unlikely to be sexual kompromat because Mandelson is openly gay.
Finally, there is insufficient evidence, at this time, to determine that someone killed Epstein. On the one hand, questions about the video footage remain unanswered. A US attorney in the Eastern District of New York emailed another attorney in 2020, referring to an “investigation into the murder of Jeffrey Epstein.” On the other hand, Epstein had tried to kill himself 18 days before his death, and signed his will two days before. His neck fractures were consistent with suicidal hanging, particularly for older individuals. And the email didn’t say Epstein was murdered, it simply acknowledged that there was, indeed, an Office of the Inspector General investigation into whether Epstein’s death was a homicide.
To be sure, the Epstein Files have exposed misconduct, and future files may further complicate the picture. British police arrested former Prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor last week for sharing confidential government trade documents with Epstein, and arrested Mandelson earlier this week, apparently on suspicion that he leaked government secrets to Epstein. The files show that Kathryn Ruemmler, former White House counsel for President Barack Obama, volunteered to Epstein the fact that she had won the CIA’s highest award, which was confidential.
And there is still evidence missing. There are 2.5 to 3 million pages from the Epstein files that the DOJ has not released. The DOJ has withheld or heavily redacted approximately 200,000 pages under the “deliberative process privilege,” “attorney-client privilege,” or the “work-product doctrine.” And the Telegraph reported that more Epstein Files may be stored at various sites around the U.S. As such, new evidence may come to light, and we will be sure to report on any of it that suggests Epstein was running a sex blackmail operation for the IC.
But the weight of the currently available evidence suggests Epstein was the puppet master, not the puppet. Epstein’s emails reveal him to be an extraordinarily gifted manipulator. He put himself at the service of helping powerful people meet their social, sexual, financial, career, intellectual, and other needs. Epstein helped former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak transition to civilian life in exchange for access to selling cybersecurity to the Israeli government; there is no evidence of any Mossad influence in the exchange. Epstein arranged for Ruemmler to use her knowledge and relationships at the Department of Justice to settle a case brought against Ariane de Rothschild. There is no evidence that the CIA controlled Epstein through Ruemmler. And Epstein charged Rothschild $25 million for his services and $10 million for Ruemmler’s.
Epstein’s pattern of sexual abuse and coercion seems to have been in service of his own desires. In 2007, Epstein was charged with abusing teenage girls, recruiting them under the guise of giving him “massages.” He served 13 months in prison, during which he received a work release. Epstein’s co-conspirators were employees and associates, such as Ghislaine Maxwell, who found girls for him, promised them gifts and favors, and arranged “massage” sessions. Epstein also manipulated young womenfrom Eastern Europe by offering them modeling opportunities before pressuring them to participate in sex acts. Jean-Luc Brunel, a French modelling agent, helped recruit young models for Epstein. After an investigation, Brunel was charged in France with sexual assault, including of minors, stemming from complaints about acts independent of Epstein. He killed himself in prison in 2022.
It appears that if Epstein passed women along to other men, it was to create a sense of both friendship and obligation among those men toward him. But sex was not his only means of winning loyalty. Through various means, Epstein cultivated relationships with powerful individuals with an eye to gaining information useful for his investments. Mandelson, for example, informed Epstein the night before it was announced that Europe was about to bail out Greece, which would have meant a certain rise in the stock market the next day; there is evidence that Epstein sent moneyto Mandelson’s then-boyfriend and now-husband. It appears that Epstein encouraged a young woman to date New York Giants owner Steve Tisch for the same reason he counseled Larry Summers on how to hit on a Chinese economist: to establish himself as someone trustworthy and capable of helping them get what they wanted, and as someone to whom they were indebted.
If Epstein indeed worked for American and/or Israeli intelligence over the decades, it was likely as someone skilled at hiding and sheltering money, which is much of what he appeared to do for his other clients, and which was the reason he lived in the Virgin Islands, a notorious tax haven. Epstein would thus have been a contractor and not fundamentally important to what those agencies do and don’t do. There is no evidence that Epstein’s sexual activities and crimes were connected to any government.
The Files suggest that people loved Epstein and called him a “best friend” because he was skilled at helping them, including by giving them advice they trusted was in their interest. He got some of the world’s greatest minds and professionals to believe he genuinely cared about them as individuals, even though he seemed to care only for himself.
Some high-profile victims have alleged a sexual blackmail scheme, but there are reasons to question their accounts. Virginia Giuffre claimed for years that Alan Dershowitz had repeatedly raped her when she was a minor, but she retracted her allegation in 2022, saying, “I may have made a mistake.” Another victim, Maria Farmer, said in 2020, “It’s just unfortunate that all the Jewish people I met also happen to be pedophiles that run the world economy, you know. So it gives a bad taste in your mouth.”
Given all this, neither we nor anyone else should have been persuaded that Epstein ran a government-backed sex blackmail operation. We remain open to new evidence, and we believe important questions remain, such as why Epstein had hidden cameras, why he sent himself that email about Gates, and what exactly Epstein did with Khasshogi and others with ties to the IC.
But the picture that emerges from the Epstein Files is different from what we had imagined. Though we did not write many pieces on Epstein, our Corrections Policy requires us not only to correct the error but also to share the lessons learned.
Why did we see evidence of a sexual blackmail operation when we should have seen, at the very least, insufficient evidence to make a judgment and, at the very most, evidence of Epstein as a master manipulator? And why are others, on both the left and right, still inclined to see something in Epstein that isn’t based on the evidence?
In June 2019, a few months before Epstein’s death, the journalist Tom O’Neill published Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties. The book documented links between Manson, whose cult in 1969 killed at least nine people, and the CIA programs MKULtra and CHAOS. It told the story of Operation Midnight Climax, a sub-project of MKUltra that used government-hired sex workers to lure men to CIA safehouses in San Francisco and New York. The CIA secretly dosed the men with LSD and observed them through two-way mirrors to study the drug’s effects.
There are more recent cases of the IC using honeypots. In 2015, the FBI seized the illegal dark web child exploitation site, Playpen, and instead of shutting it down immediately, ran it from government servers for weeks. From 2018 to 2021, the FBI ran Operation Trojan Shield to covertly manage an encrypted messaging app called ANOM. The FBI marketed it exclusively to organized crime syndicates. Believing it was secure, criminals used it to openly discuss drug trafficking and assassinations, effectively handing their entire operational playbook directly to the FBI. And it is well established that the IC uses cyber honeypots, which look like critical US infrastructure or sensitive databases, to monitor how Chinese and other groups attack them.
Independent investigators have traced connections between Epstein and the IC. Mike Benz argues that Epstein played a role in covert money laundering and in hiding transactions for the CIA, which might also explain his rapid rise in wealth. Epstein worked at Bear Stearns and processed funds for the CIA-created Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). The CIA used BCCI for off-books operations after Congress curtailed direct agency funding for such operations after the Church Committee hearings of 1975. Drop Site News has documented deals facilitated by Epstein with the help of Barak to sell Israeli surveillance and security technology to Côte D’Ivoire, Mongolia, and others.
These connections have great significance for the two of us. Since 2023, we have been alert to abuses of IC power due to our work documenting the weaponization of intelligence agencies and their proxies for both censorship and lawfare. We were predisposed and motivated to see a broader conspiracy run by the IC.
Where we did our own research on censorship and lawfare, when discussing Epstein, we relied too heavily on secondary sources. These sources included both alternative ones, like Whitney Webb’s two-volume One Nation Under Blackmail, and mainstream or left-leaning ones, like the Miami Herald and the Daily Beast, which, in our minds, helped legitimate the alternative ones.
It wasn’t so much that the facts in those sources were all wrong as that they were exaggerated and arranged to create a misleading narrative. Motivated to see a broader IC conspiracy and still deferential to mainstream sources, we repeated Ward’s claim, for example, that Acosta said “Epstein belonged to intelligence.” Had we scrutinized this seemingly damning (and highly quotable) proof, we would have noted that she heard it third-hand from an unnamed source, and many distrusted her fact-checking and reporting.
Perceiving Epstein’s death as a murder rather than as a suicide further increased our suspicion of a wider governmental conspiracy. We weren’t alone in doing this. Shortly after Epstein’s death, both then-President Trump and then-mayor of New York City Bill de Blasio speculated that someone killed him. “It’s just too convenient,” said de Blasio. Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, about Epstein allegedly hanging himself, said, “That’s pretty hard to do.” But the evidence was and is far from clear that it was a homicide.
During a chaotic time of eroding trust in institutions, the story of Epstein as a puppet for shadowy deep state agencies and creepy elites seemed plausible.
Another reason we were inclined to believe that something larger and more sophisticated was at play was for the simple reason that we had never reported on anyone quite like Epstein. His ability to attract people to him and win their trust is comparable to that of past cult leaders. In the Bay Area in the 1970s, for instance, the highly charismatic left-wing preacher, Jim Jones, sexually preyed upon his vulnerable congregants. At the same time, he charmed and even captivated societal elites, including leading Democratic Party politicians, by meeting their needs for money, voters, and sex. Epstein, similarly, operated at the highest levels of elite society, winning the admiration, trust, and even love of highly intelligent people.
Finally, like many others, we feel a deep sense of betrayal by our ruling class, which some have now nicknamed the “Epstein Class.” During a chaotic time of eroding trust in institutions, the story of Epstein as a puppet for shadowy deep state agencies and creepy elites seemed plausible.
Others appear attracted to the Epstein story for different reasons. For many on the left, Epstein provided a way to attack Trump as an abuser of women. The idea that Acosta, Trump’s pick for Secretary of Labor in 2017, had helped cover up Epstein’s crimes strengthened this narrative. At the same time, Epstein fit conveniently into right-wing theories like “pizzagate,” which imagined that political elites like Hilary Clinton were engaged in child sexual abuse, trafficking, and cannibalism. These theories mirrored the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, in which discredited therapy techniques generated a series of false claims about pedophilic abuse at daycares.
Anger toward and hatred of Israel and Jewish people appear to motivate some who see a broader conspiracy. Epstein’s real connections to Barak, wealthy Jewish businessmen, and Jewish intellectuals are potent ammunition for the theory that the state of Israel, or Jews in general, secretly control the US government through extortion.
For others, Epstein provided an easy way to understand complex problems about sex and power. Part of the reason that people trusted for their good judgment, such as Ruemmler, saw nothing wrong in what Epstein was doing is that we have a sexually libertarian culture. Ruemmler even joked about Epstein’s massages, suggesting she knew they had a sexual element.
Liberal and worldly people like Ruemmler accept that powerful men like Epstein are promiscuous. One hundred and fifty people signed his 50th birthday book, with many making comments that suggested they viewed Epstein’s promiscuity as benign. “There was nothing unusual about Epstein’s perversions,” writes Kathleen Stock in UnHerd.“He just had the means to indulge them to the max.”
And even if Epstein’s friends and colleagues knew he was hiring prostitutes, it’s not at all clear that they would have objected. “Grooming, pimping out, coercive control, sexual exploitation, an insatiable appetite for extreme youth and novelty: all fall under the respectability cover of ‘sex work,’” notes Stock. Liberal cosmopolitans know that rich and powerful men routinely hire high-priced “escorts” with little fear of arrest or prosecution.
And most of the women hanging around Epstein after 2008 were not officially escorts or prostitutes. Many were aspiring models and actresses who were given gifts and opportunities. It is thus unsurprising that few around Epstein believed his conduct violated either the law or social norms.
Traditional sexual norms once served to shield vulnerable women against widespread exploitation, and their disappearance results in periodic hysterias. The collapse of traditional religion and morality has made it more difficult to identify and guard against the kind of predatory behavior Epstein exhibited, because much of this behavior is normalized. “The Epstein panic, like so many moral panics, arises from an intuition that something is amiss in our libertarian sexual settlement,” notes Julia Yost. And the movement, and its demand that we “believe women,” made it taboo to challenge the inconsistencies of accusers. In the Epstein case, the right followed the left’s tendency to treat alleged victims as above scrutiny, even after they are caught defaming an innocent person, as Giuffre was with Dershowitz.
Unfortunately, the heightened emotions of a moral panic make it impossible to properly understand Epstein. Online, people routinely accuse the most prominent critic of Epstein hysteria, Michael Tracey, of defending pedophilia. Just as Giuffre and Farmer must be above reproach, Epstein must be below understanding. Trying to understand him is, for many, tantamount to defending him.
But not understanding Epstein’s genius for manipulation undermines our ability to protect ourselves from others like him. His high overall intelligence, including emotional intelligence, made him magnetic. And, like other cult leaders, there is something indefinable about him that gave him a charisma difficult to appreciate before the publication of the files....
