Messages released by US Department of Justice have renewed speculation that the paedophile financier was a spy
The Indian-American guru and celebrated wellness author Deepak Chopra was as effusive in his praise for Israel as he was enthusiastic for Jeffrey Epstein to join him in Tel Aviv.
Two years before his arrest in 2019, Epstein had been invited to meet Chopra when he was in the country for a talk at the Menorah Hall in Tel Aviv.
“Come to Israel with us. Relax and have fun with interesting people,” wrote Chopra, according to one message released among millions of Epstein files. “If you want use a fake name. Bring your girls. It will be fun to have you. Love.”
Epstein, though, seemed determined not to commit. “Another location,” he wrote. “I do not like israel. AT All.”
Quite why Epstein would refuse the invitation in March 2017 is among the mysteries in the files released by the US Justice Department. They paint a contradictory and often confusing picture of his relationship with Israel and, in particular, its former prime minister Ehud Barak.
Claims that Epstein could have been in the employment of a foreign security service have been gathering traction in the US thanks, in no small part, to the right-wing interviewer Tucker Carlson and other members of the media promoting them.
The files include claims from a confidential informant to the FBI that, far from disliking Israel, Epstein was in fact employed by its spy agency, Mossad. An FBI report from the Los Angeles field office written in October 2020 said the bureau’s source had become “convinced that Epstein was a co-opted Mossad agent”.
It said the Wall Street financier had been “trained as a spy” for Mossad, alleging that Epstein had ties to US and allied intelligence operations through his longtime personal lawyer Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor whose orbit included “many students from wealthy families”. It said Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and his brother, Josh, a financier, were “both his students”.
Epstein with his lawyer, Alan Dershowitz HOUSE OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE/AP
Dershowitz, however, has laughed off the claims. “No intelligence agency would really trust him,” he said of Epstein. “That’s not something he would keep from his lawyers,” he added.
Over the weekend, Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, suggested Epstein’s friendship with Barak was evidence that he was not a spy. “Jeffrey Epstein’s unusual close relationship with Ehud Barak doesn’t suggest Epstein worked for Israel. It proves the opposite,” Netanyahu wrote on X.
The newly released files showed Barak and his wife, Nili, regularly stayed in Epstein’s New York apartment and had planned a visit close to the time of the financier’s final arrest and death a month later at a Manhattan penitentiary in 2019. Their close association continued long after Epstein’s first arrest in 2006 for sex trafficking and solicitation of a minor. Barak has since said he regretted his ties to Epstein.
Ehud Barak, left, with Epstein
In 2018, Epstein asked Barak in an email to “make clear that i dont work for mossad. :)” The year before, Epstein also asked Barak if someone had asked him to “help Obtain former mossad agents to do dirty investigations”.
According to the files, Epstein arranged and contributed to an investment of $1.5 million in an Israeli start-up, Carbyne — formerly, Reporty Homeland Security. He warned Barak that the “israeli trick of using cyprus to avoid taxes is silly antiquated and dangerous,” in regards to their investment.
“Cyprus is raising eyebrows so I would propose Luxembourg,” another entrepreneur, Nicole Junkermann, suggested to Epstein and Barak in the correspondence.
Epstein also e-mailed himself several Israeli startups and inventions, including a conceptual bracelet that turned into a touchscreen.
“There’s a tremendous mystery, widely discussed, about where his money came from,” said Lynette Nusbacher, a former British Army intelligence officer. “And is it possible that some of his money came from state sources for him to act as an intelligence asset,” she told The Times. “But there is no evidence to suggest that he was anything other than the awful person he was convicted of being.”
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In 2003, Epstein applied for a second passport for his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, in order to “avoid conflicting visa stamps” when travelling. “Ms. Maxwell’s responsibilities … require her to travel extensively throughout the world. She is currently scheduled to travel on March 16. 2003 to Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia,” he wrote.
Nushbacher, a senior UK national security official and lecturer in war studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, explained the possibility of Epstein’s involvement and the structure of recruitment by the spy agency in Israel.
“Every intelligence agency has people who work for the agency, who are on salary, who have their pension paid for by the agency, we call them officers,” she said. “Then there are people whose officers influence them to do work for their agency; sometimes paid, sometimes manipulated, sometimes blackmailed — they’re called agents.
“And then there are people who are assets. They are just useful. Is it possible that Epstein was an asset to the Mossad? Yes. Do I think he was an agent of any intelligence agency, I think it was unlikely. Was he an officer? No.”
Epstein, born to Jewish immigrants and brought up in Sea Gate, a gated, predominantly Jewish community in Coney Island, is known to have visited Israel with his family in 1985. The trip included stays at the Plaza Hotel in Tel Aviv and the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, where Epstein reportedly hired a limousine to take his parents around.
Other visits were not officially documented. An email dated May 20, 2012 asked Lesley Groff, his secretary, to: “find me flights from paris to Tel Aviv, then from Tel Aviv, to New Yorl or tel aviv to Yalta(Crimea).” On May 21, Epstein added: “Book24 to tel aviv and first class to NY on 27”.
Epstein was signed up to an expensive property auction site, which emailed him bid options on Israel’s most exclusive homes.
Even if he did not want to travel to Israel by 2017, he had no disdain for Israeli women, asking Chopra to find him a “cute Israeli blond. . matter over mind”. Chopra responded with a warning, that Israeli women were “militant aggressive and v sexy”.
“I want to be clear,” Chopra said last week, “I was never involved in, nor did I participate in, any criminal or exploitative conduct. Any contact I had was limited and unrelated to abusive activity”.
He added: “I unequivocally condemn abuse and exploitation in all forms.”
Epstein’s deep and long-standing relationship with Maxwell, currently serving a 20-year sentence for her connection to Epstein’s child sex trafficking ring, only add fuel to the conspiracies surrounding his Israel link.
Maxwell’s father, the disgraced media tycoon Robert Maxwell, was widely suspected of having connections to the Israeli intelligence agency and is known to have pumped millions into the Israeli economy, promising to invest “at least a quarter of a billion dollars” to the then-prime minister Yitzhak Shamir.
Robert Maxwell was found floating off the Canary Islands in 1991 after falling from his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine. His body was brought to Israel, to be buried in Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives, a graveyard reserved for Israel’s elite servants.
There were suggestions in Epstein’s emails that point to his belief that Maxwell was assassinated by Mossad. On March 15, 2018, an email from Epstein to a redacted recipient featured the subject line: “he was passed away.” In the email, Epstein speculated about the fate of Maxwell, alleging that Maxwell threatened Israel’s intelligence agency after allegedly working as an informal agent, spying on the UK, the US, and the Soviet Union.
The email echoed a theory put forward by Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, the authors of The Assassination of Robert Maxwell: Israel’s Super Spy, who said Maxwell was pushed by Mossad. They claimed that Maxwell engaged in operations on behalf of the agency but threatened to blow the whistle unless officials agreed to pay $600 million in interest he owed on more than $3 billion in debts.
Many of the experts approached for comment by The Times said they never came across information proving links between Maxwell and Mossad, let alone tying Epstein to Israel’s most elite institution. However, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of association with the case, one Israeli author with links to the secretive agency said that you never know who Mossad employs.
“Anyone can be a spy,” he said.
THE TIMES
