The key to the Jeffrey Epstein mystery can be found during the years when he began to advance from cheap hustler to global fixer. At the end of the 1980s the Soviet bloc crumbled and both liberals and conservatives in the West (plus even a few on the so-called ‘far right’!) wrongly believed that Russia’s geopolitical threat had gone for ever. Russian and Israeli intelligence services saw things differently. One man’s crisis was another’s opportunity. Old alliances between international Jewish capitalists and Soviet communists became more relevant than ever. And in this dawning age of the oligarch, the hyper-intelligent and hyper-ruthless Jeffrey Epstein found his métier.
In this article and podcast I shall try to fill in the gaps so far as one important aspect of the Epstein story is concerned. I’m not really interested in ‘data dumps’ – vast collections of unevaluated intelligence including anonymous testimony from so-called ‘eyewitnesses’ of doubtful reliability: what I’ve done during the past week is to look at a certain section of the recently published data and correlate it with what I know in my own specialist field.
Jeffrey Epstein made up in chutzpah and native cunning for what he lacked in formal education and family contacts. He was given his first job aged 21 in 1974 (despite lacking academic credentials) teaching maths and physics at the socially elite Dalton School in New York, by its headmaster Donald Barr, a wartime US intelligence officer. Barr was born into a New York Jewish family but converted to Catholicism. It’s an interesting coincidence that his son William Barr became Donald Trump’s Attorney General.
William Barr helped to shield Donald Trump from investigation of his many suspicious ties to Vladimir Putin’s Russia – just as the same William Barr as a young Justice Department official in the Reagan Administration during the 1980s had helped arrange legal pardons for several leading figures in the Iran-Contra scandal – men who conspired with arms dealers and Israeli agents in the most important international scandal of the ‘80s.
And this same William Barr – loyal righthand man to Donald Trump – just happens to be the son of the man who gave Jeffrey Epstein his first job back in 1974.
Epstein used the social connections that this teaching post at an elite school gave him to make his next step up the ladder.
He was foremost among many ‘street smart’ hustlers employed in the Wall Street firm Bear Stearns and epitomised the ‘greed is good’ ethos of the late ’70s and ’80s. Around the same time, evidence is emerging that Epstein made his first Russian connections, with members of the Russian mafia known as the bratva then operating in the Brighton Beach neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York.
But Epstein’s ambition stretched much further, especially when (soon after leaving Bear Stearns to set up his own business) he met a very well-connected British arms dealer, Douglas Leese.
Epstein met Leese in 1981, when he was 28 and the British arms dealer was 54. The initial connection seems to have been via Leese’s son Nick, who had recently graduated from Oxford. Nick Leese was a member of Oxford’s socially exclusive and notorious Bullingdon Club where his close friends included the then Lord Ogilvy (now Earl of Airlie), son-in-law of the Daily Mail owner Lord Rothermere; and Mark Baring (now Lord Ashburton) whose father was then chairman of the family bank Barings.
The Leeses’ connections were more than merely social. Douglas Leese went into his family’s engineering firm Cam Gears in 1951 and by 1957 he was its managing director. Cam Gears was one of the UK’s leading manufacturers of steering components (in the days when there was still a substantial British car industry!), but in 1965 Leese’s family interests were bought out by the giant American company TRW.
It was at this point that Leese began his connections with very high-level arms dealing: connections that were eventually to prove crucial in advancing the career of Jeffrey Epstein.
TRW – Thompson Ramo Wooldridge – started out in the early 20th century making engine valves, but by the 1960s it was at the core of the US defence industry. Two of its founders – Simon Ramo and Dean Wooldridge – were among the most important engineers working on the American nuclear missile programme. They served on the Pentagon committee that supervised nuclear weapons planning.
With such high level connections it was no surprise that Epstein’s future éminence grise Douglas Leese moved during his 40s and 50s into the international arms trade and became expert in its sleazy networks of political corruption.
During the time Epstein first knew him in the 1980s, Douglas Leese was at the centre of large scale bribery that secured the largest British export deal in history – known as Al-Yamamah – the sale of aircraft, radar, and other military equipment to Saudi Arabia by British Aerospace and other UK companies. Among the middlemen profiting on this deal was Mark Thatcher, son of the then UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Even before helping to seal the Al-Yamamah deal (and soon after meeting the young Epstein) Douglas Leese was also responsible for helping win another foreign contract for another British company with ties to the arms trade, the electronics giant Plessey.
During 1982-83 Leese was the key intermediary using bribery and other methods to win Plessey a lucrative contract to upgrade Spain’s telephone network. It’s likely no coincidence that in this same period the Leese family’s new American friend Jeffrey Epstein was introduced to a Spanish socialite Ana Obregón. Her father had risen from a humble background to make a fortune in Madrid property deals, and as often happens with such people he hid much of his fortune in offshore banks, some with dubious reputations.
When the Wall Street firm Drysdale Securities collapsed in 1982, the family of Epstein’s new Spanish friend Ana Obregón – and many other unscrupulous wealthy clients across Europe – risked losing millions. Through his own (and Leese’s) shady global contacts, Epstein was able to recover most of their money, in return for substantial commissions.
This launched his new 1980s career as a financial ‘bounty hunter’, but it also helped him build further contacts among the super rich.
Several reports have suggested that Epstein and Douglas Leese fell out in 1987 after Epstein was found to be charging his Concorde flights and other expenses to Leese’s account. However, the latest files suggest that this isn’t true and that Epstein remained a close friend of the Leese family until 2017 (and perhaps right up until his death in 2019).
Douglas Leese’s son Julian Leese was an intern working with Epstein in the late 1980s and was still in regular email contact with him during the mid-2010s. In July 2014 for example, Julian Leese asked Epstein to put him in touch with “a very good US corporate tax lawyer”. Then in 2017 Julian’s young daughter Mimi was put in touch with Epstein to get financial help with her medical problems. She had suffered spinal injuries and needed several operations.
Mimi Leese wrote to Epstein on 30th March 2017 “I know you have been a good friend of daddy’s for many years and I am very grateful for your advice.” Julian Leese’s second wife Gia then wrote to Epstein on 9th May 2017 describing the 22-year-old Mimi (her stepdaughter) as “a total stunner with a great part of the Douglas Leese mindset!”
This is strange language to use when writing about your own stepdaughter to a man who already had a criminal conviction for “procuring a child for prostitution”, though it’s only fair to point out that the broader criminal charges against Epstein and the full scope of the scandal didn’t begin to emerge for another two years.
More importantly for the topic of this article and podcast, this language couldn’t possibly have been used if Epstein had genuinely fallen out with Douglas Leese at the end of the 1980s.
Why would the extent of the Leese-Epstein relationship have been disguised? It’s a fairly common practice in espionage circles to invent supposed splits (often involving invented financial disputes) so as to disguise continuing and important ties between individuals. The evidence suggests that the Leese family (perhaps with official encouragement) have deliberately set out to mislead journalists and disguise the true importance of the Epstein-Leese connection.
Western intelligence sources have suggested that Epstein was introduced to Robert Maxwell and the KGB “by an oil tycoon also in the pay of Russian intelligence.” If so, this was to have fateful consequences, because Maxwell’s daughter Ghislaine became for a time Epstein’s girlfriend and then his principal associate in procuring girls (some of them under-age in terms of US law) for parties attended by prominent figures in the political and business world. If Russian or Israeli intelligence were involved, then security sources are justified in describing it as the contemporary world’s “greatest honey trap operation”.
During the past ten days I have established that these intelligence sources are referring to the veteran head of Occidental Petroleum, Armand Hammer, who remained active in business and politics until shortly before his death aged 92 in December 1990; and to Hammer’s grandson Michael Hammer who like Epstein worked in the morally and legally dubious Wall Street world of the late ’70s and early ’80s, before joining his grandfather’s oil company Occidental Petroleum in 1982 and becoming one of its senior executives until 1991.
Robert Maxwell died in November 1991, during the final days of Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, and in another podcast I’ve described his multiple connections to the espionage world, so I won’t repeat them here.
Armand Hammer (with whom Maxwell built especially close links at the end of the 1980s) was an even more longstanding KGB asset and no stranger to sleaze – right at the start of his dual career as international tycoon and Soviet spy, his own father Julius Hammer (a co-founder of the American Communist Party) was given a three and a half year prison sentence in 1920 for carrying out an illegal abortion.
Julius Hammer handled the financial side of Bolshevik Russia’s first missions in the USA, including money laundering linked to illicit diamond sales. Much of this money laundering was passed through a business called Allied Drug and Chemical, that Hammer founded and ran with a fellow Jewish communist.
Armand Hammer began to follow his father into a medical career, but in the summer of 1921 (aged 23) he abandoned his internship at a New York hospital to travel to Bolshevik Russia – the nascent Soviet Union – where he spent most of the next decade. The young Hammer dealt personally with Lenin and with the founders of what eventually became the KGB (then known as the Cheka and later under various titles such as OGPU and NKVD). This KGB was of course the employer of Vladimir Putin for sixteen years from 1975 to 1991. In cooperation with his Soviet intelligence partners, Armand Hammer created several international businesses, importing to the USSR pencils, stationery equipment, and a variety of manufactured goods, and exporting furs, jewellery, caviar and asbestos.
Back in the USA during the 1930s and 1940s, Hammer went into the post-Prohibition liquor trade, selling vodka and whisky. In the 1950s he moved into the oil business, taking control of Occidental Petroleum in 1956, and was eventually a business partner of Libya’s dictator Colonel Gadafy (who contrary to the image ludicrously believed by naive Western anti-Zionists, had no problem working with one of the world’s most notorious Jewish businessmen).
Right up to his death, Armand Hammer was closely connected to the Kremlin and its intelligence services. So it’s no surprise that Hammer and his grandson introduced Jeffrey Epstein to a higher level of Moscow’s espionage world.
In 1986 Hammer was the crucial intermediary between Israel and the Soviet Union, obtaining prosecution evidence against a 66-year-old Ukrainian immigrant to the USA, John Demjanjuk, who was extradited from the USA and put on trial in Israel in the most notorious ‘Holocaust’ show trial of the 1980s.
The Soviet Union had no diplomatic relations with Israel but discreetly maintained ties via intermediaries such as Hammer. He obtained what purported to be Demjanjuk’s identification card for the Trawniki training camp in German-occupied Poland where concentration camp guards were trained.
Israel’s Prime Minister Shimon Peres sent a letter thanking Hammer for his work in obtaining Soviet cooperation with the Demjanjuk trial. Though Demjanjuk’s defence team claimed that the card was a KGB forgery, Prime Minister Peres was unstinting in his praise for Hammer’s “tireless efforts on behalf of the State of Israel, the Jewish people and the cause of justice and human rights the world over.”
Robert Maxwell (above) and Armand Hammer (below) burnished their reputations by associating with British royalty
During this same period the longstanding Soviet and Israeli agent Robert Maxwell was becoming ever more closely involved with the cause of ‘Holocaust’ education, partly through his longtime lawyer Samuel Pisar, who was a celebrated ‘Holocaust survivor’ and whose other notable clients included Armand Hammer. In July 1988 Maxwell hosted an international ‘Holocaust’ conference in Oxford under the title ‘Remembering for the Future’ – featuring 260 academics including Yehuda Bauer, Israel’s leading ‘Holocaust’ scholar. The conference took five years to arrange and focused especially on bringing together Jewish and Christian academics.
But the main connection between Maxwell, Hammer, Jeffrey Epstein, and the Israeli and Russian intelligence services came through a deal that Hammer was negotiating right at the end of his life to supply Israeli aviation technology to Moscow.
This involved the three most important 20th century Jewish capitalist intermediaries with the Communist world, plus a fourth whose arms dealing went back to the earliest days of the Israeli state. Maxwell and Hammer are fairly well known, the other two mainly operated in the shadows. These were Shaul Eisenberg (whose name is sometimes written as Shoul Eisenberg), and Al Schwimmer.
Eisenberg generally specialised in the Far East, including Red China; Hammer specialised in the Soviet Union; and Maxwell to some extent in both. Schwimmer was an American Jew: a specialist aircraft technician who as a 30-year-old in 1947 was recruited by a senior Zionist intelligence operative Teddy Kollek to smuggle planes and arms to what was about to become the state of Israel.
These illegal arms deals included obtaining fighter planes from communist Czechoslovakia: the young Robert Maxwell was also involved in these deals.
During the 1950s – at the request of Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion – Al Schwimmer and future Prime Minister Shimon Peres created what became Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI). Shaul Eisenberg was in on this from the start, and became the main Far Eastern representative for IAI.
It was a significant step up for Epstein (still only in his mid-30s) to be mixing in this sort of company, but given the various complicated issues involved, it’s not too surprising that his English mentor, the arms dealer Douglas Leese, brought him into these circles.
If so, then it would be via Leese that British intelligence monitored the deal. Whatever else Leese was, I’m sure he wasn’t a KGB agent or a traitor, but with the Soviet Union falling apart, he would certainly have picked up the scent of profitable opportunities.
In January 1990 (even before restoring diplomatic relations!) Israel and Gorbachev’s Soviet Union struck a deal that Armand Hammer had promoted in a secret plan that Hammer (with black humour) codenamed “Elders of Zion”.
Armand Hammer knew very well that critics of international Jewish influence have spent much of the 20th century bamboozled by a fake document called Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. But he also knew that these fake Protocols reflect an underlying truth about the world, and the network of powerful Jews that Hammer put together to negotiate this Israeli-Russian deal is typical of that true picture.
These “Elders of Zion” (in this case Hammer’s own phrase) working with younger wheeler-dealers such as Jeffrey Epstein, included as well as Armand and Michael Hammer (the veteran KGB asset’s grandson who like Epstein was then in his mid-30s); the British tycoon and longstanding KGB and Mossad agent Robert Maxwell; the Israeli arms dealer Shaul Eisenberg; the US-Israeli smuggler Al Schwimmer; and the Canadian Jewish billionaire Albert Reichmann, one of five Reichmann brothers who controlled what was then the world’s largest property empire, with close ties to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
They were on the surface very different types of Jew. At one extreme, Armand Hammer had never even had a bar mitzvah, because his family regarded themselves as secular communists rather than observant Jews. On the other extreme, the Reichmann family were Orthodox Jews and Talmudic scholars whose business always stopped work for the Sabbath and Jewish holy days.
But what they all had in common was fidelity to Israel, and a close interest in furthering ties between Israel and Russia.
Armand Hammer (despite his age) travelled several times to Moscow for private meetings with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to advance this ‘Elders of Zion’ project. In the late summer of 1990, just before the onset of his fatal illness, Hammer met with President George Bush in Washington to gain US approval for the Russian-Israeli aircraft deal.
History took another turn after Hammer and Maxwell died during 1990 and 1991: the collapse of the Soviet Union produced both business opportunities and hazards for Jewish businessmen and criminals during the Yeltsin era of the 1990s. New tycoons rose from the ranks of the Jewish-Russian mafia, but the aircraft deal promoted by Hammer and his ‘Elders of Zion’ only made limited progress before being overtaken by events.
At the turn of the millennium, a new generation of Jewish oligarchs found their ideal patron: Vladimir Putin, a veteran of the same KGB that in its infancy recruited Armand Hammer and promoted him for almost seventy years, and that during its transformation into post-communist Russia’s FSB had found new and equally unscrupulous Western assets.
It was in this chaotic world that one of the junior players in Hammer’s final deal – Jeffrey Epstein – rose to fame and fortune, and fell to infamy and disgrace.
Within days of the latest archive releases, journalists were understandably highlighting a mountain of evidence linking Jeffrey Epstein to the Russian intelligence services. Quite wrongly, some anti-Zionists have objected to this interpretation and have blindly argued that the mainstream media is in some way trying to distract from Epstein’s links to fellow Jews and (probably) to the Israeli intelligence service Mossad.
The problem here is that several leading figures on the so-called ‘far right’ are either in Putin’s pocket or have fallen into a cult mentality which persists (contrary to all the evidence) in seeing Russia as a champion of traditional European values.
In fact (for the reasons I have outlined) there is no contradiction between seeing Epstein as a Russian agent and an Israeli agent.
Most of the main players in the earliest and most interesting period of the Epstein story are (like Epstein himself) now dead:
- Douglas Leese died in 2011, aged 84.
- The main players in Armand Hammer’s “Elders of Zion” operation seem to have died natural deaths at advanced ages, Robert Maxwell (who in 1991 aged 68 apparently fell, jumped, or was pushed to his death from his yacht the Lady Ghislaine, named after Epstein’s notorious partner in crime) being the main exception.
- Armand Hammer died of cancer at the end of 1990, aged 92.
- His grandson Michael Hammer, who as a senior executive of Occidental Petroleum helped introduce Jeffrey Epstein to high-level Russian and Israeli intelligence operations, died in 2022 aged 67 (by which time he was supposedly an evangelical Christian – the Hammer family’s religious affiliations were always flexible!)
- Shaul Eisenberg died in Beijing aged 75 in 1997: like Hammer he was an active wheeler-dealer to the end. Eisenberg suffered his fatal heart attack while negotiating yet another Israeli deal with Chinese communist leaders.
- Al Schwimmer died in 2011, aged 94. His contacts in the Israeli Labour Party had by this time started to lose influence in favour of a new ‘right-wing’ Israeli elite led by Benjamin Netanyahu and close to both Trump and Putin.
- Albert Reichmann died in Toronto in 2022, aged 93. His family’s most controversial investment at Canary Wharf in London still stands as a monument to the trans-Atlantic capitalist values of the Thatcher-Reagan era.
Jeffrey Epstein represents the darker side of those values: the age-old axis between capitalism and communism; between Moscow, Jerusalem and New York. Will Europeans at last find the courage to reject this world, and rebuild the real Europe?
Only if European nationalists themselves purge the leadership of their own movements, expelling so-called ‘leaders’ who pander to Trump and Putin.
If the Epstein saga teaches us nothing else, it should teach us the importance of rejecting fake ‘leaders’ and shallow values.
It’s up to those of you reading this article to decide whether you have the courage to clean up our own political world, as a prelude to the broader task of retaking control of our national and European destiny.
