WHEN the FBI crowbarred their way into Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan lair, they found a locked safe containing a fake passport.
Bearing Epstein’s photograph, the Austrian papers were in the name of Marius Robert Fortelni, with entry stamps to the UK, Saudi Arabia, France and Spain.
As unsettled agents scoured the £50million mansion, decorated with stuffed animals and lurid photos, they realised it had been wired with sophisticated surveillance equipment.
It appeared Epstein may have been collecting sexual or compromising recordings of his house guests that could perhaps be used to later blackmail them.
Russian intelligence agencies have a name for information gathered for such purposes — kompromat.
Undoubtedly, a deviant sexual predator and devious conman, could Epstein also have been a spy?
After all, why would a billionaire who travelled the globe by private jet need a counterfeit travel document?
The dossier of papers released by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) on Friday lend weight to the theory he was a Russian intelligence asset.
The Epstein Files reveal that, on July 24, 2015, he emailed Sergei Belyakov, Russia’s then deputy minister of economic development and graduate of the FSB (Russian intelligence) academy.
“I need a favour,” the message began. “There’s a Russian girl from Moscow. XXXXX [her name redacted by the DOJ].
‘Valuable Russian asset’
“She is attempting to blackmail a group of powerful businessmen from New York. It is bad for business for everyone involved.
“She arrived New York Saturday of last week, staying at the Four Seasons on 57 Street. Suggestions?”
I am very
disappointed
you felt it necessary
to threaten me. You should also know that
I felt in necessary to contact some friends
in the FSB
Email from Jeffrey Epstein, 2015
It was some 18 months after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Crimea, and seven days after Russian-backed separatists shot down passenger jet MH17.
Yet Epstein had just given the name and hotel address of the woman to a Russian minister with FSB links.
The convicted paedophile also sent himself a draft email, setting out a strategy for what he might say to the alleged blackmailer.
Sinister and threatening, he wrote: “I’ve decided to help you. However, I am very disappointed you felt it necessary to threaten me.
“You should also know that I felt it necessary to contact some friends in the FSB.”
Epstein said his spook contacts had “explained” to him “in no uncertain terms” that a person attempting to blackmail a US businessman would become “vrag naroda” — meaning “enemy of the people”.
The insult was used by Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin as a trumped-up excuse for purging opponents or those he simply disapproved of. It could lead to execution or the gulag.
In his draft, Epstein then went on to offer the woman over £35,000 a month for two years, along with help getting a visa, if she halted her alleged “threats”.
The new cache of emails suggest Epstein may even have met ex-KGB man Putin himself.
One, dated September 11, 2011 — from an anonymous sender — reads: “Spoke with Igor.
“He said last time you were in Palm Beach, you told him you had an appointment with Putin on Sept 16 and that he could go ahead and book his ticket to Russia to arrive a few days before you.”
In further evidence of his links to Russia’s hierarchy, Epstein sent an email to an associate in 2010 offering to help them obtain a Russian visa, explaining: “I have a friend of Putin’s, should I ask him?”
Flight logs reveal Epstein flew to Russia at least three times, most notably with former US President Bill Clinton and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.
Travelling on Epstein’s private Boeing 727, nicknamed the “Lolita Express”, the trip included a stop in the Far Eastern Russian city of Khabarovsk.
The Epstein Files show payments, listed as “fees” or “travel expenses”, were made to several Russian women who joined the party on the Boeing 727 for various legs of the trip.
With his web of high-value contacts, ranging from Andrew Mounbatten-Windsor to politicians, business tycoons and celebrities, Epstein would certainly have been a valuable Russian asset.
The files show that in 2010, the paedophile offered up a young woman as a potential dinner partner to disgraced former prince Andrew, assuring him she was “Russian, beautiful and trustworthy”.
One intelligence source claimed that his extensive contacts book allowed Epstein to run “the world’s largest honeytrap operation.”
The high-profile personalities who are named in the files all deny wrongdoing.
Ukraine-based reporter Tanya Kozyreva wrote: “Epstein reportedly had contact with Russian officials and Putin himself. Many of his girls were Russian.
“Powerful Western elites passed through his orbit. What are the odds this wasn’t a classic Russian kompromat operation — and that DoJ is just ignoring the elephant in the room?”
‘Compelling evidence’
Conversely, Epstein’s paedophilia and trafficking of women would have provided ample opportunity for intelligence agencies to gather kompromat on him and leave him wide open to blackmail.
Epstein, who was Jewish, has also been accused of spying for Israeli intelligence agency Mossad.
The latest trove of files reveal that the FBI was informed by a source that “Epstein was close to the former prime minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, and trained as a spy under him”.
Epstein met with Barak — also a former head of Aman, Israel’s military intelligence unit — at least 36 times between 2013 and 2017.
In 2016, Barak was photographed entering Epstein’s Manhattan mansion with his face partially concealed.
Barak and his wife Nili Priel sent Epstein a 63rd birthday card in 2016, which called him a “collector of people”, and saying: “There is no limit to your curiosity.”
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
Dylan Howard, Author
It added: “You are like a closed book to many of them but you know everything about everyone.”
Barak would later say of his one-time friend: “I now deeply regret having any association with him.”
One of Epstein’s victims claimed in a lawsuit that the financier boasted of being a Mossad agent before raping her at his New York mansion.
The woman, who sued under the pseudonym “Doe”, said Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell hinted that he worked for the agency.
Her father, Press baron Robert Maxwell, has long been rumoured to have spied for them.
Maxwell was claimed to have “warned Doe that it was not good to be Epstein’s enemy”.
Alleged former Mossad spy Ari Ben-Menashe claimed in the book Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales, that the paedophile ran a “honeytrap” operation in which he provided young girls to prominent politicians.
The Iranian-born Israeli businessman alleged that Epstein then used sexual kompromat to blackmail the men to glean information for Mossad.
Dylan Howard, one of the book’s authors, said: “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.”
‘Claims not far-fetched’
The reporter who originally broke the Epstein sex trafficking scandal — the Miami Herald’s Julie Brown — has said the claims “are not far-fetched and need to be explored in further detail and examined”.
Yet, some have suggested linking Epstein to Israeli intelligence is an antisemitic trope.
Last year, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett insisted he had “100 per cent certainty” that Epstein did not have any ties to Mossad.
He said: “The accusation that Jeffrey Epstein somehow worked for Israel or the Mossad running a blackmail ring is categorically and totally false.
“There’s a vicious wave of slander and lies against my country and my people, and we just won’t take it any more.”
Epstein’s former lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, who struck the plea deal with Florida prosecutors for his client’s 2008 charge of soliciting underage sex, denies the financier was a spy.
“Believe me, I would have known about it,” he said.
“I would have used it to my advantage and to his advantage.” Epstein may have taken any evidence of collusion with spy agencies to the grave with him.
Awaiting sex trafficking charges, he hanged himself in his jail cell at New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center in 2019.
On the night he died, his cell mate had been removed and the prison guards failed to check on him every half hour as they were supposed to.
Despite the release of a so-called “missing minute” of CCTV surveillance footage from outside his cell last year, many still believe he was murdered.
Even Ghislaine Maxwell has insisted: “I do not believe he died by suicide, no.”
It would, of course, be the perfect end to a secret agent thriller — the seedy and duplicitous snitch rubbed out by his own spymasters.
