EXCLUSIVE: Epstein and Intelligence: Part I
VIPs, power, fear – how a network bought silence and why it reeks of espionage.
I’m running a series on the mysterious issue of the late Jeffrey Epstein and his connections to the global spy business at the German news portal NiUS.de. Some of this analysis will be familiar to Top Secret Umbra subscribers, since I’ve been exposing Epstein’s spy-rape network for years. However, this multi-part assessment includes considerable new information from DoJ’s “Epstein files.” If you know German, by all means read the original. If you don’t, the English version follows.
After months of delays and obfuscations, President Donald Trump released the so-called Epstein files, or at least a considerable portion of them. The Department of Justice’s latest release exceeds three million pages, including many emails to and from Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy pedophile who died in 2019 in federal custody under mysterious circumstances.
Plentiful redactions in the documents give rise to obvious questions, particularly because such omissions appear to protect rich and powerful perpetrators more than victims. Political pressure forced the Trump administration to permit members of Congress to see the unredacted files, but when the public might see them is anybody’s guess.
Regardless, this mega-dump of Epstein files fleshes out what was already known, in sordid detail. The essential story is the same: Jeffrey Epstein, a very wealthy man who associated with top global VIPs, spent a great deal of time sexually abusing and trafficking young women, many of them minors. Some were as young as nine years old. This was child abuse on an industrial scale, perpetrated with the assistance of Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s girlfriend and factotum, who remains the only person behind bars for their role in this ugly scandal. The number of victims runs into the hundreds, at least, while the files hint at truly debauched sexual crimes perpetrated by Epstein, Maxwell, and their associates.
Public attention has focused on those hideous crimes, while the political impacts of Epstein’s misdeeds are only beginning to be felt. President Trump will survive the scandal, despite his previous friendly relations with Epstein, while some of Trump’s associates many not. This is now a global scandal. In Britain, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government is in peril over the connections of several Labour Party notables to Epstein, while Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew, hasn’t just been booted from the royal family over his despicable relationship with Epstein, he now faces police investigation, from which his brother, King Charles III, is no longer protecting him.
The Epstein scandal shines an unpleasant light on the criminal antics of elites worldwide, from Europe to Asia and across the Middle East. Epstein enjoyed a vast circle of friends and associates, a who’s who of global VIPs, and while many of them had nothing to do with the dead man’s sexual crimes, some did, and more certainly had to know about them.
However, the core mystery lingering over the Epstein scandal isn’t about sex crimes, rather how Epstein, a man from a modest background, catapulted into the clannish ranks of the global super-rich as if by magic. Hence the first question is: Where did Epstein’s vast money come from? He gave the outward appearance of being a billionaire, or close, with palatial residences in Manhattan and the Caribbean, a private jet, all the trappings of the super-rich. Yet, he had no obvious job, plus seemingly unlimited free time to rape girls and discuss science with oligarchs.
Epstein presented himself as a financial wizard to the global elite, yet he had only one known client, the billionaire fashion magnate Les Wexner, with whom he enjoyed a very close relationship. However, Epstein hadn’t held a broker’s license since the mid-1980s and he left zero footprint on Wall Street. How he obtained his riches remains a mystery. A recent deep-dive by the New York Times provides clues, depicting Epstein in the 1980s as a hungry young man on the make, a skilled conman, who clawed his way into the financial elite with dodgy methods.
The unanswered financial question leads to the second, larger one: Who was Epstein working for? A key aspect to this scandal is that Epstein was not just a person, rather an organization. Anyone engaged in sexually abusing and trafficking large numbers of young women creates enemies. Not every victim will remain silent. Raped girls have families and friends. Who kept them quiet for decades? No man, no matter how wealthy, can manage that himself. Keeping such crimes under wraps in the long-term requires helpers. Helpers who are willing to employ violence. (Here it should be noted that some of Epstein’s victims seem to have disappeared, while rumors persist that Epstein collected torture videos and even snuff films depicting sexual murders.) Victims understood that they would face bad consequences if they spoke out against Epstein and Maxwell.
The “elephant in the room” in this scandal is the role of intelligence agencies. Since the vast majority of the public is unacquainted with how the secret world of spies functions in real life rather than movies, they cannot detect what is glaringly obvious to those of us who have lived in that hush-hush world. The key missing aspect to the Epstein scandal is espionage and you need the perspective of counterintelligence to see it.
I worked in counterintelligence – that is, detecting and defeating enemy espionage – for the National Security Agency and other U.S. spy services, including working on sensitive NATO intelligence missions. From the moment the Epstein scandal broke in mid-2019, with his federal arrest on charges of sexually abusing minors, the whiff of spy games was easily detected.
Almost immediately, then-Labor Secretary Alex Acosta resigned his cabinet post when it emerged that in 2008, when he was a top federal prosecutor in Florida, he arranged a shockingly lenient plea agreement for Epstein on sex crimes charges. Such a “sweetheart deal” was stunning, not least because Acosta is supposed to have said that he went easy on the pedophile because he was told by top Justice Department officials in Washington that Epstein “belonged to intelligence.” Acosta has since denied that statement, though many find his change unconvincing.
Whose intelligence did Epstein belong to? Explaining that requires an understanding of real-world espionage. First, James Bond notions must be dispensed with. Epstein wasn’t a “spy” in any 007 sense. He wasn’t engaged in clandestine meetings under dark bridges or brush-passes on jogging paths. Epstein was what professionals term an “access agent,” that is, someone who facilitates relationships with high-value espionage targets. Epstein’s value to any serious intelligence service was enormous, given his friendly relations with hundreds of global VIPs from every walk of life, including princes, prime ministers, and presidents. Epstein had no trouble charming his acquaintances into helping him, and if that didn’t work, he could fall back on the videotapes he is reported to have recorded of sexual shenanigans at his residences.
Seen through counterintelligence eyes, Epstein’s network comes into focus. This was a depraved man who ingratiated himself with the world’s rich and powerful on behalf of multiple spy agencies from several countries. He was an entrepreneur of secrets of a very disturbed kind.
The current focus on Epstein’s sexual depravity should not detract from how influential he was behind the scenes. This university dropout had VIPs visiting him nonstop and he seemed to know everybody. In 2014, when Bill Burns, one of America’s top diplomats, retired from the State Department and wanted career transition advice he turned to Jeffrey Epstein. Burns went on to serve as director of the Central Intelligence Agency under President Joe Biden. In 2015, the son of the former president of Senegal, facing prison for corruption, needed help, he too turned to Epstein instead of more conventional Washington lobbying.
How Epstein improbably became the preferred fixer for global elites, while engaged in prodigious sex crimes, is difficult to unravel based on his public resume. It can only be explained by understanding his secret life in the intelligence realm, which this series will elaborate for the first time.