James Bond caper or Lolita Book 2 – how do we describe our greatest national obsession?
One reason the Jeffrey Epstein story has never settled into a sleazy tabloid featurette is that every attempt to simplify it leaves too much out. Portray him as merely a sex-obsessed predator, and his improbable rise, his wealth, his immunity, his access make no sense. Portray him as a master spy, and the evidence quickly outruns what can be proved.
Republican Congressman Thomas Massie, a fervent advocate for releasing the Epstein files, claims they’re being withheld because the sex offender had close ties to Israel’s intelligence agencies. Unfortunately, he provides no proof.
A recent investigation by Drop Site News, by Ryan Grim, Murtaza Hussain, and Harrison Berger, offers a more comfortable perspective, one that neither sensationalizes nor absolves. It shows that Epstein’s career was deeply embedded in intelligence-adjacent networks in which Israeli intermediaries and Israeli intelligence figures played an unusually prominent and recurring role.
Not incidentally.
Not occasionally.
Repeatedly.
That fact is not a slur against Jews, Jewish Americans, or Israel as a whole. It is a description of specific, named individuals, institutions, and historical operations, many of which are already part of the public record through Iran-Contra, BCCI, and Cold War covert logistics.
Ignoring the pattern out of fear of being misunderstood does not make it disappear. It only complicates honest analysis.
Israel as the indispensable middleman
The Drop Site report re-anchors Epstein’s early professional life in the mechanics of Iran-Contra, the Reagan-era covert operation in which the CIA used Israel as a crucial middleman to move U.S. weapons to Iran in violation of an arms embargo, while funneling the proceeds to the Contra war in Nicaragua in defiance of the Boland Amendment.
Epstein’s early partners were not random financiers. They were figures who made their living inside those pipelines.
One was John Stanley Pottinger, a former senior Justice Department official who later emerged as a legal architect of embargo-busting arms deals involving Iran. Pottinger helped design dummy companies and falsified paperwork, classic covert techniques, while sharing a Manhattan penthouse office with Epstein during the very period those schemes were underway.
Another was Douglas Leese, a defense contractor whose business records and later court filings suggest involvement in highly sensitive arms transactions linking China, Iran, and offshore shell companies. Through Leese, Epstein moved in the orbit of Adnan Khashoggi, the Saudi broker who functioned as the financial linchpin of Iran-Contra, advancing funds when Iran and Israel would not trust each other.
Israel’s role here is not speculative. It is established history.
What Drop Site adds is the insight that Epstein learned his craft among the people who made that system work.
The intelligence overlap no one wants to name
The Drop Site story becomes most compelling when it turns to Ehud Barak, who served as head of Israel’s military intelligence during the planning phase of Iran-Contra and oversaw early arms deliveries. Barak later became one of Epstein’s closest personal associates, maintaining a relationship that Epstein himself did not hide.
Barak insists he met Epstein only years later, after leaving government service. Drop Site does not claim otherwise. What it documents instead is continuity of networks, the same Israeli intelligence milieu that enabled Iran-Contra and later intersected with Epstein socially, financially, and politically.
This is not proof of a single command chain. It is evidence of institutional adjacency, the kind that intelligence services rely on precisely because it preserves deniability.
None of this proves espionage. But it establishes something harder to dismiss: Epstein learned his trade among people whose livelihoods depended on secrecy, laundering, and plausible deniability.
The planes that wouldn’t go away
Perhaps the most striking finding by Drop Site concerns Southern Air Transport, a cargo airline portrayed as private and non-CIA-affiliated, unlike the Agency proprietary Air America of the Vietnam era.
Southern Air Transport’s planes were used to ferry weapons to Iran and to Contra rebels in Nicaragua, and were later implicated in alleged drug and diamond smuggling.
When Iran-Contra exploded into public view, the airline became radioactive. According to Ohio investigators and journalists cited by Drop Site, Epstein played a pivotal role in relocating those same planes to Columbus, Ohio, where they were quietly repurposed to serve the retail empire of Leslie Wexner, shipping clothing for brands like Victoria’s Secret.
This was not merely a business pivot. It was a form of logistical laundering, covert assets rebranded as consumer infrastructure, their origins buried beneath tax incentives, shell companies, and state subsidies. When Southern Air Transport abruptly declared bankruptcy in 1998, just days before a damning CIA Inspector General report on Contra cocaine trafficking, Epstein’s role vanished from the public record.
Intelligence adjacency, not intelligence fantasy
Besides tracing Epstein’s proximity to Israeli operatives like Barak, Drop Site explores the role of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the scandal-ridden institution used to launder arms profits through charities and shell companies, methods Epstein would later echo in his own financial structures.
The reporters stop short of claiming Epstein was an agent of the CIA or Mossad. As I noted earlier, their argument is narrower and more defensible: Epstein operated comfortably inside the same hidden systems that intelligence agencies relied on, and he did so repeatedly, across decades and continents.
Robert Maxwell: the missing bridge
Any serious discussion of Israeli intelligence in the Epstein story eventually runs through Robert Maxwell, the father of Ghislaine Maxwell.
Robert Maxwell was not merely a media baron who died mysteriously at sea in 1991. He was long reported by Israeli journalists, former intelligence officers, and later investigators to have had close ties to Israeli intelligence, including a back-up role to Mossad in various capacities. His funeral in Jerusalem was attended by senior Israeli officials, including prime ministers and intelligence chiefs, an honor rarely bestowed on foreign civilians.
The Drop Site report revives a largely forgotten allegation by former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe, that Maxwell helped launder and shield Iran-Contra slush funds beyond the reach of U.S. investigators. Whether every detail of that claim can be proven is less important than the uncontested fact that Maxwell operated comfortably at the intersection of media power, offshore finance, and Israeli state interests.
That context matters when, years later, Ghislaine Maxwell appears as Epstein’s closest collaborator, and when an email from Epstein’s own archive shows her attempting to buy information from a CIA-linked figure about her father’s hidden money.
The New York Times problem
The authors of a recent New York Times Magazine article argue that Epstein’s wealth had a “prosaic” explanation, and they warn against “conspiracy theories” involving intelligence agencies. Yet the same reporting catalogs Epstein’s associations, many of them Jewish American financiers with explicit ties to Israel, Israeli politics, or Israeli intelligence figures, without asking why that concentration exists.
Identifying the pattern is not antisemitism. Erasing it, however, invites distortion. Intelligence operations are not ethnically distributed. They are network-distributed. In this case, the network repeatedly ran through Israel because Israel was central to the covert systems in question — arms transfers, financial laundering, and deniable intermediaries during the late Cold War.
What this implies
Reducing Epstein to a lone con man is emotionally convenient. It allows institutions to close the book. But the Drop Site investigation suggests a different lesson: Epstein’s rise was enabled by networks that predated him and outlived him, networks designed to move money, weapons, and influence without scrutiny.
For those who believe there is a legitimate national-security dimension to the Epstein scandal, the Drop Site report does not offer neat answers. What it provides instead is something more credible, a documented pattern of proximity, function, and protection that makes the intelligence question impossible to dismiss, and irresponsible to sensationalize.
Epstein did not need to be a spy to matter. He only needed to be useful.
A Personal Parting Note
If you want a neat tidy, journalistically proper ending to this discourse, stop reading here. But if you care to know why I presume to delve into this murk, stay with me a bit longer.
What I say above is not an abstraction for me. I came to know certain Iran-Contra players up close and personal.
Because of my intelligence background, ABC News hired me in the mid-1980s to investigate Iran-Contra as a member of a four-person team headed by the brilliant correspondent Karen Burnes, who broke the first meaningful story about the scandal and owned coverage thereafter.
Over the next two years, I helped her team expose, for the first time, the minute mechanics of the Oliver North network, including its money conduits. Our reporting was so exacting that Ret. Gen. Richard Secord, head of the allegedly private Southern Air Transport, sued ABC News to try to stop our reporting. He was unsuccessful.
Among my own key sources was Stanley Pottinger. At the time, I had no idea of his closeness to a fledgling financier named Epstein, but Pottinger and others like him helped me understand the new money networks and clandestine alliances being forged by the post-Vietnam CIA and Reagan officials bent on neutering congressional oversight.
Israel, for its own separate reasons, became a charter member of this emerging infrastructure.
Such partnerships were inevitable. The Middle East was flaring, and Israeli Intel was retooling in ways that deepened deniability and allowed for exquisitely targeted covert operations.
But you didn’t have to be John le Carré to intuit the trends. Anyone familiar with the spy business knows that two things are supremely valued by practitioners: the ability to move money fast through untraceable conduits, and a routinized system for identifying and exploiting the vulnerabilities and passions of potential operational assets and sources. Epstein’s emerging financial networks, with their added sexual attractions, fit the bill perfectly. It is no wonder that Stanley Pottinger befriended him.
Nor would it be any wonder if the value of those networks to various spook agencies only increased with time. Add honeypots to barely traceable revenue streams and you have a spy’s paradise.
Later, after the Bush administration deposed and captured Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, I was hired by his lawyers in Miami to help frame a national-security defense for him. My principal focus: Noriega’s reliance on U.S.-Israeli intelligence connections – and on legendary Mossad operative Mike Harari — to advance mutual U.S.-Israeli security interests south of the border.
By all accounts, Noriega had first met Harari, architect of the Israeli hit on the Black September terrorists, during a subsequent police training exercise in Mexico. At the time Harari was Mossad station chief there and had proven adept at cultivating previous Panamanian leaders. He developed close ties to Noriega and helped him nurture his military and security apparatus. Just before Bush invaded Panama in 1989, Harari was reportedly seen leaving Noriega’s home. He then faded into the woodwork.
Until then he had been a formidable regional player. By the time I showed up at the Miami jailhouse where Noriega himself was held, reports had surfaced about an early CIA-Israeli effort, known as Operation Tipped Kettle, that had shuttled weapons captured in Lebanon to the Contras, via Honduras. It was a precursor to the full-blown Iran Contra extravaganza. In 1988, amidst burgeoning congressional investigations, Panamanian official José Blandón testified that Harari-linked networks in his own country were deeply involved in contra arms movements.
I loathed Noriega but was troubled by the prospect that the U.S. had known about his alleged drug dealing all along and had overlooked it in the name of preserving the Contra supply line, whether Harari was involved or not. As I’ve mentioned above, untraceable money was the name of the game in this scandal, and there was compelling raw evidence beyond the Blandón testimony that U.S.-Israeli middlemen were using laundering operations in Panama to bankroll covert initiatives throughout the region.
Noriega himself swore by Harari, claimed to be an honorary Mossad agent due to his intervention, and insisted the Israeli service would spring him from prison.
It didn’t happen, of course.
Meanwhile my assignment fizzled after the judge decided to focus the Noriega trial simply on the drug trafficking charges and not on any possible extenuating national security concerns.
But before that ruling came down, I had determined definitively that pilots hired by the CIA and Israeli cutouts had shuttled arms to the contras aboard private aircraft – no CIA proprietaries in sight — thus providing
additional cover. Some of the flight jockeys had reportedly been none too particular about what was loaded into their cargo bays along with the weapons.
Beyond such particulars, my investigation confirmed that U.S. and Israeli agencies were colluding to move arms and money covertly on many different operational fronts in outright defiance of congressional oversight and the law. This wasn’t a knock on the Israelis. They were not beholden to our Constitution. But the wild west environment that resulted proved exquisitely suited to unscrupulous enablers like Epstein.
Let me be clear: there is no evidence of a direct link between him and Harari. But both partook of the dark money streams and freebooting morality that gave us Iran-Contra and that persist today, as intelligence agencies in even the most stable democracies grapple with unprecedented security threats while chafing against the burdens of accountability.
As I survey the history behind all this, I wonder if Epstein ever tried to convince himself that the “important work” he was doing for U.S., Israeli, and other national interests justified the extravagant self-dealing and the debasement of female victims that went along with it. Given his brand of cynicism, I suspect he was easy on himself. We cannot afford to be so generous.