116. Epstein Files Declassified: Was He A Spy? (Ep 1)

17:51David:It does. Spy adjacent is exactly the word. And that fits him with this idea that he was able to move across borders in his private jet, get to interesting places with little friction, which again fits into this theory that he had kind of protection or support from somewhere. So a lot of that is very, very kind of vague and suggestive rather than hard fact. But I guess one of the central claims is that his value, if you like, as an intelligence asset, it's the claim, is precisely because of his use of those residences for some kind of compromise or collection of blackmail information against some of those influential people.

18:38David:And I think that's one of the ways in which it's argued that he might have or could have been a spy.

18:45Gordon:So maybe there, Gordon, having established some of the claims related to Epstein and his alleged links to the spy world, let's take a break. When we come back, we'll explore whether he was collecting that compromat on the rich and powerful. We'll see you after the break. It's the Paradise Podcast. I am your host, Ryan Michelle Bethe, with my husband Sterling. What's up? Join us here on Hulu and Hulu on Disney +, where we'll discuss each episode with the cast and crew of Paradise. I'll be getting all the secrets from Dan Fogelman, James Marsden, Shailene Woodley, Julianne Nicholson, and Sterling Kelby Brown.

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20:34Gordon:Welcome back. We are looking at this question of whether Jeffrey Epstein had connections to the intelligence world or foreign intelligence service. And I think, Gordon, the most prominent theory, in part because it's the most salacious, is this idea that Epstein was running essentially a blackmail ring to gather compromise on influential politicians and business leaders. I think it makes sense to maybe start here because that Compromat theory is the one that I think has generated an incredible amount of interest. We should say Compromat, it's a Russian term. The central claim is that Epstein is supplying young women to elite targets and then is filming them and compromising acts and passing that along to whoever his handlers might be.

21:41David:In some ways, you can see why this is potentially a more plausible part of the theory, because there is historical precedent for this. And we know about Compromat, as you said, it's a Russian term. Collecting compromising material against influential people is well established in lots of countries, but we think of it particularly in Russia. I mean, the diplomats in Moscow famously, if you go back to the 60s, you had a British ambassador honey trapped by his maid. You had a conservative MP, Anthony Courtney, who was honey-trapped by a tourist guide while he was in Moscow. French officials and ambassadors being kind of honey-trapped, and in one case one actually who took their own life.

22:22David:After they had compromising material collected on them by, in that case, the KGB, who then basically tried to blackmail them and say, you know, you work for us or this material will be exposed and it will be the end of your career. So it is an established kind of technique, isn't it?

22:39Gordon:Another piece of information that gives, on the face of it, some maybe fuel for this theory is that Epstein's residences, I think in particular the residence in Manhattan and his island, were really wired up for audio and video, it's believed. We'll come back to that detail later, but that gives some energy to this idea that he could have been taping people for the purposes of collecting blackmail.

23:06David:Yeah, and I think it's that fact of having a kind of an established location being wired and then being used for collection intelligence collection of blackmail again has a kind of historical precedent i mean the most interesting one came to my mind was something actually that the nazis ran in the late 30s early 40s which was known as salon kitty and this was a a high class brothel in this case which the nazi secret service used to entrap foreign diplomats and their own elite and it was run by this it's a really interesting story it's run by a woman called kitty schmidt katerina schmidt who'd worked as a governess and a piano teacher and briefly lived in england and then ends up running a brothel in berlin um and then once the nazis take over and they're kind of aggressively trying to clamp down on immoral activity as they would put it she realizes she's in trouble she's trying to get some of the money smuggled out to england you know by some of the girls but then she gets arrested by the gestapo and made an offer she can't refuse who you know tells her basically you're going to keep running this brothel, but you're going to run it as an intelligence gathering operation for the Nazis.

24:11David:And it was run out of a four-story building on a quiet residential street in quite a fancy quarter of Berlin. You can see almost a parallel there, can't you, to Epstein's Manhattan house, this place where people would go. Technically, it was a boarding house, discreet, luxurious place, chandeliers, silk, grand piano, German elites, foreign diplomats, all entertained there by women and lots of booze. But it's thought that maybe as many as 50 microphones were installed throughout the property, in the bedrooms and in the salons, concealed in chandeliers, behind headboards, in the upholstery of the armchairs.

24:49David:And all of that led into a cellar where technicians worked in shifts to record everything on wax discs. And there were just tons of conversations that they were recording. Most of it, it seems to be, was gathering intelligence about what people were saying rather than necessarily compromising them with the fact that they'd gone to this brothel. I think it was pretty successful in its own way as an intelligence operation.

25:13Gordon:One key piece of this, which I think stands in stark contrast to the Epstein story, is that there was a special selection of women in this brothel who were, I mean, essentially trained almost as intelligence collectors. There were this kind of special book of 20 additional women who were shown only to clients who used a secret password, which I come from. Your German is better than mine, Gordon. Is it Rotenberg? I come from Rothenberg. Rotenberg.

25:46David:Rotenberg, I think.

25:48Gordon:That's the password. And these women were trained in languages and to elicit information and conversation from people to understand military, sensitive military information if they overheard it. Also trained in techniques to steer conversations towards sensitive topics without arousing suspicion. So how do you elicit information from somebody? So that's very different than Epstein's story.

26:10David:It is.

26:11Gordon:It is. But in this case, because you essentially have these women trained as intelligence collectors to go after diplomats and military officials who happen into this brothel.

26:19David:Yeah, you get people like the son-in-law of Mussolini, the Italian leader, who's also the Italian foreign minister who comes in and speaks and is quite critical of Hitler. You also get a lot of people from the Nazi elite, including Goebbels, who turn up at this place. It allows the people running the operation to find out what they really think. There's even claims that this was from the guy running it, that it provided valuable information about Spain, for instance, which had a real impact. It was slightly unclear how big an impact it had, and it only lasted a few years at the early part of the war.

26:52David:Though it does seem to have continued after the war, and Kitty herself kept her secrets, taking them to her grave. It's an interesting example of what you can do with premises used in this way as a glamorous location for the elite to come into and for it to be wired. But it was more about eliciting information through conversation than it was through compromat in the sense of video and audio blackmail, which I think is the allegation with Jeffrey Epstein. We do know that these kinds of operations are things that intelligence agencies have done in the past. There are other places where they've wired premises.

27:31David:I remember visiting a Hotel Viru in Tallinn in Estonia. And it's really interesting. You can go there now. And if you ask nicely at the hotel, they'll take you up to the top floor for a tour. This was the tourist hotel during the days of the Soviet Union where any visiting foreigners would be taken. And when the KGB left Estonia in a hurry, they basically left all their kits behind. So if you go to the top floor of the hotel, you can see the way in which they'd wired the top floor of the hotel with audio and video equipment and with bugging devices all over, again, to collect information, including compromising information from people who were in it.

28:09David:So there's definitely this precedent here for intelligence agencies to run this kind of operation.

28:15Gordon:It also recalled to me, Gordon, just this nexus of a brothel and intelligence services. The series we did on MKUltra, where the agency had bankrolled essentially a brothel first in New York and then out in San Francisco for the purposes of observing, not for Compromont, but for the purposes of observing the effects of LSD. But I guess, Gordon, I mean, this brings us to Epstein. I mean, what are the similarities between Salon Kitty and the facts of Jeffrey Epstein's life and times?

28:50David:Yeah, I think there's some similarities and some differences. I mean, I think one of the similarities is it does look like Jeffrey Epstein's place was wired for audio and video in a modern way compared to Salon Kitty. A lot of that comes from the testimony of a victim, Maria Farmer, who spoke to CBS in 2019, who says she was assaulted by Epstein in the mid-1990s. She was also, she says, given a tour of this house. And, you know, she says Epstein told her it contained hidden pinhole cameras. And that was what he called a media room, which was stacked full of TV monitors with feeds from across the house, including bedrooms and bathrooms.

29:26David:Maria Farmer says she was told by Epstein that everything was recorded. She said at one point to him, what do you do with this? And he said, I keep it. I keep everything in my safe. Now, we don't actually know what happened to any of those recordings. The FBI has seized multiple computers and hard drives and other media from Epstein's property, but it's not really clear what might have happened to any of that kind of material. That's the bit which, if you like, feels similar, the kind of collection of compromat by someone. and we talked about some of the rich and powerful people who'd have gone through these properties the kind of gossip he'd got off people let alone the kind of potentially blackmailable material would have been extraordinary does explain things but you know i think one of the differences as we said is that in this case the women were young women and were victims you know this was not a brothel this was a you know a place in which underage girls were being abused and certainly you know did not have any kind of role in it in the way that the salon kitty story talks about and who suffered some, as we said, pretty awful things.

30:29David:So there's a parallel there, but it's not quite exact, is it?

30:32Gordon:Well, most of the time, the claims or the theory that Epstein is running this blackmail operation, it ladders into Israel's Foreign Intelligence Service, the Mossad. That is frequently the intelligence service that's listed as working or handling Epstein in this case. We should say, I mean, the former Israeli Prime Minister Daftali Bennett has flatly denied claims of Israeli involvement in Epstein's crimes. He said the accusation that Epstein somehow worked for Israel or the Mossad running a blackmail ring is categorically and totally false. He wrote on Epstein's conduct, both the criminal and the merely despicable had nothing whatsoever to do with the Mossad or the state of Israel.

31:13Gordon:And I have to say, I really don't think an intel agency would set up an operation or work within an operation that is very much involved in the trafficking of underage girls, at least not the Central Intelligence Agency nor the Mossad. I think the risk reward, I mean, even if you put aside the ethics and morality of that, Now, let's just look at this from Mossad's standpoint. The risk-reward calculus is really off. I mean, Mossad, they do conduct espionage operations at the US. They sometimes work against Americans or try to recruit Americans. But this would just have incredibly devastating consequences, not just in the security relationship between Mossad and CIA, but up to the political level in a way that I just don't see the value at the end of the day to the Israelis.

32:19Gordon:I also think it's worth mentioning at this point, there's no facts, right? I mean, there's no fact connecting Mossad to any of this, period.

32:26David:Yeah. I mean, we'll come back, I think, a bit more maybe in the next episode to some of the reasons why there were these claims about Mossad. But I think the risk-reward calculus is a really interesting one when it comes to this operation. Because, I mean, yes, Israel has once or twice, hasn't it, has spied on the US. You know, Jonathan Pollard and places like that, who was a kind of US, I think, you know, naval officer, wasn't it, in intelligence, passed quite useful intelligence to the Israelis. And it's become a big cause celebrity. But actually, a lot of fallout from that one very narrow case.

32:57David:But if you imagine doing an operation like this effectively against the US with someone that high profile and with that much risk of exposure, I mean, that is a real stretch, even before you get into the morality, as you said, of using underage girls and what's involved in it. So yeah, I think that's where the leap comes with that. I mean, to me, the fact that he's wired these premises, it's plausible Jeffrey Epstein was doing it for his own weird pleasure.

33:28Gordon:Why do we need to layer on an intelligence service behind this when we know that Epstein is a sort of pedophiliac, sex addict control freak who, I mean, right there, you have the sort of necessary and sufficient conditions for someone to maintain an audio visual surveillance apparatus in their property.

33:51David:Of his property. Exactly. So he can be doing it for his own pleasure. I mean, you could also buy the idea, or I could plausibly put out the idea, he was doing it to collect Compromat for himself. Maybe not Compromat, but influence leverage over these people for his own benefit and for his own protection, which is different from doing it for another state. He's almost in that world running almost a small private Compromat stroke intelligence gathering operation himself. And that I find more plausible than doing it on behalf of an operation from another state.

34:25Gordon:It is worth, I suppose, thinking. I mean, the risk side of it is very apparent. What is the reward side? What are you really getting? I mean, I guess the idea in this theory would have to be that you're not just getting some secrets or gossip. right that you're getting you're getting control of people i think is where this is where this theory goes is that it's it's an effort to get control of a massive number of sort of you know business and academic and political leaders through this exert this compliment and then

35:02David:exert influence and rather than just collecting gossip you know rather than the salon kitty model

35:07Gordon:that's right and again i guess it's just it's just worth saying again there's just no evidence Right. I mean, there's just there's just no credible evidence. We were putting this together to say, OK, the Mossad was involved in this.

35:19David:It might make sense at this point just to, you know, step back and think about how how would a spy service look at Epstein? From your perspective, you know, you know this world. How do you think of, you know, intelligence service would, you know, would see him?

35:32Gordon:Gordon, it's interesting in preparing for this, I actually put this question to a whole bunch of former CIA case officers. And I basically said, you know, would Epstein prior to that first sort of non-prosecution agreement or that indictment, I guess, down in Florida in 2008, would Epstein prior to that have been an interesting target for an intelligence agency? And I'll read some of the replies because they had a very similar flavor. And again, this is just a sample. Yes, he would be easy to manipulate and also clearly has no morals. Those are the type we look for.

36:13David:A very honest intelligence officer. Next quote.

36:16Gordon:Definitely would have been a prime target. Next quote. 100%. He has intel on people. He has direct access to targets of interest. Last one. Hell yeah. Yeah, access and info on movers and shakers. All right. So there were more mixed responses in some cases, but the reluctance to kind of go all in and say, yeah, he would have been a target of interest prior to the actual indictment. The reluctance came from two sources, one mentioning Epstein as a CIA contact, right? Not that of another foreign intelligence service, which that would have sort of legal complications, potential for jurisdictional overlap with the FBI, right?

36:56Gordon:So there's a there's a host of different reasons why the CIA might have been more reluctant than Mossad. But also a lot of those sort of mixed responses came from people who were blending criminality into the mix. And I think it's it's safe to say that after he had been on his kind of work release program down in in Florida in 2008, that plenty of intel services would have soured on him. Right. As having that record.

37:25David:They would have been interested in him.

37:26Gordon:Right. You would have been interested in particular prior to 2008. It really begs this very interesting question, which is, okay, if the answer is yes, how would an intelligence agency use someone like Epstein and for what purpose?

37:43David:So maybe there with that question hanging, that very interesting question hanging about the potential, at least, value of someone like Epstein. Let's stop. And next time, we'll delve into that a bit deeper and look at some of the further evidence and some of those claims regarding the fact and the idea, at least, that he might have had some kind of relationship with the spy world.

38:07Gordon:And don't forget, listeners, if you want to get that episode now, go and join the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com. You get early access, you get a whole host of other goodies, and you get to hear me and Gordon yammering at you for one more episode a week with our bonus content that we put out on Fridays. So we hope to sign up and we'll see you next time. See you next time.

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