Murat SofuogluConvicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s links to some of the most powerful political and business leaders have made banner headlines across the world over the past few months.
Millions of documents, videos and images related to Epstein and released by the US Justice Department have triggered a maelstrom of public scrutiny over his sex trafficking ring that entrapped hundreds of underage girls but managed to avoid law enforcement agencies for a long time.
While Epstein’s sex trafficking network and his crimes against underage girls began appearing in police reports and court documents as early as the 2000s, he went scott-free till 2008.
Even after he was sentenced to 18 months in jail in 2008, Epstein did not spend much time in prison – being allowed to live in his luxurious residence and even to fly to his notorious island in the US Virgin Islands.
More notably, Epstein could return to his former lavish lifestyle after his sentence, reduced to 13 months, ended in mid-2009.
He did not face arrest until a decade later, despite the fact that he was accused of abusing and trafficking more than 1,000 girls.
But how did Epstein manage to avoid justice for so long till he was jailed in New York, where he committed suicide in 2019?
Analysts and investigative journalists, who have played a critical role in partially exposing Epstein’s sex trafficking network, suspect that his strong connections with US, Israeli and probably other intelligence agencies, as well as his ties with top political and financial elites, helped him evade the long arm of the law for many years.
Was Epstein a spy?
One of the missing pieces of the puzzle in the Epstein jigsaw is the suspicion that he worked as a spy for different intelligence agencies.
Vicky Ward, an investigative journalist who played an important role in unmasking Epstein, provides some context by quoting Alexander Acosta, a former attorney for the Southern District of Florida, who offered a controversial plea deal to the paedophile financier in 2008.
Ward quotes Acosta as saying that he was told by higher-ups that Epstein “belonged to intelligence” – apparently the CIA – with a “leave-it-alone” status. Therefore, Acosta could not go after him because Epstein was "above his pay grade", Ward wrote.
“So, Acosta, according to himself, backed off on prosecuting Epstein back in 2007, despite the possession of ample evidence proving his guilt, because he ‘belonged to intelligence’. Whose intelligence, exactly? is the first of many questions that arise here,” wrote John Schindler, a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer.
Schindler believes that Epstein was definitely a spy, but he is not sure for which intelligence he was an asset, mentioning Russian and Israeli intelligence. He also hints that Epstein had connections with American intelligence, like the FBI.
In addition to the Acosta episode, there were other indications that Epstein had handled political, financial, and, at times, military transactions among the US, Israel, and other states since his early years.
Epstein, who worked for the American investment group Bear Stearns in the 1980s, was also allegedly involved in arms trafficking when he was a young man. Ward wrote that the disgraced financier organised a meeting with defence contractors in the Pentagon in 1981.
Dan Steinbock, an acclaimed expert on global affairs, feels that something was profoundly wrong about the fact that Epstein enjoyed “a longstanding political immunity even after documented crimes, as well as FBI monitoring, certain comments by multiple involved parties.”
“The longitude of Epstein activities, his high-level Israeli visitors and high-profile US political targets” signal that he had connections with intelligence communities, according to Steinbock.
By ‘high-level Israeli visitors’, Steinbock refers to former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, who also served as the country’s army chief, to top a 35-year-long career in the military.
Barak’s connections with Epstein have been well documented, including the ex-premier’s stays in the sex offender’s Manhattan house during his US visits.
“It is very embarrassing," says Alon Liel, a former director general in the Israeli foreign ministry, referring to Epstein-Barak ties. However, Liel is not sure about the possibility that Mossad leveraged Epstein's contacts in favour of Israeli interests.
“Nothing of this kind was mentioned here,” he tells TRT World.
Despite the far-right Netanyahu government's rejections to connect Israel with Epstein, there are a number of associations between the sex offender financier and the Israeli state.
Beyond his connection with Barak, Epstein also played a critical role in Israel's security deal with Côte d'Ivoire, playing the middleman between the two countries. Epstein also figured in the formation of Mongolia-Israel ties, according to disclosed files.
According to a 2020 FBI report, one of the US intelligence group’s sources said that Epstein “was a co-opted Mossad agent”, describing the American Jewish disgraced financier as someone “trained as a spy” for Israel’s intelligence service.
“The recently published files show that Epstein was up to date with news from around the world, but also from countries that were of particular interest to him and, implicitly, to any intelligence service,” says Ecaterina Matoi, a Bucharest-based political analyst and President of Strategic Dialogue for Global Affairs Initiative.
This reality points to “a character surpassing the level of trained intelligence officer, an informant or a person recruited by an intelligence service to carry out different missions,” Matoi tells TRT World, referring to Epstein’s alleged ties with Mossad.
Others also believe that Epstein had definite links to Mossad. Dylan Howard, Melissa Cronin and James Robertson, the authors of the book Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales, are among them. Their book relied primarily on the accounts of Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Iranian-born Israeli intelligence officer.
“When we set out to write a book about his crimes, we thought we knew the whole story. Before long, however, what we uncovered was compelling evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was a spy—largely for Israel's Mossad—and allowed to operate in the United States seemingly without consequence," Howard told Fox News in a 2020 interview.
"He (Epstein) used his power to exploit the vulnerable and underaged, all the while covering his tracks within the innermost circles of the establishment,” Howard added, referring to Epstein’s apparently secret mission.
“He used his access to trap the rich and famous, and traded in the dirt he had on them to the world's most secretive intelligence agencies. The conclusion of our reporting is clear: Epstein was a spy, running a complex intelligence operation for the purpose of blackmailing powerful individuals and politicians in the United States and abroad. But for whom?"
That question, however, remains unanswered fully.
Epstein-Maxwell connection
Epstein’s ties to Israel also have an interesting personal dimension through Robert Maxwell, the father of Ghislaine Maxwell, the sex offender’s long-time associate and his “main girlfriend”.
Robert Maxwell, a British-Jewish businessman and media mogul, was born in Czechoslovakia, then a communist state.
Steinbock believes that “the role of Maxwell family members” should be seriously considered when it comes to Epstein’s alleged ties with Mossad and the Israeli state.
During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Maxwell played a critical role by convincing Czechoslovakia’s communist leaders to arm Zionist militant groups, enabling them to achieve air superiority. Since then, Maxwell worked in various capacities in support of Israeli interests.
The British-Jewish mogul, who was on the brink of bankruptcy, died in suspicious circumstances in 1991.
In a 2018 email, Epstein expressed his conviction that Maxwell “was passed away” after his threat against Mossad that “unless they [the Mossad] gave him £400 million to save his [Maxwell’s] crumbling empire, he would expose all he had done for them”.
According to Ward, Robert Maxwell was “a conduit between the Israelis and other governments during his lifetime”, introducing Epstein to Israeli leaders, who then “allegedly used Epstein as the equivalent of an old-fashioned Russian ‘sleeper,’ someone who could be useful in an ‘influence campaign’.”
Matoi, the Romanian analyst, notes that the late Maxwell was buried in the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem after a notable funeral attended by Israel’s top political figures, including former prime minister Yitzhak Shamir and former president Chaim Herzog, as well as at least six serving and former heads of Israeli intelligence.
The Maxwell funeral itself hints “at a relation with the Israeli government that might surpass the framework of a simple relation with Mossad,” says Matoi.
While there is an ongoing dispute on when and how Epstein met the late Maxwell, there is strong evidence that both men knew each other well. Different sources also suggest that Ghislaine Maxwell was introduced to Epstein by his father.
Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced to a 20-year jail term for her complicity in child sex offences and trafficking. She reportedly converted to Judaism during her jail time. Most recently, she invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to disclose Epstein’s and her connections to high echelons of politics.
