The Israeli government installed security equipment and controlled access to a Manhattan apartment building managed by convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, according to a set of emails recently released by the Department of Justice. The equipment was installed starting in early 2016 at 301 E. 66th Street—the residence where former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak frequently stayed for stretches at a time.

The security operation at “Ehud’s apartment” was in place for at least two years, emails from the DOJ disclosure show, with officials from the Israeli permanent mission to the United Nations corresponding regularly with Epstein’s staff regarding security. The apartment was technically owned by a company connected to Epstein’s brother, Mark Epstein, but was effectively controlled by Jeffrey Epstein. Units in the building were frequently loaned out to Epstein’s contacts and used to house underage models.

Rafi Shlomo, then-director of protective service at the Israeli mission to the United Nations in New York and head of Barak’s security, corresponded with Epstein employees to arrange meetings to discuss security and coordinate installation of specialized surveillance equipment at the 66th Street residence. Shlomo personally controlled access to the apartment for guests and even conducted background checks on cleaners and Epstein’s employees.

Under Israeli law, former prime ministers and other high ranking officials typically receive security services after they leave office. According to the emails, Epstein personally approved the installation of the equipment and authorized meetings between his staff and Israeli security officials.

Ehud Barak and the Israeli mission to the United Nations did not respond to requests for comment.

At the time of Epstein’s death in 2019, Barak downplayed his connection to the disgraced financier, stating that while he had met with Epstein several times, he “didn’t support me or pay me.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently suggested that Epstein’s close ties to Barak, a longtime Labor Party official and rival of Netanyahu, undermine rather than strengthen the case for Epstein’s ties to Israel. “Jeffrey Epstein’s unusual close relationship with Ehud Barak doesn’t suggest Epstein worked for Israel. It proves the opposite,” Netanyahu said. “Stuck on his election loss from over two decades ago, Barak has for years obsessively attempted to undermine Israeli democracy by working with the anti-Zionist radical left in failed attempts to overthrow the elected Israeli government.”

A January 2016 email exchange between Barak’s wife, Nili Priell, and an Epstein employee—whose name is partially redacted but appears from other communications to be his longtime assistant Lesley Groff—discussed installing alarms and surveillance equipment at the residence, including six “sensors sticked to the windows,” and the ability to remotely control access to the premises. Priell informed Epstein’s staff that, “They can neutralize the system from far, before you need somebody to enter the appartment. the only thing to do is call Rafi from the consulate and let him know who and when is entering.”

The correspondence also indicated that the work done by the Israeli government was significant enough that it required Epstein to personally approve it. “Jeffrey says he does not mind holes in the walls and this is all just fine!” Groff wrote to Barak and Priell.

The mission was in regular touch with Epstein’s representatives over multiple visits by Barak and his wife throughout 2016 and 2017.

In a January 2017 email to Shlomo—with the subject line “Jeffrey Epstein RE Ehud’s apartment”—an Epstein assistant provided Israeli officials with a list of employees who would need access to the apartment, adding, “I understand from you already have a copy of her ID from awhile ago...she is the maid and has been going in and out of the apartment for a long time now!” A few weeks later, they wrote to Epstein himself that, “Rafi, the head of Ehud”s security, is asking if I could meet him at 4pm on Tues. 14th at his office (800 2nd Ave and 42nd) re Ehud’s apartment.” Epstein approved the meeting.

The correspondence continued throughout that year—in August an assistant for Epstein reached out again to Shlomo to inform him of yet another stay by Barak and his wife at the Epstein residence. By November 2017, Shlomo had been replaced by another Israeli official who managed security and surveillance for Barak.

Barak’s longtime aide Yoni Koren, who died in 2023, was another frequent guest at Epstein’s 66th Street apartment. Koren stayed at the apartment on multiple occasions—including in 2013, while he was still actively serving as “bureau chief” for the Israeli Ministry of Defense, according to calendars released by the House Oversight Committee investigation into Epstein and emails released by Distributed Denial of Secrets. Email correspondence from Barak’s inbox also showed Koren exchanging information with Epstein for a wire transfer, as previously reported by Drop Site.

New emails released by the Department of Justice showed that Koren continued to stay at Epstein’s apartment while receiving medical treatment in New York up until the second arrest and death of the financier in 2019.

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The year before Jeffrey Epstein’s suspicious death in a Manhattan jail, the financier was working to broker an infrastructure deal for Emirati logistics conglomerate DP World in Nigeria, according to a massive trove of emails released by the Justice Department last month.

In an email exchange from the summer of 2018, Epstein facilitated talks between then-chair of Nigeria’s sovereign investment fund, Jide Zeitlin, and DP World’s ex-chairman, Sultan Ahmad bin Sulayem, on possible shipping terminals in Lagos and Badagry. Sulayem resigned from DP World on February 13, 2026 amid fallout from the revelation of his intimate friendship with Epstein.

DP World’s leadership was reluctant to invest in an industrial zone in Nigeria unless they could own the surrounding port outright, and talks with previous Nigerian presidents, since 2005, had led nowhere. Zeitlin informed Sulayem that he was close to then-President Muhammadu Buhari and billionaire shipping magnate Gabriele Volpi—the owner of Intels, Nigeria’s largest logistics company, which services the country’s massive oil & gas sector. Epstein, in turn, offered to involve Kathryn Ruemmler, former White House counsel under President Barack Obama. Ruemmler recently announced her resignation as chief legal officer of Goldman Sachs.

Sulayem and Epstein worked together for more than a decade, cultivating a friendship between Israel and the United Arab Emirates long before the Abraham Accords agreement in 2020. Zeitlin wrote to Epstein in September 2018, after Djibouti nationalized DP World’s main hub in East Africa, “I hope your pal’s sojourn in Tel Aviv … was more effective than his efforts on the African continent.” After Epstein’s death, DP World acquired a controlling stake in a Nigerian logistics provider in 2022 and began expanding its footprint in Lagos as of last year.

Epstein was keen to profit from armed conflicts on the African continent. While negotiating DP World’s access to Nigeria, he was also helping Zeitlin navigate around U.S. sanctions on Oleg Deripaska, then-chairman of the Russian aluminum titan Rusal. The sanctions had a major impact on Ivan Glasenberg, the Israeli-South African CEO of mining giant Glencore; Glencore’s operations had been disrupted by a fraud probe into their dealings with Israeli mining kingpin Dan Gertler in Congo-Kinshasa. “Do you know Oleg Deripaska or Ivan Glasenberg?” Zeitlin asked Epstein. “Easy,” Epstein replied.

The American financier had deep ties to Israeli mining and military outfits in Africa, which he helped support alongside former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak—a close associate with whom Epstein corresponded almost daily. “With civil unrest exploding in ukraine syria, somolia, libya, and the desperation of those in power,” Epstein wrote in a 2014 email to Barak, “isn’t this perfect for you.” Barak replied, “You’re right [in] a way. But not simple to transform it into a cash flow.”

That year, as the Nigerian military was locked in a grinding war with Boko Haram, Barak positioned Israeli security vendors as partners to then-President Goodluck Jonathan’s government, using a Christian university as a foothold to establish Israel’s cybersecurity industry in Nigeria. Epstein, who was friendly with Nigerian pastor and former trade minister Okey Enelamah, was closely involved in cultivating Barak’s opportunities in West Africa.

Israeli intelligence firms marketed their security know-how as “field-proven,” a euphemism for technologies deployed against Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation. Years before Barak sold a biometric access control system in Nigeria, Israeli authorities installed its prototype, called “Basel,” at the Erez Crossing between Gaza and Israel. Israel’s automated checkpoints, equipped with facial and hand-geometry scanners, were touted as a way for African governments to control movement of populations at scale.

Security cooperation offered an appealing way for Barak and Epstein to generate cash from chaos in Nigeria, while also promoting the political interests of the Israeli government. Barak’s initial foray in Nigeria led to a broad institutionalization of Israeli cyber expertise over the following years. In 2020, the World Bank tapped the Israel National Cyber Directorate and a digital forensics startup co-founded by Barak to shape Nigeria’s cyber infrastructure.

A hidden motive behind the security deals was the promise of accessing Nigeria’s rich petroleum resources. Barak’s hacked emails, published by Distributed Denial of Secrets and thoroughly corroborated by recent releases from the Justice Department’s Epstein Files, show Barak parlaying his Nigeria security relationships into oil investment opportunities, with Epstein’s steady guidance. This playbook illustrates a clear through-line for Epstein and Barak’s Africa strategy: Counter-terrorism partnerships opened doors and foreign investors seeking energy and mining deals walked through them.

“Hit the nail on the head”

At the start of 2014, emergency rule was in force in Nigeria as states on the borders of Niger, Chad, and Cameroon faced near-daily attacks by Boko Haram. Several hundred people were killed in a surge of violence, including arson, car bombs, and a massacre at a Catholic church. The apparent inability of the Nigerian government to halt the accelerating chaos offered an opportunity for Barak—one year removed from public office, and building a portfolio as a high-level consultant for foreign governments—to pitch Israeli security cooperation as a solution.

Barak often relied on his wife to approach leads for unofficial negotiations on Israeli security deals. On January 28, 2014 she wrote a message to Tim Akano, CEO of Nigerian technology firm New Horizons, who had invited Barak to Nigeria the previous year:

Dear Tim
we are shocked at the horrible deadly terror attack today with so many innocent people killed.

Terror works like a cancer when it is trying to have a grip in a country.

Please convey Former PM Barak and my condolescences to the President, to the First Lady and to the Nigerian people.

As we discussed during our last visit, Former PM Barak is ready to be of help tackling and defeating the challenge of Boko Haram based on his experience.

Our hearts are with you,

Nili Priell Barak

Coincidentally, Akano was attending a cybersecurity conference in Tel Aviv the very same day. He wrote back, “I am an incurable optimist. I am confident that very soon we will have opportunity in Nigeria to receive help from Prime Minister Barak. I will continue to look for the right opportunity to hit the nail on the head.”

In the following months, the Israeli Defense Ministry negotiated a deal to transfer U.S.-made attack helicopters to Nigeria—but the sale was blocked by the Obama administration in the summer, after officials flagged human rights violations by the Nigerian army.

Epstein looked for other ways of penetrating Nigeria. On August 30, 2014, he sent a snippet of philosopher Robert Nozick’s “Tale of the Slave” to his friend Barnaby Marsh, an investment advisor. Marsh responded, “We should think about the growing emerging role of cards and phones in economic exchange and the future of money,” and shared an article about the use of electronic identity cards and biometric databases in Nigeria. In October, DP World chairman Sultan Ahmad bin Sulayem emailed Epstein to inform him of a meeting with Aliko Dangote, “the richest man in Nigeria.”

Akano, ever the optimist, was persistent. In April 2015, he emailed Barak a new opportunity, this time in the energy sector. During a previous visit to Abuja, Barak had floated the idea of Israeli firms building power plants in Nigeria. Akano proposed a pilot case: A Christian school, Babcock University, needed a power plant to supply electricity to its campus.

Barak’s emails and subsequent news reports don’t show any records of a power plant purchase—instead, Babcock bought biometric surveillance equipment developed by Israeli military intelligence.

In May 2015, Barak and his business partner Gary Fegel made a $15 million investment in FST Biometrics, a facial recognition technology for “access control” founded by Aharon Ze’evi Farkash—the former head of Israel’s military intelligence and the author of a Côte d’Ivoire surveillance plan brokered by Barak and Epstein the previous year.

Fegel, dubbed “Ehud Barak’s billionaire” by Israeli media, ran the aluminum business at Glencore, where he worked with both Deripaska, the aluminum kingpin, and Glasenberg, the CEO of Glencore—the two sanctioned individuals whom Epstein later advised through Zeitlin, then-head of Nigeria’s sovereign wealth fund. Fegel was also working closely with Barak to source cyberweapons from Israeli military research units, while Epstein secured funding from Silicon Valley and European bankers.

Farkash developed the concept of “remote identification” during the second Palestinian Intifada at Israeli checkpoints on the Gaza border. In 2003, Israel deployed the “Basel” system at the Erez Crossing, using facial scans to identify and process Palestinians going to work in Israel. “Palestinians were standing in the [queue] to enter Israel for four, five, or even six hours,” a spokesperson explained. “The military was trying to make sure that no one passing through the checkpoint was a terrorist or on a watch list.” He pitched the technology as a convenience for Palestinians frustrated by the wait times: “If someone is not a terrorist, he will not like us very much.”

As Boko Haram targeted Christians in their places of worship, the biometrics pilot at Babcock University took on a sectarian subtext. The pilot helped build relationships between Israeli operators and the Nigerian national security officials, while their partnership was framed as a matter of countering Islamic terrorism. By July 2015, a new “in-motion identification” system—the name for FST’s patented technology—was live at Babcock, allowing for facial recognition and authentication of students from a distance, in chapels, classrooms, and dormitories. Five hundred Babcock lecturers were trained to secure their classrooms with biometrics; a press release boasted, “the Israeli latest technology…helps guarantee safety on campus by filtering away all unwanted persons.”

Meanwhile, Epstein was working hard to establish Barak’s credibility as a global leader in cybersecurity. Emails show that Epstein connected Barak with several influential figures in Silicon Valley, including billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, former Microsoft president Steven Sinofsky, and many others.

Around the same time as Barak’s FST investment, Epstein loaned Barak $1 million to invest in another security startup founded by Israeli intelligence officers: Reporty Homeland Security (now rebranded as Carbyne), a 911 response platform which enables emergency dispatchers and security services to retrieve precise location data and live video/audio feed from phones. As with FST Biometrics in Nigeria, Reporty pilot projects laid the groundwork for state security cooperation between Israel and Mongolia.

The two seed investments, FST and Reporty, built Barak’s reputation as a cybersecurity pioneer. Barak emailed Epstein from Israel, shortly after the investment in FST was announced: “We miss you. Never a dull moment here…Reporty moves forward. The access control co. I’ve entered with Gary Fegel drew positive attention here. I start to look as being involved in Security related HighTec.”

Epstein and Barak’s persistence paid off. Barak’s companies scaled up from operating a pilot at a small university to advising at the highest level of Nigeria’s state cybersecurity apparatus. In 2020, the World Bank subsidized a partnership with the Israel National Cyber Directorate and Toka Group, another ex-intelligence startup co-founded by Barak, to work directly on Nigeria’s national cybersecurity infrastructure. The cooperation deepened last year, in July of 2025, as an Israeli firm installed cyber warfare simulators at Babcock to train the next generation of cybersecurity operators.

“This is going to be fun”

Epstein had a long history in Nigeria. His first documented visit to the country was in September 2002, when he traveled with President Bill Clinton and a large entourage on his private Boeing 727 jet (later dubbed the “Lolita Express”), part of a highly-publicized HIV/AIDS advocacy tour that included stops in Ghana, Rwanda, Mozambique, and South Africa. Epstein’s interests in Africa were not purely philanthropic, however; he was deeply involved in shipping, logistics, and the global commodities trade.

JPMorgan’s Investment Bank consulted with Epstein on major African investment deals, according to unsealed emails from the U.S. Virgin Islands’ lawsuit against the bank. In a 2010 email to a JPMorgan executive, Epstein boasted of receiving security clearance to meet with several senior African and Arab political officials—including Nigerian foreign minister Henry Ajumogobia, who had recently served as Nigeria’s OPEC delegate and Minister of State for Petroleum Resources.

Among the names of celebrities and politicians in Epstein’s “little black book,” seized from his Palm Beach residence in 2005, was a contact for Lal Dalamal, a Nigeria-born British-Indian philanthropist, whose family was a major player in the import and export of agricultural commodities and consumer goods in Nigeria.

In a September 2010 email exchange, German businessman David Stern sent a note to Epstein about an upcoming meeting with “a guy who has access to Nigeria oil and when selling it to China (or somebody else).” Stern expressed skepticism about the deal, writing “This seems very fishy (as my boss JEE would say).”

Later that day, Stern sent Epstein an update, using a racial slur for Africans to express his frustration about the deal. “This is getting insane…” Stern wrote, “Now F thinks the Nigeria oil deal might be a scam so the idea is for me to meet the [slur] to check it out.”

Epstein’s connections to West Africa proved lucrative for his associates. In 2011, Epstein invited a JPMorgan executive to his New York mansion to meet Karim Wade, son of the President of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade. Epstein wrote: “one of the most important players in africa, will be at the house this week, i think you will enjoy him.” Epstein tried to tee up a deal: “karim wants to hedge a million barrels each quarter of oil buying. This is going to be fun.” Senegal’s sole oil refinery, in Dakar, is supplied almost entirely by Nigerian crude.

“A way to make new friends for Israel”

Epstein quietly began helping Ehud Barak leverage his security ties in Nigeria to set up energy investments for his friends in Israel after Barak resigned as Israeli defense minister in 2013.

In emails with Renova Group, a conglomerate owned by Russian-Israeli oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, Barak proposed a Nigeria joint venture with Idan Ofer, chairman of the Israel Corporation, a massive petrochemical conglomerate founded by the government of Israel. Epstein had worked closely with Barak in establishing the relationship with Vekselberg and a consulting deal with Renova Group, which they also leveraged in backchannel negotiations with Russia during the Syrian civil war.

On May 19, 2013, Barak contacted his friend Michael “Micky” Federmann, billionaire chairman of the Israeli military technology giant, Elbit Systems. At the time, Elbit was facing controversy over a mass surveillance project in Nigeria. Ten days earlier, Nigerian legislators had learned of a secret $40 million intelligence contract for Elbit to develop infrastructure to spy on Nigerians’ online communications, and the country’s House of Representatives threatened to shut it down.

In the first week of June of 2013, Barak traveled to New York to visit Epstein and attend former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s 90th birthday party. Following his meeting with Barak, Epstein made an impromptu five-day trip to Africa; two weeks later, Barak received an invitation to speak at a conference for senior leadership of the Nigerian military and representatives from the country’s banking, oil & gas, and manufacturing sectors.

The event, called the World Cyber Security Conference, was hosted by an IT firm called New Horizons and was not announced publicly until after Barak confirmed his attendance. According to email correspondence, the main purpose of the conference appeared to be arranging private meetings for Barak with President Goodluck Jonathan and senior military chiefs, including the Chief of Defense Staff, Ola Sa’ad Ibrahim.

In an email to Barak on July 14, 2013, Akano, the event organizer, candidly expressed that Nigerian leaders saw Barak as a direct channel to the Israeli government. Akano shared with Barak a news article in which the Nigerian president called for additional Israeli support to fight Boko Haram. He wrote to Barak: “[Jonathan] needs more assistance from the Government of Israel. I am sure he will appreciate whatever help the Prime Minister can still render in whatever form- if there are new solutions or new technologies etc that can help Nigeria.”

Barak asked private intelligence firm Ergo to prepare a briefing on Nigeria, containing a dossier on Goodluck Jonathan, and his inner circle and adversaries. Ergo used informants inside Nigeria to develop their reports, and Barak cautioned them to be discreet. On July 20, Barak wrote to his Ergo contact: “[Please] make sure sources in Nigeria DO NOT know the purpose of the questions and/or identity of end user (namely myself).”

The conference was postponed after the mother of First Lady Patience Jonathan, who was hosting the event, was killed in a car accident. So, on August 5, Barak changed his travel destination to New York City. On arrival, he emailed Epstein: “R U in NY?” Epstein replied “no,” and sent Barak a number so they could catch up on the phone.

Instead, that week Barak met Henry Kissinger, another contact from Epstein’s black book, at the Four Seasons Hotel restaurant. In his final interview with Steve Bannon, Epstein recalled meeting Kissinger when they were both members of the Trilateral Commission, a non-governmental organization founded by David Rockefeller, the former CEO of Chase Bank.

After their meeting, Barak sent Kissinger an email asking for an invitation to the annual gathering of the Bilderberg Group, a transnational off-record forum held annually and attended by a select group of international elites. Kissinger’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Epstein sent Barak an email on August 7, checking in: “is your time productive[?]” Barak replied: “Time will tell. I’m trying to make it one.”

Barak finally arrived in Abuja, Nigeria on September 16, 2013 for the rescheduled World Cyber Security Conference. According to the event itinerary, he was slated to meet with President Goodluck Jonathan in the afternoon, followed by dinner hosted by the First Lady, with key leaders in the government, military, and intelligence community, and several foreign ambassadors.

Notwithstanding Barak’s status as a private citizen, his hosts treated the event as a diplomatic outreach to the Israeli state. The event organizer wrote to Barak: “The dinner is one other excellent way…to meet with good Friends of Israel and make new friends for Israel as well.”

The actual conference, held on September 17, was only six hours long—and three of them were dedicated to prayer, reciting the national anthem, taking photographs, eating lunch, and presenting souvenirs and certificates to attendees. Barak spoke for 20 minutes, followed by a Q&A.

Nigerian media used the event to urge speedy passage of a pending Cybercrime Bill, a comprehensive legal framework for online surveillance, which was under pressure after the House of Representatives voted to suspend Elbit’s $40 million contract. Two days after the cybersecurity conference, on September 19, the Senate voted to advance the bill.

The next month, Goodluck Jonathan traveled to Jerusalem for his first-ever state visit to Israel. Although the cybersecurity bill was still stuck in the House, Elbit technicians “quietly landed” in Abuja on November 26 to begin installing the internet surveillance facility. Civil-society monitors observed Nigerian personnel being trained in Israel, even as Nigerian legislators were still debating the details of the bill.

“I don’t have time to learn from my mistakes”

As Epstein coached Barak to become an energy dealmaker, he was not shy about giving harsh criticism to steer him in the right direction. When American oil & gas developer Jack Grynberg pitched Barak on buying some of his oil assets, Barak shared the detailed financials with Epstein to pass along to Apollo Global Management CEO Leon Black for due diligence. Barak wrote, “Do not hesitate to correct or direct me along the way. I don’t have enough time to learn from my own mistakes. Shabbat Shalom.”

A few hours later, Epstein sent a frustrated response: “This is total 100 percent BULLSHIT. I told you on the phone before sending or asking anyone about it you should do your own homework, You cannot be seen to be selling garbage ,frauds. bad things and or trouble. this is a total waste of your time.”

Later, Barak introduced Grynberg to ex-Mossad chief Danny Yatom, when Grynberg sought help with armed security for his power generators in Nigeria’s Ogun and Ondo states. Barak warned Yatom that Grynberg was a “tricky” character, and cautioned against getting too entangled with Grynberg’s operations; Yatom ultimately declined to work with on the American’s Nigeria project.

The following July, Barak set up shop at Epstein’s 71st Street mansion, aiming to meet with powerful industry titans who could advance his geopolitical ambitions in Africa. After meeting Nigerian petrochemical magnate Ambrosie Bryant Chukwueloka Orjiako at Idan Ofer’s house in London, Barak followed up with Orjiako, to make plans to meet again there or in New York soon.

Barak and Epstein were actively engaged in Israel’s oil and gas sector, working together to broker access to the Leviathan natural gas field for foreign investors. Epstein also arranged a meeting between Barak and DP World chairman Sultan Sulayem, while Barak was in Russia for a private meeting with Vladimir Putin at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in 2013.

Epstein seized the opportunity to promote DP World’s investment in Israeli ports. Barak replied in an email that it was “a little bit too early,” and suggested that direct investment by an Emirati company could succeed “once (and IF) we’ll start getting deeper into a sincere peace process.”

Soon after the Abraham Accords were signed in 2020, DP World bid for ownership of Haifa Port, one of Israel’s main Mediterranean Sea terminals, which services operations at the Leviathan field. They were ultimately out-bid by India’s Adani Group.

Barak’s business interests were prospering with Epstein’s support. The relationship between the two men was intimate, with near-daily email and phone correspondence. Epstein wrote Barak, in a heartfelt message: “there are very few people that I enjoy spending time with, you are unique.” Barak replied, “Thx. The same.”

While writing a memoir and living at Epstein’s apartment in November 2015, Barak asked Epstein’s assistant to set up an electric piano, so he could practice classical music between writing sessions. Barak and Epstein, both pianists, shared a passion for music. Barak sent Epstein an article about the career benefits of studying music, with a note: “What is it about serious music training that seems to correlate with outsize success in many diverse fields? Here is the answer re your success in life.”

Epstein corrected Barak: “our.”

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Correction, March 27, 2026: This article incorrectly stated that Ivan Glasenberg was under U.S. sanctions; Glasenberg was not personally sanctioned, he was forced to quit the board of Rusal after its main owner, Oleg Deripaska, was sanctioned by the U.S. The article has been updated to reflect this.

Jeffrey Epstein sat at the crossroads of academia, philanthropy, and venture finance as these global capital flows were threatened by the brewing confrontation in Ukraine.

In 2013, during the early cryptocurrency boom, Epstein sought an audience with Vladimir Putin to encourage the Russian president to shift course from the MIT–Skolkovo model. Instead of playing “catch up” with the United States through venture-backed startups, Epstein proposed, Russia could help lead a new financial system based on a novel global currency.

Epstein funded the early development of cryptocurrency through the MIT Digital Currency Initiative, founded in 2015. MIT’s Bitcoin Core Development Fund helped pay bitcoin’s early developers to maintain the open-source software authored by Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin’s anonymous inventor. Epstein was an early investor in Coinbase, and he was friends with Brock Pierce, the co-founder of U.S. dollar stablecoin company Tether, which operates, in effect, the world’s largest crypto bank.

Epstein was also recruiting cryptographers to a more ambitious project: hacking the human genome. In an email to a redacted recipient in August 2012, Epstein wrote, “My biology gurus at harvard all agree that the signal intelligence used by the various agencies , could be put to work on breaking the dna code or protein signal problems. breaking foreign codes is the expertise of the us and nsa.” Epstein prompted the recipient to help him recruit “code breakers” from the various intelligence agencies: “it would be great to know which agency button to push.”

In an interview with Steve Bannon months before his death, Epstein revealed that he had purchased a property in New Mexico—the Zorro Ranch—as a research facility to attract the nation’s top scientists from the former “Manhattan Project” campus in nearby Los Alamos after the U.S. government cut funding for high-energy physics at the end of the Cold War. “In our world, the physical world, there were things that were just unexplainable,” he told Bannon. “I wanted to see if we could build tools so others smarter than me could help investigate it.”

The millions of documents published by the Justice Department last month reveal Epstein’s disturbing fascination with eugenic science, expressed through research linked to the intelligence services of multiple governments. Epstein covertly negotiated access to dangerous and ethically dubious technology, between financial elites, often alluding to grand ambitions for reshaping both the human genome and the world order.

Drop Site News has spent the past several months exposing Epstein’s ties to U.S. and Israeli intelligence. Our full series is available here. We also partnered with Jmail in their effort to make the full Epstein files accessible and searchable. View the archive at https://jmail.world/.

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Jeffrey Epstein Recruited NSA Codebreakers for Genome “Manhattan Project”

The financier pursued cryptographers to “hack” the genetic code, and develop “new signals intelligence” to understand inter-cellular communication.

In January 2010, Ilya Ponomarev, a member of the Duma—the Russian parliament— helped arrange a visit to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by a group of senior Russian officials. He told a Latvia-based outlet he was in Boston to explore cooperation between Russian and American startups.

Vladislav Surkov, deputy of then-President Dmitry Medvedev, was part of the delegation. At the time, Surkov was seeking to develop the “second leg” of a managed multiparty system to counter-balance Putin’s dominant United Russia Party. After the visit, Surkov asked Ponomarev, a popular member of A Just Russia, the controlled opposition party, to become a “technology transfer” advisor for Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian-Israeli billionaire.

Vekselberg, owner of the conglomerate Renova Group, was in charge of the Skolkovo Innovation Center, dubbed Moscow’s “Silicon Valley,” a high-tech business district subsidized by Russian state-owned enterprises and administered by the non-profit Skolkovo Foundation.

With Ponomarev’s help, Vekselberg established the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, or “Skoltech,” a $300 million research partnership paid by the Skolkovo Foundation to MIT. MIT and Skolkovo share profits and royalties from the partnership, which includes intellectual property related to CRISPR gene-editing technology. Skoltech supported research on RNA-targeting methods using CRISPR, and also owns rights to diagnostic technology based on the same RNA-targeting effector.

Like many of his ultra-wealthy peers, Jeffrey Epstein was fascinated by gene therapy and life-extension technology. He once suggested to news anchor Katie Couric—to her shock and disgust—that he even planned to clone himself. But his interest in genomics was more than a passing fancy; it was an enduring obsession during the final decades of his life.

In December 2006, before Epstein was jailed for prostitution of a minor in Palm Beach, Ghislaine Maxwell invited Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his then-girlfriend Anne Wojcicki to Epstein’s Little St. James Island, according to emails in Epstein’s hacked Yahoo! inbox vetted and published by Distributed Denial of Secrets. Wojcicki had founded a personal genomics startup called 23andMe, and Maxwell encouraged Epstein to cultivate a relationship with her. “Be v nice to her not stupid,” Maxwell wrote. “She is interested in mapping DNA etc ..she is key :)”

That same year, Epstein had been in contact with leading Harvard geneticists George Church and Gary B. Ruvkun, who won a Nobel Prize in 2024 for his research into micro RNA. Epstein planned to fund Church’s Personal Genome Project at Harvard, and Ruvkun sought Epstein’s support for genomics research to elucidate “pleasure signals in the brain.” Ruvkun wrote to Stephen Kosslyn, later Harvard’s Social Science Dean, “let me know if this subject is too strange for our patron.” The correspondence was forwarded to Epstein, who wrote back, “the patron has no boundaries.”

After Epstein’s release from prison on sex crime charges in 2010, he began funding Church’s CRISPR gene-editing research. In November 2011, Church stirred some controversy by telling an interviewer that he hoped to clone a Neanderthal.

Epstein wrote to Church a few weeks later, after the scientist declined an invitation to an event, “did the cloning issue , give you pause?” Church replied, “Yes. I’m working toward this goal fairly rapidly but trying to do so in a way that minimizes risk to the field.”

“Why don’t you come and i won’t mention it,” Epstein coaxed him. “I just find it intellectually amusing.” Church did not reply to request for comment.

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“Find Me The Top Hacker”

Epstein’s interest in gene-editing was not purely intellectual; it was personal. Joe Thakuria, Church’s Harvard Medical School colleague, helped Epstein conduct research on his own genome. In June 2014, Thakuria sent Epstein a $193,400 invoice for a package deal to mutate his adult stem cells “to increase longevity,” noting that “If we do this, he, like George Church, would be one of very few people in the world to have this done.” Later that year, Epstein tried to arrange a meeting between Church and Bill Gates to discuss “anti aging” and “genetic fabrication.”

MIT received millions of dollars in donations directed by Epstein to support pet projects that happened to closely intersect the frontier research conducted under the Skoltech partnership.

Epstein gave his first gift to the MIT Media Lab in 2002, to fund the research of artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky. Over the next decade, Epstein gave several large gifts to Seth Lloyd, a quantum computing researcher featured at the Russian Quantum Center in Skolkovo, who co-authored papers with Skoltech-funded researchers.

Microsoft, the technology conglomerate of which Bill Gates is a founder and major shareholder, also had formal ties to Skolkovo. In 2010, Viktor Vekselberg and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer signed a memorandum in Moscow to begin “a wide-ranging series of collaborative initiatives that will underpin the Russian Federation’s technology innovation agenda,” later opening an R&D center at the Skolkovo Innovation Center.

Skolkovo was one of several foreign funders of the MIT Media Lab, led by Epstein’s close friend Joi Ito. The Skolkovo partnership funded research grants for high-profile principal investigators like Chilean physicist César Hidalgo and Neri Oxman, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman’s wife, whose research Epstein had personally backed.

Epstein was also supporting the work of Madars Virza, a Latvian research scientist working on cryptocurrency at the Media Lab. In 2011, the Skolkovo Foundation funded Virza and Israeli scientist Eli Ben-Sasson’s research on Zerocash, a design for an anonymous cryptocurrency based on “zero-knowledge” cryptographic proofs—also backed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

In emails released by the Justice Department last month, Epstein discussed the cryptographic theory behind Zerocash with Italian hacker Vincenzo Iozzo, “ZeroCash…is essentially a ‘privacy preserving’ version of Bitcoin,” Iozzo wrote to Epstein. “If we use...similar [zero knowledge proofs] for our currency, we can enforce arbitrary rules on how the currency is spent.” Epstein invested in Ben-Sasson and Virza’s Electric Coin Company, to create the Zcash blockchain based on their research. Later, Epstein helped Virza make a bank transfer in the Virgin Islands before a “fork” in the Zcash code. Virza did not reply to request for comment.

Epstein’s interests in genes and cryptocurrency were deeply intertwined. He regarded the human genome as a cryptographic puzzle, and wanted to “hack” the genetic code.

As early as December 2009, Epstein reached out to Daniel Dubno, a CBS News producer who previously worked with DARPA and the Department of Homeland Security, to “find me the top hacker codebreaker, nsa type,” to assist in analysis of proteins.

That month, Epstein contacted MIT parallel computing pioneer Danny Hillis with the same request: “i am looking for nsa quality code theorist. biology at every level involves a host of Alice and Bob interactions, authentication, signnal processing. Noisy channels.” (In cryptographic theory, Alice and Bob are common placeholders for two parties trying to communicate with each other.)

In his messages to Hillis, Epstein seemed somewhat conversant in the frontier methods in artificial intelligence research at the time, writing, “THe math gets quite complicated. algebraic topologists ,sometimes look at the intersections in multidimensional spaces,” referring to the practice of representing a high-dimensional object as a collection of overlapping regions, then studying the pattern of their intersections.

Dubno followed up with Epstein a few months later, to inform him about a crypto workshop he was planning, with some promising recruits. “A bunch of Israeli hackers are in this with me as well as the chief disruption officer at Darpa, Dr. Peter Lee,” Dubno wrote. He added, “I’d design this so you’d get your questions answered if you’d help me get mine.” Epstein replied, “Im in.” Dubno visited Epstein’s island within a matter of days. Hillis and Dubno did not reply to requests for comment.

For the next decade, Epstein continued to recruit engineers from U.S. national security entities, including DARPA, to his genome hacking project. He asked Kathryn Ruemmler, the White House attorney who had handled the legal fallout from the Edward Snowden leaks, to help him source cryptographers from the National Security Agency. “Can you find a guy from nsa that can think about signal intelligence applied to DNA,” Epstein wrote . “I want to intercept communication between living cells in organisms.”

In late 2012, he had sent the same request to Boris Nikolic, Bill Gates’ top aide: “do you have any contacts at nsa so that we can use de encypriton (sic) in biological systems?” “Yes,” Nikolic replied, “There are no many places where I do not have someone ;)”

“A New Form Of Money”

Despite an auspicious start, the partnership between MIT and Skolkovo came under strain in 2012, caught between rising tensions between Washington and Moscow, and an increasingly restrictive political climate within Russia itself.

That year, major street protests broke out in Moscow and St. Petersburg against the Russian government. In response to the demonstrations, Putin accused the U.S. of fomenting unrest, and his foreign minister claimed the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was attempting to influence Russia’s elections through “pro-democracy” non-profit and non-governmental organizations.

USAID was funding a major Russian civil society organization to conduct election monitoring, documenting allegations of voter fraud that fueled the protests. Ponomarev—now seen as a liberal opponent of the government—did not have public ties to USAID, which was a close partner of the Gates Foundation. Even so, as concerns mounted over his safety inside Russia, Nikolic, Gates’ science and technology advisor, quietly sought Epstein’s help to protect him.

In an email dated January 11, 2012, Nikolic asked Epstein to travel with him to Russia to meet Ponomarev. Nikolic forwarded a message from Ponomarev requesting an invitation to speak at the World Economic Forum that year “so that not only official Putin’s voice is heard.”

“He is a member of Duma,” Nikolic explained to Epstein, “and he and Alyona (his very smart and cute girlfriend) are the main organizer of the uprising against Putin…I am afraid what will happened to him. The stakes are huge.”

Nikolic believed that Ponomarev was in imminent danger. “He might replace Putin and become a president by himself (he will sooner or later) if he does not [get] killed before. It is super dangerous - any idea how to help him???” Nikolic signed off, “Pls do not forward this email.”

The documents do not show whether Epstein responded, or if he acted on Nikolic’s email at all. Ponomarev did not speak at Davos that year. As Nikolic had warned, Ponomarev’s status in Russia quickly became more precarious. After Putin’s return in May 2012, Ponomarev led a failed filibuster to stall a bill drastically increasing penalties for participating in protests. In June 2012, Nikolic sent another message encouraging Epstein to build a relationship with Ponomarev, writing, “It is somewhat dangerous for me to spend more time with him. But I think it is worth it.”

The next month, the Russian government adopted a new “foreign agents” framework for foreign-funded NGOs, restricting the activities of civil society organizations. In September 2012, USAID was banned from Russia.

The MIT-Skolkovo partnership became a political flashpoint as the Kremlin moved to contain Ponomarev. In March 2013, Ponomarev resigned from his political party, A Just Russia, after being forced to break with the protest movement. Ponomarev and other high-profile figures connected to Skolkovo were investigated for suspected embezzlement, and a Moscow court ordered Ponomarev to pay back his lecture fees from Skolkovo.

The same month that Ponomarev was separating from his political party in Russia, Ehud Barak stepped down as head of Israel’s Defense Ministry. With Epstein’s help, Barak quickly negotiated a lucrative consulting agreement with Renova Group—the conglomerate owned by Vekselberg, the billionaire head of Skolkovo.

Barak told reporters that his retirement meant that he now would have time to “study, write, live and enjoy.” Instead, he immediately began working with Epstein to conduct covert diplomatic work in support of Israeli security interests abroad. One of their first priorities was securing a private meeting with Vladimir Putin to discuss a Russian-led resolution to the civil war in Syria, and the peaceful removal of President Bashar al-Assad from power.

Epstein offered Barak a strategy he often employed: using non-governmental multilateral institutions to engage state leaders through backchannels. Within days of Barak’s retirement, on March 27, 2013, Epstein and Bill Gates visited Thorbjorn Jagland, a member of the Nobel Peace Prize committee, accompanied by representatives of the International Peace Institute (IPI), a non-profit think tank specializing in multilateral diplomacy.

Barak and Epstein were simultaneously using the IPI to cut a security deal for Israel in Mongolia, in hopes of accessing mining interests in that country. Barak traveled to Ulaanbataar in late April 2013, and emailed Vekselberg to set up an urgent phone call: “met with most of the leaders from the President downwards and several business people. If your plans for Tuesday [have] not been changed I have a thought that could probably help.” That Tuesday, Vekselberg and Putin attended a meeting for the Board of Trustees of the Russian Geographical Society in St. Petersburg.

On May 9, 2013, Epstein updated Barak on his efforts to engage Putin through Jagland: “jagland is going to see putin in sochi, jagland asked that I make myself availble to meet with him sometine in june, to explain how russia can structure deals in order to encourage western investment.” Barak wrote back: “i know Jagland for long time. probably we have to talk about it.”

The next day, Epstein laid out his proposal for Putin, in a May 10 email to Jagland: “When sputnik was announced, the West was caught flatfooted. The same can now happen with Russia taking the lead in finance.” Epstein suggested that Putin was chasing the wrong modernization model, “copying silicon valley, looking for start ups, playing catch up to Microsoft . apple google and the like.”

In place of the “Skoltech” model, Epstein wanted to offer Putin an alternate path: Russia could “get out in front and leapfrog the global community by reinventing the financial system of the 21st century.”

The American financier proposed a framework for a new global currency: “A new form of money, on a world wide basis… much larger than any single project envisioned by any govt. and at its core not really that difficult to bring to fruition.”

Jagland had no clue what Epstein was talking about. “Hi Jeffrey, all this is not easy for me to explain to Putin,” he wrote. “You have to do it. My job is to get a meeting with him.”

Epstein dialed back the message for Putin, writing, “You can tell him that you and I are close, and that i advise Gates. this is confidential, . I would be happy to meet him , but for a minimum of two to three hours, not shorter.”

Jagland’s pitch to Putin appears to have worked. On May 22, 2013, Epstein claimed to Barak that he’d received, and rejected, an invitation to meet with Putin at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum the next month: “Putin asked that i meet him in st petersburg the same time as his economic conference…i told him no, . If he wants to meet he will need to set aside real time and privacy.”

But, with close guidance from Epstein behind the scenes, Barak finally met Putin in late June 2013, during the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

“Access Remote Parts of Africa”

On August 6, 2013, the Kremlin extended Skolkovo’s funding through 2020, reversing the prior decision to gut the program. Barak and Epstein swiftly found an opportunity to profit from the Kremlin’s decision, making use of Epstein’s connection to the Gates Foundation.

Shortly after returning from St. Petersburg, Barak joined the advisory board of Parasight, an Israeli biotech company in the Skolkovo Innovation Center, which was developing technology to detect malaria in blood samples using computer vision AI. On August 10, 2013, Epstein connected Barak to Nikolic to get support for Parasight (now called Sight Diagnostics) from the Gates Foundation. Nikolic’s invitation to Barak appears in both the hacked dataset published by Distributed Denial of Secrets and the DOJ release last month, further corroborating the authenticity of the hacked Barak email cache.

Nikolic made plans to meet Barak in New York during the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) in late September 2013. Nikolic wrote Barak: “I will be in NYC that whole week and I look forward to seeing you and catching up – most likely at Jeffrey’s – it is more interesting there than at CGI ;)”

Like most of the startups advised by Barak, Parasight’s roots were in Israeli military research units. Parasight co-founder Yossi Pollak is an alumnus of Talpiot, an elite Israeli Defense Forces science and technology program; Sarah Levy, a founding engineer and eventual chief technology officer, is also a Talpiot graduate and veteran of Unit 81, the secretive special technology unit of the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate.

Barak’s point man on the Parasight project was his brother-in-law and business partner Doron Cohen, who served under Barak in Sayeret Matkal, the Israel Defense Forces’ elite special operations unit. Cohen and Barak were working together, in secret, on a security deal between Israel and the West African nation of Ivory Coast. In parallel, Epstein was shepherding the Gates Foundation into Ivory Coast, leveraging his close relationship with Nina Keita, the niece of President Alassane Ouattara; he tried to coordinate a meeting between Ouattara, Keita, and Gates on September 16, 2013, before the U.N. General Assembly that week.

Barak met Nikolic at Epstein’s mansion on September 20, 2013, and Barak introduced Nikolic to Parasight co-founder Daniel Levner via email. Levner later conveyed Nikolic’s feedback on next steps with the Gates Foundation: “Dr. Nikolic’s view is that the Gates Foundation’s driver in choosing technologies is the ability to access remote parts of Africa.”

Two months later, in November 2013, Barak received an email from Parasight’s founders asking for Vekselberg’s support for additional grant funding from Skolkovo. Barak discussed on the phone with Cohen, and one week later, the grant application was approved: Skolkovo pledged an additional $2.5 million to Parasight, on the condition that Parasight put $1.25 million of its own money into a new Russian entity.

Sight Diagnostics later developed portable malaria detection in collaboration with the U.S. Army Medical Research Directorate at Kisumu field station in Kenya, where the army runs programs for the U.S. Presidents’ Malaria Initiative, a USAID-led partner of the Gates Foundation. Drop Site was unable to confirm if Gates Foundation was directly involved in the Kenya trial. The Foundation, Nikolic, and Ponomarev did not respond to requests for comment.

“Designer Babies”

The files released by the U.S. Justice Department and House Oversight Committee have shown Epstein deeply preoccupied with theories of racial and genetic superiority. In an anonymous essay recovered from Epstein’s files, titled “Africa, parasites, intelligence,” the writer mused that “For Africa, the environmental factor is parasites—disease—known to exert a strong negative effect on intelligence.” “And what is special about Jewish intelligence?” the author asked. “Surely it is that it emerged in mercantile settings, natural home of numbers, logic and mathematics.”

Calculations about the long-term viability of the Israeli state, and anxieties about the demographics of its Jewish population, formed a backdrop to Epstein and Barak’s engagement with Putin. In the last years of Epstein’s life, Barak shared grave concerns with Epstein about Israel’s looming demographic crisis. During a dinner at Epstein’s New York mansion in February 2013, Barak told former Obama economic adviser Larry Summers that Israel needs to solve its Jewish population shortage “before it’s too late” and stop “the slippery slope to a one state nation … with an Arab majority.”

Barak believed the best hope for Israel’s future was allowing for conversion into Judaism to promote migration, by breaking the orthodox Rabbinate’s authority to define who is a “Jew.” “Open the gates for massive conversion to Judaism,” Barak said.​​ “It’s a successful country, many will apply.”

Russian migration had been essential to Israel’s past success, and Barak hoped to repeat the pattern: “The Russian million changed Israel dramatically. Many would prefer to be Jews rather than Russians. Lots of young people, including women. We can easily absorb another million.” He proposed restricting migration from Arab and North African countries, telling Epstein and Summers, “We can control the quality much more effectively, much more than the founding fathers of Israel did. They took whatever came just to save people. Now, we can be more selective.”

As the relationship between the U.S. and Russia continued to deteriorate over the subsequent decade, Israel was forced to manage an increasingly tenuous balancing act between the two great powers. Epstein himself took a quiet interest in Russia’s growing conflict with Ukraine and NATO. On March 13, 2014, three days before a referendum on whether Crimea should join Russia, Epstein wrote to his broker at Deutsche Bank, “let’s play,” and instructed her to place a $250,000 bet against the Russian ruble. By the end of the year, the ruble had lost nearly 50 percent of its value relative to the U.S. dollar.

After the referendum, on March 18, Epstein messaged Ariane de Rothschild and her senior advisor Olivier Colom, a former aide to Nicolas Sarkozy and expert in the African mining industry: “ukraine upheaval should provide many opportunites , many.”

On March 20, 2014, Ilya Ponomarev was the sole “no” vote in the Duma on Russia’s annexation of Crimea. He was vilified in Russian state media, and placed on a billboard in the center of Moscow which labelled him as a “national traitor.” Ponomarev fled to the United States soon after.

The next year, in June 2015, Epstein asked for Nikolic’s help obtaining asylum for a Russian woman whose name is redacted in the emails. Nikolic offered to introduce her to Ponomarev. “He knows most of leadership of LGBT community in Russia and has helped such application for asylum in USA in past,” Nikolic wrote, adding, “He will help.”

By this time, Nikolic had departed the Gates Foundation, and was helping steer major private capital into the gene-editing boom. In August 2015, Epstein’s Deutsche Bank banker, Paul Morris, forwarded a write-up on the CRISPR startup Editas Medicine, highlighting a $120 million funding round led by Nikolic.

In the final year before his death, Epstein supported a bio-lab in Ukraine for the production of “designer babies,” led by hacker Bryan Bishop. On July 21, 2018, Epstein wrote to Bishop, “i have no issue with investing the problem is only if i am seen to lead.” Bishop wrote back, “I have always envisioned there would be anonymity requirements about babies– we can’t publicly identify who these are or their parents or benefactors, it would brand the child as (essentially, and sadly) a freak for life in the media.”

Bishop planned to brainstorm with Epstein about ways to protect the anonymity of all persons involved. “I had always assumed the investor would need absolute anonymity, for these kinds of products,” Bishop wrote. “So the financial structure needs to be designed with these details in mind.”

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russian state media began spreading a “conspiracy theory” that the United States was operating secret military biological experiments to create “monster” soldiers in Ukraine. U.S. and Ukrainian officials categorically denied the allegations.

As the war unfolded, Ilya Ponomarev became a leader of the Freedom of Russia Legion, a volunteer militia of Russian defectors fighting for Ukraine, and joined the Congress of People’s Deputies, a shadow parliament of Russian opposition figures.

In 2019, a redacted sender wrote to Epstein regarding another vocal critic of Putin, Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelenskyy. “Zelensky looking for help,” the person wrote, “Putin dismissive, saying he is run by Israelis.” According to Epstein’s calendar, he planned to stay at the Hyatt Regency in Kyiv in February, one month before the first round of Ukraine’s presidential elections. In another message, Epstein received a link to a May 2019 New York Times article on Ihor Kolomoisky, Zelenskyy’s Ukrainian-born, Israeli backer. Epstein wrote back, “I’m following the situation. Lot of fun.”

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Epstein connected an Indian billionaire close to Prime Minister Narendra Modi with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak ahead of the first ever trip by an Indian PM to Israel. Days later, that billionaire, Anil Ambani, told Epstein after a visit to Delhi that “Leadership” wanted Epstein’s help for Ambani to meet “jared and Bannon asap,” and requested his “assistance” regarding Modi’s upcoming meeting with Trump.

Modi’s landmark visit to Israel in 2017 helped accelerate the burgeoning relationship between the three countries. Afterward, Epstein celebrated in an email that Modi had “danced and sang in Israel for the benefit of the US president.”

On Saturday, the Indian government responded to the revelations about Modi’s visit to Israel in Epstein’s communications. “We have seen reports of an email message from the so-called Epstein files that has a reference to the Prime Minister and his visit to Israel,” said a statement by India’s foreign affairs ministry. “Beyond the fact of the Prime Minister’s official visit to Israel in July 2017, the rest of the allusions in the email are little more than trashy ruminations by a convicted criminal, which deserve to be dismissed with the utmost contempt.”

What the Indian government did not address, however, was that individuals in Modi’s orbit had long been engaging with Epstein as a trusted intermediary on a wide range of diplomatic and economic issues. The story below makes some of those connections.

This is the latest in Drop Site’s series on Epstein and Israel. We are partnering with Jmail, a searchable inbox of Epstein’s emails, to make all the Epstein messages searchable and public. Please consider supporting our journalism with a free or paid subscription.

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“Leadership Would Like Your Help”: Indian Billionaire Tapped Jeffrey Epstein Before Modi’s Visits to U.S. and Israel

Story by Meghnad Bose, Fatima Khan, and Biplob Kumar Das

On March 16, 2017, Anil Ambani, an Indian billionaire closely associated with Narendra Modi’s BJP government, sent financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein a message that the “Leadership” was asking for his assistance in connecting with senior figures in Donald Trump’s orbit ahead of an upcoming state visit by the Indian prime minister.

Ambani texted Epstein, “Hello. Was in delhi. Leadership wld like ur help for me to meet jared and bannon asap. PI advise. Likely visit to dc by pm in may to meet donald. Also assitance on that.” Epstein and Ambani proceeded to set up a time to chat. A few messages later, Ambani texted, “Thanks as always.” Epstein responded, “Fun.”

In the months that followed, two consequential state visits by Indian prime minister Narendra Modi—his first meeting with Trump, and then the first trip by a sitting Indian prime minister to Israel—would change the course of India-Israel relations.

According to the new tranche of documents related to Epstein released by the Department of Justice, Epstein played a direct role as an intermediary in the dealmaking between the three countries.

In July 2017, Narendra Modi became the first Indian prime minister to make an official visit to Israel, a move that marked a decisive break from decades of Indian foreign policy that had kept relations with Israel largely discreet in deference to Arab states and the Palestinian cause.

The trip came at a moment of rapid political change in the region. Weeks earlier, Modi met U.S. President Donald Trump for the first time in Washington, while Trump was deepening U.S. ties with Israel and the Gulf Arab monarchies, and India was seeking to position itself as a key partner for the US Indo-Pacific strategy to contain China.

Modi’s highly publicized visit to Tel Aviv—featuring unusually warm personal interactions with Israeli leaders—was widely read as a signal that India was openly embracing a U.S.–Israel–India strategic axis, particularly in defense, technology, and intelligence cooperation.

In the meantime, emails show that Epstein, who played a connective role between Indian, Israeli, and U.S. elites in the run-up to the trip, was monitoring developments closely.

On July 6, 2017, as Modi concluded his historic visit to Israel, an elated Epstein wrote to an individual identified in the emails as Jabor Y, identified in past reporting as an individual with ties to Qatar’s former prime minister, Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani. “The Indian Prime minisiter modi took advice. and danced and sang in israel for the benefit of the US president,” Epstein wrote. “they had met a few weeks ago.. IT WORKED. !”

Modi’s office did not respond to Drop Site’s requests for comment.

The same day, Epstein texted Ambani, who had deep investments in Israel, writing “Your guys performance was both clever and executed well . Good work.”

Epstein, in fact, was in regular contact with Ambani, a tycoon closely linked to the BJP establishment—with emails showing the two men setting meetings, discussing political developments, and evaluating the implications of possible political appointments in the U.S.

In the months leading up to the 2017 visit, Epstein messaged Ambani saying he had emailed him former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s contact information. On March 5, Epstein also offered to set up a meeting between the two. On March 11, Epstein told Ambani that Barak was going to fly in to Paris to meet with the Indian business tycoon.

Ambani messaged Epstein that he would have to postpone the scheduled meeting with Barak in Paris due to a dinner with then France President François Hollande, Epstein wrote back, “Ehud was flying to meet. should I cancel him?”

“Cancel him,” Ambani replied.

On March 9, 2017, Ambani wrote to Epstein to ask his view on whether former CIA director David Petraeus could be the new U.S. ambassador to India. Ambani told Epstein that “Amb to India is key” and added, “Need a strong person like patreaus. To deal wth neighbores pak afghanistan etc.”

Epstein responded that although Trump liked Petraeus, the Pentagon was wary of that choice, to which Ambani replied, “K. Who do u suggest.”

Epstein wrote back, “a tall swedish blonde woman , to make it fun to visit.”

“Arrange that,” Ambani replied.

Also on March 9, Epstein also offered to organize a private dinner between Ambani and the head of NATO. “If you want a private dinner with head of NATO I Will organize , but not attend,” he texted.

On March 12, Epstein texted Ambani, “Told your ambassador, not front burner. Visit this week with Saudi.” Ambani responded, “K thanks.”

On March 14, Epstein messaged again, to tell Ambani that he “should meet Tom Pritzker, he’s one of the family.” Epstein was referring to the billionaire chairman of Hyatt Hotels. He added that Pritzker was chairman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

“april should be fun,” said Epstein, before adding that, “He will be at the may 5th dinner for the foreign ministers , most of the UN ambassadors that i am orgzanizing. ( you are invited ) . i will send you guest list and tell me who you want to sit next to. - then he is off to the the himalyas for a trek. . I told him you guys should meet.”

“K. Await list,” responded Ambani.

A few days later, Epstein again insisted that Pritzker was “worth a meeting” for Ambani and put them in touch.

On March 16, in response to Ambani’s request that “Leadership” would like Epstein’s help to meet Bannon and Kushner, the financier proposed Ambani meet Tom Barrack instead. Barrack, reportedly a friend of Trump’s, had been the chair of his inaugural committee and is currently the U.S. ambassador to Turkey.

Epstein wrote, “steve and jared are meeting 15 people a day. mostly meet and greet with little follow up.. state dept is way understaffed. MBS s meeting took time to set and basically a waste of time. . though photo op was what they wanted. . its early for anything meaningful.. you should meet with tom barrack.”

Epstein emailed Barrack to pitch a meeting between him and the Indian billionaire. “Anil ambani , India , is coming to new york first week april, i think you would enjoy,” wrote Epstein.

Minutes later, Epstein updates Ambani, “Tom barrack with me in palm beach tues wed.” Ambani replies, “Enjoy.”

On March 29, Epstein also told Ambani that “Israel strategy” would dominate Modi’s meeting with Trump that summer.

At the time, the Indian billionaire had substantial business interests in Israel. The previous year, his company, Reliance Defence Ltd, had entered a joint venture with Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd, a state-owned Israeli defense firm, to produce air-to-air missiles and air defense systems in a deal valued at $10 billion over a decade.

Epstein, who had pleaded guilty to sexual offenses and become a registered sex offender as far back as 2007, appeared concerned about whether Ambani was worried about Epstein’s public image while engaging with him.

As Modi’s trip kicked off in Israel on July 4, 2017, Epstein reassured Ambani, “If my google is a concern a large group of ministers blunts it.”

Ambani did not respond to Drop Site’s request for comment.

Epstein expressed satisfaction with the growing ties between Israel, India and the U.S. that he had helped foster. Two days after Modi’s visit to Israel concluded, Larry Summers, former Harvard president and Secretary of the Treasury, asked Epstein if he still thought Trump is a better president than Hillary Clinton would have been. Epstein responded affirmatively, stating, “yes, defintley (sic) India israel. for example great and all his doing.”

“Excite an interest in India”

Other correspondence in the Department of Justice release show that Epstein had been involved in the years before the visit in helping build a connection between Silicon Valley and the BJP government. In June 2014, a month after Modi first came to power, Epstein hosted a previously unreported gathering at his New York residence with Ehud Barak, Larry Summers, and Hardeep Singh Puri, a senior BJP leader who had joined the political party earlier that year.

That October, Epstein emailed Puri asking whether his meeting with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman was taking place. Puri replied that he was in San Francisco for the meeting, adding, “You, my friend, make things happen. Any advice?” Epstein responded with guidance on how Puri should pitch Hoffman, including offering to organize a trip to India and make introductions across industries.

In November, Puri followed up with a detailed pitch to Epstein and Hoffman outlining India’s economic plans under Modi. “The market buzz is strengthened by the election of a new Government with a strong mandate bent on reviving the Indian economy with a major focus on Digital India,” he wrote, urging Hoffman to visit India. “I am now convinced more than ever that India today presents a terrific opportunity for internet-based economic activity,” he added.

The following year, at an event titled India-US Start-up Konnect 2015 in San Jose, Modi said in his speech, “Reid Hoffman, your LinkedIn is a great product. And, you are an inspiration to many here and in India.” (Hoffman did not respond to Drop Site’s request for comment. Hoffman has previously apologized for his role in facilitating Epstein donations to MIT.)

In December 2014, Puri had written to Epstein again: “Please let me know when you are back from your exotic island,” adding that he wanted to stop by with books to “excite an interest in India.”

Around the same period, Epstein was also corresponding with Pritzker about visiting India. “should we do india together, jaitley and modi,” Epstein asked, referring to the newly elected prime minister and his finance minister. Pritzker replied, “You will HATE India. I will be amused by your reaction.”

“Utmost Contempt”

The Modi visit to Israel in 2017 paid immediate dividends for both countries. During Modi’s visit to Israel, the two countries signed a string of agreements ranging from technology and space to energy and agriculture. The two countries also agreed to “focus on joint development of defence products, including transfer of technology from Israel.”

In 2017, India was reported to be the largest buyer of Israeli weapons, having bought $715 million worth of weaponry, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. In the following years, as the BJP consolidated its hold over the country, its relationship with Israel only grew closer through defense collaboration and increasingly close diplomatic alignment. Drop Site previously reported that, in 2019, hours after Modi secured a decisive victory in parliamentary elections that year, Epstein offered to arrange a meeting between the Indian prime minister and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon.

Newly released documents show that the individual that Epstein had been working to arrange this meeting was Ambani, who met Epstein within hours of Modi’s electoral victory. Three days earlier, on May 20, Epstein had already claimed to Bannon that Modi was dispatching Ambani to meet him. “Modi sending someone to see me on thurs,” Epstein wrote.

On May 24, a day after meeting Ambani, Epstein texted Bannon again: “really interesting modi meeting, he won with HUGE mandate.” He added, “his guy said that no one in wash speaks to him however his main enemy is CHINA! and their proxy in the region pakistan. they will host the g20 in 22. . totally buys into your vision.”

The same day, Epstein followed up with Ambani, writing, “i think mr modi might enjoy meeting steve bannon , you all share the china problem.” “Sure,” Ambani replied. Epstein then relayed the message to Bannon: “modi on board.”

Bannon did not respond to Drop Site’s request for comment.

Following the disclosure of the new tranche of files from the Department of Justice on January 30 showing Epstein’s involvement in talks related to Modi’s visit to Israel, the Indian government responded in a public statement. “We have seen reports of an email message from the so-called Epstein files that has a reference to the Prime Minister and his visit to Israel,” said a statement by India’s foreign affairs ministry. “Beyond the fact of the Prime Minister’s official visit to Israel in July 2017, the rest of the allusions in the email are little more than trashy ruminations by a convicted criminal, which deserve to be dismissed with the utmost contempt.”

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The UAE has learned to punch above its weight by mastering the art of buying influence with global elites—particularly in Washington, but also through a deepening strategic partnership with Israel that came into the open with the 2020 Abraham Accords. The story of how a diminutive Gulf state came to sit so close to the center of global power has never been fully told. And Jeffrey Epstein played a part in coaching Emirati elites and building the relationship between Israel and the UAE.

The story below, based on private correspondence from Epstein spanning more than a decade, tells the story of his intimate relationship with Sultan Sulayem, the powerful head of the Dubai Ports World financial empire and an individual closely connected to the Emirati ruling families. The story helps reveal the hidden backstory of the Abraham Accords, which were signed one year after Epstein’s death.

This is the latest in Drop Site’s series on Epstein’s intelligence ties, and there is more to come. More leaked communications to analyze. More security deals to track. But we can only continue if we have the resources and legal protection to defend this work.

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On December 26, 2025, Israel became the first country to recognize the Republic of Somaliland as an independent state, signing a mutual declaration “in the spirit of the Abraham Accords.” The surprise diplomatic announcement landed after months of public advocacy from one of Somaliland’s most important foreign investors: Dubai’s DP World, whose chief publicly argued for recognition at a conference in October—touting hundreds of millions of dollars invested in the company’s port at Berbera.

The Israeli move inflamed the government of Somalia, and drew denunciations from the African Union and Arab League. Formal recognition of Somaliland strengthens the UAE’s logistics hub in Berbera, where Israel is already building up a military base to protect their Red Sea shipping interests from drone and missile attacks by Yemen’s Houthi government. Israel’s efforts to shore up the government in Hargeisa come as the UAE continues its own brash series of interventions in the Horn of Africa, and support for the genocidal Rapid Support Forces in Sudan.

The strategic gambit in Somaliland marks another chapter in the deepening relationship between Tel Aviv and Abu Dhabi. In the last two decades of his life, American financier Jeffrey Epstein acted as an informal diplomatic bridge between Israel and the United Arab Emirates—through his intimate friend Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, the chairman of DP World and a close associate of the ruler of Dubai.

Epstein took a keen interest in DP World, one the world’s largest container terminal operators, which controls the Jebel Ali Free Zone (JAFZA) in Dubai, an essential logistics hub for trade transiting through the Persian Gulf. JAFZA is the U.S. Navy’s most frequently visited foreign port, and the U.S. has more ships in UAE ports than any other port outside the United States.

After bouncing back from his first prison stint for child prostitution in 2009, Epstein bragged about his relationship with “the owner of the deep-water port of Djibouti on the horn of Africa, a smuggler’s paradise.” The Port of Djibouti was DP World’s largest container terminal in Africa at the time. Epstein claimed that his relationship with Sulayem was so close, “he was basically in charge” of the port.

Epstein’s comments about the port sounded like grandiose exaggeration. But his claim of having an intimate friendship with Sulayem is now corroborated by a flood of his emails from the House Oversight Committee, a U.S. federal court case, and the hacked inbox of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

The conversations reveal Epstein’s extraordinarily close bond with Sulayem from at least 2006 through to his death in 2019—the date range of emails available from his leaked Yahoo! account. The email data was vetted and provided to Drop Site News by Distributed Denial of Secrets. Sulayem did not respond to requests for comment about his relationship with Epstein.

Epstein was a trusted friend and advisor to Sulayem, but his network appeared to extend across the stratum of Emirati elites. A journalist who visited Epstein in 2013 noted a photograph displayed in the anteroom of his New York mansion, showing Epstein with Mohammed bin Zayed, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, wearing beachwear and snorkel gear.

In the decades before the Abraham Accords “normalization” in 2020, Israel and the UAE quietly built extensive intelligence and commercial ties. After the Accords, this relationship came fully out of the shadows: direct flights began within months, bilateral trade exceeded $1 billion within one year, and a free-trade agreement took effect the year after that, eliminating most tariffs. Meanwhile, UAE investment funds have invested heavily in Israeli artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and defense firms.

Epstein died one year before the signing of the Accords, and did not live to see the relationship between Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv come into the open. But his behind-the-scenes efforts to foster ties between Israeli and Emirati elites helped lay the groundwork for a strategic partnership that is now reshaping the region.

“The only person I have met who is as crazy as me”

In early 2006, the Emirati elite were humiliated when U.S. politicians blocked logistics conglomerate DP World from acquiring six major U.S. seaports, turning the bid into a major national security scandal. After the company was forced to retreat, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, then-Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, vowed that the nation would never be caught flatfooted in Washington again.

In the aftermath of the scandal, as DP World withdrew from U.S. operations, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem emailed Jeffrey Epstein to arrange a meeting in New York in November 2006. Epstein was eager to meet, pressing Sulayem to “come sooner.” The following year, Sulayem was appointed chairman of DP World, as the company pushed ahead with international expansion and worked to steady its relationship with Washington.

Epstein and Sulayem enjoyed a close personal relationship that transcended business. In November 2007, a few months after his indictment in Florida on sex abuse charges, Epstein mentioned to Sulayem hearing a “funny story” from a woman they both knew. Sulayem replied, “Yes after several attemps (sic) for several months we managed to meet in NY. There is a missunderstanding (sic) she she wanted some BUSINESS! while i only wanted some PUSSYNESS!” Epstein replied, “praise Allah , there are still people like you.”

Earlier in 2007, while offering his advice on an expected IPO for DP World, Epstein reviewed early unpublished English translations forwarded to him by Sulayem of a book written by Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum—the ruler of Dubai—and offered his feedback on the translation to improve the book’s reception abroad.

“His Highness should take great care to make certain his book ‘MY Vision’ , is translated with sensitivity and grace,” Epstein wrote. “The translations that I have read do not do his thoughts justice.” Epstein recommended a new title, “My Country’s POEM,” and offered his literary insight: “I’m sure it will be read by a wide audience of english speaking people, they will not comprehend his sophsitication (sic) if the words are crude, and the sentences awkward.” (Maktoum’s book was published in English several years later without Epstein’s recommended title.)

The two stayed in regular contact, discussing business strategy, coordinating meetings with senior business and political leaders, and arranging vacations at Epstein’s private island, Little St. James. Epstein wrote to Sulayem after one enjoyable excursion together in March 2007, “hope you had fun,, I am glad to have you as my friend,, you are the only person I have met who is as crazy as me.” After Epstein’s death, the Miami Herald discovered that Epstein’s neighboring island, Great St. James, had been purchased in Sulayem’s name in 2016. An aide for Sulayem told the Herald he had not given Epstein’s permission to use his name on the property title. (The island has since been sold to a private investment firm.)

Epstein’s legal troubles related to child sex abuse were compounding in the background of the two friends’ fun and debauchery. In June 2008, after taking a controversial plea deal that gave blanket immunity to Epstein’s “unnamed co-conspirators” and provided for a short, eighteen-month prison bid with work release outside the prison walls, Epstein informed Sulayem that they would have to take a hiatus from their adventures together. “Unfortunately ,, it looks like i am going on a forced vacation for a year,” he wrote dejectedly. “I look forward to getting this behind me, and then spending time with you.”

“I think you should meet”

The correspondence in Epstein’s Yahoo accounts contains several gaps where messages appear to have been deleted in bulk, including a significant missing window from 2008, during his first stint in a Palm Beach prison. But after Epstein’s return to public life in 2010, a second set of emails from the hacked inbox of Ehud Barak show Epstein and Sulayem’s relationship continuing to blossom, as Epstein began a concerted effort to strengthen ties between elites in Israel and the United Arab Emirates.

On several occasions in the mid-2010s, Epstein arranged meetings between Barak and Sulayem—pitching them as an opportunity for Barak to get closer to the ruler of Dubai, and promote Israeli diplomatic and security interests abroad. “I tnk [sic] you should meet,” Epstein wrote to Barak on June 18, 2013. “He is the right hand of maktoum.”

That day, Barak was visiting Russia for a private meeting with Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. (The meeting with Putin was part of a diplomatic backchannel coordinated with Epstein’s help, concerning a Russian-brokered regime change in Syria.) Epstein had a pattern of coordinating his own meetings with Barak’s; according to a travel itinerary emailed to Epstein by his assistant, the financier flew to Dubai and Africa for several days while his friends were together in Russia.

Upon Barak’s return to Israel from St. Petersburg, Epstein tried to facilitate a deal for Sulayem to invest in Israeli logistics infrastructure. He sent an email to Barak on July 4, 2013 with a link to a news article about foreign private investment in Israel’s ports, writing “is this something for sultan?” Barak viewed the proposal as premature: “I think it’s a little bit too early. Probably once (and IF) we’ll start getting deeper into a sincere peace process. Or alternatively after the next revolution on either side of the ME barricades.” But Barak encouraged Epstein to continue developing the relationship: “I think we have to think harder on how to leverage this acquaintance.”

Barak and Sulayem crossed paths again at the St. Petersburg summer conference in June 2015, with Epstein once again handling the meeting details. “I owe him. Last time he paid for my coffee and starters,” Barak wrote. Epstein quipped, “knowing how you eat, you owe him a lot.”

The relationship Epstein brokered continued to flourish. On August 5, 2018, Sulayem emailed Epstein about Carbyne, an Israeli cybersecurity company that Epstein had funded and Barak led as chairman, which enables emergency dispatchers and security services to retrieve precise location data and live video/audio feed from phones. In a message to both Epstein and Barak, Sulayem informed Epstein he was also intending to invest in the company, and he had discussed with Carbyne’s founder, Amir Elichai, about ways to use the technology for “Dubai 911” and personnel security at seaports operated by DP World.

Sulayem forwarded an email from Elichai, a veteran of Israel’s Unit 8200 signals intelligence unit, proposing Sulayem’s participation in Carbyne’s Series B fundraising round that year. After meeting with Epstein and Barak, Peter Thiel had also invested in the round. Epstein introduced Barak and Elichai to one of Thiel’s venture funds while helping Barak develop relations with senior security officials in Mongolia. (Those talks had blossomed into a formal security agreement between Israel and Mongolia in 2017, which included plans for integrating Carbyne into the Mongolian emergency service.)

Drop Site could not confirm whether Carbyne was ultimately deployed in Dubai or DP World-linked port operations. However, later public reporting shows that UAE investors swiftly became involved in Carbyne after the Abraham Accords normalization in 2020. In September 2022, Carbyne announced a $56 million Series C round, and named Emirates-based fund TALC Investment among its participating investors. In 2024, Emirati businessman Mohammed al-Dhaheri also invested in Carbyne, as part of a portfolio tied to Abu Dhabi’s airport and security-infrastructure ecosystem.

Emirati money has continued to pile into Carbyne. This year, the company raised $100 million in July 2025 with participation from TALC Investment and KAAF Investments, the Dubai-based family office of Mishal Hamed Kanoo. Carbyne’s “Investors” page now includes Yousef Al Otaiba, UAE’s ambassador to the United States. Otaiba, who had been tapped by MBZ to rehab the UAE’s lobbying operation in the United States after the original DP World fiasco, had long cultivated ties with former CIA Director David Petraeus, who is also a backer of Carbyne.

“Arms, drugs, and diamonds”

Since the 1980s, the UAE has been a major transit hub for gems, minerals, metals, and contraband from around the world. During that decade, the once-sleepy emirate, known for its fishing and pearl diving industries, transformed into a center for transnational capital—including arms trafficking, diamond smuggling, and money laundering.

Central to this transformation was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), a bank created by seed capital from Abu Dhabi ruler Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al-Nahyan. BCCI earned a reputation as the preferred financial conduit for intelligence agencies and organized crime during the Iran-Contra scandal—a clandestine weapons and cocaine smuggling pipeline to which Epstein and several of his associates were connected.

During the Iran-Contra operation, the CIA’s covert arms deals were financed using accounts at BCCI and its vast network of shell entities, allowing illicit cross-border transactions, like multimillion-dollar weapons and drug shipments, to be shielded from regulators and the public. Planes from Southern Air Transport, a “proprietary” front airline used by the CIA, shipped weapons and cocaine through a complex logistical network linking the United States, Nicaragua, Israel, and Iran.

After the Iran-Contra operation was exposed by journalists, BCCI’s global operations were raided and the bank collapsed in 1991. An investigation by the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, one year later, noted the close relationship between Agha Hasan Abedi, the Pakistani head of the bank, and Sheikh Zayed, the ruler of Abu Dhabi. According to the report, Abedi lavished the sheikh with attention and flattered his ego, while coordinating everything, “from the building of the Sheikh’s palaces in Pakistan, the furnishing of his villas in Morocco and Spain, his medical appointments, to the digging of wells for his homes in the desert.”

BCCI officials later told Senate investigators that Abedi effectively “created the UAE” through his relationship with Sheikh Zayed, even suggesting the BCCI chief had originally conceived the idea of structuring the country as a federation of semi-autonomous monarchies (called “emirates”) that gave it its name. Lawyers for the Al-Nahyan family denied that Sheikh Zayed had any role in BCCI’s illicit operations, and claimed that bank officials had kept their criminal activities hidden from him.

During the BCCI boom, amid rapid global investment in the UAE, Sulayem helped lead the development of Dubai’s shipping and logistics infrastructure. In 1985, he was named chairman of the Jebel Ali Free Zone Association (JAFZA), the industrial enclave bolted to Dubai’s major sea-air port, where firms could import, store, and re-export goods quickly, by boat or by plane, without going through customs.

Because the UAE free zones did not report cargo data to the United Nations, they became popular transit points for illicit goods traveling to and from Africa. Tobacco was smuggled from the Dubai free zone into the Port of Djibouti to be distributed across Africa. Likewise, weapons were frequently routed from the UAE to Djibouti, where fraudulent certificates concealed guns, grenades, and ammunition in transit to Somalia.

The UAE was also a vital logistics hub during Angola’s civil war at the turn of the century. In the 1980s, Southern Air Transport planes flew hundreds of trips in Angola, carrying loads to and from diamond mines, while allegedly air-dropping weapons to the UNITA rebel army, an armed group waging an insurgency against the Angolan government. The cities of Dubai and Sharjah became essential to the logistics of guns and diamonds that fueled the war. In the 1990s, the war’s final decade, Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer known as the “Merchant of Death,” used the free zones as aviation hubs for weapons destined for UNITA soldiers.

The UN Security Council imposed a diamond embargo in 1998, aimed at restricting diamonds sourced from the conflict in Angola. In early 2000, as global scrutiny intensified on “blood diamonds” from war zones, the Angolan government consolidated the legal rough diamond industry into a single entity dominated by Israeli diamond trader Lev Leviev, in a move to cut UNITA out of the market. In February 2002, UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi was assassinated by the Angolan army, who were supported at the time by ex-Mossad director Danny Yatom and other retired senior Israeli military officials.

Three months after Savimbi’s death, Sulayem founded the Dubai Multi Commodities Center (DMCC). Based in DMCC’s Almas Tower, the Dubai Diamond Exchange houses a Kimberley Process office, where rough diamonds are inspected and certified for export. With the creation of a regulated export pipeline, UNITA’s illicit diamond-trading structures were rapidly dismantled, and the Angola war drew to a close. By 2007, Sulayem’s son was named executive chairman of the DMCC, as it became the key bureaucratic chokepoint for routing rough stones and precious metals from Africa to the rest of the world.

According to Rolling Stone journalist Vicky Ward, Epstein later bragged that he had made his fortune from “arms, drugs, and diamonds.” When federal authorities raided Epstein’s New York mansion in July 2019, they discovered forty-eight loose diamond stones, and a large diamond ring in a locked safe. Documents released in December 2025 under the Epstein Files Transparency Act suggest that the diamonds had been evaluated by a diamond grading laboratory between 1998 and 2004. The original source of Epstein’s diamonds is unknown.

“Shake hands With Trump”

As the UAE continued its evolution into a global financial capital in the 2000s, Epstein helped cultivate relationships between the country and investment giant JPMorgan.

In 2009, Epstein connected Sulayem and his friend Jes Staley, then-CEO of JPMorgan Investment Bank, in an attempt to enhance JPMorgan’s status in the Persian Gulf, where royals had long preferred Swiss banks.

In December of that year, Epstein arranged a meeting with Staley and Sulayem to begin discussions about various projects involving JPMorgan, including a proposed Chinese acquisition of DP World. Epstein advised Staley to show up as a “senior statesman” and keep the “nitty gritty” details to lower-level staff. “Sultan is laying the groundwork for you to establish a serious presence,” he advised Staley on December 9. Epstein kept close tabs as the meetings progressed, writing the next day, “having fun?” Staley replied: “Wild. Just saw the crown prince.”

The discussions between the men were not all strictly business. A few months earlier, according to documents from a lawsuit by the U.S. Virgin Islands against JPMorgan regarding Epstein’s criminal activities, Sulayem forwarded Epstein an article about Willis Knuckles, a Liberian politician who was forced from power when a picture emerged of him engaged in illicit sexual relations with two women. Epstein forwarded the email from Sulayem, and an attached graphic image, to Staley.

In parallel, also in late 2009, Yousef Al Otaiba, the UAE ambassador to the United States who later invested in Carbyne, was working closely with notorious Malaysian con man Jho Low. Otaiba had introduced Low to the head of the UAE’s sovereign wealth fund—and, according to a lawsuit filed against Low in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, Low used this relationship to convince Malaysian officials to create their own sovereign wealth fund, 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB). Low was later found to have embezzled billions of dollars from 1MDB; he remains at large and has become the subject of multiple films and books.

In a 2013 email obtained by Drop Site, Otaiba sent instructions to “please transfer the recently received $30 million” from his Swiss bank, Lombard Odier, to a J.P. Morgan Chase bank account in Delaware on July 9th of that year. It’s unclear where the $30 million Otaiba wanted transferred came from, but the Wall Street Journal reported in June that Otaiba and a colleague pocketed at least $66 million from offshore accounts that were connected to Low.

In April 2013, about eight weeks before $30 million showed up in Otaiba’s Swiss account, 1MDB had raised $3 billion in a joint bond sale with an Abu Dhabi partner. Otaiba and his partner, Shaher Awartani, according to Otaiba’s emails, were Low’s main points of contact in the UAE, providing introductions to the financiers needed to make such deals happen. Otaiba did not respond to request for comment about the transfer. Lombard Odier was later implicated in the money laundering scandal. The Luxembourg-based Edmond de Rothschild bank was convicted of money laundering related to the 1MDB affair. (Epstein had close ties to the bank through his friendship with owner Ariane de Rothschild, later leveraging the connection in hopes of financing Israeli cyberweapons development.)

Back in Washington, Otaiba worked closely with then-Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer, providing Arab cover as the two fought against President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Otaiba is “influential with certain parts of the Hill, making them doubt what this administration is doing with regard to Iran,” a senior White House official said at the time, “And it feels less partisan because it’s not Israel but an Arab country.”

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to Congress against the Iran deal in 2015, Dermer invited Otaiba to be his guest in the chamber. Otaiba declined, as the political environment had not yet ripened for such public coordination. Asked about the alliance between the two at the time, a high-level official in the Israeli embassy, who had Netanyahu’s ear, said, “Israel and the Arabs standing together is the ultimate ace in the hole. Because it takes it out of the politics and the ideology. When Israel and the Arab states are standing together, it’s powerful.”

Out of the Closet

The budding strategic partnership between the Emirates and Israel took on an increasingly personal dimension, as Epstein helped Sulayem’s family access world-class Israeli medical care for Sulayem’s daughter, who had become non-verbal after recovering from a major ailment.

From 2014 to 2017, Epstein helped connect Sulayem with therapists and physicians, and Sulayem inquired about seeking treatment from Israeli neurologist Shai Efrati. Sulayem sent multiple emails to Epstein about Efrati, including a BBC Future article on “bringing the dead back to life,” about Efrati’s hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and a link to Efrati’s TEDx talk titled “Reverse Aging.” Sulayem asked, “Do you have contacts for these people and can you check if this help my daughter.”

Emails released by the House Oversight Committee show that access to elite medical services was one of the perks of being friends with Epstein, and he made similar medical arrangements for Steve Bannon in the same time period. “If you take a trip to palm beach. All [blood tests] etc. can be done [by] head of Mayo clinic a good friend,” Epstein wrote to Bannon in August 2018, adding a word of advice: “reminder money medicine law. JEWS only.”

Epstein’s efforts to connect Sulayem to top-flight Israeli medical care appeared to pay off in June 2018, when Sulayem sent a confirmation-of-treatment document listing his wife and children at Assaf Harofeh Medical Center (now Shamir Medical Center), where Efrati’s Sagol Center for Hyperbaric Medicine is based. Weeks later, Sulayem sent Epstein details of a children’s cancer fundraising campaign at an Israeli charity, which he planned to support.

The emails illustrate the extraordinary level of personal trust between the two men that existed through Epstein’s last years. In early 2017, after receiving an invitation from then-campaign advisor to Donald Trump and current U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Tom Barrack, to attend Trump’s first presidential inauguration, Sulayem promptly reached out to Epstein for guidance on how to navigate the offer. “Do you think it will be possible to shake hand (sic) with trump,” Sulayem wrote. Epstein replied, “very many people going. it will be very crowded . but if you can meet some before or after in either wash or ny , it might be worth it . but unlikely.”

In May of the same year, Sulayem ordered 30 Ancestry DNA test kits for Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, to be delivered to Epstein’s mansion and collected later by officials of Emirates Airlines.

The correspondence and friendship between Epstein and Sulayem continued right until Epstein’s second arrest on sex trafficking charges in July 2019, and his death in jail one month later. The relationship between the UAE and Israel, meanwhile, continued to develop rapidly, leading to the signing of the Abraham Accords agreement in September 2020, as well as high-profile business proposals with Sulayem at the forefront.

Two months after the Abraham Accords signing, Sulayem signed a memorandum of understanding for DP World to “assess the prospects of developing Israeli ports and free zones and establishing a maritime service between Eilat in Israel and Jebel Ali in Dubai.” His son Ahmed lauded the move as a productive step toward boosting economic and trade relations between the two countries.

In a November 2022 interview about the Abraham Accords, Epstein’s close friend Ehud Barak told journalist Afshin Rattansi, “I’m glad that the Emirates and Bahrain went ‘out of the closet’ and are ready to formalize relationships with us, and I hope that others will follow. It’s a positive development — of course, it’s not a real peace, it’s not a major breakthrough. We know these people for 25 years, and we have a very intensive relationship with them in many arenas.” (Barak walked out of the interview after Rattansi insinuated Israel’s involvement in covert support for Islamist militant groups.)

The relationship between Israel and the UAE has only deepened in the years since, even as the Israeli genocide in Gaza has provoked global outrage. In December 2025, the UAE signed a $2.3 billion defense deal with Elbit Systems, one of the largest arms sales in Israeli history.

Although Epstein did not live to see these agreements come to fruition, the private channels he helped cultivate between Emirati and Israeli elites helped make them possible. Today, those same networks are converging around support for Somaliland—with Epstein’s old friend Sultan Sulayem as one its most vocal Emirati supporters.

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On December 17, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a $35 billion deal to sell natural gas to Egypt in what officials describe as the largest energy export agreement in Israel’s history. The natural gas will be produced from Leviathan, a massive field west of Haifa. “On this day,” Netanyahu wrote in a statement that day, the third day of Hanukkah, “we’ve brought another jug of oil to the nation of Israel. But this time, the flame will burn not just for eight days, but for decades to come.”

The gas export permit for Egypt came after months of delays and behind-the-scenes disputes between Tel Aviv, Cairo, and Washington. The decision is expected to reinforce the Camp David peace framework between Egypt and Israel—an arrangement strained by the Gaza genocide—while cementing Israel’s emergence as a major natural gas supplier in the eastern Mediterranean and beyond.

The deal has been more than a decade in the making—and one unlikely individual played a small, but essential role in laying its groundwork: Jeffrey Epstein. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak consulted extensively with Epstein on financial deals around Leviathan for years, as Barak searched for international backers for Leviathan’s development.

Epstein’s role in Israel’s gas politics contradicts the image, advanced in a recent New York Times profile, of Epstein as a confidence man who was viewed with skepticism by financial and political elites. In fact, Epstein advised financial giant JPMorgan Chase Bank on several global energy and logistics deals after the 2008 financial crisis: unsealed documents from a recent U.S. Virgin Islands’ lawsuit show Epstein engaged with British MP Peter Mandelson regarding the acquisition of natural gas assets from the Royal Bank of Scotland in 2010, and he arranged a 2011 meeting between JPMorgan executive Jes Staley and Karim Wade, son of then-president of Senegal Abdoulaye Wade, to discuss a large crude oil trade. (Later, Epstein tried to help with developing Senegal’s offshore gas as well.)

Hacked emails from Barak’s inbox reveal that Epstein shared a critical interest with JPMorgan executives in the early 2010s: development of Israel’s offshore gas fields. Private emails from Barak’s Gmail account show that the former Israeli prime minister was courting foreign investors for the Leviathan gas field, while Epstein provided close guidance behind the scenes. The documents were posted by Distributed Denial of Secrets, a non-profit whistleblower and file-sharing website. Drop Site is partnering with Jmail to make the DDOS emails available to the public.

During that period, the development of Israel’s natural gas resources was transforming into an urgent political priority. In February 2011, the same week Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak fell from power, the region was gripped by supply shocks from attacks on the Arab Gas Pipeline by militants in Sinai. The Leviathan field, discovered in December 2010, was estimated to hold roughly half a trillion cubic meters of recoverable reserves, enough to supply the energy demands of Israel and its neighbors for decades, and transform the energy politics of the Eastern Mediterranean.

At this pivotal moment in the early months of Leviathan’s history, Epstein also helped secure a meeting between Netanyahu and senior JPMorgan leadership, a meeting which was referenced in documents from the U.S. Virgin Islands lawsuit and previously reported by the Daily Beast.

The reason for the meeting, and the nature of Epstein’s involvement, was not disclosed in the court documents, which are heavily redacted. But, whether by chance or by design, Netanyahu agreed to the meeting on March 23, 2011—the same day the Knesset Finance Committee voted on a major tax increase on natural gas exports, a key hurdle to beginning commercial development of Leviathan.

Israel’s offshore gas ambitions did not progress smoothly. By 2014, amid a brutal war in Gaza, Israeli energy tycoon Yitzhak Tshuva was facing an antitrust case against his company, Delek Group, which owned the Leviathan field together with Texas-based Noble Energy (since acquired by Chevron). Epstein coached Barak on credibly presenting himself as an expert on energy, as Barak searched for friendly partners in Europe, Russia, and the U.S. to help Tshuva’s group become compliant with Israel’s anti-monopoly law and push the Leviathan project forward.

Netanyahu ultimately forced a compromise, allowing the Delek–Noble consortium to control Leviathan, the large field for foreign exports, while selling off its stake in Tamar, a smaller field for domestic supply.

As the new gas framework was being finalized, Netanyahu’s son, Yair, was captured on tape at a Tel Aviv strip club in late 2015, drunkenly confessing that it was a corrupt bargain. In the recording, Yair told Nir Maimon, son of gas magnate Koby Maimon, who became the controlling interest in Tamar, “My dad made an awesome deal for your dad, bro. He fought, fought in the Knesset for this.” He pressed Maimon to give him some cash to pay a stripper, “Bro, my dad now arranged a $20 billion show for you and you can’t spot me [400 shekels]?”

Although Epstein stopped banking with JPMorgan in 2013, additional leaked emails from Epstein’s Yahoo account suggest elite business leaders in the United Arab Emirates continued to view Epstein as having high-level ties to the bank for years afterward. During a 2015 conference in Kazakhstan, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, head of Dubai Ports World, was angling for a meeting with Israeli economist Jacob Frenkel, then-chairman of JPMorgan’s international business, who had also been involved in planning the 2011 Netanyahu meeting.

After the antitrust dispute was finally resolved in 2016, JPMorgan financed a multi-billion-dollar plan to develop Leviathan. JPMorgan declined to comment for this story. This report on Epstein’s background in the Leviathan saga is part of an ongoing series investigating his connections to the intelligence communities in both Israel and the U.S.

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“Surprisee Suprise”

After Jeffrey Epstein was arrested for the second time on sex trafficking charges in the summer of 2019, JPMorgan initiated an internal probe, “Project Jeep,” to investigate its risk exposure from Epstein’s criminal activities. The project produced a 22-page summary of the bank’s communications with Epstein, including a bulleted list of excerpts from emails between Epstein and Jes Staley, former head of JPMorgan’s investment bank, dating back to 2008. Staley met Epstein in the mid-1990s, at the offices of The Limited, when Epstein was working as chief financial adviser to fashion mogul Leslie Wexner.

When the New York Times Magazine reported that Staley credited Epstein for setting up the meeting with Netanyahu in 2011, the bank’s spokesman told the paper that JPMorgan “neither needed nor sought Epstein’s help for meetings with any government leaders.” The bank’s statement appears to contradict its own analysis in “Project Jeep,” which includes several examples of Epstein introducing senior bank leadership to government leaders in the UK, Africa, and the Persian Gulf. Epstein “appear[ed] to maintain relationships with a number of senior business executives and senior government officials globally,” JPMorgan’s attorneys wrote.

On March 23, 2011, Roy Navon (head of JPMorgan’s Israel office) sent an email to Staley and Jacob Frenkel, writing, “Against all odds, we have been granted a meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu.” Staley forwarded the email to Epstein with a note: “Thanks.” Epstein replied: “surprisee suprise.”

Staley received confirmation of the Netanyahu meeting on the same day as a key vote being held in the Knesset Finance Committee on the “Sheshinski” bill—named for an advisory committee headed by an esteemed Israeli economist—that would increase the Israeli government’s tax on offshore oil and gas profits.

Netanyahu framed the gas tax as an effort to balance the needs of Israeli citizens, who were facing rising energy costs, with the demands of the field’s investors, who were threatening to pull the plug on the project. At the eleventh hour, lawmakers were attempting to add language restricting the government’s ability to raise taxes again in the future—but the objection was dropped after the Finance Minister promised Netanyahu would commit to “tax stability” at the next cabinet meeting.

Major international banks were already positioning around the Leviathan project: Barclays and HSBC—two of JPMorgan’s rivals—were the exclusive financial advisers for the Leviathan investors’ smaller field, Tamar, and had loaned nearly $400 million the previous year.

At around the same time Staley received Navon’s email confirming a meeting with Netanyahu, the minutes for the marathon Sheshinski session show lawmakers were debating whether “financing expenses” would be recognized in calculating the new levy—a decision that would have direct implications for how investors and lenders modeled cash flows from the Leviathan project.

After the successful Sheshinski vote, Netanyahu phoned Finance Committee chair MK Moshe Gafni to congratulate him, calling the law “among the most important for Israel’s economy.” One week later, on March 30, the Sheshinski law was passed, lifting the state’s take on natural gas profits to more than 50 percent.

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“Really a Lucky Guy”

Leviathan sits on one of today’s central geopolitical fault lines: Europe’s dependence on Russian gas. Israeli gas could diversify Europe’s supplies by bringing new, non-Russian gas into European markets. Russia’s state-backed energy group, Gazprom, made a bid for ownership in Leviathan in 2012, but it was rebuffed by the field’s American owners from Noble Energy. Nevertheless, in February 2013, Delek and Noble’s smaller gas field, Tamar, arranged an exclusive deal with Gazprom to offtake Israeli liquefied natural gas and market it in Asia — a deal some participants hoped to parlay into a future role in Leviathan as well.

With U.S.-Russia competition in the background, Epstein emailed Barak on August 1, 2013 to advise him about challenges to American investment in the Leviathan field’s development. Netanyahu’s cabinet had decided to allocate 40 percent of its gas reserves for foreign exports, but a judge threatened to halt the decision, due to a pending lawsuit over whether the cabinet had the authority.

Epstein reacted to the news: “Supreme Court President Asher Grunis said on Thursday that he is inclined to issue an injunction banning natural gas export until the court ruled on the matter. im not sure an amercian [sic] energy co, will do well in israel.” Barak replied to Epstein’s warning, “U R probably right but I would like to check it somehow.”

Epstein and Barak’s private discussions about the future of Leviathan came as Israeli antitrust regulators, faced with the enormous size of the new Leviathan field, were threatening to break up Delek and Noble’s monopoly on Israel’s large gas fields—an outcome the group was eager to get ahead of by enlisting Barak’s help.

On January 16, 2014, according to a confidential memo written by Barak, Yitzhak Tshuva, the owner of Delek Group, visited Barak’s home to ask for help finding a “major player” to acquire rights to Leviathan production for the Israeli domestic energy market, in anticipation of an anti-monopoly order aimed at breaking up Tshuva’s holdings. The regulator’s concern stemmed from past contracts, from before the Leviathan discovery, that had locked in high prices for Israeli consumers. The same day as Tshuva’s visit, Barak sent an urgent email to Epstein, asking to speak on the phone.

The next day, Barak contacted his associates at Renova Group, the conglomerate owned by Russian-Israeli billionaire Viktor Vekselberg. Barak had a lucrative consulting agreement with Renova to source energy, mining, and real estate opportunities. As Drop Site previously reported, Barak and Epstein had leveraged the relationship with Renova in another strategic initiative for Israel in 2013, a diplomatic backchannel to Vladimir Putin during the Syrian civil war.

In a memo sent to Renova on January 17, 2014, Barak explained that Israel’s anti-monopoly regulator planned to break Tshuva’s control over Israel’s gas by forcing the Leviathan consortium to bring in a new partner for domestic energy supply. “The Problem is that Mr.Tshuva is the major share holder in both Yam Thetis AND Tamar (really a lucky guy),” Barak wrote, referring to two other gas fields controlled by Delek and its partners.

The full memo is available here:

Leviathan Proposal

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Barak offered Renova marketing rights to roughly one-eighth of Leviathan’s reserves, but only for domestic sales inside Israel. Renova would also take on the obligation to drill new production wells, build an offshore platform, and lay a dedicated underwater pipeline to shore. The proposal promised long-term contracts to Israel’s largest electric utility, an attractive security for borrowing money.

Renova’s representative, Yakov Tesis, wrote back on January 21, “it makes no sense for Renova to accept the offer,” as Renova would be taking on huge risk to see the project succeed, without any real ownership of the gas reserves. Barak tried to sweeten the deal by showing Renova a memorandum of understanding from Woodside Energy Group, an Australian firm, that valued the field at over $10 billion, but Renova declined again. (Woodside walked away soon after.)

Meanwhile, Barak pursued American private equity interests, in spite of Epstein’s earlier warning. In February of 2014, Barak shopped the Leviathan deal to U.S. private equity giant Texas Pacific Group (TPG), an occasional collaborator with Leon Black’s firm Apollo Global Management. TPG partner Chris Ortega replied that, while the Leviathan discovery was a “transformative” moment in Israel’s energy politics, any solution would be capital-intensive and politically fraught and take too long to see a return on investment.

Facing another setback, Barak continued to lean on Epstein for support. After an event for Israel’s national emergency response service in Palm Beach two weeks later, Barak wrote to Epstein, “Thx for the time and energy you invest in supporting my efforts to bring home more bread. These exchanges ARE highly valuable for me.” At the time, the two men had been pursuing funding for offensive and defensive cybersecurity startups sourced from Israeli intelligence, including Carbyne, an emergency response platform founded by alumni of Israel’s Unit 8200 signals intelligence unit.

Now, Barak reported to Epstein that he was ready to broaden the scope of his efforts, writing, “I’ll try to focus beyond CyberSec on Vik. AZ. Mon. and KAZ.” — referring to opportunities with Vekselberg, Azerbaijan, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan. Epstein replied, “im alwys there for you.”

In Barak’s confidential memo to Renova, he had outlined a three-fold plan for Israel’s gas exports from Leviathan. First, regional exports to the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, and small amounts to Egypt; second, a gas pipeline to Ceyhan, Turkey for the Turkish market and Europe; and, third, a liquefied natural gas plant in Cyprus to export gas to Asia and the rest of the world.

Barak had begun talks with the leadership of SOCAR, Azerbaijan’s state-owned oil company, to partner with the Delek–Noble group in developing Leviathan. Barak hoped to negotiate access for Israeli gas interests into the Trans Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP) and Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), the central and western segments of the Southern Gas Corridor that crossed from Azerbaijan to Italy through Turkey. Avelar, a Swiss-based subsidiary of Renova, operated key gas infrastructure and power utilities in Italy, with alleged links to Italian bureaucrats involved in pipeline politics. Barak pitched SOCAR executives on a deal linking the Leviathan field to the “real power structure” in the TANAP/TAP corridor.

The next month, in March, Barak’s wife sent Epstein their travel itinerary for Rome and Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. Epstein and Barak made plans to speak on the phone before Barak departed.

Epstein, meanwhile, continued to steer Barak’s efforts to establish his reputation as a credible energy dealmaker. As Barak searched for partners for Leviathan, Epstein was not shy about giving harsh criticism to his friend.

When energy tycoon Jack Grynberg asked Barak to find a buyer for his oil & gas assets, Barak wanted to loop Renova into the deal. But, first, he shared Grynberg’s financial statements with Epstein and Apollo CEO Leon Black for due diligence. Barak wrote to Epstein deferentially, “Do not hesitate to correct or direct me along the way. I don’t have enough time to learn from my own mistakes. Shabbat Shalom.”

A few hours later, Epstein sent a frustrated response: “This is total 100 percent BULLSHIT. I told you on the phone before sending or asking anyone about it you should do your own homework, You cannot be seen to be selling garbage ,frauds. bad things and or trouble. this is a total waste of your time.”

Barak scrambled, sending an email to Black’s executive assistant, “I’ve just learnt that the deal I’ve wrote [sic] you about yesterday, namely GADECO/Grynberg Oil Co. Is not on the market any more. I do not have more details but I kindly ask you to delete my emails and do not forward it to Leon or others within Apollo.”

“Stolen Gas”

Barak and Netanyahu, although political rivals, both wanted to see Leviathan succeed. While Barak tried to shop Leviathan access to overseas investors who could absorb Israel’s regulatory chaos, Netanyahu applied a different lever: turning Leviathan into a national security issue that would override anti-monopoly regulations altogether. When Barak failed to protect Tshuva’s gas monopoly by bringing in a compliant foreign partner, Netanyahu used the prime minister’s office as a blunt instrument to restructure Israel’s energy economy.

Shortly after Leviathan’s discovery, in January 2011, Netanyahu warned that offshore gas fields were a “strategic objective that Israel’s enemies will try to undermine” and vowed that “Israel will defend its resources.” By 2014, he had backed a plan for the Israeli government to cover up to half of the security costs for offshore facilities. These were promising signs for money-lenders: in April of 2014, Reuters reported that Tshuva’s company, Delek, was beginning a “road show” to raise up to $2 billion in bonds to fund Leviathan’s development, with underwriting from JPMorgan, Citi, and HSBC. The bond offering closed on May 11.

Just two months later, on July 8, 2014, Israel began “Operation Protective Edge,” a brutal assault on Gaza that killed more than 2,000 Palestinians, the majority of whom were civilians. At the start of the war, IDF officials were reportedly concerned Hamas might use long-range rockets to threaten offshore gas rigs. A blog post for The Guardian argued that control over gas, particularly the Gaza Marine field, was a key driver of Israeli policy. The author, British journalist Nafeez Ahmed, was fired the next day. (According to Ahmed, a Guardian editor justified the decision stating, “Palestine is not an environment story.”)

In his post, Ahmed noted that Israel’s Minister of Defense at the time, Moshe Ya’alon, had argued in a 2007 policy paper that allowing Gaza to develop its own gas would “bankroll terror” by making Hamas rich from gas royalties. Alternatively, if the Palestinian Authority was given control of the gas and Hamas was excluded from gas profits, Ya’alon claimed, Hamas would retaliate by sabotaging Israel and PA gas infrastructure. Ya’alon wrote, “It is clear that without an overall military operation to uproot Hamas control of Gaza, no drilling work can take place without the consent of the radical Islamic movement.”

Gaza’s gas politics impacted Israel’s diplomatic relations with its Arab neighbors; Jordan, like Israel, suffered from energy shortages due to attacks on Egyptian pipelines after Mubarak’s fall. In autumn 2014, Jordanian officials announced plans to import gas from both Gaza Marine and Israel’s Leviathan field.

The Leviathan announcement immediately sparked domestic backlash and street demonstrations against the purchase of “stolen gas.” In early January 2015, Jordanian media reported Amman put the Leviathan talks on hold after Israel’s antitrust regulator moved against the Delek–Noble consortium. Jordanian officials announced they would proceed with plans to buy gas from Gaza.

Amid the fighting in Gaza and protests in Amman, Leviathan was halted. The Leviathan owners, and their financiers, would not sink billions into development without regulatory certainty from the Israeli government. Delek executives threatened international arbitration, and Noble warned it would not invest more until the antitrust dispute was resolved.

Barak pressed forward, looking to Asia for answers. In April of 2015, he exchanged emails about an “energy play” with Joshua Hantman, a former advisor to Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. They discussed a Cyprus-based company called Cynergy Group, which was looking to buy up natural gas assets in the Eastern Mediterranean, including a stake in Leviathan. Hantman reported to Barak confidentially that he had garnered interest from South Korea’s Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister, Choi Kyoung-hwan, as well as members of the president’s office. Hantman wrote, “That is the world’s largest strategic buyer of gas - ready to join us.” Barak wrote back, “Stay in touch and let’s see whether a way to collaborate will emerge.”

Leviathan was by now becoming an explosive political conflict in Israel. That spring, Israel’s antitrust commissioner resigned, warning that Netanyahu’s government was prioritizing monopolists and foreign buyers at the expense of Israeli consumers, who would face higher gas prices if the Delek–Noble monopoly was not broken. Economy Minister Aryeh Deri also resigned, under pressure from Netanyahu to exempt the gas framework from antitrust scrutiny. Netanyahu, still the prime minister, stepped in to take over Deri’s economy portfolio.

Then, in September, the Russian military officially entered the Syrian civil war, launching airstrikes across Syria in support of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. With extraordinary leverage, Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly offered Netanyahu a deal: Give Gazprom a stake in Leviathan, and, in exchange, Russia would protect the gas fields from Hezbollah and Hamas. Now, the debate in Israel had a new dimension: accepting Gazprom would resolve the deadlock, guarantee the gas field’s security, and instantly turn Israel into an indispensable energy exporter—at the cost of alienating Israel’s allies in the U.S. and Europe.

Netanyahu found an opportunity, in one blow, to appease Israel’s neighbors, its NATO allies, and the gas oligarchs at home. In December 2015, after months of Knesset clashes, Netanyahu used an obscure section of the country’s antitrust law to authorize the economy minister (now Netanyahu himself) to permit a gas monopoly on national security grounds. Netanyahu invoked relations with Jordan, Turkey, and Europe to justify the move, signaling to banks and allies that Leviathan was politically protected.

“Fake News”

After Netanyahu’s move to break the Leviathan deadlock, Amman quietly resumed planning to import gas from Leviathan. In September 2016, Jordan signed a $10 billion deal to import gas from the field, spurring a resumption of protests under the slogan “The Enemy’s Gas is Occupation.” Jordanian officials sealed the Leviathan contract under “state secrets” rules and waited out the protests.

Soon after, in November of 2016, the Delek–Noble consortium announced it had secured a $1.75 billion loan from JPMorgan and HSBC for the first phase of Leviathan’s development. The framework that made JPMorgan financing possible transformed Israel’s gas sector into a protected duopoly. Under Netanyahu’s gas framework, Tshuva and his partners retained control of Leviathan, which would become Israel’s main gas export supply, but were forced to sell their stake in the smaller Tamar field—leaving Isramco (linked to Kobi Maimon) as the controlling owner of Israel’s main domestic gas supply.

Egypt followed a similar pattern to Jordan: quiet diplomacy, private contracts, and plausible deniability. In 2018, a Cairo-based buyer signed long-term “private-sector” purchase agreements for Tamar and Leviathan gas, and the Leviathan partners bought into the dormant Mubarak-era pipeline that once sent Egyptian gas to Israel, so it could be reversed for exports.

The first gas from Leviathan finally began flowing in December 2019. A small amount of this early gas flowed to Egypt through the reversed pipeline.

Earlier that year, on June 26, 2019, Barak announced his intention to challenge Netanyahu in an election slated for that September. Two days later, emails from Epstein’s estate show Epstein messaging Steve Bannon about the election and “dealing with Ehud in Israel.” Bannon praised the decision and asked Epstein whether he could announce himself as Barak’s strategic advisor.

Epstein did not live to see the vote—he died in a Manhattan prison cell on August 10, 2019. Despite his death, Epstein’s ghost continues to haunt Israeli politics. In November of 2025, Netanyahu posted, without comment, an article from Jacobin magazine containing Drop Site’s reporting on Epstein’s ties to Barak and Israeli intelligence—implicitly leveraging Epstein’s connection to Barak to detract from his longstanding rival.

Netanyahu now openly invokes Epstein to wound Barak, using Epstein’s crimes to deflect attention from his own corruption cases and his responsibility for the genocide in Gaza. “The media channels are not news channels, they are fake channels,” he said in March, “They invite Ehud Barak again and again… with great respect and dignity, but, strangely, he is not asked a single question on [Epstein].”

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To the paper’s credit, their journalists have put into the record some details that took an impressive effort to track down. For instance, the paper reported about Epstein’s business associates in the early 1980s:

Epstein had been spending extravagantly, and despite his lofty compensation at Bear Stearns and his work for [Douglas] Leese, he found himself strapped, even occasionally bouncing rent checks. Back in New York, he joined forces with John Stanley Pottinger, a lawyer who had recently left a senior post in the Justice Department. Epstein, Pottinger and Pottinger’s brother rented a penthouse office in the Hotel St. Moritz on Central Park South. (The broker, Joanna Cutler, told us that Epstein initially stiffed her on the commission.)

The Times deserves credit, we suppose, for digging up that nugget from his one-time broker—but had the paper decided to look up rather than look down, they may have noticed something a bit more revelatory in their own reporting.

Stanley Pottinger, as it happens, was a notable figure in the scandal that became known as Iran-Contra, in which the CIA used Israel as a middleman to move off-the-books weapons to Iran. In the early 1980s, under the CIA’s supervision, Pottinger advised an Iranian banker on shipping embargoed arms to Iran using fraudulent paperwork and overseas “dummy companies”—in the very same period that Pottinger and Epstein worked together selling “tax-avoidance” strategies from a penthouse by Central Park. Pottinger’s system eventually gave rise to a network of covert intermediaries shipping arms around the world; the CIA’s profits became a slush fund used to illegally bankroll the insurgent Contra army, who waged a war against Nicaragua’s leftist government while simultaneously trafficking cocaine to the United States.

The other figure from Epstein’s past, Douglas Leese, meanwhile, is described by The Times as “a defense contractor with extensive connections in the arms industry and the British government.” What he did with those connections and where he trafficked those arms is left unexplored by the paper—a look at Bermuda financial records and Leese’s own lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Miami, suggests he was working with the U.S. government and linked to a Chinese arms manufacturer. The Times also failed to note that Epstein and Leese had a mutual associate in Adnan Khashoggi, the notorious money launderer and weapons trafficker—who was also a central player in the Iran-Contra affair.

The Times did find that Epstein was “a relentless scammer” who “abused expense accounts, engineered inside deals and demonstrated a remarkable knack for separating seemingly sophisticated investors and businessmen from their money.” The contrast between what The Times found noteworthy about his relationship with his penthousemate Pottinger—he initially stiffed the broker!—and what they failed to notice is stark. In order to acquit Epstein of any connections to intelligence agencies, the paper of record instead crafted Epstein into an antisemitic caricature of historic proportions. We put this take to The Times, and were told by spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha, “We report on facts that we are able to confirm, not supposition.”

Of course, it could be an extraordinary coincidence that Epstein shared a penthouse with an Iran-Contra lawyer, worked for an Iran-Contra arms dealer, and then, as we report below, moved the Iran-Contra planes to Ohio for use by billionaire retail mogul Leslie Wexner. It may simply be a coincidence that Ehud Barak, one of Epstein’s closest friends, was the head of Israel’s military intelligence during the planning for Iran-Contra, and he supervised the CIA’s first delivery. But it might also be something The Times should look a bit closer at, if they’re so inclined.

Until then, Drop Site’s reporting will have to do, and we can’t do it without readers. If you haven’t yet upgraded your subscription, please consider doing so today. And remember that contributions to Drop Site–which you can make here–are fully tax deductible to the extent permitted by law.

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Drop Site News is collaborating with Distributed Denial of Secrets and the creators of JMail to make new emails publicly available and searchable. Epstein’s Yahoo! email cache was vetted and published by DDOS. You can find much of the inbox here. We’re adding new emails every week.

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How the Iran-Contra Planes Landed at Les Wexner’s Base

Jeffrey Epstein helped Leslie Wexner repurpose the CIA’s Iran-Contra planes from arms smuggling to shipping lingerie.

When a Southern Air Transport plane was shot down over Nicaragua in October 1986, the world got a rare window into U.S. government covert activity. Southern Air Transport was founded as a small cargo airline in 1947, the same year the Office of Strategic Services evolved into the Central Intelligence Agency, as the U.S. pivoted to a Cold War posture. The agency owned the airline outright from 1960 until 1973, at which point it was sold to the same man, Stanley G. Williams, who had run the company since the Kennedy administration.

The downing of the plane, and the testimony of its lone survivor, Eugene Hasenfus, pulled a string that eventually unraveled the scandal known as Iran-Contra. Using Southern Air Transport planes, the CIA was shipping weapons to Iran, using Israel as a middleman, and deploying the profits to arm the Contras against the leftist Nicaraguan government.

None of it was legal, and Southern Air Transport was getting too hot. In need of a new mission, the company relocated its headquarters from Miami, Florida, to Columbus, Ohio. By 1995, the company had rebranded by flying imported shipments of clothing from China. But for three years in Columbus, the airline continued to be dogged by rumors it had been—or was still—involved in smuggling.

According to veteran Columbus journalist Bob Fitrakis, who provided his historical reporting on the topic to Drop Site and The American Conservative, investigators in both the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office and Ohio’s Office of Inspector General were looking into Southern Air Transport amid rising public scrutiny of the Iran-Contra affair—and sources in both offices identified Jeffrey Epstein as having a pivotal role in relocating the planes.

At the time, Epstein was a relatively obscure financier managing the money and real estate investments of Ohio-based fashion and retail mogul Leslie Wexner. Under his stewardship of the Wexner empire, the planes that previously carried arms to Iran and Nicaragua were repurposed to deliver clothes to feed Wexner’s network of retail chains, including Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch.

Southern Air Transport abruptly declared bankruptcy on October 1, 1998—exactly one week before the CIA Inspector General released its official findings on the Iran-Contra affair linking the airline to allegations of Contra cocaine trafficking from Nicaragua. Under pressure from the governor’s office, Ohio officials dropped their inquiries, meaning that Epstein’s role never became public.

How did Epstein end up moving the former Contra planes to Columbus? Answering that question—or at least getting close—requires a closer look at the men behind the scandal that defined the second half of the Reagan administration, and gave the public the clearest look inside the U.S. government’s clandestine global operations in a generation or more. Like a spy service Forrest Gump, Jeffrey Epstein can be found there every leg of the way.

“Finding Hidden Money”

In 1981, Jeffrey Epstein resigned from Bear Stearns amid suspicions of insider trading, and began traveling regularly to London, where he grew close with the family of Douglas Leese, a British businessman with a long career in auto and aerospace manufacturing. Epstein became Douglas Leese’s protégé and fast friends with his sons Nicholas and Julian, according to a podcast interview later given by the latter. After World War II, Douglas Leese had been managing director of his father’s company, Cam Gears, a steering-gear manufacturer that supplied Jaguar, Ford, Nissan, and other global auto brands. In 1965, the company was sold to TRW, a U.S. aerospace conglomerate known for satellites and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

1979 was a revolutionary year in the Persian Gulf—Saddam Hussein became president of Iraq and swiftly executed and imprisoned his political rivals, while, across Iraq’s eastern border, the people of Iran overthrew the CIA-backed Shah. During Iran’s revolution, university students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took Americans as hostages, leading the U.S. to impose harsh economic and military sanctions.

The CIA planned to fuel a war between Iran and Iraq, to ensure neither Saddam Hussein nor Ayatollah Khomeini could gain control of the Strait of Hormuz, while keeping the Soviet navy out as protector of the Gulf. But the hostage crisis had added a wrinkle to their plans. After the 1979 revolution, the U.S. was prohibited from selling weapons to Iran, as any overt weapons deals would violate an official arms embargo and undermine President Ronald Reagan’s public position that America did not bargain with terrorists.

Instead, in a strategy aimed at reducing Soviet influence with Iran, the CIA tacitly supported weapons sales from China, and Beijing began shipping armaments to both Iran and Iraq in 1980. In spring 1983, Iran signed a $1.3 billion arms deal with China. These weapons were supplied in part by Chinese manufacturing conglomerate Norinco using British Hong Kong as the transshipment point.

Douglas Leese at the time owned a Bermuda holding company, Lorad. Soon after the Iran arms deal was signed, a new Lorad entity, a shell company called Norinco Lorad, was formed in Bermuda; a Hong Kong trading company called Lorad Far East followed a few months later.

Leese’s exact role in China’s weapons sales has never been made public. But in 1995, a British MP—George Galloway, in fact—alleged Leese had clandestinely funded Middle East arms deals using a Bermuda bank. That year, the owners of British retail chain Littlewoods raised alarm bells about Leese’s arms trafficking ties, after the company received a proposal for Norinco to sell washing machines to Littlewoods and weapons to Lorad.

Two years later, in a U.S. civil complaint against the Littlewoods owners, Leese claimed his work concerned “highly-sensitive” projects “believed to be classified by the Department of Defense and other agencies of the United States government.”

Meanwhile, the CIA prepared its own covert pipeline to ship American-made weapons to Iran. In the fall of 1980, the FBI placed Cyrus Hashemi, an Iranian banker, under extensive electronic surveillance, recording tens of thousands of conversations over a five-month span. The tapes revealed that John Stanley Pottinger, Hashemi’s attorney, was helping the Iranians circumvent the arms embargo using phony invoices and overseas shell companies. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee later found that the CIA was involved in planning the arms deals and had met with Hashemi in Pottinger’s office.

Pottinger, it turns out, was working together with Epstein in New York. Pottinger had previously served as an Assistant Attorney General under President Richard Nixon—now, he joined up with another “crook,” and the two men rented a penthouse office together on Central Park South, according to the New York Times. The Times reported that Pottinger and Epstein were pitching “tax avoidance” strategies for wealthy clients, and noted that the business partnership was “short-lived.” In 1984, Pottinger was identified in a federal indictment against Hashemi for illegal arms exports, and Hashemi fled to England.

Pottinger escaped prosecution after the FBI’s incriminating tapes of his conversations mysteriously disappeared; he went on to make a fortune on real estate deals in the 1980s, and became a New York Times’ bestselling novelist. His Times obit from last year reports that his final spy thriller remains unpublished. Hashemi died in 1986 after being infected with “a rare and virulent form of leukemia” that was diagnosed only two days before he died. (His death was later alleged to be foul play.)

After Hashemi’s indictment, another player stepped in to broker access to Iran for the Americans: Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, uncle of slain Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. In July 1985, Hashemi, Khashoggi, and Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres had met secretly in Hamburg, West Germany, to hatch a plot: With CIA director William Casey’s blessing, the U.S. would ship the weapons to Israel, Israel would sell its own weapons to Iran, and Washington would commit to replenishing Israel’s stockpile later.

Epstein obtained an Austrian passport with a false name and an address in Saudi Arabia at some time in the 1980s. After his arrest in 2019, U.S. authorities discovered it in a safe in his New York mansion. At a bail request hearing, Epstein’s attorneys claimed it came from a “friend,” intended to conceal his Jewish identity in case of a potential kidnapping while traveling. Seven Americans, including a CIA officer, were kidnapped in Lebanon between 1984 and 1985, and discussions emerged around an “arms-for-hostages” trade with Iran.

After Peres agreed to facilitate Khashoggi’s shipments to Iran, the logistics were handled by Israeli military intelligence. Epstein’s close friend and confidante, Ehud Barak, was the head of Israel’s military intelligence directorate (AMAN) during the planning phases, from April 1983 to September 1985—he left the position one month after the first arms shipment was completed. To this day, Barak maintains that he was introduced to Epstein by Shimon Peres at a “public event” in 2003, after he left government service. Barak has also falsely claimed that he barely knew Epstein. Whether they truly met before 2003 is unknown.

The Israeli arms pipeline depended on a fragile trust. The Israelis wanted cash up front, but the Iranians would only pay after the weapons were delivered. Acting as the “bank,” using accounts at the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), Khashoggi advanced tens of millions of dollars in credit so that weapons could move even when the parties did not trust each other. Ghaith Pharaon, a Stanford-educated businessman close to the Saudi royal family, acquired regional banks and distressed insurance companies in the U.S., to loop BCCI into U.S. financial markets.

The CIA shielded BCCI from federal investigators, to conceal the money trail to their illicit arms deals. BCCI operated as a Cayman Islands entity structured as a charitable trust, funneling capital into employee-benefit funds and philanthropic foundations in the UK and South Asia, which in turn owned a plethora of shell companies. The shells served as parking lots for BCCI assets, and conduits for transactions that needed to be hidden from the balance sheets of the bank’s local branches around the world. In practice, BCCI founder Agha Hasan Abedi and his small circle of deputies controlled the entire flow of money with almost no outside oversight.

With each successful delivery, an American hostage was freed in Lebanon, and the intermediaries earned handsome commissions. Once arms profits had been cycled through BCCI’s network, real estate was a method of transforming suspicious cash flows into legitimate sales and rental income, while obscuring the “true” ownership behind layers of shells. BCCI was heavily involved in real estate lending and property purchases through shells and nominees and Khashoggi himself had massive real estate holdings worldwide, including hotels, ranches, mansions, and commercial properties.

Decades before Epstein became a household name, former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe wrote in his 1992 memoir that Barak feared Peres or the Americans would discover the slush fund bank accounts where the arms profits were hidden, and take the money for themselves. Ben-Menashe claimed that Barak arranged for media mogul Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, to launder the Iran weapons profits through his companies’ accounts, and hide the money in Soviet banks where they could not be touched by the Americans.

In 1991, four years after Iran-Contra, Maxwell disappeared from his 180-foot yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, while it cruised off the Canary Islands. Hours later, Spanish authorities recovered his body from the Atlantic. Maxwell’s media empire was collapsing under a mountain of debt, and he was secretly siphoning hundreds of millions of pounds sterling from his companies’ pension funds. When investigators began untangling the books after his death, they found nearly half a billion pounds missing, and possibly more.

An email obtained from Epstein’s Yahoo! inbox, dated October 15, 2005, suggests Ghislaine Maxwell was trying to purchase information about her father’s missing fortune—from a CIA operative. Maxwell emailed Epstein excitedly while visiting Bhutan for the wedding of Princess Chimi Yangzom Wangchuck. She wrote Epstein, “The wedding was amazing…Also was w/a CIA operative who sd that he ‘worked’ w/Dad! I was so shocked. He sd he could tell, all find all, and reveal all, (for a price)!!”

Epstein often made vague boasts about being a “financial bounty hunter” who tracked down “hidden” money. In 1987, while Robert Maxwell was allegedly “hiding” money from arms deals, Epstein bragged to a journalist about “finding” money for Adnan Khashoggi in such detail, the journalist thought Epstein “might be in the business of hiding as well of finding it.”

“Logistics Man”

After the Southern Air Transport plane carrying Hasenfus was shot down over Nicaragua on October 5, 1986, the Iran-Contra scheme began to unravel. On October 9, Hasenfus confessed in a conference before the world’s press that he was working with the CIA to ferry weapons to the Contras, secretly backing their war against Nicaragua’s leftist government. U.S. officials quickly denied Hasenfus’s confession, saying he was on a “private” mission. (Hasenfus passed away in late November of this year)

Southern Air Transport, a CIA front, was not only shipping weapons to the Contras—the planes were also carrying weapons to Israel, to fuel the brutal war between Iran and Iraq. Just weeks after Hasenfus’ press conference, SAT flew its last Iran-Contra mission, from Tel Aviv to Tehran, carrying 500 U.S.-made anti-tank missiles.

One month later, a Lebanese newspaper broke the story that the Iran arms sales were part of a secret deal in exchange for the release of Americans taken hostage in Lebanon. One of the hostages, CIA officer William F. Buckley, had been killed in captivity. U.S. officials confirmed the reports, spurring an investigation by the Justice Department. Within weeks, the U.S. Attorney General was forced to step in front of news cameras and acknowledge that profits from the Iran arms sales were secretly fueling the Contras. Soon afterwards, newspapers reported that the same SAT planes had been smuggling cocaine from Nicaragua and Colombia into the United States.

The story became a major political scandal in the U.S. In December 1986, reports emerged that Khashoggi had received tens of millions of dollars for brokering the weapons shipments. Within one month, in January 1987, Khashoggi’s U.S. holding company filed for bankruptcy; BCCI’s front man, Ghaith Pharaon, sold off his bank assets shortly thereafter. SAT, which was now flagged in DEA databases for suspected cocaine trafficking, pivoted to highly publicized famine relief missions in war-torn “hot spots” in Africa with the United Nations and the World Food Programme.

Within months, Epstein appeared to be absorbing lessons from the era’s covert financial engineering. In 1987, as the Iran-Contra operation was unraveling, he emerged as a key financial advisor to retail and fashion kingpin Leslie Wexner. Epstein became an officer of several Wexner shell companies, while later leading the same family office that ran Wexner’s philanthropic foundation—an architecture that, like BCCI’s, placed a charitable vehicle at the apex of a vast web of companies. That same year, Wexner established The New Albany Company, a massive real estate development project to build a new city in a rural area outside Columbus, Ohio.

Later in 1987, Epstein reprised a basic BCCI tactic: use a regulator-friendly narrative to gain control of a financial institution, then pillage its assets. Just as BCCI used Ghaith Pharaon as a nominee to acquire banks and insurance companies, Epstein helped Steven Hoffenberg persuade Illinois regulators to approve the purchase of two ailing insurers, by promising a $3 million capital injection from Towers Financial, Hoffenberg’s debt collection agency. The money never arrived, of course—after closing the sale, they used the insurers’ bonds as collateral to finance hostile takeovers of two struggling airline companies, Pan Am and Emery Worldwide.

Towers Financial became a slush fund that subsidized Epstein’s lavish lifestyle in New York. After it collapsed in 1993, Hoffenberg pleaded guilty to defrauding investors out of nearly half a billion dollars in what the SEC called the largest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history at the time. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison; he later described Epstein as his “co‑conspirator,” though Epstein was never charged.

The stolen money, however, vanished. In 2002, Hoffenberg alleged that Epstein hid $100 million in offshore accounts while working with prosecutors to scapegoat Hoffenberg and other Towers Financial executives. “Epstein certainly did secretly cooperate against Hoffenberg and gave at least three interviews to prosecutors,” Vicky Ward reported for Rolling Stone, adding that “had the case gone to trial, a source with knowledge says it would have likely turned out far worse for Epstein than for Hoffenberg.”

In that 2002 interview, Hoffenberg also helped to piece together part of Epstein’s past; he told Ward he believed it was, in fact, Douglas Leese who had introduced Epstein to Adnan Khashoggi. When Ward asked Epstein to respond to Hoffenberg’s claims, Epstein said he didn’t know Leese and furiously rejected any association with the Towers Financial fraud.

Epstein threatened to sue Ward if her story insinuated his culpability in the Ponzi scheme—and, when Vanity Fair attempted to revive the story in 2007, private messages in his Yahoo inbox show that Epstein drafted letters to Ward’s editor, Graydon Carter, railing against her piece and threatening again to sue for defamation. In drafts sent to himself by email, he wrote to Carter, “I am writing to you to give you the opportunity , while ti (sic) still exists to correct a wrong.” (Epstein may have been counseled against sending those emails; Carter told Drop Site he never received them.)

Epstein lied to Ward about his ties to the Leese family: he knew both of Douglas Leese’s two sons very well. The elder brother, Nicholas, wrote a bawdy letter in Epstein’s fiftieth “birthday book” containing anecdotes of escapades – including description of a sexual assault framed as hijinx gone wrong – in Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, and Tramp nightclub in London.

The relationship between Epstein and the Leeses remained intimate over the years. According to the emails obtained by Drop Site, Epstein was the godfather of Leese’s granddaughter, and both brothers affectionately addressed Epstein in their emails as “my boy.” In 2007, at Epstein’s request, Julian Leese sent a collection of family photos, writing, “Always thinking of you and the old days.”

Julian Leese briefly worked as an intern at Towers Financial after graduating from University of Salford, and he told journalist Tom Pattinson that his father had supported Towers Financial by introducing Hoffenberg to people in his circle. In his final recorded interview, Julian claimed his father sold radar equipment, not weapons, and admitted that Epstein occasionally advised his father and was present at some of his business meetings. In the same interview, he claimed Epstein and his father had a falling out around the early 80s, over Epstein’s abuse of his father’s expense account—a claim that raises more questions than it answers. (Julian passed away in 2024.)

“Corruption All Over the City and State”

While the Towers Financial ponzi scheme was taking off, Epstein had risen to the status of chief financial adviser to Wexner’s business empire, built around his clothing company The Limited, headquartered in Ohio. Epstein also became the financial engineer and trusted fixer behind Wexner’s massive real estate development project in New Albany. By 1991, The New York Times described Epstein as “president of Wexner Investment Company.” Epstein’s sudden rise to influence baffled Wexner’s old advisers, who were pushed out of Wexner’s organization one by one.

Although Epstein is sometimes described as a con artist who beguiled a naive billionaire—the New York Times called Wexner “his most significant mark”—the series of events leading up to Epstein’s takeover of Wexner’s fortune paint a very different picture.

In 1991, the Columbus Police Department was investigating the mob-style assassination of Arthur Shapiro, an attorney whose firm worked for The Limited. In March 1985, Shapiro was due to testify before a grand jury in a major tax evasion case—but the day before his testimony, he was shot twice in the head, at point-blank range, in his car outside a Columbus cemetery.

Berry Kessler, an accountant, was considered the prime suspect in Shapiro’s murder; he was later convicted for two unrelated murder-for-hire plots, and sentenced to death. Another Columbus man sharing his last name, John “Jack” Kessler, was Wexner’s partner in The New Albany Company, where Epstein became co-president.

On June 6, 1991, a Columbus police analyst submitted an internal memo that suggested Wexner’s business was connected to organized crime. The memo identified several Wexner corporate entities formed by the slain lawyer’s office, some of which appeared to be linked to Wexner’s New Albany property development. Epstein’s name later appeared as an officer of some of these same companies when they were dissolved a few years later.

In July 1991, one month after the “Shapiro murder” memo was submitted to the police department’s Intelligence Bureau commander, Wexner signed a document giving Epstein power of attorney to act on his behalf in all affairs, effectively handing Epstein personal control of his vast fortune, and the right to sign property transactions on Wexner’s behalf. The Columbus Police Chief ordered the memo destroyed. Ohio’s former Inspector General David Sturtz leaked a surviving copy of the “Shapiro murder” memo to journalist Bob Fitrakis, who published it in July 1998.

Meanwhile, Miami International Airport made plans to demolish the hangar where Southern Air Transport was suspected of smuggling cocaine, a former U.S. Army depot that had been used by the CIA for more than twenty years. With Epstein acting as Wexner’s “logistics man” in Ohio, in 1996 SAT finished relocating its world headquarters to Columbus to deliver products from factories in Hong Kong and southern China directly to Wexner’s network of Limited Brands’ stores.

The Ohio Department of Development and Rickenbacker Port Authority assembled a generous incentive package to lure SAT out of Miami, according to FOIA records obtained by Fitrakis.

The Rickenbacker Air National Guard Base was already a well-established military and intelligence hub when Wexner’s company planned to turn it into a consumer logistics port. The nearby Defense Logistics Agency, 15 miles away, was in charge of the global supply chain for weapons systems. A decade earlier, CIA technicians had quietly met Louisiana smuggler Barry Seal at the same base and installed hidden cameras inside his plane’s fuselage, before sending him back to Nicaragua on a DEA sting.

The state offered a $6 million low-interest loan and a half-million dollar development grant, while the Department of Transportation agreed to pay ten million dollars for infrastructure upgrades. The port authority freed up $30 million in revenue bonds to be used by the project, and the county made the facilities 100-percent tax exempt for fifteen years.

“While I was writing investigative articles for Columbus Alive...I found myself inundated with people leaking stories about corruption all over the city and state,” Fitrakis told Drop Site and The American Conservative. Sturtz, the former inspector general who leaked the Shapiro murder file, spoke to the journalist specifically about Epstein. “After that, he verbally gave me a lot of information about Wexner and Epstein’s ties to organized crime and the intelligence community,” Fitrakis said. “That’s how I learned about Southern Air Transport.”

Fitrakis contacted former Franklin County Sheriff Earl Smith to find out what he knew about Epstein. Smith’s office, he learned, had an ongoing investigation into drug smuggling at Rickenbacker, related to the CIA’s planes. “He knew Epstein was the point person in soliciting Southern Air Transport to come to Ohio,” Fitrakis said. Sturtz was dismissed from the Inspector General position in 1994, which he told Fitrakis he believed was connected to his inquiry into Wexner and Southern Air Transport. His successor also resigned after two months on the job.

In Columbus, the airline did not shed its drug smuggling pedigree. In 1996, customs agents discovered cocaine hidden aboard a SAT plane, according to a report in a Mobile, Alabama paper. SAT’s public information officer told the newspaper the plane was delivering “fresh flowers” from a large flower exporter in Colombia. SAT asserted it was “not tied to the CIA and would like to know itself where the cocaine came from.” By the time the Alabama incident hit newswires, the plane in question had been handed over to an insurance company due to “mercury contamination.”

The Columbus experiment ended one year later, as more of SAT’s sordid smuggling history was dragged into public view. In June 1998, after the airline had already collected millions of dollars in state subsidies, SAT decided to “park and sell off” its fleet of Lockheed Hercules planes. On October 1, 1998, SAT abruptly filed for bankruptcy—exactly one week before the CIA Inspector General released its official findings on Contra cocaine trafficking allegations.

“A Photo With Some African Warlords”

When Ghislaine Maxwell was interviewed by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in July, she was asked whether Epstein ever had any contact with intelligence agencies. Maxwell gave a vague response about Epstein’s business of “finding money” in Africa in the 1980s: “I think he may have suggested that there was some people who helped him,” Maxwell said. “He showed me a photograph that he had with some African warlords or something that he told me…That’s the only actual active memory I have of something nefarious -- not nefarious... but covert, I suppose would be the word.”

In parallel to Iran-Contra, from 1984 to 1986, Southern Air Transport flew hundreds of trips inside Angola, with some runs connecting the capital city Luanda to Dobbins Air Force Base in Marietta, Georgia. Angola’s northeastern diamond-mining towns, cut off by unsafe roads and railways, were largely accessible only by air. SAT obtained a lucrative contract from Angola’s state-owned mining company to carry equipment to the mining towns, and carry diamonds out. While making trips to the mines, the SAT planes were suspected of air-dropping weapons to the rebel group UNITA with South Africa’s support.

South Africa profited handsomely from the Angolan civil war. Johannesburg became a booming re-export hub for illicit Angolan diamonds, as UNITA-controlled “blood diamonds” were under UN embargo and could not be exported legally from Angola. By the late 1990s, UNITA earned billions of dollars by smuggling diamonds to Johannesburg, where they re-exported with false certificates-of-origin and shipped onward to London and Belgium. A UN report estimated that over $1 million worth of diamonds were smuggled out of Angola per day in 2001.

Angola was the mirror-image of Iran-Contra. As in Iran, Saudi money was the “bank” for Angola’s war. As in Nicaragua, the diamonds (like the drugs) were fueled by an off-the-books arms trade. An associate of Saudi ruler King Fahd testified before Congress that Saudi aid to UNITA was part of an informal deal with Washington in exchange for access to mobile radar surveillance systems. He recounted being told that tens of millions of dollars had been funneled through Morocco to train UNITA fighters, and claimed Prince Bandar had planned to sell oil to South Africa. The Saudi government has denied these claims.

In Columbus, SAT’s collapse was written off as the result of “financial troubles.” But before declaring bankruptcy in 1998, half of its fleet of Lockheed Hercules planes were sold to Transafrik, an Angolan airline based in the United Arab Emirates. SAT resumed its missions supporting diamond mining operations, as Angola’s civil war raged on. Decades later, Epstein bragged to journalists about making his fortune out of “arms, drugs, and diamonds.”

Epstein, for his part, only came to the attention of the international press after agreeing to ferry former President Bill Clinton around Africa in 2002 on his private jet, later dubbed the Lolita Express. Speaking to Hoffenberg in prison that year, journalist Vicky Ward asked why a man who had thrived in the shadows would risk so much with such a public spectacle. “He can’t help himself. He broke his own rule,” Hoffenberg said. “He always said he knew the only way he could get away with everything he did was to stay under the radar, but now he’s gone and blown it.”

Epstein’s claim to have barely known Hoffenberg, and Wexner’s attempts to personally distance himself from Epstein, are undermined by the fact that both men knew Epstein’s cardinal rule – a rule he was apparently preternaturally unable to follow.

On June 30, 2008, the Florida state court accepted Epstein’s guilty plea to state charges of soliciting a minor for prostitution, part of a secret plea deal with federal prosecutors that allowed him to serve an 18-month jail sentence on a work-release program that allowed him to leave the jail and roam the world outside.

Four days before, Leslie Wexner sent his friend an email: “Abigail told me the result…all I can say is I feel sorry. You violated your own number 1 rule… Always be careful.” Epstein’s reply to Wexner was contrite: “no excuse.”

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Six months after Jeffrey Epstein’s death in August 2019, the philanthropic foundation founded by billionaire fashion tycoon Leslie Wexner published an “independent review” of Epstein’s involvement in the organization, in response to concerns raised by donors and alumni of foundation-funded programs. The Wexner Foundation is one of the largest contributors to pro-Israel causes in the U.S.

The review claimed that Wexner Foundation staff had “no contact” with Epstein after his resignation as a trustee in September 2007, and, before that, he had “played no role in the management or administration of the Foundation’s operations,” had “no meaningful role in the Foundation’s budget [or] finances,” and “did not make decisions regarding the use of Foundation’s funds.” None of that is true.

Hundreds of leaked emails from Epstein’s Yahoo inbox, spanning from 2005 to 2008, contradict the Wexner Foundation report. Inside the Wexners’ family financial office in Ohio, staff treated Epstein as de facto chief financial officer, where major decisions about taxes, lines of credit, eight-figure funds transfers, and politically sensitive grants were routed through Epstein’s lawyer, and required Epstein’s approval.

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The new email cache was vetted and published by Distributed Denial of Secrets, and contains many of the same forensic signatures as the dataset reported by Bloomberg earlier this year. Officials from the Wexner Foundation, the law office that conducted the review, and Epstein’s former legal counsel did not respond to requests for comment.

The emails show that Darren Indyke, who served as both Epstein’s personal lawyer and attorney for the foundation, was the “middleman” in such communications, cloaking Epstein’s foundation-related activities with attorney-client privilege. Indyke is also the executor of Epstein’s estate, which has been accused of “obstructionism” for withholding “privileged” emails from civil lawsuits and congressional subpoenas. The Wexner Foundation’s independent reviewers did not have access to the emails published here, because, according to the 2020 report, “the Foundation’s archive of emails does not go back to Epstein’s time as a Trustee.”

On paper, the Wexner family’s philanthropic foundation and their retail empire, once home to Victoria’s Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Bath & Body Works, were legally separate and largely had their own staff. But, in practice, as is typical of such foundations, one small family office sat over both the family’s fortune and philanthropy. Internal emails between Epstein, Indyke, and Wexner’s staff show Epstein as the effective boss of the family office, and the real gatekeeper of the Wexners’ money.

In email after email, Wexner financial controller Peg Ugland wrote to Indyke with account balances for a web of Wexner entities—charitable trusts, private investment vehicles, and personal trading accounts—with a recurring refrain: “Please ask Jeffrey if I can transfer.”

Epstein was the final authority on which Wexner entity should cover which expense, how to move assets between entities, and whether to approve large funds transfers for the Wexners’ accounts. Epstein continued to advise on IRS filings and multi-million dollar transactions until at least December 2007—two months after he had supposedly resigned as trustee.

Under Epstein’s financial stewardship, and after his departure, the Wexner Foundation bankrolled pro-Israel charities like college Hillels and free “birthright” trips. These programs had a common mission of teaching young, diasporic Jews to define their religious identity by their connection to the modern state of Israel founded in 1948.

For decades, the foundation also funded the operations of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, including the Wexner Israel Fellowship, which sent Israeli government officials to Harvard on full scholarships. The tens of millions of dollars donated by the Foundation made Epstein himself a powerful player at Harvard. The relationship between Harvard and the Wexner family ultimately ended not because of Epstein’s 2008 conviction, but after a falling out over the university’s refusal, under pressure, to sufficiently crack down on protests in 2023 against Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip.

“Always Be Careful”

Four days before Jeffrey Epstein submitted his guilty plea to state charges of soliciting a minor for prostitution, on June 26, 2008, Leslie Wexner sent his friend an email: “Abigail told me the result…all I can say is I feel sorry. You violated your own number 1 rule… Always be careful.” Epstein’s reply to Wexner was contrite: “no excuse.”

Epstein was introduced to Wexner in 1986 by Robert Meister, whose firm provided insurance for Wexner’s clothing company, The Limited. Epstein quickly became Wexner’s most trusted investment adviser and, by 1991, Wexner had signed over to Epstein complete power of attorney over his estate and all his affairs. That year, the New York Times described Epstein as “president of Wexner Investment Company” and nobody has disputed that he had major influence there. Yet Wexner’s foundation has maintained his influence did not extend to the iconic pro-Israel philanthropy organization.

The same year Wexner gave Epstein personal control of his vast fortune, Wexner formed the “Study Group,” a group of ultra-wealthy Jewish entrepreneurs who developed philanthropic initiatives to fund support for Israel. Meister’s wife, Wendy, also introduced Leslie to Abigail Koppel, a young Israeli-American attorney, twenty-five years his junior. Epstein was named trustee of Wexner’s philanthropic foundation, and he supervised the drafting of Leslie and Abigail’s prenuptial agreement before they were married in January 1993.

The marriage cemented a deeper tie between Wexner and the state of Israel; he was marrying into Israel’s founding generation. Abigail’s father, Yehuda Koppel, was the commander of a special-operations unit of Haganah, the paramilitary army that created the state of Israel in 1948. Haganah, forming the core of the Israel Defense Forces, carried out the ethnic cleansing of Palestine later termed the Nakba.

Wexner’s new father-in-law had also played a foundational role in the birth of Israel’s military intelligence. According to the diary of Israel’s founding father, David Ben-Gurion, Koppel served in SHAI, Haganah’s intelligence arm and the predecessor to Israel’s central military intelligence directorate, AMAN. During the Nakba, his unit conducted “sabotage” operations involving vehicle hijackings and explosives. In the 1950s, soon after the Nakba, Koppel moved to New York to open an office for Israeli state-owned airline El Al, which became a front for Mossad and Shin Bet agents, according to the CIA and South African intelligence.

Since 1983, the Wexner Foundation has contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to Israel-linked charitable causes, quietly underwriting flagship pro-Israel institutions in America. Although Leslie is the family’s familiar public face, Epstein’s emails suggest Abigail became far more active than Leslie in the family’s finances after their marriage. As both the trustee of The Wexner Foundation and director of the Wexner Family Charitable Fund, Abigail sits on both sides of the philanthropic funding pipeline: how money enters the family fund, and how much of that money flows to charitable causes.

Epstein and Abigail sometimes emailed directly, but most critical financial issues raised by Wexner’s family office were routed to Epstein through Indyke, who was both Epstein’s personal lawyer, and the secretary of The Wexner Foundation, according to an SEC filing.

In one example from Epstein’s emails, in August 2006, the family office controller Peg Ugland emailed Epstein’s lawyer about a grant to the Jewish Media Fund, which creates and distributes Jewish-heritage media for American schools and television, including a Sesame Street spin-off dedicated to Israel called Shalom Sesame.

The Abba Eban grant, named for a famed Israeli diplomat who also served on the Jewish Media Fund’s advisory council, was pushed as “the highest priority” in an email from Larry Moses, the foundation’s president. “I need to know if it is ok and if it should be paid from LHW Charitable or WF,” Ugland wrote. Indyke, acting in his role as middleman, forwarded Ugland’s request to Epstein, who made the call that payment from the foundation would be appropriate as long as the recipient was a U.S.-based charity.

As was often the case, Epstein’s reply was filled with typos and not simple to follow; this time making it impossible for his lawyer to decipher. Indyke apologetically responded by asking for clarification, telling Epstein he had already “confirmed that it is a US public charity.” Epstein’s reply upped the ante on the typos, but was finally clear: “pay for foundctiona.”

(That communication style is something of a power move, familiar to subordinates used to dealing with bosses who take little care to write with grammar or clarity, requiring the underling to divine the meaning of the message.)

“Ask Jeffrey”

Epstein was often the final say inside the family office control room, where emails suggest there was a blurred line between personal, corporate, and philanthropic money. Epstein was frequently asked to approve funds transfers totally unrelated to philanthropy, including an April 2006 request from Ugland to move $1 million from a Wexner Personal Holdings Corp account at Bear Stearns to a JPMorgan account with the same name. Drop Site found several similar funds transfer requests between 2005 and 2008, totaling tens of millions dollars, with Ugland often explicitly requesting Indyke to “ask Jeffrey” for approval.

In a March 2007 email, Wexner attorney Charles Miller submitted an invoice to Indyke with a note “about 90% of my time was LSJ [Epstein’s private island holding company], 10% Wexners.” Epstein instructed Indyke to split the bill in such a way that was not remotely in line with the declared work performed, charging the Wexners double for a fraction of the work: “200 k , from wexner, 100k from lsj.”

The Wexner family office used layers of entities that kept real ownership of shell entities obscured from outsiders and regulators. In one 2007 email, Wexner’s lawyer Gideon Kaufman reported that the U.S. Forest Service had offered to reimburse the owner of a Wexner ranch property after a ditch collapse, but the agency needed to see the full ownership chain before cutting a check. An entity called Ranch Lake IV was on the deed, but behind it sat two shell entities and then Wexner himself.

Preserving the anonymity of a shell entity’s “ultimate beneficial owner” was a priority and a specialty of Epstein’s. Gideon wrote to Indyke, “At the end of the day we will get about 14 thousand dollars from [the Forest Service] and I wonder if it’s worth all the brain damage and revealing all these documents to them for that amount of money Please advise thanks.” Indyke forwarded the query to Epstein. “At this point do we still have anonymity in the ownership of Ranch Lake IV?” he asked.

While calling the shots for the Wexner financial machine, Epstein also sought to conceal his own role from financial disclosures. In 2006, Indyke sent Epstein a draft amendment to Limited Brands’ Schedule 13D, an SEC filing that discloses who controls big blocks of stock in a public company. Indyke needed Epstein’s sign-off, writing “I just wanted to make sure the disclosures…are acceptable to you before we file.” Epstein wrote back, “do i have to be named personaly. if ftc is trustee.” FTC is shorthand for Epstein’s Financial Trust Company.

The next year, on September 21, 2007, two weeks after Epstein had supposedly resigned as trustee, Indyke sent another 13D draft for Epstein’s comment and approval. In the 2007 filing, Epstein and FTC were no longer named, replaced by Indyke himself as trustee.

Despite the labyrinthine structure of shell entities, the staff of the Wexner family office were accustomed to treating Epstein as the true fiduciary—causing confusion as Epstein was slowly disentangled from the family’s finances. In a November 2007 email, Ugland asked Indyke to clarify who was the trustee for two of the family’s charitable trusts. Indyke replied that the trusts remained under “FTC.” Ugland was confused whether Epstein was still part of FTC, writing, “Is FTC now you, or still JEE?” Indyke forwarded the message to Epstein with a note, “another example of ASW withdrawing,” a reference to Abigail.

Although the Foundation’s independent reviewer claimed that its staff had “no contact” with Epstein after his resignation in September 2007, and he had “no meaningful role” before then, the emails suggest Abigail Wexner remained at least partly dependent on Epstein for months after that date. On November 23, 2007, at the beginning of the financial crisis, Epstein directly advised Abigail on executing a purchase of one million shares of Limited Brand stock, valued at almost $20 million.

Wexner urgently needed Epstein’s advice—because the market was crashing, and liquidity was thin on the day after Thanksgiving, most of the shares had to be bought outside normal trading hours to avoid moving the stock price. Wexner planned to use a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan, which provides a legal safe harbor for “inside traders” who do not possess secret information about the business.

Epstein sent a detailed plan for executing the stock purchase on Black Friday, and told Abigail, “Darren said frankly he thought you didn’t want me involved.” She replied the next day, “I spoke to Darren and told him not to worry about it- in the end it is not a problem.”

Two weeks later, on December 7, Leslie Wexner found himself in a similar situation requiring Epstein’s counsel. Wexner had been asked during a board meeting at The Ohio State University whether he had any holdings in Mellon Bank, but he couldn’t answer the question; Indyke emailed Epstein for clarification. BNY Mellon is currently facing a civil lawsuit alleging the bank knowingly provided financial services in support of Epstein’s sex trafficking operation.

“Great Opportunities”

As a looming public relations crisis over Epstein’s legal troubles crept closer, Abigail Wexner executed a plan to claw back family funds trapped in C.O.U.Q. Foundation, a large Epstein-controlled entity which had been used to fund Jewish organizations, university research, youth programs, and hospitals.

On December 26, 2007, the Wexners’ attorneys prepared IRS forms to create a new private foundation for Leslie Wexner, called YLK Charitable Fund. Indyke emailed Epstein a draft copy of the IRS submission, asking for Epstein’s approval on a disclosure document that showed Epstein’s C.O.U.Q. trust would transfer more than 25% of its assets into YLK. The new fund had only two officers, Peg Ugland and Abigail Wexner; it was named “YLK” after the initials of Abigail’s father, Yehuda L. Koppel, of Israel’s founding generation.

On January 1, 2008, six days after Indyke emailed the IRS paperwork to Epstein, two Epstein-controlled entities dumped almost their entire balance sheets into Abigail’s new fund. Epstein’s C.O.U.Q. Foundation transferred about $12 million in securities, and his Financial Trust Company contributed Apple stock worth roughly $34 million.

YLK barely functioned as an independent charity. After receiving the $46 million from Epstein, it made two large grants totalling $6.5 million to the Columbus Foundation, a non-profit community fund in Ohio, and a handful of small donations before its portfolio was hammered by the 2008-10 market crash. The foundation took in no new contributions in 2009, then dissolved at the end of 2010, shipping its remaining assets (about $35 million) back into the Wexner Family Charitable Fund.

Leslie Wexner’s 2019 letter claimed Epstein had “misappropriated vast sums of money,” and the C.O.U.Q.-YLK donation was a repayment of those funds. The 2020 independent review reaffirmed this assertion, stating that the donation was a “partial recovery” of misappropriated assets. Publicly claiming to have been wronged by Epstein put the Wexners on the side of the victims, rather than the perpetrator. However, the donation in question was similar in character to many other transactions he had carried out for the Wexners over the years.

The Wexners remained collegial with Epstein, even as they were supposedly recovering “misappropriated” assets: one month before the money flowed back from C.O.U.Q. into YLK, Abigail was working hand-in-glove with Epstein on multimillion-dollar stock trades; a few months after the money was returned, Leslie sent the note scolding Epstein for not being “careful.”

Epstein entered his guilty plea in June 2008—but emails suggest he remained quietly connected to Wexner business, attempting to cultivate a relationship between Wexner and Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, the CEO of Emirati conglomerate Dubai Ports. Less than a month after submitting his guilty plea, he wrote to Sulayem on July 18, “where are you my friend.. .. great opportunities,, did anything ever come of your wexner meeting?”

“Pure Zionistic Motivations”

After Epstein’s public departure, the Wexner Foundation remained a major force in pro-Israel philanthropy, funneling millions of dollars into programs aimed at boosting Israel’s influence in the U.S. Between 2003 and 2018, Inside Philanthropy tallied $128.4 million donated by the Wexners to Israeli and Jewish charitable causes, making them the third largest donor to such causes in the U.S. during that period.

Wexner resigned as CEO of Limited Brands in 2020, one year after Epstein’s death. That year, right-wing politicians in Israel campaigned against the Wexner Foundation and its fellowship programs for Israeli officials, claiming the foundation had a “radical left political affiliation.” After Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir decided to ban government employees from participating in the Wexner Foundation’s leadership programs, another Likud lawmaker praised the decision, writing that the foundation was part of Israel’s “shadow regime” and “a long arm of the deep state.”

The accusations tied into a domestic political brawl in Israel, aimed at undermining former prime minister Ehud Barak—a close associate of Epstein, then attempting to reenter political life and challenge current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Barak’s political opponents in Israel have long raised questions about his financial ties to the foundation.

Details about that scandal are also documented in the emails obtained by Drop Site. In late 2005, Larry Moses (president of the foundation) emailed Indyke about an agreement with Barak to write two books about Middle East politics and his experience as head of state, with a fee of $100,000 per chapter to be paid to Barak by the foundation. Indyke needed Epstein to instruct on how to execute the payments, writing, “Please advise what you want Peg to tell Larry Moses.”

The single manuscript that Barak completed for the foundation eventually earned Barak $2.3 million in consulting fees. The Wexner Foundation has stated Barak’s payment was for two reports (one of which was never completed) and related advisory work.

The enormous payment became a talking point for Barak’s right-wing political opponents for years, who cast aspersions on Barak and Wexner’s relationship with Epstein. In response to attacks from Israeli lawmakers aligned with Netanyahu, the Wexner Foundation defended itself as an institution firmly committed to the interests of the state of Israel, decrying what it called an attack on, “a foundation that from its inception has acted from pure Zionistic motivations.”

Epstein continues to serve as a political football in Israel. Netanyahu shared a Jacobin article on November 21 that included a summary of Drop Site’s coverage on Epstein’s ties to Barak and Israeli intelligence. Barak has dismissed claims of Epstein’s involvement in Israeli politics as “extremely antisemitic.”

On August 8, 2019, after Epstein’s arrest but two days before he died in jail, Wexner wrote a letter to the foundation community portraying himself as another victim of Epstein’s actions, claiming that he was “deceived,” and that his trust in Epstein was “grossly misplaced.”

“I deeply regret having ever crossed his path,” Wexner wrote.

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In March 2006, the Harvard Kennedy School published a working paper, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” by influential political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. The paper, which ran in the London Review of Books and became the basis for a book published the following year, was an unflinching analysis of the impact of pro-Israel advocacy and lobbying groups on the U.S. political system, and the role of organizations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in shaping U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East.

Mearsheimer and Walt described a loose coalition of philanthropists, think tanks, advocacy groups, and Christian Zionist organizations that routinely pulled U.S. policy toward the Middle East away from America’s national interest, as the U.S. was being drawn into a military quagmire in Iraq. “Other special interest groups have managed to skew U.S. foreign policy in directions they favored,” Walt and Mearsheimer wrote, “but no lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essentially identical.”

Even before the Kennedy School posted the paper online, the project had already spooked editors at The Atlantic, who originally commissioned the essay in the early 2000s. In an interview with Tucker Carlson earlier this year, Mearsheimer revealed that the editor of The Atlantic offered them a “$10,000 kill fee” if the publication didn’t print the article. Mearsheimer said, “That’s the fastest $10,000 we ever made.”

The paper was written by two highly esteemed scholars of international relations; Walt had been serving since 2002 as Academic Dean at Harvard’s Kennedy School, as prestigious an appointment as exists in the field, and Mearsheimer taught at the University of Chicago. But the backlash against it was swift, intense, and unusually public in the world of academia. A wave of news articles described the authors as antisemites, while the Anti-Defamation League weighed in to denounce what they called an “anti-Jewish screed.” The pressure became so intense that the Kennedy School removed its logo from the paper and added a disclaimer distancing the institution from its arguments.

Unknown at the time, Jeffrey Epstein gave feedback on talking points to discredit Mearsheimer and Walt, and used his extensive social network to circulate allegations of anti-semitism against the two scholars. Details of Epstein’s role in the backlash to the “Israel Lobby” paper come from a trove of emails obtained by the non-profit whistleblower organization Distributed Denial of Secrets and provided to Drop Site News.

The emails from Epstein’s Yahoo! account have been covered in part by Bloomberg, but his correspondence over Walt and Mearsheimer’s work has not previously been reported. Bloomberg conducted cryptographic verification on the email cache that they said “strongly authenticated a portion of the emails; corroborated sources of important enclosures; and found no meaningful evidence of fakery,” though evidence suggested that some emails were deleted. The source for the DDoS cache stated that they were not the source for Bloomberg—a statement DDoS said is supported by slight variations in the scope of the email tranche.

The cache shows that, during the first week of April 2006, Epstein received multiple early drafts of an attack piece by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz titled “Debunking the Newest - and Oldest - Jewish Conspiracy.” In it, Dershowitz, who also served as Epstein’s defense attorney in his criminal matters, accused Mearsheimer and Walt of recycling “discredited trash” from neo-Nazi and Islamist websites, accusing them of authoring a modern counterpart to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Epstein responded to Dershowitz’s email, “terrific…congragulations (sic).”

A few hours later, Epstein received another message from Dershowitz’s email address, signed off by an assistant. The assistant asked Epstein to help circulate copies of the attack piece, writing, “Jeffrey, were you going to distribute this for Alan?? If I should forward this to someone in your office, pls let me know.” Epstein replied in the affirmative: “yes I’ve started.”

Despite holding no formal role, Epstein was a powerful figure at Harvard. He had spent years cultivating relationships at the university, donating more than $9 million between 1998 and 2008, and positioning himself as a fixer and patron for high-profile academics, including Dershowitz and economist Larry Summers—who was the president of Harvard at the time.

At the time, Epstein served as trustee and president of the family financial office of billionaire fashion tycoon Leslie Wexner, which donated nearly $20 million to the Kennedy School between 2000 and 2006. The Harvard Gazette described The Wexner Foundation’s contributions as “underwriting core operating expenses” for the school. The foundation also funded a visiting scholar program, the Wexner Israel Fellowship Program, which allowed ten Israeli government officials to attend the Kennedy School each year for a one-year master’s degree.

The behind-the-scenes campaign of subversion ironically affirmed the key tenets of the Walt and Mearsheimer paper. In other words, wealthy and well-connected men were deploying their financial resources and connections in order to undercut a paper claiming that wealthy and well-connected men were using their wealth and financial resources for the benefit of the state of Israel and against the interests of the United States.

The consequences of a coordinated smear campaign by elite members of media and academia were dire for Mearsheimer and Walt. The Chicago Council on Global Affairs canceled a scheduled talk by the pair in 2007, after pressure from pro-Israel supporters. Other institutions that previously welcomed them to speak now insisted that any appearance be “balanced” by an opposing speaker who was sympathetic to Israel. The backlash narrowed their platform in mainstream media, academia, and think tanks for years while making public appearances more difficult.

In recent years, Mearsheimer has gained a new audience thanks to the profusion of independent media and YouTube channels where he has appeared as a commentator. “I’m not surprised to see these emails, because Dershowitz and Epstein were close and both have a passionate attachment to Israel,” Mearsheimer told Drop Site. Walt declined to comment.

“An injustice is about to be done”

During the very same week Epstein and Dershowitz were coordinating an effort to ruin the academic careers of Walt and Mearsheimer, the convicted sex offender was also discussing with his lawyer strategies for destroying the credibility of a young woman who had accused Epstein of sexual abuse. That case has since garnered significant international attention. It is disconnected from the response to Walt and Mearsheimer, but, in hindsight, it is startling to see that the men working behind the scenes to undercut their paper were simultaneously engaged in a campaign to discredit a child accuser of a man who would become globally notorious in years to come.

In 2005, Epstein came to the attention of the Palm Beach Police Department after a 16-year-old girl and her family reported a sexual assault two years earlier at his mansion on El Brillo Way. The investigation eventually identified dozens of alleged victims over the following year, and Epstein’s case was taken to the state’s attorney Barry Krischer.

On April 10, 2006, five days after Dershowitz published his response to “The Israel Lobby” working paper, Epstein sent Dershowitz, who was also his lawyer, some information obtained by a private investigator to consider sharing it with the state’s attorney to undermine testimony against him. The letter from Epstein accused his underage accuser of consuming drugs, shoplifting, and engaging in other sexual activity, arguing that the dirt he had obtained undermined her character and credibility. He also attacked the personal history of her family members.

The financier and power broker also expressed disappointment that he was still facing legal scrutiny for his actions at all. Epstein remonstrated the prosecutor, stating, “I hope you recognize that I am quite surprised by the recent turn of events, after you advised me almost two months ago that I was to just ‘chill’ ,advice I followed and then was subsequently advised that you were now satisfied that the case was to ‘fizzle.’” Epstein proposed asking Krischer for an opportunity to come to Florida for a “face to face all-hands meeting” where he could present “exculpatory evidence” prior to any Grand Jury.

Epstein ultimately pleaded guilty to reduced state charges in 2008 in a wildly controversial plea deal that immunized unnamed co-conspirators, and saw him evade federal prosecution. He served only 13 months in the Palm Beach County jail, with six days per week on 12-hour work release outside the jail.

His personal relationship with Summers went on seemingly unimpeded by his conviction and imprisonment for child sex abuse. Recent disclosures from the House Oversight Committee show that Epstein and Summers continued to communicate up until the time of his death in 2019, including messages the previous year in which Summers sought his romantic advice regarding an individual who he said viewed him as a mentor.

The attacks against Walt and Mearsheimer, meanwhile, continued after they expanded their working paper into a book in 2007. Jeffrey Goldberg, writing in The New Republic, denounced them for antisemitism, compared their perspective to that of Osama bin Laden, and warned that its logic revived “an ancient idea spread by anti-Jewish ideologues: that Jews, operating in the shadows, manipulate gentile leaders.” Invoking a notorious antisemitic radio host from the 1930s to describe the scholars, Goldberg went on to proclaim that their book was “the most sustained attack… against the political enfranchisement of American Jews since the era of Father Coughlin.”

These attacks had a suitably chilling effect on the academy for years, where discussions about the influence of pro-Israel pressure groups remains taboo despite the importance of the issue to U.S. foreign policy. In 2016, roughly a decade after The Atlantic backed out of publishing Walt and Mearsheimer’s article in the face of public pressure, Goldberg was named its editor in chief.

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Today’s story, a glance at Epstein’s relationship with the Indian elite, draws on documents recently released by the House Oversight Committee as well as a new tranche of some 18,000 Epstein emails obtained by Drop Site News this week. That correspondence comes from the Yahoo inbox of Epstein; some of the messages were reported on by Bloomberg News, but Bloomberg did not make the full cache public.

The Yahoo emails were provided to Drop Site by the nonprofit whistleblower site Distributed Denial of Secrets, which received a copy. DDOS also obtained the correspondence of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. You can support their work here. (We didn’t tell them we’d post their donation link, it’ll be a nice surprise if people come through for them.)

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—Ryan Grim

Jeffrey Epstein offered to set up a meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon in mid-2019, less than two months before his arrest, according to a review of documents released by the U.S. House Oversight Committee. The documents, which reveal previously unknown details about the depth of Epstein’s relationships with high-profile Indian political and business figures in the years prior to his death, also show Epstein corresponding about the India-Israel relationship with a powerful Indian billionaire who had entered into a joint venture with a state-owned Israeli defense firm.

Epstein had close ties with powerful figures in the Israeli intelligence establishment, and his high-level interactions on India also came at a time when the bilateral relationship between New Delhi and Tel Aviv was beginning to accelerate.

Following official state visits by Modi and Netanyahu in 2017 and 2018, in which the two signed cooperation agreements on cybersecurity, aviation, and energy, in 2019, India signed major arms deals with Tel Aviv to acquire advanced anti-tank and surface-to-air missiles. Today, India, which did not have formal ties with Israel until 1992, is the single largest customer for Israeli arms, with purchases unaffected by the genocide in the Gaza Strip.

Several years before this relationship began to publicly blossom, disclosures of his private calendars show that Epstein had several appointments with Hardeep Singh Puri, a senior leader of Modi’s ruling BJP party. The appointments took place long after the financier had been convicted of sexual offenses, and while he was engaged in other global dealmaking aimed at furthering the interests of the Israeli government and private firms tied to Israel intelligence.

The recipient of Epstein’s messages in 2019 pushing to set up a meeting with Modi is redacted in the House Oversight Committee releases of his communications. But the details match closely with the contemporaneous activities and locations of Steve Bannon. The unidentified person discussing Modi told Epstein that he was in Kazakhstan; Bannon was attending a conference there at the same time. The sender mentions working with “Kobach” and “Kolfage,” and that he is the chairman of an unnamed organization. At the time, Bannon was the chairman of the advisory board of We Build The Wall, a nonprofit that fundraised for a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, a project he worked on with Kris Kobach and Brian Kolfage. (The project ended with Bannon pleading guilty to fraud.)

Though Bannon had been fired from the White House in 2017, he remained influential in MAGA world, offering advice to Trump on political strategy. Bannon did not respond to a request for comment.

On May 23, 2019, the day Modi won a commanding parliamentary majority and secured re-election as prime minister, Bannon messaged Epstein saying, “I’m doing a one hour show for India on Modi while here-- bringing American Hindu guys with us.” Epstein responded, “his focus wants to be stopping china.” The following week Bannon did an interview with the Indian news outlet WION. In the interview, Bannon discussed Modi extensively—and the importance of a U.S.-India relationship in the context of the U.S.’s economic war with China.

Seeking to facilitate a meeting, Epstein pressed further. “I can set,” Epstein wrote in a text. “you should meet with modi.” Bannon replied, “please.” Epstein followed by asking, “when can you do it?”

At the time, Bannon had been one of the most vocal anti-China voices in conservative politics, calling China “the greatest existential danger” to the U.S. in an interview that May and demanding an escalated trade war to counter Beijing’s global economic ambitions.

The day after his message pushing for contact with Modi, Epstein sent another message to Bannon encouraging him to overcome any obstacles to the meeting. Epstein emphasized what he saw as the strategic importance of the relationship, while highlighting Bannon’s well-known economic concerns about China: “my guy said to tell you that you are missing a great opportunity, look at your underwear. it either says made in china or made in india. . how is it possible that you guys don’t understand shared goals.”

The disclosures by House Oversight do not show any significant intervening correspondence between Bannon and Epstein on the subject. Hours later, Epstein wrote again, stating, “modi on board.”

Modi’s office did not respond to Drop Site’s requests for comment.

Epstein died in a jail cell in Manhattan that August. In September, Modi attended a joint rally with Trump in Houston. At the event in front of a packed stadium, Modi had said, “Abki baar, Trump sarkar,”—This time, it’ll be Trump’s government—a play on his own election slogan “Abki baar, Modi sarkar.” The remark, which came as the 2020 presidential election cycle was heating up, was instantly controversial and criticized as a foreign leader’s attempt to intervene in the U.S. election.

“It Is Part of Israel Strategy”

In addition to Epstein’s contacts with Bannon about Modi, the financier also had other interactions with powerful figures in Indian politics and business in the years prior to his death.

In March 2017, an individual whose name was redacted by the House and whose identity could not be determined asked Epstein, “The white hse announced yday pm modis trip to dc. Can u tell me whn and the dates ? Thanks.” Epstein responded that Modi’s visit to Washington, which was to be his first meeting with Trump, was “a part of Israel strategy” and added, “should know more after i return from paris.” Epstein later continued, “...what i am told is that discussions re Israel strategy were dominating modi dates. however lots and lots of internal conflicts taking priority.”

The following day, an email account linked to Anil Ambani—an Indian business tycoon and brother of Asia’s richest individual Mukesh Ambani—corresponded directly with Epstein. On March 30, 2017, Ambani emailed Epstein an article from Business Standard titled “After trump phone call, govt weighs if Modi should visit US early.” He added: “Dear Jeffrey, Info. BR, Anil.” Epstein replied, “India Israel Key -not for email.”

Epstein’s communications regarding India-Israel relations—both with the unnamed individual and with Ambani—came just weeks before ties between the two nations reached an unprecedented high point in July 2017, with Modi becoming the first Indian prime minister to visit Israel.

That same year, India was reportedly the largest buyer of Israeli weapons, having bought $715 million worth of weaponry, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. As Modi’s bonhomie with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu intensified on the back of a deepening military relationship, the Indian prime minister declined to meet with officials from the Palestinian Authority during his trip to Israel. The Palestinian Authority had traditionally maintained strong ties with New Delhi.

Ambani had substantial business interests in Israel. In 2016, his company, Reliance Defence Ltd, entered a joint venture with Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd, a state-owned Israeli defense firm, to produce air-to-air missiles and air defense systems in a deal valued at $10 billion over a decade. (Ambani’s investment in the Israeli firm Rafael is different from his controversial deal for Rafale fighter jets bought from the French company Dassault, over which Modi’s office had been accused of corruption to aid Ambani’s business interests.)

Ambani did not respond to a request for comment.

Epstein’s history in India stretched back at least to the 2000s. Private emails show Epstein arranging various deals beginning in 2006 with Indian businessmen with companies in Dubai, including an attempt to arrange the acquisition of a small share in a company owned by an Indian designer clothes magnate. That email is found in Epstein’s Yahoo account, contents of which had previously been leaked to Bloomberg. Drop Site has obtained thousands of emails from that account, provided to us by the whistleblower site Distributed Denial of Secrets.

Epstein’s Meetings with a Senior BJP Leader

Another influential Indian who engaged with Jeffrey Epstein was Hardeep Singh Puri, a former president of the United Nations Security Council who is a minister in Modi’s current cabinet.

Puri is featured on Epstein’s list of scheduled appointments at least five times between June 2014 and January 2017, according to documents released by the House Oversight Committee.

Puri, who joined Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP party in January 2014, met with Epstein in June that year. Puri was joined in the meeting by Norwegian diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen, a close friend of Epstein. At the time, Puri was the vice president of the International Peace Institute, where Rød-Larsen, who played a part in the 1990s peace process between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, was the president. Rød-Larsen was also deeply involved in Epstein and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s efforts to broker a security agreement between Israel and Mongolia, Drop Site reported in September.

Puri again met Epstein in September and October 2014, according to the schedules. The purpose of the meeting—or, possibly, another attendee—is redacted. On February 4, 2015, Epstein’s calendar had a reminder that Puri was to arrive in New York that day from India.

Epstein had appointments with Puri again in January 2016 and January 2017. In September 2017, Puri was sworn in as a minister in the Modi government. He currently heads India’s ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas.

A September 2014 email that Epstein wrote to Kathryn Ruemmler, former White House counsel for Barack Obama, briefly set off a firestorm on Indian social media this week after Puri’s name was mentioned alongside a list of other notable public figures expected to be in New York for a host of events including the UN General Assembly, with Epstein writing: “’girls?’”, careful i will renew an old habit,” in the email thread. The public response assumed that Epstein had meant that he was trafficking girls for the men listed, but the context of the exchanges shows that he was telling Ruemmler about the people he would be meeting from around the world. His line about “girls” and his “old habit” was in response to something separate she had said.

But the level of outrage did compel a response from India’s ruling party. A senior BJP leader responded on social media by saying, “Read the entire email thread and you’ll see there is no reference whatsoever to anyone being supplied with girls — nothing in the conversation even points in that direction.”

Puri did not respond to a request for comment.

Despite the apparent misinterpretation, the emails do show Epstein engaging in backchannel communications discussing Indian geopolitics with a range of influential individuals. Those contacts, coming alongside other efforts to make political and economic deals for Israel and other countries, appears to have continued up till the final months of his life.

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On July 31, 2019, just eleven days before Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in a Manhattan jail cell, his connection to the Rothschild banking dynasty became the subject of major public controversy.

Anonymous sources informed Bloomberg of a 2015 visit to Epstein’s New York mansion by baroness Ariane de Rothschild, the CEO of Edmond de Rothschild Group, a storied private bank and one of the largest Swiss financial institutions by assets under management. The bank’s spokesperson denied any relationship to the notorious American sex trafficker. Epstein was found dead on August 10, 2019.

Four years later, after Epstein’s meeting calendars were leaked to the Wall Street Journal, the bank finally admitted that de Rothschild had met with Epstein as part of her “normal duties at the bank between 2013 and 2019.” Epstein provided introductions to U.S. finance leaders and law firms and provided tax and risk consulting, the bank disclosed, while also helping de Rothschild personally on “a couple of occasions” with advice on estate management.

The bank remained vague about the actual nature of its relationship with the convicted sex trafficker. Newly released documents reveal that Epstein and de Rothschild’s personal relationship was much closer than the bank previously acknowledged. According to emails released by the U.S. House Oversight Committee on November 12, Epstein planned to see a Broadway play with de Rothschild in January 2014, and scheduled a private trip with her to Montreal that September.

A second set of documents—the leaked inbox of former Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak, hacked by Handala and uploaded by non-profit whistleblower Distributed Denial of Secrets—sheds light on Epstein’s efforts to leverage his personal friendship with de Rothschild to raise funds for the development of Israeli cyberweapons. After Barak’s retirement from government in 2013, he recruited Pavel Gurvich, a graduate of the Israel Defense Forces’ secretive Unit 81 technology unit, to source cyberweapons startups from the Israeli intelligence community. Gurvich did not respond to a request for comment.

Private communications between Barak and Gurvich show discussions about a wide range of cyberweapons concepts drawn from Israeli military research, inspired in part by the astonishing scope of U.S. global surveillance apparatus revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013. Epstein pushed forward a plan to finance Israeli “offensive cyber” startups with the hope of winning de Rothschild’s support.

Epstein often played the role of middleman, handing off messages between the banker and the former prime minister. In one note, Epstein passed along a tantalizing offer from de Rothschild to Barak: “if Ehud wants to make serious money, he will have to build a relationship with me. take time so that we can truly understand one another.” Barak asked for advice, deferring to Epstein’s supposed expertise on women—“I’m ready,” he wrote, “But I need your advise re HOW? (ladies is your forté).”

Neither Barak nor de Rothschild responded to requests for comment from Drop Site News. The Handala hacking team is suspected of having links to Iran, but Drop Site has been able to verify the authenticity of a number of private details in the Barak email database. Many of Epstein’s emails have also been verified via the House disclosures.

It’s not clear whether the Rothschild bank ultimately participated directly in Epstein and Barak’s cyberweapons efforts—but in October 2015, de Rothschild negotiated a $25 million contract with Epstein’s Southern Trust Company, the same entity Epstein used to fund Barak’s intelligence-linked security startup Reporty Homeland Security (now known as Carbyne) earlier that year. According to a proposal reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, the multi-million dollar contract was for “risk analysis and the application and use of certain algorithms.”

House disclosures show that Epstein and de Rothschild remained close in the years before Epstein’s death. In an email exchange in 2018 with former Obama White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, Epstein gossiped about de Rothschild’s marital issues with Benjamin de Rothschild, heir to the Rothschild fortune. He wrote to Ruemmler, “ariane said ben giving her a very hard time, and did not know about tattoo…she said he wants her to do wife like things. ugh.” Ruemmler replied, “Barf.”

Ruemmler met Epstein when he reached out after she left the Obama administration on behalf of the Rothschild bank, asking if she’d be willing to represent them in an ongoing Department of Justice investigation into money laundering and tax evasion. Ruemmler accepted and helped negotiate a non-prosecution agreement.

Barak and Epstein frequently discussed regulatory issues facing their Swiss bank partners, as Epstein scouted opportunities to finance Barak’s cybersecurity enterprise. The email datasets, which are mostly clustered between 2012 to 2016, show Barak and Epstein working on a partnership between Ariane de Rothschild and Boris Collardi, then-CEO of Swiss bank Julius Baer. Edmond de Rothschild Group and Julius Baer were both implicated in major tax evasion and money laundering investigations during the same time period. The communications do not reflect Epstein or Barak’s involvement with the bank’s responses to the investigations.

“He Will Have To Build a Relationship With Me”

In early 2013, while Ehud Barak was entering the final months of his term as Israel’s Minister of Defense, he was being privately courted by international private banks in Davos, Switzerland, who sought to use his political connections to attract ultra-wealthy individuals as new clients. In March 2013, soon after he resigned from the defense ministry, Barak received a “rainmaker” agreement from Boris Collardi, then-CEO of Julius Baer Group, a Swiss private bank based in Zurich.

The agreement offered Barak CHF 600,000 (over $750,000 USD) for a one-year retainer, while naming him as a “strategic advisor” offering geopolitical advice to bank leadership. In his pitch to Julius Baer, he recommended the bank seek out new sources for capital in “uncharted waters”—proposing in an email, “Russian, probably Chinese as well as Jewish (non US) capital as new major sources for capital.” (Simultaneously, Barak signed a million-dollar contract with Renova Group, a Russian conglomerate, as Drop Site previously reported.)

Three days after the press release about Barak’s hiring was published that July, Olivier Colom, senior advisor to Benjamin de Rothschild’s famous Edmond de Rothschild bank, sent an email to Barak’s close associate, Jeffrey Epstein. “I hear that Ehud Barack [sic] has decided to work for Julius Baer,” Colom wrote. “Too bad, we may have been able to offer him something…too late.”

Epstein forwarded the message to Barak, who replied: “Not a surprise to you, I believe. Let’s talk about it later.”

Epstein enjoyed a close personal relationship with Ariane de Rothschild, then vice-chairman (now CEO) of the Edmond de Rothschild group. Ariane Langner had married into the French branch of the Rothschild dynasty in 1999 and, after her husband’s death in 2021, she became the first person without Rothschild paternity to run the family-owned banking institution.

Barak, however, was not a big fan of de Rothschild. He sent Epstein an article on Edmond de Rothschild’s $300 million investment fund for Africa, in which Ariane explained that the bank hoped to invest in a booming consumer economy, not endless war for resources. “Africa will be the equivalent of China. What is of interest to me is that it is not led any more by mines and energy, but that banks and insurance companies are developing,” she said. Barak was horrified, captioning the article: “Globalization of cultural and media consumption.”

Epstein was similarly chagrined. “I am aware,” he lamented. “She is lost.” It’s no mystery why Epstein and Barak disagreed with de Rothschild’s take on Africa; the two men were simultaneously engaged in mining and energy investments in several African countries, selling Israeli security technology to embattled presidents in Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, and beyond. Creating a booming consumer economy in Africa was not on their agenda.

In his emails to Barak, Epstein indicated he viewed Ariane de Rothschild as a misguided byproduct of nepotism. He compared Benjamin de Rothschild’s decision to appoint her as chairman of the bank, to Barak putting his son-in-law (a classical cellist) in charge of the Israeli military: “[She] has many interfamily battles as well as biz. it would have been like you making Yoed [Nir], the defense minister because he was family.”

Whatever misgivings Epstein had about de Rothschild, they didn’t impede his desire to leverage her resources for grander ambitions. Epstein was a super-connector of the world’s elite, and began building a relationship between the former prime minister and the private banking heiress. He invited Barak and de Rothschild to dinner at his New York mansion on September 23, 2013.

On November 18, Barak sent Epstein a link to a news article about Edmond de Rothschild bank opening a new London branch, with the message: “Any news recently from the Lady?” Three days later, Epstein passed along a message from de Rothschild to Barak: “my thoughts were confirmed, when it was said to me, ‘if Ehud wants to make serious money, he will have to build a relationship with me. take time so that we can truly understand one another.’” Epstein told Barak he didn’t respond to de Rothschild’s offer: “I just listened.”

Barak was eager to exploit the opportunity, but he deferred to Epstein on the psychology of women: “I’m ready. But I need your advise [sic] re HOW? (ladies is your forté).”

Epstein told Barak what he must offer to de Rothschild: “time. attention. stable. recurring. PREDICTABLE where what when.”

Barak offered Epstein ideas for a “donor advised VC” focused on strategic sectors of the Israeli tech economy. A donor-advised fund is a philanthropic fund that allows donors to make tax-deductible contributions while recommending which investments and grants to spend the money on. Edmond de Rothschild bank was known for building “umbrella” funds with smaller thematic funds that could attract large amounts of capital from global investors. Barak proposed a small fund (”4-5% of the overall planned volume”) based on Israeli companies in telecommunications, cybersecurity, and biotechnology.

Epstein had been pursuing the concept of a large donor-advised fund for several years, according to unsealed emails from the US Virgin Islands lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase Bank. After the 2008 financial crisis, Epstein tried to convince JPMorgan executives to establish a donor-advised fund backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, until he was forced out of the American bank in 2013. He continued to shop the idea to European private banks after he moved his accounts to Deutsche Bank in August of that year. Barak asked Epstein for help building the relationship with de Rothschild: “I will need some guide along the way.”

Epstein reassured Barak that he was in good company with former U.S. military leaders with lucrative careers peddling intelligence-linked cybersecurity products: former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden and US cyber commander Keith Alexander. He wrote, “ok, consider you michael hayden, and keith alexander. would be easy to [raise] serious money, you wouldn’[t] have to do the dog and pony show.”

On November 25, four days after his conversation with Epstein about the outreach to Rothschild, Barak arranged a private “brainstorm” session with Pavel Gurvich, a veteran of Unit 81, the secret technology unit of Israeli military intelligence. Barak and his business partner Gary Fegel, a former mining industry executive, had recently invested in Gurvich’s cloud security startup Guardicore. Guardicore was later acquired by Akamai, and integrated into the world’s largest web content delivery network, in 2021.

Barak and Fegel were infatuated with offensive hacking tools. They had tried and failed to buy a major stake in a spin-off of the spyware vendor NSO Group, whose products have been used to target dissidents and journalists, including the late Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. After the meeting, Gurvich emailed Barak a map of undersea Transatlantic cables and network access points which had been disclosed by the Snowden leaks, with the caption: “[Imagine] a similar map of Chinese and Russian [computer-network-exploitation] activities.”

Fegel, like Barak, was an elder statesman with limited technical understanding of cybersecurity—but he clearly understood the military and economic opportunity presented by cyberweapons. After receiving the leaked NSA document from Gurvich, Fegel wrote back, “I don’t claim to understand this in detail, but it is striking that such info floats around the whole world. Somebody will always try to obtain such info and/or try not to share such info….that’s why the cyber market will never be satisfied and the problem can never be solved completely.”

Gurvich agreed to advise Barak and Fegel on an investment fund to develop “offensive cyber technology,” by finding promising early-stage companies and products in Israeli military research units. Gurvich proposed several areas of focus for cyberweapons, including an “NSO-like company” that targets cell phones, hacking tools for routers and internet-connected appliances, and surveillance of the Tor network. Gurvich began headhunting for military intelligence personnel working in these domains.

The trio weighed strategies for spinning off Israeli intelligence tools into Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) startups. Gurvich wrote, “We can try to pursue projects like these individually…or consider Ehud’s Idea of building an Advanced Cyber Lab who’s [sic] main purpose could be create Proof of Concepts that we can try selling using Ehud’s connections. Once we see that there is interest in one…we can choose to develop it in the LAB or spin-out a firm dedicated for it.”

In the meantime, Epstein continued to foster the growing personal relationship between Barak and Ariane de Rothschild. On January 30, 2014, Epstein invited Barak to a dinner meeting in Paris with himself, de Rothschild, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Epstein himself bowed out of the meeting shortly beforehand, saying he had a cold. But, in a sign of his close interest in the meeting, he managed all the logistics by email, ultimately arranging for Barak to visit the Rothschild bank’s office in Paris.

The morning after his scheduled meeting at the Rothschild bank, Barak flew to Germany to attend the Munich Trans-Atlantic Security Conference. There, he met with Michael Hayden, the former NSA director whom Epstein had previously name-dropped while coaching Barak on the strategy for financing cyberweapons. Before his flight, Barak’s wife Nili Priell emailed him a dossier on Hayden to prepare him for the meeting.

After the conference, Barak sent an email to Hayden thanking him for the appointment, while referencing an unspecified plan to be set in motion: “It was good meeting with you in Munich. I meant what I’ve said to you and wonder whether we can meet later this month to review the options....Let me know if the whole idea make[s] sense to you.”

Epstein later emailed Barak asking for an update on the talks: “how was munich.” Barak replied: “Munich was ok. Better to talk over the phone.” Barak and Hayden tried to schedule a follow-up meeting in New York City the following week, on February 26; but their trips missed overlapping by a few hours. Hayden promised: “We’ll keep working on it.”

Neither Fegel nor Hayden responded to interview requests from Drop Site.

“The Realization of the Zionist Vision”

While plans for the donor-advised fund incubated, Epstein found more opportunities to bring de Rothschild and Barak together under the banner of philanthropy and Israeli national security policy. On March 30, 2014, Epstein sent Barak an e-mail: “I’m trying to figure out how i can be more helpful.” The next day, Epstein passed along a message to Barak from the Rothschild baroness: “Hi Jeff would you mind asking Ehud whether or not he is advising the Herzliya Conference editorial committee on bringing ro [sic] the conference fromer [sic] or current defence ministers/security specialists?”

The Herzliya Conference is an annual national security policy summit run by the Institute for Policy and Strategy, founded by ex-Mossad research chief Uzi Arad. The conference convenes Israel’s top political, security, intelligence, and business leadership to shape the country’s security agenda. Barak was on the Board of Directors of the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya, which organized the conference.

Barak wanted to be helpful, but he was unsure how to respond to de Rothschild’s message about the conference attendees: “I’m on the Board of the IDC think tank which organizes the Herzeliah (sic) Conference. But what’s the Question?” Epstein replied: “i send you what i received and know” and told Barak “i will be speaking to her in an hour.” Barak asked Epstein to gather more context: “Thx. Use your senses to recommend me.” The next day, Barak shared the conference speaker list with Epstein, to deliver to de Rothschild, with a note: “Pl don’t use this material with others.”

The Rothschild Caesarea Foundation sponsored the 2014 Herzliya Conference in honor of the foundation’s 50th anniversary. Caesarea is a coastal area between Tel Aviv and Haifa, where an ancient Roman and Byzantine port city once stood. In 1921, the British Mandate government leased the Caesarea sand dunes to Edmond de Rothschild’s Palestine Jewish Colonisation Association for 200 years.

The French branch of the Rothschild family was essential to founding the modern state of Israel. “The Jewish State,” the 1896 pamphlet considered the foundation of modern Zionism, was originally titled, “Address to the Rothschilds.” In it, Theodor Herzl appealed to Edmond James de Rothschild—whose family had become prominent financiers of the European colonial enterprise—to finance settlements for Jews fleeing ghettos and pogroms in Europe. The Rothschild heir established the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association to purchase land for Jewish settlers.

In February 1948, the Zionist paramilitary Haganah violently expelled the residents of a fishing village near the ruins of Caesarea, and demolished most of the homes that remained. In 1962, Edmond James de Rothschild and the Israeli government agreed to convert the Caesarea lease into a tax-exempt non-profit foundation in which the foundation would develop the real estate around Caesarea, with profits distributed as grants for higher education in Israel.

But in 2010, regulators discovered the foundation held nearly a half-billion shekels in surplus liquidity at the end of the year, but only contributed twenty million shekels to higher education. The Israeli Tax Authority issued an income-tax assessment for more than 100 million shekels, challenging the foundation’s tax-exempt status. The Herzliya conference branding was a PR strategy for the Rothschild foundation while the case was still pending in court.

Ariane de Rothschild delivered the 2014 Herzliya Conference opening address on the “legacy” of Edmond de Rothschild, titled “Social Entrepreneurship and the Spirit of Pioneering in the 21st Century.” In her speech, de Rothschild addressed the tax dispute: “This deeply ingrained relationship [between the Rothschild foundation and the state of Israel] is being questioned today by our partner. My husband Benjamin and I expect that it won’t be challenged any further.”

The bank executive used the Herzliya platform to promote “venture philanthropy,” the very same non-profit framework Epstein and Barak planned to exploit as a strategy for funding the Israeli technology sector. In an interview at the conference, she observed that Israel was unsustainably dependent on philanthropic grants, as younger diasporic Jews inheriting wealth were reluctant to support Israel.

She said: “Jews abroad struggle with their questions: Are we Jews? Are we Zionists? Are we both?” She proposed applying “pure market tools” to philanthropy, so contributions could become venture investments, rather than endowments. This way, a younger generation of donors could take an “active role” in shaping the outcomes of their charitable contributions: “The startup nation must become the leading social startup nation.”

Barak had been scheduled to speak at Herzliya on June 10, 2014, and he planned to meet with de Rothschild at the conference—then, a few days before the conference began, Epstein informed Barak of last-minute plans for a dinner meeting with Peter Thiel on June 9, at Epstein’s mansion in Manhattan. Barak remained in New York, and canceled his meeting with de Rothschild in Israel.

The Rothschild baroness was frustrated by her reception at Herzliya, and Epstein relayed this to Barak in a June 12 email: “are you in [Geneva]? you might want to tell ariane, who hated the [conference].” Barak replied: “I’ll be there next week…that[‘s] what happens where she first pay[s] then check[s], rather than the other way around. I’ll call you.”

After hanging up the phone, Epstein immediately emailed de Rothschild to set up a meeting with Barak. Epstein scheduled a breakfast at de Rothschild’s home on June 18. Before, Epstein privately emailed Barak to brief him: “she has a real [problem] with her [foundation] and the israeli govt. i will need 20 minutes of your time to brief you.” After the meeting, Epstein pinged Barak for an update, writing: “>?” Barak asked for a number to call so they could speak on the phone.

It is unclear what, if any, help Barak could have offered to assist de Rothschild in the foundation’s tax dispute. The conflict with the Israeli government escalated over the following year. In May 2015, de Rothschild explained in an interview that her husband was refusing to visit the country in protest over the matter. “It is a shame there is a misunderstanding about what we do and how we do it. It is insulting that the state casts doubt on us,” de Rothschild said. “If there is a family that does not have to prove its commitment to Israel, it’s ours.”

Finally, in 2018, the Rothschild Foundation and the Israeli government announced that they had reached a new pact. As part of the deal, the foundation agreed to invest over $200 million in education grants in Israel, while releasing land to build 2,000 homes in the seaside town of Or Akiva, a nearly exclusively Jewish community. (The foundation fought efforts, meanwhile, to advance land to the adjacent Palestinian-Israeli town of Jisr al-Zarqa.)

The agreement extended the foundation’s tax-exempt status until at least 2032. In a statement announcing the pact, the Israeli government praised “the considerable contribution of the Rothschild family to the realization of the Zionist vision and to the State of Israel.” Drop Site was unable to confirm whether Barak or Epstein were involved in the resolution to the dispute.

“He Is Ready. Assured Discreetness”

In May of this year, Edmond de Rothschild bank’s Luxembourg unit was convicted of money laundering related to embezzlement from Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund between 2009 and 2013. This marked the first time a bank in Luxembourg had ever been convicted of money laundering. The Swiss financial regulator FINMA also found Julius Baer, with whom Barak had a consulting agreement, committed major anti-money-laundering violations during the same period. Boris Collardi, the head of Julius Baer, was personally reprimanded by FINMA.

Epstein and Barak were intimately familiar with money laundering and tax evasion issues facing Edmond de Rothschild and Julius Baer, and frequently discussed these topics with each other—and, occasionally, with the heads of the banks.

In December 2015, Edmond de Rothschild bank entered its non-prosecution agreement under the Department of Justice “Swiss Bank Program.” The bank paid $45 million and admitted they had aided U.S. clients in concealing undeclared accounts with multiple billions of dollars of assets.

One month later, on January 1, 2016, Barak sent a congratulatory email to Collardi on Julius Baer’s settlement on a separate DOJ tax evasion case, in which the bank was accused of helping U.S. clients hide $600 million in undeclared Swiss accounts—the bank paid back nearly the full amount to the U.S. government. Barak wrote Collardi an enthusiastic note, “That’s Really Great!!!” Epstein sent Barak a copy of the the Justice Department’s civil forfeiture demand, requiring Julius Baer to surrender $220 million. Collardi did not respond to Drop Site’s request for comment.

In April 2016, the same month as the Panama Papers leak, the conversations between Epstein and Barak in the former Israeli Prime Minister’s inbox came to a halt. One of the very last conversations between the two men concerned a “discreet” meeting between de Rothschild and Collardi. On April 27, Barak emailed Epstein about “weekend schedules”. Epstein replied, “She said she would call me after the general meeting.”

Two days later, on April 29, Barak wrote Epstein, “I met BC [Boris Collardi] today in Monaco. He is ready. Assured discreetness. Any news from AdR [Ariane de Rothschild]?”

Ehud Barak’s hacked email inbox contains no further emails between Barak and Epstein. But the latest document set released by the U.S. House Oversight Committee in early November shows that Epstein and Barak’s secret plan for Collardi and Rothschild was still progressing, one year later.

On April 30, 2017, Barak shared a cryptic e-mail with Epstein, in an email thread discussing a The New York Times review of the Broadway play Oslo, about Norwegian diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen – a close friend of Epstein’s who played a part in the 1990s peace process between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. “About time for our actions to turn into theatre and movie pieces,” Barak wrote, cheekily. “Shall we talk? Any news from BC/AdR?” Epstein wrote back, “both have the flu.” Barak replied: “High stress.”

This story is the latest in an ongoing series on Epstein’s ties to foreign intelligence services, and his role in helping fuel a global boom in Israeli surveillance technology.

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In mid-October, the House Oversight Committee released an interview with former U.S. prosecutor Alex Acosta, who told the panel that—contrary to widespread public reporting—he had never told Steve Bannon that Epstein “belonged to intelligence.” Acosta denied ever discussing Epstein with Bannon, and claimed to have “no knowledge as to whether he was or was not a member of the intelligence community.”

Yet, along with Acosta’s interview, the House panel also released a new cache of documents from Epstein’s estate containing direct evidence of Epstein’s links to Israeli intelligence: Epstein’s personal calendars reveal that a senior Israeli intelligence officer, with personal ties to former CIA Director Leon Panetta, lived at Epstein’s Manhattan apartment for multiple stretches between 2013 and 2016. When cross-referenced with emails leaked from the inbox of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, a portrait emerges of Epstein at the nexus of high-ranking intelligence officials in both the U.S. and Israel.

This is the fourth piece in Drop Site’s ongoing series on Jeffrey Epstein’s role in brokering intelligence deals for Israel.

In the first, we exposed Epstein’s role in brokering a security agreement between Israel and Mongolia. In the second, we identified Epstein’s effort to set up a backchannel between Israel and Russia during the Syria civil war. In the third, we showed Epstein’s role as a key facilitator of a security agreement between Israel and the West African nation of Côte d’Ivoire.

Meanwhile, we’re left wondering why the rest of the media, which has demonstrated no lack of excitement when it comes to the saga of Jeffrey Epstein, has all of a sudden lost its reporting capacity, in the face of reams of publicly available newsworthy documents. A question for editors reading this newsletter: What are you doing?

From a place of competition, we’re glad the media are sitting on their collective hands and we’re proud to have broken this series of stories, which give us a glimpse of a world that is often hidden from public view. But it’s also a topic that would benefit from the collective attention of our national media. Here’s hoping some will join in.

Either way, we’ll continue the work, and are grateful for the support of readers who make it possible. If you haven’t yet upgraded your subscription, please consider doing so.

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Last week, we let you know that an investigation we published on the BBC is now the subject of a lawsuit we intend to fully contest—the article can be read here—and that we needed help raising money to cover legal costs that had already approached $40,000. In just a few days, readers donated nearly $200,000. An enormous thank you from all of us at Drop Site. Having the resources to fight back in court is a game changer.

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Israeli Spy Stayed for Weeks at a Time With Jeffrey Epstein in Manhattan

Leaked emails show Epstein working on a wire transfer to Ehud Barak’s top aide, Yoni Koren, who regularly stayed at his apartment.

An Israeli military intelligence officer stayed at Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan apartment on at least three occasions—including once, in February 2013, while working as a senior aide to then-Israeli Minister of Defense Ehud Barak.

Yoni Koren made his intelligence career working in covert operations alongside the Mossad, and remained a lieutenant colonel in reserve duty after he officially left the intelligence directorate. He stayed in Epstein’s apartment again for two weeks, in October 2014, and a third time for ten more days in September 2015.

Drop Site compiled evidence of these stays from schedules released by the House Oversight Committee last month and Barak’s hacked emails, originally released by the Handala hack team and later shared by Distributed Denial of Secrets.

On all three trips, Koren appeared to be conducting official or unofficial business. A Times of Israel article from late January 2013, a few weeks before Koren’s first documented stay, identifies him as still actively serving as the “bureau chief” for the Israeli Ministry of Defense that month.

After Barak’s retirement from government, Koren continued to serve as an informal intermediary between the American and Israeli intelligence communities, with Barak acting as his handler. Email records show Barak using Koren as an intermediary to exchange information with AMAN, the Israeli military intelligence directorate. Koren was also active in Epstein and Barak’s efforts to source cybersecurity startups from the technology research units of AMAN, demonstrating how enmeshed in Israeli spy networks he remained.

In February 2015, leaked emails show Barak sending Epstein bank details for funds to be wired to Koren’s Citibank account. The purpose of the wire transfer is not known. Drop Site was unable to confirm if the funds were successfully transferred. But the bank transfer information was followed by an unusually cryptic communication between Barak and Koren regarding hand-off of a physical bank card.

Koren helped arrange a private tour of the White House and Pentagon for Barak and his grandchildren, which took place a few days later. The Pentagon trip was coordinated by Jeremy Bash, former chief of staff of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense (as well as the ex-husband of CNN host Dana Bash). Koren and Bash helped to exchange messages and arrange meetings between their respective bosses—Barak and Leon Panetta, the former C.I.A. Director and Secretary of Defense.

“Keep the Card”

On February 14, 2015, Barak sent a note to Epstein. “Hi Jeff Will you be in NY during the coming week?”, Barak wrote. Epstein replied, “im flying back to ny tues to meet with you.” Epstein’s personal calendars, released by the U.S. House Oversight Committee last month, shows that they ultimately met on February 19 at 5 p.m.

But the two men had a second, last-minute meeting that wasn’t reflected on calendars released by Congress. According to hacked emails, Barak arranged an urgent appointment with Epstein on February 20, writing, “Are you still in town? Can we meet again for 30min today or tomorrow?.” Epstein’s meetings had run late the previous night, and he’d already missed his flight to Paris—but he agreed to meet.

Three days later, on February 23, Barak sent Epstein an email titled “Yoni acc. Info,” containing wire transfer details for a Citibank account belonging to “Itzhak Koren.”

The purpose of the wire transfer is not apparent from the email records. That Saturday, February 28, Barak sent an unusual email to Koren, containing detailed instructions to pick up a package from the Hyatt 48LEX hotel in Manhattan’s Midtown East.

According to the email, Barak purchased red “Beats by Dre” headphones on February 24, the day after sending Epstein the bank details. Barak instructed Yoni to collect a package containing the headphones from the hotel and return them to an Apple Store on the Upper West Side. According to Barak’s message, attached to the box was an envelope with a receipt and a bank card. Barak wrote Koren, “To get a refund in cash, you’ll need the card. Email me when you collect it.”

Barak’s request was highly unusual. For one thing, it was in English. Across hundreds of emails exchanged between Barak and Koren in the leaked email dataset, the two men communicated almost exclusively in Hebrew. It was also unheard of for Barak to request Yoni to run a mundane errand, and the timing of the exchange also raises a red flag. After purchasing the headphones and leaving them for Koren, Barak was scheduled to leave the country.

Koren seemed to immediately understand Barak’s request, and he agreed, writing back, in Hebrew: “No problem, what’s her name?” Barak replied with a woman’s name: “Rachel Levin.” This name doesn’t appear anywhere else in Barak’s emails and it’s unclear who or what he was referring to.

The next Monday, March 2, Koren collected the package and reported to Barak that the card had been credited with the funds. Barak instructed Koren to “Keep the card,” and they made arrangements to meet in Israel. On March 12, after a brief trip to London, Barak landed in Tel Aviv and immediately emailed Koren, asking to speak on the phone.

“It Never Happened”

Sometimes an earphone is just an earphone, but Barak and Koren had good reason to write emails in coded language. Documents leaked by Edward Snowden just over a year prior revealed that the two men were major counter-intelligence targets for the United States and the NSA had been snooping on their messages.

Koren’s intelligence career began in the Research Division of AMAN, the IDF’s Military Intelligence Directorate, eventually rising through the ranks to become a senior officer. In 1985, Koren worked on a covert campaign with Mossad to help Syrian intelligence kidnap PLO operatives traveling from Cyprus to Lebanon. Koren described the operation in an interview with Israeli New York Times journalist Ronen Bergman, for his book “Rise and Kill First.”

When Barak became the Chief of Staff of the IDF in the 1990s, Koren became his Bureau Chief, managing Barak’s schedule and operations. He was also an assistant to Israel’s military attaché in Washington, coordinating senior Pentagon contacts like Colin Powell, then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. After Barak left the IDF, Koren headed Barak’s staff as Interior Minister, then Foreign Minister, then Defense Minister. Barak served as prime minister from 1999 until 2001.

After Barak’s retirement, Koren was a covert “fixer” in Washington, who enjoyed special access to senior national security figures, including Leon Panetta, and his senior adviser, Jeremy Bash. Panetta, who went straight from director of the CIA to defense secretary under former President Barack Obama, was Barak’s U.S. equivalent. As soon as Barak left the Israeli government, Koren became a key go-between for Barak and the American and Israeli intelligence communities.

On March 25, 2013, one week after Barak left his defense minister post, Koren forwarded a personal invitation from Jeremy Bash to participate on a panel on the Arab Spring (or as they called it, “Middle East turmoil”) at the Panetta Institute for Public Policy in Monterey, California. In an email thread with Bash, Barak agreed to come to California, and expressed his eagerness to discuss “possible opportunities with LP [Leon Panetta] and YK [Yoni Koren].”

After the Monterey event, Barak and his wife drove north to the San Francisco Bay Area, for a private meeting with Oracle founder Larry Ellison at his mansion in Woodside, a massive estate modeled after a 16th-century Japanese emperor’s palace. In his Evernote app, Barak bookmarked a conversation with Ellison’s chief of staff, with the tags “@Private” and “#Initiatives.”

The following year, according to Epstein’s personal calendars, released by the House, Koren stayed at Epstein’s spare apartment again, for the first two weeks of October 2014. The calendar released by the House committee reads: “Reminder: Yoni in apt Sept. 30-Oct 13.”

In the weeks preceding his stay at Epstein’s apartment, Koren maintained contact with spies in AMAN, despite his supposed status as a “private citizen.” On September 14, 2014, Barak and Koren exchanged emails about a Haaretz opinion column titled “A strange man, al‑Sisi” that asserted Egyptian President Abdel‑Fattah el‑Sisi offered to give Palestinians a huge plot of land in the Sinai peninsula, adjacent to Gaza, but Mahmoud Abbas rejected the idea. Barak asked Koren to confirm with someone in AMAN if the report was true. Koren returned a few hours later with a response: “It never happened.”

The emails suggest Koren worked as a two-way intermediary, with Barak hinting at Koren to pass a message back to contacts in Israel. When Haaretz published a second column about el-Sisi’s alleged offer, the next day, Barak wrote Koren: “2nd time? Probably someone should deny it.”

On October 6, 2014, while staying in Epstein’s apartment, Koren forwarded Barak a message from Bash, Panetta’s henchman, containing details of Panetta’s travel dates to promote his book “Worthy Fights,” about his service as C.I.A. Director and Secretary of Defense under President Obama. The message was taken by Barak as a proposal by Koren to meet with Panetta in New York. He expressed that he would be unable to make it in time.

Barak later asked Koren for help getting special access to secured areas of the White House and Pentagon. On December 8, 2014, Barak emailed Koren to inform him of plans to take his daughter and two grandkids to Washington D.C. in the spring, writing, “I want to take them to the WH and get there something more than the regular public tourists visit…Please see if you can be of help.”

Bash took care of the arrangements for Barak and his family to get access to secure facilities in the White House and the Pentagon. Bash was by then a private citizen, and he had started his own consulting company, Beacon Global Strategies — but he still enjoyed high-level access to the White House and U.S. defense establishment. Yoni helped Barak pass along his family’s passport details to Beacon, so they could receive clearance.

Barak, his daughter, and his two grandchildren visited the White House and Pentagon on March 31. They received a Secret Service escort, and a guided tour from Yael Lempert, a Special Assistant to President Obama, and the National Security Council director for the Levant, Israel, and Egypt. Lempert later negotiated the largest military aid package in American history, a ten-year, $38 billion dollar package for Israel, in 2016.

The Pentagon visit was coordinated by Eric Lynn, another senior advisor to Panetta, who arranged for a private tour by Laura Updegrove, the Defense Department’s Israel Country Director. A few weeks after the visit, in April 2015, Lynn emailed Barak details about fundraising for his congressional campaign in Florida’s 13th District—Barak forwarded the message to Koren, asking ,“What should be done?” Yoni replied: “You don’t have to do anything.”

Lynn lost. The seat is now held by Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who spearheads the House effort to release the Epstein files. Lynn did not respond to request for comment.

“Endless loyalty to the state”

Yoni Koren died of cancer on January 8, 2023. His career of service to Israel ran exactly parallel to Barak’s, albeit in the shadows. He remained one of Barak’s most trusted advisors and closest confidantes throughout his military and civilian careers. Barak did not respond to a request for comment; neither did Jeremy Bash.

On Koren’s passing, Barak wrote a eulogy for Koren, calling him, “A talented intelligence officer…with endless loyalty to the role, the IDF and the state. A brave man who knew no fear, even when he stood in front of the forces of evil.”

Correction: The article headline originally referenced Epstein’s mansion in Manhattan. The address in question was a separate apartment owned by Epstein in the city. Koren was a senior officer in AMAN but not the head of the military intelligence directorate.

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Jeffrey Epstein and Ehud Barak were specialists in war profiteering. At the end of his tenure as Israel’s defense minister and after his supposed “retirement,” Barak embraced a role as a salesman of Israeli security services to embattled governments, opening the door for Israeli intelligence leaders to shape the security apparatuses of several African nations, including the country of Côte d’Ivoire.

Quietly facilitating these efforts was Jeffrey Epstein, who died in jail in 2019. Epstein wrote at one point to Barak: “with civil unrest exploding [...] and the desperation of those in power, isn’t this perfect for you.” Barak replied:, “You’re right [in] a way. But not simple to transform it into a cash flow.” Transforming unrest into cash flow, in the case of Côte d’Ivoire, involved brokering deals between the Israeli state and the embattled West African nation.

New details about Epstein’s role in Israeli intelligence operations in Africa have emerged from two sets of documents: an archive of leaked emails released by the Handala hacking group and hosted by non-profit whistleblower site Distributed Denial of Secrets and documents released by the U.S. House Oversight Committee last month. The latter set includes Epstein’s personal emails and appointment calendars, which provide clear evidence of Epstein’s involvement in Israel’s West African security negotiations in 2012, while Barak was still Israel’s Defense Minister.

The two men worked together as a conduit for Israel’s intelligence sector in Côte d’Ivoire, where Barak was welcomed as a representative of the Israeli government even after leaving public office. Epstein helped Barak deliver a proposal for mass surveillance of Ivorian phone and internet communications, crafted by former Israeli intelligence officials.

As in Mongolia, Epstein and Barak’s private deal-making evolved seamlessly into an official security agreement between Israel and Côte d’Ivoire in 2014. Since the agreement was signed, over a decade ago, President Alassane Ouattara has tightened his grip on power, banning public demonstrations and arresting peaceful protestors. In this October’s election, the octogenarian won a fourth term, in defiance of constitutional term limits, while opposition candidates were barred from participation.

Today, Ouattara continues to enjoy the support of Israeli security firms to help him maintain power. His Israeli-backed police state has squashed civic organizations and silenced critics. In the wake of the recent election, exiled activist Boga Sako Gervais denounced Ouattara’s authoritarian slide: “Under Ouattara, since 2011, freedoms of opinion, thought, and expression have been criminalized,” he said. “It has become forbidden to criticize the head of state.”

The story of Israel’s security agreement with Côte d’Ivoire is only one chapter in the saga of Epstein and Barak’s covert activities in Africa—it is reported here as the next entry in an ongoing series on Epstein’s ties to intelligence networks.

Epstein, Israel, Ivory Coast: How Israeli Intelligence Built a Police State In West Africa

By Murtaza Hussain and Ryan Grim

In late 2010, a disputed presidential election in the west African nation of Côte d’Ivoire triggered political upheaval and violence that rapidly destabilized the country. The UN certified Alassane Ouattara as the winner of a November 2010 runoff vote. But the outcome was not accepted by the rival incumbent, Laurent Gbago. After months of violence, a French and UN military intervention was launched in April 2011 to remove Gbago and drive him from the country.

After Gbagbo’s exile, Ouattara inherited a security apparatus fractured by the crisis, and his own hold on power was uncertain. The new president announced that his government had foiled a coup plot against him by officers still loyal to Gbagbo in June 2012.

Five days after that announcement, the new Ivorian president, who had a long career as an economist at the International Monetary Fund and a reputation as a technocrat, traveled to Jerusalem to meet Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and discuss cooperation on science, technology, and counterterrorism. The following month, an Israeli delegation visited Côte d’Ivoire to field Ouattara’s questions about Israel’s security apparatus and rebuilding the Ivorian presidential army.

While Israeli and Ivorian officials sat in hotel conference rooms and took press photographs, American financier Jeffrey Epstein was across the globe, engaged in shadow diplomacy to develop further ties between Israel and the new Ivorian leader.

On June 18, 2012, the very same day Barak was meeting with Alassane Ouattara in Jerusalem, according to Epstein schedules released by the U.S. House Oversight Committee, his son David Dramane Ouattara was in New York City for an appointment with Epstein.

On September 12, three months later, Epstein met with Ouattara’s niece Nina Keita, whom he had known since at least 2002; as a young fashion model in Jean Luc Brunel’s Karin Models agency, she had traveled on his “Lolita Express” plane between New York and Paris. After Keita’s visit, records show that Epstein went straight to the Regency Hotel in New York for a private meeting with the Israeli defense minister.

The next month, Epstein flew to Africa. In a note to his assistant, he instructed her to arrange to switch planes in London before flying to Côte d’Ivoire, Angola, and Senegal. There are no flight logs documenting the Africa trip.

The flurry of visits appeared to pay dividends for Epstein, Barak, and the Israeli government. Two weeks after Epstein’s trip to Africa, the Ivorian Interior Minister Hamed Bakayoko was in Tel Aviv to meet with Barak and discuss a bilateral security accord focused on intelligence and cybercrime.

Barak has previously claimed his “private investments” with Epstein were conducted as a private citizen and unrelated to official Israeli state affairs. The documents released by the House in October, however, suggest that Epstein played the same “fixer” role while Barak was still the sitting Defense Minister of Israel. Barak did not respond to a request for comment.

Less than a year later, Barak resigned from the Israeli government. In 2011, Barak had split from Israel’s Labor Party and formed a small “centrist” faction called Independence. Despite his long history in government, including a past stint as prime minister, his tiny party was predicted to get wiped out in the January 2013 Knesset election.

He left his position as defense minister on March 18, 2013, before an agreement with Côte d’Ivoire was reached. Barak’s departure from government did not end his role negotiating security agreements for Israel, however. After he left his formal government role, emails and private records show that he finished negotiating the intelligence deal with Côte d’Ivoire covertly. In these efforts, Epstein provided critical assistance.

On March 19, 2013, one day after leaving his government post, Barak received an email from his business partner and brother-in-law Doron Cohen, containing materials prepared by MF Group, a French-Israeli security contractor run by Michel Farjon. The consortium of companies, spread across several European countries, did security work in Africa; the group had been involved in a controversial sale of military helicopters to the government of Cameroon.

An email address associated with Farjon sent details of MF Group’s planned projects in Côte d’Ivoire: a mobile and internet communications surveillance center and a video monitoring center in Abidjan. According to email logs, Barak and Farjon met three days later, on the fourth floor of G Tower in Tel Aviv, on March 22, 2013.

Barak and Cohen made efforts to keep these communications secret. Farjon’s emails to Cohen never mentioned Barak by name—instead using cryptic subject lines like “files to be transferred to your friend”—and Barak and Cohen’s emails referred to Farjon by his initials “MF,” often in connection with another player called “AM,” or “Maoz.” Cohen took precautions to ensure their conversations were not overheard; on April 12, he emailed Barak: “I had a good meeting today with MF and AM. I’ll be glad [to] update you. I’ll be in the car alone at 0415 am until 5am.”

Reached for comment by Drop Site at the same email address that appears in the files, Farjon acknowledged that the documents containing proposals for Côte d’Ivoire had originated from his company. But, he said, his company did not actually engage in business in the country and denied that he had ties with Barak and Cohen. “The documents are accurate as previously stated. No cooperation with Barack, Cohen, Epstein. No deal with Ivory Coast, nor any cooperation,” Farjon said. Drop Site was unable to reach Cohen.

Although the talks were proceeding briskly, the momentum was halted after an unexpected report came from the United Nations.

Since 2004, during the country’s first civil war, Côte d’Ivoire had been subject to a UN arms embargo that blocked weapons sales and applied strict requirements for even “non-lethal” training and equipment transfers. On April 17, 2013, the UN Security Council reported the discovery of “dozens of crates” of Israeli ammunition at the presidential palace and the Attécoubé naval base, likely transferred to Gbagbo’s security forces during the 2010-2011 crisis. The crates had Israel Military Industries labels and Spanish markings; the report suggested the ammunition had been relabelled and retransferred to Côte d’Ivoire from a third country.

On April 21, Cohen emailed Barak: “I met with MF and AM last night. We are facing a problem. We need to schedule a serious talk about them.” Cohen refrained from discussing the problem over email. Four days later, the Security Council announced it was extending the arms embargo on Côte d’Ivoire for another year.

Immediately upon his return to Israel, Barak made phone calls to Israeli security leaders with some connection to Côte d’Ivoire. On May 15, he called Amos Malka, the former head of Israeli intelligence and a recent chairman of Israeli armor manufacturer Plasan. Plasan had also been swept up in the sanctions enforcement: in addition to the Spanish-marked ammunition crates, UN embargo monitors had flagged a five-ton shipment of Plasan body armor to Abidjan.

Malka, like Barak, occupied a blurred public-private boundary in Israeli intelligence. Malka’s company Logic Industries was installing a surveillance apparatus in the United Arab Emirates under contract with a Swiss company, as Israel and the U.A.E. did not have direct security ties. The email logs do not disclose the subject matter of Barak and Malka’s phone call—but, after hanging up, Barak emailed Malka the résumé of a Spanish-Israeli logistics expert at the “Prime Minister’s Office,” a common cover name for either Shin Bet, Israel’s counterintelligence service, or the Mossad, both of which are based out of the office.

“I have never worked with Mr. Barak since my retirement,” Malka told Drop Site when reached for comment, referencing his departure from the security services in 2002. “I know him very well but no business together.”

Barak called one more stakeholder on May 19, 2023: the Honorary Consul of Côte d’Ivoire in Israel, Michael “Micky” Federmann, chairman of the Israeli military technology giant, Elbit Systems. Federmann was experienced at navigating UN sanctions and West African politics; Elbit had supplied military helicopters to Côte d’Ivoire during the first Ivorian civil war.

Finally, on May 27, Barak called Sidi Tiémoko Touré, Chef de Cabinet (head of office) of President Ouattara. Barak emailed Touré after the call to formally request an audience with Ouattara, and they arranged a meeting in Abidjan in August.

In preparation for his West Africa trip, Barak asked private intelligence firm Ergo to prepare a briefing on Côte d’Ivoire. It contained a dossier on Ouattara and his inner circle and detailed organization charts of the state’s defense and internal security organs.

Meanwhile, Barak prepared paperwork for a “non-security” pretext to visit West Africa. On July 22, he received a document from his son-in-law Michael Menkin, a manager at the medical equipment supplier Elsmed, containing a brief proposal to build hospitals and diagnostic centers in Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire.

Barak arrived in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire on the first of August. According to an itinerary sent to him by Touré, Barak met with Marcel Amon-Tanoh, Ouattara’s chief of staff, and Hamed Bakayoko, Minister of the Interior and Security, on August 2, 2013, who shared more information about the Ivorian security apparatus. Barak and his wife even visited Amon-Tanoh’s home, and met his two daughters, both Oxford-educated graduate students in London. The next day, August 3, Barak met with President Ouattara and Paul Koffi Koffi, the deputy in charge of Defense.

Farjon, of MF Group, told Drop Site that he learned independently that Barak had indeed met with Ouattara, but said he did not know how his materials became involved. “I don’t see how or why Barak could have accessed my documents. Keep digging,” he told Drop Site.

“How Can We Move Forward”

Barak finally returned to Israel late at night in August. Upon arriving, emails show that Barak made a phone call to Stanley Fischer, the governor of the Bank of Israel and a close friend of Ouattara from their days at the International Monetary Fund during the late 1990s.

A few days later, Barak was contacted by Jean-Baptiste Gomis, the Ivorian ambassador to Israel, bearing gifts from Côte d’Ivoire. Gomis wrote: “i seize this opportunity to ask you for a meeting to talk about your impression of your visit in Cote d Ivoire and moreover how can we move forward.” Barak visited Gomis at his home soon after.

On September 16, 2013 the details of Israel’s offer arrived in Barak’s inbox. Barak received a proposal from Aharon Ze’evi-Farkash, former head of Israeli intelligence, for a SIGINT (“signals intelligence”) organization in Côte d’Ivoire.

The document, a 13-page PDF, mapped out the complete architecture for eavesdropping on phone calls, satellites, tactical radio, and “special targets” like cyber cafés. The data streams flowed to “media processing” servers, to be reviewed by analysts, then synthesized into reports for security leaders.

The document was authored by Farkash and Amnon Unger, who developed these systems in occupied Palestine during the two periods of Intifada between 1990 and 2005. The two men had been senior commanders in Israel’s Unit 8200 signals intelligence unit, before branching off to other roles in the military and private sector.

Ic Preliminary Proposal

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Farkash reminded Barak that he was operating in a gray area by sharing planning documents with a foreign country. He wrote to Barak in Hebrew: “The document is based on experience that has been accumulated during Amnon’s and my service in the unit… I believe this meets the ‘export‑of‑knowledge’ test. I thought it appropriate to bring this to your attention.” “Export-of-knowledge” (יצוא ידע) refers to Israel’s Defense Export Control Act, which requires a license for transfer of “defense know-how,” even unclassified, exploratory material like a technical spec.

Barak replied to inform Farkash that he would “probably be in touch with the client toward the end of the month.” A few days later, Barak flew to New York where he visited Epstein, during the 68th Session of the United Nations General Assembly. Epstein had been coordinating meetings for Barak for that week.

Epstein had been helping manage Barak’s itinerary in anticipation of his visit, writing that “we should try to scheudle some people for dinners or lunches when you are here.” Epstein proposed several prominent business and political leaders: New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, British Ambassador Peter Mandelson, banker Ariane de Rothschild, and Joshua Cooper Ramo, advisor to former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

Epstein also planned a meeting for Barak with another, less famous guest—Sidi Tiémoko Touré, Chef de Cabinet for President Ouattara. Before arranging the meet, he made a phone call to Ouattara’s niece, Nina Keita, according to last month’s House Oversight release.

On September 21, Epstein sent Barak a message with Touré’s personal email address: “chief of staff of outara, he arrives tomorw, try to coordianate, i am flexible. if you decide you have time.” Barak planned to visit Epstein’s house the next morning for coffee: “Let’s talk it tomorrow.”

For several months, Barak’s email logs showed no further discussion of the Côte d’Ivoire plan. But Epstein’s calendars, released by Congress, show another meeting with Nina Keita on November 7, 2013—the same day UN peacekeepers launched a joint operation with Ivorian security forces to dismantle armed militias and remove illegal checkpoints. The security operation, followed by a UN Security Council meeting two weeks later, set the stage for the lifting of sanctions.

In March 2014, a piece was printed in the Israeli publication Calcalist about the pending Ivorian security deal, with glowing remarks about Barak’s business acumen and his reputation in the global defense industry. Barak gave a quote coyly denying his involvement, saying “These are private conversations, and the public has no interest in them.” Barak’s brother Avinoam emailed him a link to the story, and Barak replied, “Creative minds. HaLevay Alay,” a Hebrew saying for “I wish it were me.”

As winter turned to spring, the key players were mobilized again. Ouattara made preparations for a sweeping re-organization of the Ivorian intelligence apparatus. On April 10, 2014, he dissolved the intelligence service, Agence nationale de la stratégie et de l’intelligence (ANSI), and transferred its resources into a new body, the Coordination nationale du Renseignement (CNR).

Four days later, the UN Group of Experts issued a new recommendation to the UN Security Council to ease the arms embargo in Côte d’Ivoire and lift a decades-long ban on diamond exports. Non-lethal equipment used for maintaining “public order” no longer required notification to the UN Sanctions Committee. Barak’s wife Nili emailed Ivorian ambassador Gomis to arrange a meeting with Barak.

The UN embargoes were officially lifted on April 29, 2014. After Gomis returned to Israel from Abidjan in May, Barak’s wife invited the ambassador to G Tower for a meeting with Barak and Danny Yatom, the former head of Mossad. Gomis replied to the invitation: “I WAS IN COTE D IVOIRE LAST WEEK AND HAD A CHANCE TO TALK TO THE PRESIDENT HE IS WILLING TO TALK TO THE PRIME MINISTER EHUD BARAK NOT TO ANYONE ELSE.”

Barak emailed his wife: “Just tell Danny that following their request I will meet alone first and then arrange for a trilateral meeting.” Barak and Gomis met in the afternoon on May 29, 2014, and Gomis sent Barak’s wife a thank-you note afterward:

erev tov
i would like to thank your husband for the nice meeting we had yesterday
i will report to the president
thank you again for your patience

Two weeks later, on June 13, 2014, Avigdor Liberman, Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, arrived in Côte d’Ivoire to sign an agreement on defense and internal security, accompanied by more than 50 businessmen, who came to evaluate prospective investments in the country. The dollar amounts of the deals conducted were not made public.

The efforts that Barak had taken with the assistance of contacts like Epstein bore fruit with this formal agreement signed between Israel and Côte d’Ivoire. But the deal was only one of several that the two men were orchestrating on behalf of Israeli interests on the continent.

On August 17, 2014, Doron Cohen emailed Barak with an update on their other endeavors in Africa: “I met the man who has some money in the bank in Africa. Very interesting and very generous offer. Let’s talk.” This time, even Barak was confused by the cryptic message. He replied: “Who is the man who has money in Africa and what does he offer[?] Catch me on the mobile to explain.”

Read more of Drop Site’s reporting on Jeffrey Epstein and Ehud Barak:

Jeffrey Epstein and the Mossad: How The Sex-Trafficker Helped Israel Build a Backchannel to Russia Amid Syrian Civil War

Jeffrey Epstein Helped Broker Israeli Security Agreement With Mongolia

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Jeffrey Epstein facilitated efforts to open a backchannel between Israel and the Kremlin during the Syrian civil war, according to leaked emails from former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

The trove of emails, exchanged at the height of the Syrian civil war between 2013 and 2016, reveal Epstein’s successful efforts to secure a private meeting between Barak and Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss a Russian-brokered end to the conflict, including winning Russian support for a negotiated removal of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Epstein was an invaluable resource for Israel’s former prime minister, who also served as head of intelligence and defense minister throughout his career, sharing whispers from within Russian elite circles and intel on Putin’s interlocutors in Europe and the U.S—and even advising him on how to engage with the Mossad. Barak, fresh out of his role as Israeli defense minister, built a deep portfolio of investments and business relationships around the world with Epstein’s help.

On February 21, 2014, Epstein wrote to Barak, “with civil unrest exploding in ukraine syria, somolia [sic], libya, and the desperation of those in power, isn’t this perfect for you.” Barak replied: “You’re right [in] a way. But not simple to transform it into a cash flow. A subject for Saturday.”

These efforts also provided cover for covert diplomacy on behalf of the Israeli government. Together, Barak and Epstein sought to pressure the Obama administration to either intervene directly in the Syrian war, or make concessions to the Kremlin in exchange for Assad’s graceful exit. In their exchanges, Epstein expressed his frustration at the Obama administration’s failures to contain Tehran, as the two men searched for opportunities to promote U.S. strikes on Iran.

Despite securing a sit-down with Putin in the summer of 2013, they did not succeed in convincing Russia to support Assad’s ouster, but their negotiations set the stage for U.S.-Russia cooperation on disarmament of Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal a few months later.

Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., wrote in his memoir that Israel’s diplomatic leadership was told to “avoid being perceived as a player” in Syria. Clandestine actors sought to shape agendas in Moscow and Washington, while Israeli officials denied involvement and used the media to legitimize “red lines” for air strikes inside Syria.

After their failed attempt to remove Assad, Barak and Epstein sought to leverage the Russian channel again in 2015, as Barak pushed for U.S. strikes on Iran and rejected Obama’s nuclear deal framework. Barak failed to convince the Obama administration to change course. The plot, nevertheless, illustrated Epstein’s knack for steering the superpowers toward Israel’s interests by leveraging a social network that intersected the Israeli, American, and Russian intelligence communities.

The leaked emails come from the same archive previously reported by Drop Site—materials released by the hackers known as Handala and disseminated by Distributed Denial of Secrets. The emails include extensive, previously unpublished documents and photographs from Barak’s inner circle including non-public information verified as accurate by Drop Site. Many documents from the Handala hack were independently validated by records released by the U.S. House Oversight Committee this month.

Our ongoing series reveals how Epstein used elite networks and quasi-official institutions to promote Israeli security interests and enrich his circle of friends and companions. This story follows the same pattern, with the highest of stakes: a chaotic war on Israel’s ever-expanding border, and the balance of power between the United States and Russia.

Barak did not respond to a request for comment. Epstein died in jail in New York during the first Trump administration. The news outlet The (b)(7)(D) previously reported on some of the correspondence.

Stories like this are not easy to do and are only possible with the support of readers. Consider a 501(c)(3) tax-deductible donation today.

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“The Kremlin Holds the Keys”

In the early hours of May 9, 2013, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak emailed his close friend Jeffrey Epstein with an urgent message. “R U awake? if yes, pl call,” Barak wrote Epstein, at 1 a.m. in New York. Shortly after they spoke, Barak emailed again to ask Epstein to keep their conversation private: “jeff pl don’t share the info with any of our friends.”

Epstein replied: “Of course not. I think you should let Putin know you will be in Moscow. See if he wants private time.”

Barak and Epstein built a backchannel to Putin in hopes of winning Russia’s support to remove Syrian president Bashar al-Assad from power, according to leaked emails from Barak’s inbox. Before approaching Putin, Barak and Epstein sought to use one of the major American newspapers to frame Israel’s narrative about the Syrian war, and telegraph a framework for peace talks led by the United States and Russia.

That spring, the Syrian civil war entered its third year. A popular uprising against the Assad regime had rapidly devolved into a brutal sectarian conflict fueled by foreign powers. The flow of Russian and Iranian weapons inside Syria and the threat of their diversion to Israel’s enemies were among Israel’s top security priorities.

Since the early days of the war, Israeli security leaders believed Assad’s downfall was imminent. Barak, then serving as Israel’s Defense Minister, told the Washington Post in December 2011 that Assad’s fall was “inevitable,” and a matter of “weeks...not a matter of months or years.”

More than a year later, Barak’s prediction had still not come true. With Russia and Iran’s support, Assad stubbornly clung to power. Israeli officials, recognizing the need to engage Russia, visited Moscow in January 2013 to discuss concerns about Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile falling into the hands of Hezbollah in Lebanon or Sunni militants linked to al-Qaeda.

Meanwhile, Israel escalated its operations within Syria’s borders. In late January, the Israeli air force conducted an airstrike on Damascus intended to halt the transfer of surface-to-air missiles to Hezbollah. Barak postured about the strikes at a security conference the following month: “When we say something we mean it.” He re-iterated his assertion that Assad’s fall “is coming imminently,” and when it happens, “this will be a major blow to the Iranians and Hezbollah.”

But Assad still refused to bend, and Hezbollah’s strategic gains on Israel’s borders increased the pressure to remove Iran’s man in Damascus. Rapprochement with the Kremlin offered a solution.

Barak stepped down from his post in March 2013 after the failure of his new political party to contest Knesset elections. His retirement from formal office, he said, meant that he now would have time to “study, write, live and enjoy.” Instead, he immediately began working with Epstein to conduct covert diplomatic work in support of Israeli security interests abroad.

The key to Barak’s backchannel diplomacy with Russia was his relationship with Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian-Israeli oligarch and owner of the multinational conglomerate Renova Group. Barak offered his services as a strategic consultant to Renova, a position that would generate a lucrative salary for himself and further his ambitions in the global mining and energy sectors, while enhancing his access to powerful figures in the Russian elite.

Barak kept Epstein abreast of every update on his courtship with Vekselberg. As Barak progressed toward a formal agreement with Renova, Epstein counseled Barak on contract negotiations, writing on April 27, “I think you should propose all up front. no need for a written agreement. until later.”

Beneath the surface of mundane contract details, Epstein and Barak worked on a covert plan with the support of Israeli intelligence—regime change in Damascus.

The Israeli military strategist, often described as “emotionally handicapped,” relied on Epstein to help him craft his messaging when dealing with other political officials and business elites. Epstein, for instance, asked Barak to wait until they could speak privately before Barak notified intelligence leaders of a deal with Vekselberg: “do not go to number 1 too quickly, I understnad more now so we should speak.” The euphemism “number 1” is a moniker used to refer to the head of the Mossad, dating back to Barak’s days as director of Israeli military intelligence, when the Mossad director’s identity was kept secret.

As the Renova contract was being finalized—a $1 million advance and a $1 million quarterly retainer—Barak planned a trip to Moscow on May 12 to meet with Vekselberg.

A few hours after Barak informed Epstein of his Moscow plans, Epstein shared some intelligence about one of Putin’s interlocutors, the head of the Council of Europe: “on may 20 [thorbjorn] jagland is going to see putin in sochi, jagland asked that I make myself availble to meet with him sometine in june, to explain how russia can structure deals in order to encourage western investment, I never met him, wanted you to know.” Barak, who was working closely with Epstein to cut deals in the Eurasian energy sector, wrote back: “i know Jagland for long time. probably we have to talk about it.”

Epstein responded with a short list of past and present American national security leaders who, his response implied, could also be useful in Russia talks. He wrote, “Ok, panetta??, Alexander, Clarke?”—likely referring to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, NSA Director Keith Alexander, and Cybersecurity Czar Richard Clarke.

Upon his return from Moscow, Barak contacted George Tenet, former director of the CIA, to pitch a talk he (Barak) could give at Allen & Company’s Sun Valley event in July—a “summer camp” for billionaires and elite politicians to convene and negotiate deals. The topic? “Think of Syria, CW. (+background of Iran’s elections & nuke program, Global Terror, North Korea etc). Probably briefing for selected group.” Barak was not recorded on the guest list.

In the meantime, Epstein and Barak crafted an op-ed for Barak to publish that could shape the narrative for a Russian-led transition in Syria that secured Israel’s interests.

On May 19, Barak sent Epstein a draft titled “The Kremlin Holds the Keys,” which argued that Assad’s regime had permanently lost its legitimacy, and Russia should take leadership to negotiate a swift end to the war, or see “years of bloody massacres…in a ‘no man’s land’ Syria.” A “post-Assad” Syria, wrote Barak, was a foregone conclusion; it was now up to Russia to decide whether or not to “convince Assad to leave,” or prolong the war.

Barak’s editorial proposed that the U.S. and its allies should accept a “price” for a Russia-led solution to the war. He acknowledged that removing Assad from power should not compromise Russia’s “interests and perspectives” in Syria—namely, Russia’s deep ties within the Syrian security apparatus, and its access to naval bases at Tartus and Latakia. He framed the chemical weapons threat as a decisive issue requiring initiative by the Russians, who knew “the generals of the chemical weapons units on a first name basis.”

The backdrop of Barak’s editorial was Russia’s looming delivery of advanced weapons systems to Syria, including anti-ship missiles and advanced air defenses, which threatened to further entrench Israel’s enemies. In the weeks prior, Israel began escalating its operations inside Syria, conducting more air strikes on Damascus to block Iranian missiles bound for Hezbollah; Russia responded by sending its warships into the Mediterranean.

Barak felt enormous urgency to secure a face-to-face meeting with Putin as soon as possible, before the conflict escalated further. Besides Epstein, he also requested comments from Ron Dermer, close confidante to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was preparing to become Israel’s next ambassador to the U.S. Barak wrote to Dermer, “i don’t care how you’ve corrected it. yours will be always better in clarity and conciseness than mine. try earlier. i don’t want events to overwhelm us.” Dermer swiftly returned a refined copy with more fluent English.

As was typical of Epstein’s style, he sent back a rough cut riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. Unlike Dermer’s narrower cut, Epstein significantly revised Barak’s piece, and added a new title: “Wait Until It’s Too Late.” Epstein’s draft was more forceful and polemical, scolding the U.S. for failing to act, and adding an unambiguous statement of Israel’s national interest that was absent in Barak’s draft: “Israel cannot simply wait until it’s too late.”

Epstein did indeed wait until it was too late to send his edits; Barak wrote back: “Unfortunately we came to a deadline and had to sent somewhat less brilliant text. I hope one of the big three will buy it.”

The New York Times rejected Barak’s editorial. The Times’s international opinion editor wrote: “We are potentially interested but we feel that the key part of the piece is left vague. Proposing a Russian-mediated solution is only an appealing op-ed for us if the mechanics are spelled out. Barak is a military man and an experienced negotiator so I have no doubt he has something specific in mind…What does he think the price will be? What is the Russian incentive to budge now?”

Epstein had conveyed a similar criticism of Barak’s draft: “I thought the article should have more of a headline, so that you are clearly associated with a [position].” After the rejection from NYT, Barak wrote Epstein back: “U R Right.”

Epstein then expanded on his own aggressive view, arguing that the U.S. was waiting too long to intervene when it came to Palestinians and Iran: “I really like the Wait until its too Late, to be your critiqe of the communities foreign policy. Years ago , things moved slowly, stalin took weeks to defend. months of prepartion. strategies etc. today these things force decision, for good and for bad .. The U. S wait policy , the palestinain wait policy, iran wait policy,”.

Barak decided not to address the specific questions posed by the NYT editor. He wrote to his spokesman on May 21: “tell them they can get a full description of answers to all their questions in a different piece…not now because it will empty the main message.” The Times rejection was followed by rejections from Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. The op-ed was eventually published, without Epstein’s changes, in The Telegraph on May 30, 2013.

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“The messages were conveyed to the top players”

Upon returning to the Russian presidency in May 2012, Putin sought to neutralize widespread street protests which, he claimed, were fomented by external agents funded by U.S.-backed NGOs. Putin had a longstanding, mutually hostile relationship to the Clinton family. The protests against his election, which he pinned squarely on the shoulders of the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, ratcheted those tensions ever higher, foreshadowing a contest that would consume American politics in the years to come.

Watching the collapsing governments of the so-called “Arab Spring” from afar, and seeking to prevent a similar “color revolution” in Russia, Putin began a balancing act of centralizing political and economic authority while preserving channels for foreign capital investment. Epstein, close with former President Bill Clinton, had a role to play.

Epstein once bragged to a journalist that he “often flew to Moscow to see Vladimir Putin,” and enjoyed close ties with Russian business and political elites. The American financier specialized in moving money across borders, and his expertise would be useful in stemming capital flight from Russia amid Putin’s crackdown on “foreign agents.”

On May 22, 2013, Epstein informed Barak he’d received—and rejected—an invitation to meet with Putin at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum the next month: “Putin asked that i meet him in st petersburg the same time as his economic conference…i told him no, . If he wants to meet he will need to set aside real time and privacy.”

Barak found his own official reason to attend the conference: supporting a technology incubator in Moscow led by Vekselberg. The Kremlin was threatening to cut funding for the Skolkovo Innovation Center — Russia’s “Silicon Valley,” which Renova was heavily involved in developing.

Renova sent Barak an email with talking points to discuss in St. Petersburg and included the contact information for Putin’s foreign policy aide, Yury Ushakov, which Barak could use to request face-time with the president.

Barak reached out to Putin’s aide two days later, on May 26, to request a meeting with Putin in St. Petersburg just prior to the conference. “I would like to meet with President Putin for 30-40min at an early opportunity. Preferably before the main June Events,” Barak wrote, adding, “I’m fully aware of the intense burden on the President’s schedule these days, but I urge you to draw the President’s attention to my request.”

Epstein was eager to get an update about the Russians’ reply, and he emailed to confirm if Barak was coming to Henry Kissinger’s 90th birthday party in New York on June 3, 2013. That event would also be attended by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, the lead broker for U.S. policy on Syria and Iran. Barak replied: “I’ll attend Dr. K birthday. Re Putin I’ll talk to you later.”

Ushakov’s chief of staff acknowledged Barak’s message on June 5, and passed along Ushakov’s direct phone number to coordinate the meeting details.

Then, on June 7, the first of Edward Snowden’s bombshell revelations on the NSA dragnet PRISM surveillance was published, casting a shadow over Barak and Epstein’s planning. Barak sent Epstein an email with subject line “NYT missing editorial,” referring to The New York Times editorial board’s “President Obama’s Dragnet,” a scathing piece on the PRISM revelations that day.

The two men recognized the Snowden leaks could undermine the Obama administration’s leverage in negotiations with Putin. Barak asked Epstein to read the article, in which the NYT editors claimed the president had “lost all credibility” by abusing his executive powers. Barak wrote, “Find and read it re our conversation about what could EH [attorney general Eric Holder] have done to help his boss.” Epstein replied: “any confirmation on st petersburg?”

Despite making contact with Ushakov, Barak’s consulting company Hyperion had still not been registered for the conference. On June 10, Barak emailed Boris Collardi, CEO of Julius Baer, a Swiss private bank where he was also an advisor: “I need your office help. Russia is not yet orderly run place. I’ve got an official confirmation of a meeting with Putin but Hyperion’s registration file had not yet confirmed. Probably they never heard the name. I think that if JB will approach the organizing body […] on my behalf they will conclude it within hours.”

With Julius Baer’s help, Barak swiftly locked in his appointment. In less than 24 hours, Ushakov’s office confirmed the appointment time. Barak wrote back, trying to convey the urgency and importance of the meeting: “I’d never spent the time of the President and won’t do it now. The meeting IS important. So make sure it’s done during the SPEIF.”

The same week, Israeli intelligence officials used official channels to engage with other stakeholders in Syria, as Mossad director Tamir Pardo arrived in Ankara for talks with Turkish spy chief Hakan Fidan.

On June 12, Epstein sent Barak another piece of intelligence to prepare him for the meeting in St. Petersburg: “putin will re do his staff in the summer. bringing only very trusted people closer… more info on phone or face to face.”

Putin’s meeting with Barak was not logged on any SPIEF event calendars for the SPIEF conference. But Barak’s emails confirm a meeting scheduled for the evening of June 20, and a Russian journalist saw Barak waiting to speak with Putin again late in the evening of June 21, after Angela Merkel’s visit to the Hermitage.

On June 24, Barak sent an email back to Ushakov, reporting that the backchannel communication was successful. Barak confirmed that messages from Putin had been transmitted to relevant parties: “[Please] note and convey to your Boss that the two messages were conveyed yesterday night fully and accurately to the top players.” Barak’s email did not specify the identities of the players or the content of the messages.

The previous day, Edward Snowden arrived at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport to seek asylum. Barak acknowledged Ushakov’s difficult position, and invited him to follow up later. “I understand that in the meantime new issues are crowding on your plate,” Barak wrote. If you need more details I’m on the same #.”

“Getting Authorization Now For Iran”

Two months after the St. Petersburg conference, on August 21, 2013, opposition-controlled areas in Ghouta, Syria were struck by rockets containing sarin gas, killing and injuring thousands in the suburbs of Damascus. Ten days later, President Obama delivered a speech at the Rose Garden of the White House, announcing he’d seek congressional authorization for U.S. strikes on Syria, enforcing the “red line” he had drawn exactly one year prior.

Epstein emailed Barak as soon as news of Obama’s speech broke, on August 31, to propose publishing his shelved Syria narrative: “Time to write the wait ‘until too late’ op Ed ???” Barak responded, solemnly: “[U.S. strikes] might be launched before the op ed will be accepted by any major paper.” Epstein disagreed, suggesting any action would likely occur after the G20 summit on September 5, and Congress’s return the week after: “it will be at minmumm a week or two not before g20.” An hour later, Barak agreed: “After listening to POTUS speech, You’re probably right.”

In the same email thread, Epstein offered Barak guidance on how to ratchet the pressure on the U.S. to strike Iran: “I would use the opportunity to compare it with iran. The solutions become more compelx with time not less. i think many people would like your views on egypt. syria, etc. russias role.? i think you might point out the gassing of ‘women and children’ is an expressions from the 20th centry. women are no longer equiv to children,. civilians. vs combatants . only.”

Epstein wished Congress would approve bombing Iran after bombing Syria, writing, “hopefully someone suggests getting authorization now for Iran. the congress woudl do it.” Barak did not draft or publish an op-ed on Epstein’s proposed theme at that time.

On September 9, 2013, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry floated the idea that Assad could avert strikes by surrendering “every single bit” of chemical weapons.

Reporters regarded Kerry’s comment as an “off-hand remark” or a gaffe, and a U.S. State Department spokeswoman tried to brush it off as a rhetorical comment. But Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov took the statement seriously, and offered a plan to peacefully impose international control over Assad’s stockpile. The next day, Obama expressed his approval of Lavrov’s proposal to avoid the use of force.

Putin published an op-ed in the New York Times, “A Plea For Caution,” attempting to sell the same solution to the American public. “It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States,” he wrote. “Is it in America’s long-term interest? I doubt it. Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan ‘you’re either with us or against us.’”

U.S. and Israeli positions rapidly converged toward an international framework for regime change that resembled Barak’s proposal, using chemical weapons disarmament as an on-ramp to a “transitional government” backed by the United Nations.

Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. explicitly called on the international community to remove Assad. Michael Oren told The Jerusalem Post, “We always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran.” At the end of September, Oren stepped down from his ambassador post, replaced by Dermer—the silent editor of Barak’s summer op-ed. The UN mission to destroy Syria’s stockpile began in October, and UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon announced Russia-sponsored peace talks in Geneva soon after.

Russia became the indispensable broker after the Ghouta attack, exactly as Barak urged. But, in spite of the disarmament effort, the parallel peace talks in Geneva stalled out almost immediately over the question of Assad’s future. As a pre-condition for joining the Geneva talks, Kerry demanded Iran agree to Assad’s removal and a transitional government; Iran refused, and the peace process fell apart before it began. The U.S. and Israel ultimately accepted a Russia-led solution on chemical weapons, but failed to remove Assad from power.

“I am not political”

Jeffrey Epstein portrayed himself as an “apolitical” financier. But the backchannel diplomacy in Russia reveals him as a political “fixer” who arranged access to senior Russian political figures with the goal of advancing Israeli national security interests, often in direct contradiction to the United States’ national security strategy.

In April 2015, the U.S. and Iran agreed on a nuclear deal framework in Lausanne, Switzerland, a development that cut against the preferences of the Israeli government, as well as Epstein’s own expressed hopes for a U.S. attack on Iran. TIME magazine asked Barak to write an editorial on the subject. In his essay “Iran Has Escaped a Noose,” Barak argued that only tough sanctions and military force could restrain Tehran, and sanctions would become difficult to reassemble after a deal was signed.

Barak suggested instead a “surgical strike” on Iranian nuclear facilities, to set Iran “five years backward” and deter future cheating. “The possibility [of strikes] should not be rhetorically holstered,” he wrote, “It may, finally, later down the stream be the only language Iran understands.”

He sent the article to Epstein shortly after it was published, and asked to speak on the phone. The same day, he sent a video of Bill Clinton discussing negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear program in 1994. Barak wrote a note about Clinton’s video in an email to another colleague: “Obama is highly vulnerable among Democrats on the Iran issue…Clinton 21yrs ago…talked of North Korea but exactly the same words. NK is now a nuclear player.”

Barak once again leaned on Epstein to get a line to Moscow before the Iran nuclear deal was finalized. He visited New York City from April 21 to April 24, where received Epstein’s help to once again attend the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum that summer. Epstein connected Barak to Sergey Belyakov, a former Russian economic minister with ties to Russian intelligence, to help Barak get an invitation and set up meetings with senior Russian officials. Epstein also directed Barak to convey that senior Russian officials including Putin should also contact Epstein directly for meetings.

Epstein wrote on April 23, 2015: “I spoke to sergey…he will help. I suggest you send him a note that states that you think Putin and his advisors would benefit from spending some time with Jeffrey to discuss markets currency and the financial system in the new world of zero interest rates. and that I am not political. He has to answer certain questions.” Epstein’s request to again add Barak came as the Israeli government was attempting to manage an increasingly delicate balancing act in its ties with Moscow and Washington. He added: “when you receive the list [of Russians] from sergey, he asked that we prioritze who we would find most interesting.”

As promised, Belyakov delivered Barak a formal invitation to speak on a panel at SPIEF, and a list of important names for Barak’s consideration. In St. Petersburg in June 2015, Barak met with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, Central Bank governor Elvira Nabiulina, and other Russian elites.

Epstein was not merely a fixer for Barak, but also a friend and advisor, who collaborated with him at high-levels to promote Israeli security interests. The correspondence between Barak and Epstein, as well as publicly released information about Epstein’s travel and activities during this period, point to a significant degree of collaboration between the two men, involving numerous governments in negotiations intended to serve Israeli security interests. In a note sent by Barak to Epstein after the St. Petersburg forum in 2015, he rattled off a long list of heads of state, senior officials, and business magnates he had met, reporting “great meetings” with all.

Around the same time, Epstein was known to have conducted meetings with several Obama administration officials, including former U.S. ambassador to Russia, and later CIA chief William Burns, as well as Obama White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler. While shedding light on his efforts with Barak to secure Israeli interests in Syria, the emails leave open the question of other interactions that Epstein may have engaged in with U.S. and other government officials.

While the collaboration between the two men did not depose Assad or trigger a U.S. attack on Iran, the negotiated outcome in Syria did reduce the perceived threat to Israel. They also succeeded in opening a diplomatic channel between Moscow and Tel Aviv that would be vital to the next decade of war. Epstein had also helped make Barak a wealthy man shortly after he left his role as defense minister, in a collaboration that would last for years.

A day after sending his summary of the St. Petersburg trip, Barak messaged Epstein again to re-affirm his gratitude: “Thx for setting the whole thing together.”

It’s well known that Epstein had personal ties to Israel, including to senior political officials like Barak and Ehud Olmert, and that he donated to organizations like Friends of the IDF. But Epstein’s activities in Mongolia show, for the first time, that he facilitated a deal that led to a security agreement between Israel and other nations.

The leaked emails were released by Handala, a pro-Palestinian hacking group with speculated ties to Iran. The documents were posted by Distributed Denial of Secrets, a non-profit whistleblower and file-sharing website. Although the emails lack cryptographic signatures, they contain a vast amount of unpublished private photographs and documents from Barak and his inner circle, including information that was not publicly known at the time. (More on the verification at the bottom of this article.)

Messages spanning from 2013 to 2016 show intimate, oftentimes daily correspondence between Barak and Epstein. Their conversations address political and business strategy as Epstein coordinated meetings for Barak with other members of his elite circles. In 2008, Epstein pled guilty to charges of “procuring a minor for prostitution”; Barak has denied knowledge of Epstein’s sex trafficking and abuse of minors.

This article is the first in a series that will explore Epstein’s work on behalf of Israeli military interests, particularly as it relates to his role in the development of Israel’s cyber warfare industry.

The rise of Israel’s cyber surveillance and weapons industry has been one of the most significant geopolitical developments of the past two decades, making sophisticated hacking tools available as “turnkey” packages to police and military around the world. The spread of “zero-click” exploits that require no interaction from targets, coupled with the proliferation of web-connected devices in homes, offices, and manufacturing facilities, has transformed what is possible for spy agencies and those in their orbit.

In the shadows of Israel’s cyber boom was Jeffrey Epstein, who exploited his network of political and financial elites to help Barak, and ultimately the Israeli government itself, to increase the penetration of Israel’s spy-tech firms into foreign countries. Epstein actively supported the Israeli intelligence industry via venture capital investments and contributions to charitable organizations – “non-governmental” entities that laid the foundation for official Israeli security deal-making. The story of Israel’s 2017 security agreement with Mongolia is a window into the true nature and scope of Epstein’s operation.

Doing this work is not cost-free—even the relatively modest first story below invited baseless legal threats—and it’s only possible with support from our readers. If you haven’t already, please upgrade to a paid subscription or make a one-time contribution.

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How Jeffrey Epstein Helped to Broker an Israeli Security Agreement With Mongolia

By Murtaza Hussain and Ryan Grim

In April 2013, almost exactly one month after leaving his post as Israel’s Defense Minister, Ehud Barak visited Mongolia to meet President Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj and top security officials. The Mongolia plan had been set in motion in January of that year, while Barak, the country’s former prime minister, was still serving in the Israeli government. The broader goal of the meeting was to promote the Israeli defense industry’s introduction into the Mongolian market, while seeking business opportunities for clients of Barak’s consulting business. During his visit, Barak received a tour of the Special Operations Forces Training Center near Ulaanbataar.

Not physically present, but helping coordinate events behind the scenes, was Jeffrey Epstein, according to a trove of hacked emails between Epstein and Barak posted by Distributed Denial of Secrets and confirmed as authentic by Drop Site. Epstein, a New York financier and elite fixer who later became notorious for his role as a sex trafficker of underage girls, died in jail in 2019. In addition to his criminal activities, he also used his elite connections to broker an agreement for Israel, the emails reveal.

Barak’s visit to Mongolia aligned with a visit by Terje Rød-Larsen, president of the International Peace Institute, a non-profit think tank specializing in multilateral diplomacy. Barak and Rød-Larsen were both members of Epstein’s social circle, and well-acquainted; Rød-Larsen was a key mediator in the 1993 and 1995 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, when Barak led the Israel Defense Forces. Before Barak left government, at least by 2010, the two maintained an informal backchannel in Barak’s personal email inbox, scheduling meetings and sharing articles on international diplomacy.

On April 21, 2013, Barak arranged a meeting at Epstein’s New York mansion for an “overview of the coming days.” The next day, Rød-Larsen sent Barak an email with details for a proposed advisory team consisting of “internationally-recognized experts” who could facilitate foreign investment in key industries in Mongolia. The draft proposal highlighted the great “opportunity” of Mongolia’s “massive natural resources (mostly minerals and metals),” promising to accelerate Mongolia’s economic growth and bolster its international status. Barak replied to Rød-Larsen’s proposal: “Thoughtful, far looking and necessary.”

The archived conversations show Barak and Epstein arranged two more meetings in New York on April 22 and April 24. Barak landed in Ulaanbataar in the evening of April 26, according to an itinerary emailed by the Consul General of Mongolia to Israel. Early the next morning, Barak tried to reach Epstein for a final phone call: “Jeff hi[.] I can’t reach you on any phone. Pl try calling me. In about an hour I shall start meetings here. It’ll be more complicated.”

On April 27, 2013, the itinerary shows Barak met with the Secretary of the National Security Council of Mongolia, Enkhtuvshin Tsagaandari, followed by President Elbegdorj, the Foreign Minister, and the Defense Minister. At Barak’s request, the CEO of Israel Weapon Industries (a spin-off of state-owned Israel Military Industries) delivered a gift to Tsagaandari, a Jericho pistol in a box engraved with the date, and a message: “in appreciation of friendship, cooperation, and good faith.”

Barak saw clear opportunities for profit in Mongolia. During the visit, Barak sent an email to Russian-Israeli oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, asking to speak urgently on the phone. In the days leading up to the trip, Barak had negotiated a consulting agreement to develop energy, mining, and other industrial opportunities for Vekselberg’s Renova Group conglomerate. Barak wrote to Vekselberg on April 28: “I’m in Mongolia. Already met with most of the leaders from the President downwards and several business people…I have a thought that could probably help.”

On April 29, in between meetings with Mongolian officials and events marking Mongolia’s presidency of the Community of Democracies, Rød-Larsen chaired a panel discussion on the Arab Spring at a democracy promotion event in Ulaanbataar, which Barak joined as a participant. The same day, Rød-Larsen signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Mongolian Foreign Minister Luvsanvandan Bold to deepen the country’s cooperation with IPI.

Epstein began recruiting his associates to participate in IPI’s Mongolia advisory council. On September 28, 2013, Epstein emailed Barak to float the idea of working alongside Lawrence Summers, a Harvard economist who served in the Clinton and Obama administrations: “spent the afternoon with Larry Summers, I think he would work well with you.” Barak responded affirmatively: “I think greatly of him especially in re to advise for Sovereign Heads. We can complement each other effectively with a lot of synergies.”

In December 2013, IPI submitted a “Mongolia Presidential Advisory Agreement” to Mongolian authorities, establishing the group of experts who would advise on institutional reforms to promote “global peace and security.” The agreement also stipulated a $100,000 payment to each member of the Mongolia Presidential Advisory Board, according to a 2020 investigation by Norwegian newspaper Dagens Næringsliv (DN).

On January 24, 2014, the Advisory Board held its inaugural meeting at the Intercontinental Hotel in Davos, Switzerland, attended by the Mongolian President and National Security Advisor, Rød-Larsen, and Lawrence Summers. Joining by telephone were Kjell Bondevik (former PM of Norway), Kevin Rudd (former PM of Australia), Barak, and Epstein. Epstein’s professional affiliation in the meeting agenda was listed as “financier.”

The Davos meeting coincided with that year’s World Economic Forum (WEF), an annual gathering of global elites. News reports confirm Summers attended that year’s confab. The Intercontinental Hotel is a hub of action at Davos, and that same evening, according to photos posted online, WEF founder Klaus Schwab attended “Mongolia Night” with the nation’s president.

According to draft minutes from the meeting attached in an email to Barak from the IPI, Summers proposed that Mongolia create a sovereign wealth fund to invest “aggressively” in equities using proceeds from commodity exports. He also advised improving relations with the multinational mining company, Rio Tinto. Epstein recommended an evaluation of “all of the country’s financial structures and institutions,” in addition to the sovereign wealth fund. Barak advised that Mongolia’s armed forces should focus on “internal security issues,” especially “the need for good intelligence.” Bondevik described the importance of civil society programs and the “Scandinavian welfare model” as a method of promoting good governance.”

Notes From Mongolia Presidential Advisory Board Meeting

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Bondevik would later deny that Epstein was present at the meeting, telling DN that, “I do not remember Epstein participating in our conference calls and his name was not mentioned in this context.” Drop Site’s email to The Oslo Center, an NGO that lists Bondevik as its founder and executive chair, went unanswered. Epstein and Barak continued to correspond regularly, with Epstein counseling the former Israeli politician on how to leverage his contacts to make money. On February 21, Epstein wrote to Barak, “with civil unrest exploding in ukraine syria, somolia [sic], libya, and the desperation of those in power, isn’t this perfect for you.” Barak replied: “You’re right [in] a way. But not simple to transform it into a cash flow. A subject for Saturday.”

By February 24, 2014, Barak had not yet been paid for his participation in the Advisory Board, and he sent an email to Epstein: “Thx for the time and energy you invest in supporting my efforts to bring home more bread...should I send Terja [sic] my Transfer info? Or wait for him to approach me?”

Epstein replied: “yes to terje, im always there for you.”

“We Should Send it to Jeff”

Epstein’s involvement with the Advisory Board deepened further in the following months. On April 28, 2014, he emailed Barak to set up a phone call to discuss Mongolia. Barak, though a year out of government, was still heavily involved in unofficial national security engagements— high-level state visits as a private citizen, consultation on security issues—sometimes followed by an official agreement with the Israeli government.

On May 2, 2014, Epstein pinged Barak to remind him to deliver a Mongolia proposal to Rød-Larsen. The following day, Barak sent Rød-Larsen a detailed policy memo covering military intelligence, emergency services, and a national rapid response force. He offered a plan to “modernize Sigint, Humint and Visint capabilities”—referring to electronic surveillance and the building of spy networks—“including UAV’s and mobile cellular networks monitoring systems.” The memo also recommended procurement of anti-tank missiles, high-precision artillery, and air defense systems. The proposal’s letterhead bears the official Emblem of Israel, which requires approval from the Israeli Minister of the Interior, over Barak’s name.

Barak Proposal

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Barak likely stood to gain personally from these policy proposals. In the closing paragraph of the memo, Barak offered “to support Mongolia on other issues like modern agriculture, water [management] (including for the mining industry) and modern medical and diagnostic centers - based on Israeli experience in those areas.” Barak was concurrently pursuing his own agreements with several Israeli companies in the fields of mining, agri-biotech, and medical equipment, according to his emails.

For the next year, progress stalled: IPI tried unsuccessfully to schedule a one-on-one follow-up meeting between Barak and President Elbegdorj in late 2014. Then, in March 2015, Epstein loaned Barak $1,000,000 to fund an early-stage Israeli startup called Reporty Homeland Security. The company was co-founded by Pinhas Buchris, a former commander of both Israel’s Unit 8200 military intelligence unit and Unit 81, a high-tech intelligence unit. Reporty (now rebranded as “Carbyne”) enables emergency dispatchers and security services to retrieve precise location data and live video/audio feed from phones. The company was being piloted in local municipalities in Israel, and they planned for an international launch in November 2015.

On September 26, 2015, Epstein invited Barak, Rød-Larsen, President Elbegdorj and Foreign Minister Lundeg Purevsuren to his home in New York for dinner. Purevsuren emailed Barak and his wife later to say he enjoyed the meeting, and made plans to visit Israel. Five days after the dinner, on October 1, Rød-Larsen authorized payment of $100,000 to Epstein from IPI funds earmarked for the Mongolia Advisory Board, according to the Norwegian newspaper Dagens Næringsliv (DN). IPI has denied that Epstein ever received any payment from the Institute and DN found no explicit confirmation Epstein received the funds.

Internal IPI emails obtained by DN show another effort by Rød-Larsen to compensate Epstein. In January 2016, after Board member Kevin Rudd refused payment for his participation, Rød-Larsen proposed to give Rudd’s share to Epstein. He wrote in an email: “For forms sake we should send it to Jeff, however I am sure we will get it back many fold!”

For the next several months, Epstein and Barak pitched Reporty’s emergency response platform to potential investors. According to the leaked emails, Epstein arranged for Barak and Reporty co-founder Amir Elichai to meet Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures partners Andrew McCormack and James Fitzgerald in New York in February. After the meeting, McCormack sent a follow-up email politely declining to invest; Valar was not convinced Reporty could “replace” legacy emergency notification systems. Elichai asked McCormack to reconsider: “We are not asking/forcing [governments] to change their current systems...We want to be the ‘Man in the middle.’”

The former prime minister used his national security résumé to open more doors: he pitched Reporty to Singapore National Security Minister Teo Chee Hean, and secured a pilot program with the Singaporean government. Barak introduced Elichai to an Israeli investor in Brazil who offered to pitch Reporty to the Rio de Janeiro head of security services.

According to investor materials emailed to Barak, the Reporty team also planned to deploy in Mongolia. A May 2016 investor presentation slide displayed a ‘pin’ on Mongolia with an annotation: “New region coming soon.”

In late 2017, Mongolian and Israeli security officials met in Ulaanbaatar. They agreed to cooperate on emergency services, and discussed “introducing Israeli advanced technology into [the] Mongolian emergency service.” In 2019, medical officers from the Israel Defense Forces participated in joint military exercises with the Mongolian Armed Forces for the first time.

While he played a vital part in helping lay the groundwork for the 2017 agreement between the two countries, based on his private correspondence with Barak it is unclear if Epstein helped execute this final step. Epstein’s emails to Barak’s personal inbox abruptly stopped shortly after April 22, 2016, the week of Ghislaine Maxwell’s deposition about her email contact with Epstein in Giuffre v. Maxwell in the Southern District of New York. Barak’s use of his personal email also tapered off around this time.

“Enjoy the Island”

Epstein’s alleged ties to foreign governments and intelligence agencies have been a source of speculation for years. But his role in the Mongolia Advisory Board plan and his intimate contacts with Barak, private sector tech firms tied to Israel’s security establishment, influential non-governmental organizations, and senior foreign government officials, show for the first time that he engaged in activities that altered the relationship between states—in this case, building formal security ties between the government of Israel and Mongolia.

After Epstein’s death in prison, some members of the Mongolia Advisory Board suffered fallout from their connections to him. Rød-Larsen resigned as the president of the IPI in 2020, after revelations that he received a personal loan from Epstein in 2013. The IPI has denied that the loan was connected to Institute activities or finances.

When the scandal of Rød-Larsen’s ties with Epstein became public, IPI issued a statement condemning Epstein, and hired ”Big Four” accounting firm KPMG to conduct a forensic audit. The auditors found five donations to IPI from Epstein-affiliated corporate entities between 2010 and 2019, totaling $650,000. IPI tax filings showed three contributions from Epstein in 2017 alone, amounting to $375,000. The organization announced that it would donate the equivalent sums to support victims of human trafficking and sexual assault.

IPI declined to comment on issues related to the prior leadership of the organization. Messages sent to an address associated with Larsen did not receive reply. Barak did not respond to a request for comment. Barak has previously denied his continued role in Israeli agreements after leaving office.

In the years since Barak’s ties to Epstein became publicly known, the former Israeli prime minister has attempted to downplay their connection. Barak admitted to visiting Epstein at his Manhattan residences and private Caribbean island, and he acknowledged working with Epstein to find business opportunities after leaving public office in Israel. But he said he only saw Epstein “on occasion,” and had no knowledge of his involvement in sex trafficking or abuse of young girls. Describing the disgraced financier as an enigma whose illegal private activities were kept secret, Barak called Epstein “a terrible version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

The emails reveal a close friendship between the two men. They bonded over music and mathematics, and Epstein at one point wrote Barak: “there are very few people that I enjoy spending time with, you are unique.” Barak often leaned on Epstein for guidance, and in his February 24, 2014 email about payment for the Mongolia Advisory Board, Barak signed off by sending a Skype contact to Epstein and asking him to provide a direct personal evaluation.

“Let me know once you’ve talked to him. And your impression,” Barak wrote. “In the meantime enjoy the Island.”

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The Leaked Ehud Barak Emails

The two email accounts belonging to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and leaked by the “Handala Hack Team” in October 2024 contain numerous corroborated details and contact information from Barak and his family and friends, as well as dozens of previously unpublished images and scanned documents from his personal and professional life. These materials reveal information that was not publicly available at the time the email leaks occurred, including a mention of Epstein’s “birthday book,” as well as private photographs, contracts, and memos from Barak’s work with the Mongolia Advisory Board and other consulting roles.

Handala announced the leaked “Israel Prime Minister Emails” on October 2, 2024. The release was accompanied by several of Barak’s private photos, including a “mirror selfie,” a Crusader-inspired knight costume, and the former prime minister’s Israeli passport. Other emails from the leak were previously reported by Reason Magazine in a story about Epstein’s connections to Barak and individuals in the global tech sector.

Handala is a pro-Palestinian hacking group that first appeared in December 2023, targeting mostly Israeli institutions and political figures for data theft and public leaks.

Researchers have speculated that Handala is affiliated with Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence. An analysis of the release by Drop Site News discovered a consistent email exporter timestamp offset corresponding to a local timezone of UTC+04:30 (Asia/Kabul, or Iran Daylight Time). Iran stopped observing Daylight Savings Time on September 22, 2022. The Handala dataset coverage ends in 2018, suggesting the files may have been exfiltrated several years before they were published.

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Waqas Ahmed contributed reporting