While Guilty for Sex Trafficking, Ghislaine Maxwell Takes Fall for Alleged Sexual Blackmail Operation Run by Western Intelligence Agencies

Evidence suggests that Epstein and his paramour Ghislaine Maxwell were working for U.S., British and Israeli intelligence agencies to build a video database of sexually compromised political leaders, oligarchs and influential celebrities who could be manipulated and controlled by blackmail.

The really intriguing question is what happened to the tens of thousands of hours of videos seized by the FBI, which may show global affluentials engaging in illegal sex with underage girls.

Ghislaine Maxwell claims that she has copies of the Epstein sex videos and now threatens to use as bargaining chips to save herself—or take them all down with her.

In a packed lower Manhattan courthouse on June 28, Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison for conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein to recruit, groom and abuse underage girls. Federal Circuit Judge Alison J. Nathan said before rendering sentence that “the damage done to these young girls was incalculable.”

In Maxwell’s defense, lawyer Bobbi C. Sternheim said that Ms. Maxwell’s life had been clouded by two men: “her narcissistic, brutish father” Robert Maxwell, wealthy British media tycoon and former member of parliament, and “the controlling, demanding, manipulative” Jeffrey Epstein.

Maxwell herself spoke in court on Tuesday—her first public remarks since her July 2020 arrest—dressed in prison scrubs and with her ankles shackled. She acknowledged “the pain and anguish” of the victimized women who had addressed the court before her, but stopped short of apologizing or accepting responsibility for her crimes, claiming that “it is the greatest regret of my life that I ever met Jeffrey Epstein.”

While Maxwell’s attempt to blame Epstein for her crimes was obviously self-serving, what she could not say was that she was the one to take the fall for a sexual blackmail operation sponsored by Western intelligence agencies.

That operation appears to have originated with her father Robert back in the 1980s.

Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli intelligence official, claimed to have seen Jeffrey Epstein in Robert’s office in the early 1980s.

Allegedly, Epstein helped Maxwell hide money in numerous offshore bank accounts.

A British army veteran from Czechoslovakia who influenced the Czechoslovakian government’s decision to arm Zionist paramilitaries during the 1948 war and smuggled aircraft parts to Israel, Robert was a long-time operative for Israeli intelligence whose funeral was attended by six former heads of the Mossad.^[1]

A Maxwell family friend said that Maxwell was a double or triple agent who “traveled in very rarified circles. He had information about government ministers, about scientific discoveries, about internet and data information that was valuable to many governments. My feeling was that he probably was an agent to the Russians, to the Israelis, and the British.”

Daddy’s Little Girl

Described by an Oxford University classmate as “naughty, funny and very worldly,” and by others as “pleasant,” though with a “ruthless side,” large “sexual appetite” and belief that she was “royalty,” Ghislaine Maxwell was her father’s youngest and favorite daughter, prompting him to name his yacht after her.^[2]

Ari Ben-Menashe believed that Ghislaine accompanied her father so frequently, including on a now-infamous 1989 party on Maxwell’s yacht where Donald Trump and several key figures in a major spy software scandal were in attendance, because she was involved in his intelligence-related activities.

Other acquaintances believed that Ghislaine continued her father’s work as an agent to the Russian, Israeli and British intelligence agencies.^[3]

Jeffrey and Ghislaine

Ghislaine said in a 2016 deposition that she met Jeffrey Epstein in 1991—the year of her father’s death—through a mutual friend; however, Ari Ben-Menashe claimed that Epstein and Ghislaine were already dating in the late 1980s. Ben-Menashe said that “Epstein was hanging around with Robert Maxwell and the daughter was hanging around there too, and that’s how they met.”

According to Ben-Menashe, the order for Maxwell to embrace Epstein and involve him in ongoing arms deals came from the “bosses” at Israeli intelligence headquarters. They indicated that “Ghislaine got involved with Israeli intelligence together with him. But not in this arms deal with Iran business.”^[4]

At the time, Epstein was also bankrolling a software program connected to Israeli military intelligence, which was marketed for critical electronic infrastructure in the U.S. and abroad.

Ben-Menashe told Zev Shalev, a former CBS News executive producer, that “these guys were seen as agents. They weren’t really competent to do very much. And so they found a niche for themselves—blackmailing Americans and other political figures.”^[5]

Ben-Menashe added that Epstein “was the simple idiot who was going around providing girls to all kinds of politicians in the United States. See, fucking around is not a crime. It could be embarrassing but it’s not a crime. But fucking a fourteen year old girl is a crime. And he was taking photos of politicians fucking fourteen year old girls—if you want to get it straight. They would just blackmail people like this.”^[6]

When Epstein got a sweetheart plea deal after being charged in Palm Beach, Florida, for sex crimes in July 2005, U.S. Attorney (for the Southern District of Florida) Alex Acosta stated that he had been “told to back off” because Epstein was “above his pay grade and belonged to intelligence.”^[7] Acosta was rewarded by becoming Secretary of Labor for Epstein’s old friend, Donald Trump.

“It’s How the Intelligence Services Work”

Author Martin Dillon, who interviewed sources in the Mossad, wrote that Epstein was “sort of flying very important people around the world, providing young girls for some of them. Building files. It’s how the intelligence services work.”^[8]

Dillon added that, “if you’re an intelligence community, and you have someone like Epstein, who’s kind of a celebrity, who can attract celebrities, who can be in part of conversations about world events about the most secret things. If you could put people like [Bill] Clinton on his planes and you can put Ehud Barak, a former Prime Minister of Israel and a former general, then he is a guy who really matters to you…he is going to be an asset for you. Look what he can do. He can give you information on all those politicians; on their private behavior, their peccadilloes, all these things are important to intelligence communities.”^[9]

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist, said that he also has “little doubt that Epstein was running an intelligence operation, and that his knowledge [for years] helped him escape justice. There is no other viable explanation for his filming of prominent politicians and celebrities having sex with young girls.”

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Jeffrey as 007

Epstein may have first been recruited into the intelligence services at The Dalton School in Manhattan, where he taught math after dropping out of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University in 1974.

The headmaster of The Dalton School at the time was Donald Barr, future attorney general William Barr’s father, who had worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and wrote a novel about child-sex slavery.

William Barr worked for the CIA’s China desk and as a CIA lawyer. Years later, he was responsible for investigating and covering up the circumstances of Epstein’s death in jail on August 10, 2019.^[10]

As reported in Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales: Spies, Lies & Blackmail, by Dylan Howard et al., following his stint at The Dalton School, Epstein worked at Bear Stearns, where he became a limited partner servicing mega-millionaire clients like Seagram’s President Edgar Bronfman.^[11]

That alone should set off serious alarm bells, since nothing could be more improbable than a college dropout, who had been teaching basic math to high school students, and had no financial credentials or experience, finding himself offered a job at Bear Stearns—then one of the world’s pre-eminent financial institutions—where he is then made a partner and given the awesome responsibility of safeguarding and enhancing the investment fortunes of America’s corporate titans. Really?^[12]

The Bronfmans’ incidentally were involved with Mafia accountant Meyer Lansky, who pioneered the mob’s use of sexual blackmail, and with intelligence operations.

In 1968, Allen Bronfman set up a firm, Space Research, that manufactured howitzers which could be fired into space, and served as a cover for smuggling arms on behalf of British and U.S. intelligence. Richard Bissell, former CIA Deputy Director for Plans, sat on its Board of Directors.

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According to Steve Hoffenberg of Towers Financial Corporation, a leading debt collection and corporate raiding agency where Epstein worked in the early 1980s after Bear Stearns, Epstein helped perpetrate securities fraud and a multi-million dollar Ponzi scheme for which Hoffenberg was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Hoffenberg had called Epstein the “architect of the scam,” though Epstein’s name was mysteriously dropped from the criminal case.

British journalist Nigel Rosser reported in January 2001 in the Evening Standard that Epstein had claimed that he was working for the CIA during the 1980s. Epstein also told friends that he worked as a so-called “bounty hunter” in the world of shadow finance, retrieving money embezzled by African dictators and other criminals.

Epstein’s fortune expanded after he set up his own financial management firm where he managed the finances of the wealthy. Clients included Iran-Contra and CIA-linked arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi with whom he helped broker global armaments deals—most likely through the notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), a CIA front.^[13]

A Mintpress exposé written by Whitney Webb found that, in the 1980s, Epstein became connected to a mob-linked class of oligarchs with deep ties to both U.S. and Israeli intelligence. Among them was Leslie Wexner, founder of the The Limited, a retail chain which expanded dramatically in the 1980s when it bought Victoria’s Secret, who allowed Epstein to manage his finances.

Wexner was close to the Bronfman family and to members of organized crime syndicates once represented by Roy Cohn, Joseph McCarthy’s lawyer.

Catherine Austin Fitts, who investigated the intersection of organized crime, black markets, Wall Street and the government, was told by an ex-CIA employee that Wexner was one of five key managers of organized crime cash flows in the United States.

In the 1990s, Wexner and Epstein helped Southern Air Transport (SAT), a CIA-run airline that had smuggled arms to the Nicaraguan Contras, relocate to Wexner’s home state of Ohio.

Ohio Inspector General David Sturtz and then-Sheriff of Franklin County Earl Smith were among those who expressed belief that both Epstein and Wexner had ties to the CIA.

Ronald Lauder, the son of Estée Lauder and U.S. Ambassador to Austria in 1986-87, provided Epstein with an Austrian passport which he used to enter the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia and Spain containing Epstein’s photo but a false name—indicating intelligence ties.

That Epstein was running a blackmail operation was made evident by the fact that he had bugged the venues—whether at his New York mansion or Caribbean island getaway—with microphones and cameras to record the salacious interactions that transpired between his guests and the underage girls that Epstein exploited. Epstein then stored much of that blackmail in a safe on his private island.

When officials raided Epstein’s New York City townhouse when he was arrested in July 2019, they found thousands of graphic photos that included images of underage girls and a safe filled with compact discs labeled “nude girls,” according to authorities.^[14]

Maria Farmer, an artist who accused Epstein of sexually assaulting her when she worked for him in the 1990s, said that Epstein once walked her through the mansion, pointing out pin-sized cameras that he said were in every room. “I said, ‘Are you recording all this?’” Ms. Farmer said in an interview. “He said, ‘Yes. We keep it. We keep everything.’”^[15]

Ghislaine’s Security Blanket

Maxwell may herself be spared death in prison because, as an ex-friend told the Daily Mail, she claims she has copies of everything that Epstein had and a secret stash of pedophile sex tapes that could implicate the world’s most powerful and will try to use them to save herself.

The ex-friend said that “Ghislaine [who recruited and groomed the young women in the sex ring] has always been as cunning as they come. She wasn’t going to be with Epstein all those years and not have some insurance. [The tapes that she has] could implicate some twisted movers and shakers.”^[16]

“42” and Others in the Power Elite

One of those movers and shakers could be Bill Clinton. The first year Clinton was president, Epstein was already attending donor dinners at the White House and making White House visits. ^[17] Between 1993 and 1995, Epstein visited the White House at least 17 times.

In Epstein’s little black book of contacts, Clinton is listed as “42” [Clinton was the forty-second president]. The book listed 21 different ways to contact Clinton, from cellphone numbers to his home number in Chappaqua, a suburb of New York.^[18]

Following the Reagan Era, the Israeli right wing was concerned that a new president would push for Israel to make peace with the Palestinians, something those officials sought to avoid by any means necessary.

Ben-Menashe argues that, when Bill Clinton’s candidacy in the 1992 U.S. presidential election became clear, efforts were made to target him via sexual blackmail and Epstein was chosen for that purpose with Ghislaine as his sidekick.

Clinton claimed that he only traveled on Epstein’s Lolita Express on four occasions—though other records point to twenty-seven trips.^[19]

British socialite Lady Victoria Hervey described Clinton and Epstein as “being like brothers.” Epstein even had a portrait of Clinton in his home wearing a blue dress that could be an allusion to the infamous stained blue dress at the center of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Who’s Who

The flight logs from the Lolita Express reveal a “who’s who” of early 1990s high society, including Hollywood actors such as Kevin Spacey; comedian Chris Tucker; singers Jimmy Buffett and Courtney Love; TV host Charlie Rose; Bill Gates; celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz, conservative billionaire David Koch; and politicians such as Tony Blair, Ehud Barak and Bill Richardson.

Epstein also gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to politicians on both sides of the aisle, including the Clintons and their foundation and George H. W. Bush, John Glenn (D-OH), Charles Schumer (D-NY); Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY), Bob Dole (R-KS), John Kerry (D-MA) and others.^[20]

Dead Men Do Not Tell Tales

John Mark Dougan is a former Palm Beach County Deputy Sheriff who said he is certain that Epstein was murdered in prison in August 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges (officially he was said to have committed suicide)—and he knows why.

The world’s intelligence agencies, he says, could not risk the chance of Epstein’s blackmail file ever going public. Those files are explosive. He says he knows because he has them.^[21]

Dougan served as Deputy Sheriff in Palm Beach in 2009 at the time Epstein was in prison after being arrested on sex-trafficking charges. Now Dougan lives in Russia where he has been granted political asylum.

Epstein’s prison time in Florida was “an absolute shit show,” Douglas told author James Robertson from Moscow. “I’ll tell you why. He was able to leave jail basically anytime he wanted…as long as he had two deputies go with him who were paid on overtime detail. Usually, those who work on overtime detail are selected out of a random pool, however, these deputies were handpicked by the sheriff. And they were guys who specifically would look the other way while he was bringing underage girls into his office and into his home. Unbelievable.”^[22]

Dougan went on to discuss the existence of blackmail tapes—or rather DVDs. He said that “every bedroom in Epstein’s houses had multiple cameras in them. He used to keep records of everybody. He used to store everything. So the Palm Beach police department, they knew that there were thousands and thousands of these DVDs; except, now this is interesting, when they went to search for them, they were gone.”

Dougan continued: “Who had the knowledge that the search was coming? And the answer is the Palm Beach County State Attorney’s Office. Because the State’s Attorney’s office and Sheriff’s office, they’re the ones who have to take the warrants and take them in front of the judge to get them signed off. There were elements within these two organizations that didn’t want to see anything happen to Epstein.”^[23]

How far would Epstein’s protectors go to keep their prized asset safe?

Joseph Recarey, the officer who had original access to the blackmail files, died suddenly after a brief illness at the age of 50 in 2018.

Dougan said: “It’s funny because back in May [2019] when everything started to happen with Epstein again, when all the ruckus started to get raised again, he [Recarey] mysteriously died. I know this guy. He was fit as a fiddle. He was fifty years old and died of a sudden illness. It was unexplained. Do I think that Epstein was put up to getting some wealthy people to sleep with some underage women so those people could be blackmailed by Western intelligence agencies. Absolutely I do.”^[24]

Among those targets was Prince Andrew, who was grilled about his sexual preferences by one of Epstein and Maxwell’s child recruits. A September 2019 report in London’s Times revealed that the British MI6 was “concerned that Russia may have obtained kompromat, compromising material, on Prince Andrew”—resulting from the tapes Dougan had in his possession.

Dougan specified that Joe Recarey was aware of his efforts to uncover breaches of public trust by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s office via his investigative website.

In late 2009 or early 2010, Recarey asked Dougan to scan all the documents as well as copy hundreds of DVD disks he had on the Epstein case to keep them safe. He had lost faith in Barry Krischer, the Palm Beach County state’s attorney at the time of the investigation.

Dougan said that he would meet with him occasionally to get more documents to store, the last time being in 2015. The FBI, he said, seized his computers in 2016, which had everything Recarey gave to him.

The FBI and other intelligence agencies, Dougan said, may have been surprised to have discovered that he kept an off-site back-up that was sent to him in 2017 after he was safely established in Russia.

According to news reports, U.S. intelligence agencies apparently analyzed the files and communicated with British authorities.

If Britain’s secret intelligence service MI6 has concerns about any ties between Prince Andrew and Epstein, they got it from their Washington counterparts, Dougan said.

This meant that the FBI had seen everything and had more knowledge of the contents than he did because it was not his business to look deep into the files. The FBI was in a position to know everyone who was implicated in the videos, recordings and documents, and had access to decryption keys.^[25]

Ron Chepesiuk, a distinguished book author and researcher, verified the blackmail tapes. They captured images of older men having sex with underage women in Epstein’s house—where cameras were everywhere.

The CIA’s Love Traps

The Epstein-Maxwell blackmail ring had many precedents in earlier CIA operations.

During the Cold War era, the CIA operated sexual blackmail rings in San Francisco and New York City, employing prostitutes to target foreign diplomats in what The Washington Post nicknamed the CIA’s “love traps.”

Jack Anderson and Les Whitten wrote in a 1975 column in The Washington Post that, “through hidden one-way mirrors, CIA agents filmed the sexual adventures and later tried to blackmail the victims into becoming informants.”

Federal narcotics agents had to make sure the blackmail apartment had a live-in look and was stocked with food and liquor so the victims would not become suspicious.

In the 1980s, Craig Spence, a conservative lobbyist who boasted about working for the CIA, pimped out children to the power elite in Washington in apartments that were bugged with video and audio recording equipment.

Spence said that his “personal phone book and party guest lists constituted a “who’s who” in Congress, Government and journalism.”

Spence hosted glittery parties and, according to an explosive report published by The Washington Times, had his home bugged and set up a secret two-way mirror, and…he attempted to ensnare visitors into compromising sexual encounters that he could then use as leverage.”

Which sounds a lot like what Epstein and Maxwell were doing several decades later.

Spence, it should be noted, died under mysterious circumstances in a Boston hotel room after he was subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury—just as Epstein died mysteriously and Maxwell might, unless she is saved by the blackmail tapes that could be released after her death.

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1. On Maxwell’s Mossad ties, see Seymour Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy (New York: Random House, 2013); Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy: The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul (Boston: Da Capo Press, 2003). Rafi Eitan, one of the most famous Israeli spies, acknowledged that Maxwell was a spy for Mossad. ↑
2. Nigel Cawthorne, Ghislaine Maxwell: Jeffrey Epstein and the Fall of America’s Most Infamous Socialite (Gibson Square, 2021), 52, 54, 59, 60. ↑
3. Dylan Howard, Melissa Cronin and James Robertson, Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales: Spies, Lies & Blackmail (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2019), 27. ↑
4. Howard, Cronin and Robertson, Epstein, 28. ↑
5. Howard, Cronin and Robertson, Epstein, 28. ↑
6. Howard, Cronin and Robertson, Epstein, 28, 29. ↑
7. Howard, Cronin and Robertson, Epstein, 108; Barry Levine, The Spider: Inside the Criminal Web of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell (New York: Crown Publishers, 2020), 139. ↑
8. Howard, Cronin and Robertson, Epstein, 109. ↑
9. Howard, Cronin and Robertson, Epstein, 109.
10. Epstein’s death was ruled a suicide, yet Epstein was alleged to have broken three bones in his neck before he died. The two prison guards who were supposed to be keeping a watchful eye on Epstein in his Manhattan jail cell mysteriously fell asleep at the same time, and the video of his cell was erased. ↑
11. Howard, Cronin and Robertson, Epstein; see also Levine, The Spider. Epstein allegedly met Bear Stearns CEO Alan “Ace” Greenberg at a parent-teacher conference at The Dalton School, and Greenberg was so impressed with Epstein that he gave him a job. Later, Epstein was fired because he was found to have lied on his resume about graduating college, though that information could have easily been found out at the time of his hiring. ↑
12. According to Nigel Cawthorne, the National Association of Securities Dealers has no record of Epstein working with Bear Stearns. Cawthorne, Ghislaine Maxwell, 75. Bear Stearns CEO James Cayne told New York Magazine in 2002 that, because of his mathematical background, Epstein was put in Bear Stearns’ special products division where he would advise the company’s wealthiest clients on the tax implications of their portfolios. Levine, The Spider, 23.
13. Howard, Cronin and Robertson, Epstein, 17, 18. Epstein was introduced to Khashoggi through another of his clients, Sir Douglas Leese, a British arms dealer for whom Epstein helped devise offshore tax havens. Levine, The Spider, 34. ↑
14. According to an ex-friend: “Not only did Epstein like to capture himself with underage girls—he wanted to make sure he had something to hold over the rich and powerful men who took advantage of his sick largesse.” ↑
15. Bruce Levine wrote that Epstein had a surveillance apparatus that would have made any John Le Carre spymaster proud. Levine, The Spider, 121. ↑
16. Maria Farmer said of Ghislaine: “‘What made her tick was power and control over vulnerable people,’ not least the Filipina maids whom she treated as though they were barely human.” ↑
17. Howard, Cronin and Robertson, Epstein, 34. ↑
18. Levine, The Spider, 118. Clinton’s close friend and counselor Doug Band was also listed. ↑
19. Howard, Cronin and Robertson, Epstein, 34. ↑
20. Howard, Cronin and Robertson, Epstein, 46. ↑
21. Howard, Cronin and Robertson, Epstein, 174. ↑
22. Howard, Cronin and Robertson, Epstein, 174, 175. ↑
23. Howard, Cronin and Robertson, Epstein, 174, 175. ↑
24. Howard, Cronin and Robertson, Epstein, 174, 175. ↑
25. Howard, Cronin and Robertson, Epstein, 174, 175. ↑

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