Intelligence And Blackmail [Trenchant Edges]
Welcome back to the Trenchant Edges, a newsletter about fringe culture and this week, some of the worst kinds of people.
Today is the 5th anniversary of the very normal death of old Jeffery Epstein, pedophile rapist and intelligence asset.
A couple years ago I wrote two pieces on him centered around my suspicion that he probably did kill himself.
My plan for this week had been to do one piece setting up some context for what Epstein was doing and another as a kind of an update of what we’ve learned in the almost two years since I last wrote about him.
There’s a weird mix of a lot and very little there.
I could half ass that, but I’m going to do something a bit different. I want to talk about what Epstein was like, actually doing and how his many strange puzzle pieces fit into the world of politics.
I’m going to start with a bit of fiction that I think is more relevant than it might look. While Epstein was living it up in Palm Beach and his island, Nicholas Cage starred in the 2005 film Lord Of War.
This is one of my favorites. It’s moody, bleak, and a skillfully acted character study of addition, wealth, and amorality. And it’s quotable as hell. It has Cage as a stand in for Viktor Bout, a Russian arms deal who was arrested a few years previously. It follows his rise and fall.
Near the end of the film there’s a scene where Cage is finally caught and he tells the agent who’s been chasing him for years to savor the moment and enjoy it because he isn’t going to jail.
This is his explanation:
And there’s immediately a knock at the door proving him right.
The real Bout had a, well, rockier time. But was eventually traded back to Russia for American basketball player Brittney Griner in late 2022 after more than 10 years in prison.
So much for Hollywood magic.
But I think this scene captures something very important about the kind of person Epstein was. Not his character exactly, but his position in society.
For himself, Jeffery Epstein was a wheeler dealer and fixer. For his clients (most notably the Mossad and CIA) he was a cut out.
A freelancer who had no institutional ties. IE: Someone you can have do crimes for you and then cut loose if they’re caught.
He was useful to powerful people.
I find my priorities with Epstein have changed quite a bit since I first looked into him.
How exactly did Epstein get his money?
How much money did he actually have?
Who was he actually working for/with?
Hey, didn’t he record a bunch of blackmail? What happened to that?
Who did he blackmail or help blackmail?
These were my original questions. And I’m still curious about them but I’m more interested in what you might call a network analysis of Epstein’s social life particularly in the 80s.
There are a ton of people who we don’t actually know when they met Epstein. Which seems nuts to me, but that includes Robert and Ghislaine Maxwell who might be the two most important people in his life.
But that’s getting ahead of ourselves I think.
What I want to do with the rest of today is focus on some basic facts about intelligence work and why you might want someone in Epstein’s position.
Anarchy in the USA (but it sucks)
On the first day of my world politics class way back in 2007 my professor explained that the international order was fundamentally anarchic. By international order he meant the relationships between different nations and by anarchic he meant that there are no rules or leaders except what’s imposed.
Much of our post-Enlightenment geopolitics has centered on the realization that it helps to have nice reasons for doing what you’re doing especially when you’re being a bastard. “Humanitarian intervention” sounds better than “invasion.”
We’re just trying to help!
So, we’ve got these nations and nations need to be defended because if you lose control of your borders you quickly get promoted to “former nation”.
Which gives us standing armies and those standing armies are filled with paranoid people looking for threats to themselves, their comrades, their nation, and their power.
In the US we call these people “The Department of Defense” in another Orwellian turn.
Because it’s anarchy it’s very important to keep up the charade of The Rule Of Law so few people are willing to break norms.
But the Rule Of Law is always applied selectively.
Epstein makes for a good example: We know of a number of his coconspirators besides Ghislaine Maxwell. Why haven’t they been charged? Why aren’t they offered deals to roll on Epstein’s illicit sex clients and blackmail victims?
Because those who make such decisions are not invested in finding justice here or bringing the truth to life. Anarchy. Because they get to choose what counts as justice we can’t review their decisions.
Alas.
All this is why in addition to the paranoid military people, nations also employ even more paranoid people called spies.
Spies come in many flavors.
They’re all liars. Lying is as fundamental to spying as balls are to football.
There’s a word for all this.
Asymmetrical Information Advantage
Take two competing parties. Each knows things the other doesn’t and each thinks they know something about what the other does know.
This is information asymmetry.
There are 195 nations today, so you can imagine things get a lot more complicated there very quickly.
Spies exist to increase the asymmetrical information advantage. Keeping secrets, finding other people’s secrets. Convincing them they know things which are wrong. Convincing them we know things we don’t know.
Every country must spy or accept being at a consistent information disadvantage, which amounts to always getting clowned on be it economically, politically, militarily, or diplomatically.
You need spies to infiltrate other nations or groups you find dangerous and spies to prevent other groups from infiltrating you. This latter group is counter-intelligence and we’ll be coming the fuck back to them,
It’s commonly thought in the US that our first civilian spying agency was the OSS. This is somewhat mistaken. The FBI predates it by decades and J Edger Hoover was a master spy and master blackmailer.
The FBI is a counter-intelligence organization with a law enforcement hobby. IE: They’re spies first and cops second. The “best of all possible worlds” you might say.
Counter-intelligence is where they put the people in government who are afraid of the nation’s population and who want to keep an eye on them. This is why it used to be common to refer to the FBI as America’s Gestapo.
The most important counter-intelligence operation in US history was the FBI’s COINTELPRO because when activists stole documents proving it existed, it forced the reveal of a ton of other intelligence fuckery.
You see, spies are not to be trusted. Ever. To be a good spy is to be good at getting someone who should know better to trust you.
Spies can justify whatever behavior they like using magic words like “national security”. It doesn’t matter what nation they spy for. Spies are spies.
More than anything else though spying is boring. Much of it is waiting. Most of the people working as spies today are analysts. A ton of it is writing reports and looking at blurry photos.
International men of mystery are rare and, at least for professional organizations, undesirable. A successful spy is likely to be a boring spy. Someone people don’t even notice.
Sure, that’s not how things are in the movies but the real world doesn’t fit into a neat 2 hour story either.
Neoliberal Spy Mercenaries
The most interesting thing about privatization has been what it’s done for spies and their support staff in the US. The Edward Snowden leaks were only possible because of Booz-Allen IT contracts that gave Snowden access to secret information.
My working hypothesis is that Jeffery Epstein represents a different kind of contractor. Unaffiliated, doing his own thing, but traveling through useful social circles. Collecting information to sell off in bits and bobs.
Uber but for ruining lives.
A very important question is where Epstein first came to the attention of intelligence officers. I figure there are two reasonable answers: Either around the Dalton School or around Bear Stearns.
This is hard to say. He might have been hired by Trump AG Bill Barr’s father Donald Barr, who both worked in intelligence (Donald in the OSS and Bill in the CIA).
Or it could have been any of a slew of people once Epstein was in wall street, which famously served as the main recruiting ground for both the OSS and early CIA.
Perhaps it was more like a relay marathon: His potential was spotted and he was passed from person to person getting closer to real power.
Or maybe it was purely corporate espionage. Epstein supposedly handled “esoteric markets” for wealthy clients, whatever the fuck that means.
I’m going to quote a bit from a Fox Business article because that’s as close to the horses mouth as I can find.
Epstein's teaching style got him booted from Dalton in 1976, but his smarts got him his first job on Wall Street at Bear Stearns, the brokerage firm then run by the legendary trader, Alan "Ace" Greenberg. One of Epstein's students was Lynne Greenberg, who told her dad that Epstein might make a great financier. It was an unorthodox entry into Wall Street, an industry which often recruits from top schools, but Bear Stearns was an unorthodox firm - one that would be his go-to investment bank for much of his career in finance.
Under Greenberg, Bear Stearns earned a reputation as a scrappy, working-class competitor to elite investment banks like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Greenberg often said that his best hires were known as "PSDs" — shorthand for poor, smart and determined. Greenberg died in 2014, and his daughter didn't respond to a request for comment, but former Bear executives say the culture of the place rewarded risk taking and making money, and Epstein grasped this ethos immediately.
The article goes on to talk about how despite being kicked out (“Asked to leave”), Epstein would maintain close connections with senior people at the firm.
Bear, if you’re not familiar, was one of the trading firms who was let fail in 2008 instead of being bailed out as other funds would. They were known for what you might call a high tolerance for risk.
After leaving Bear he incorporated Intercontinental Assets Group, and claimed to be a mixture of asset manager for billionaires and financial bounty hunter, finding or hiding assets. Spanish Actress Anna Obregón partially confirms this story, saying she hired him and IAG to recover money from Drysdale Government Securities according to James Patterson’s book filthy rich.
We’ll come back to Patterson.
Around 1983 he was alleged to have started selling Chinese weapons Iran with Adnan Kashoggi. Perhaps this allegation deserves a bit more scrutiny since it comes by way of Steven Hoffenberg who partnered with Epstein for the Towers Financial scandal, which was the largest ponzi scheme in US history until Bernie Madoff.
What all the stories about Epstein from the 80s have in common is the sense of someone bouncing around high finance without much purpose aside from getting as rich as possible. This is long before, “Billionaire philanthropist financier” was his go to in the society pages.
By the end of the 80s he was in Towers Financial and a trusted advisor to L Brands Les Wexner.
There’s more of a sense of him having built something by the end of it. Epstein would buy his Palm Beach home from which many of the abuses have come to light in 1990.
How facilitated any of this was by shadowy forces (the CIA and/or Mossad) seems very open to interpretation. From my research I get the sense that the 80s were a very, uh, gig worker kind of era after he left Bear. Finding his way into collaborating with the Israelis to sell arms to Iran (Either with or parallel to Iran-Contra) seems to have given him more focus or maybe just more money.
My sense is that he’s mainly an opportunist who was able to make good rather than someone who was being run closely by a handler. There’s overwhelming numbers of reports of his ability to gain people’s trust and convince them of his intelligence and trustworthiness.
Epstein’s the kind of guy who’s useful to have around but who you don’t have to worry too much about keeping clean because he’s not really in the club. Deniability.
And, lo, that’s exactly what most of his old friends have done.
I have a sense that he’s constantly looking for a new deal, a new tidbit he can sell off to build face with this contacts within intelligence and among the wealthy.
Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself
At the end of the day (and it’s getting close, lol), the question of if Epstein did off himself or not is kind of irrelevant unless you care about the particular prison and… I don’t.
What matters is the networks of power and wealth he touched and disturbed and what we can learn about the global ruling class from that.
Spoilers: It’s nothing good.
The short answer seems to be that the ruling class is functionally a criminal cartel who keep psychopaths on a leash to provide them with vices and to throw away if inconvenient.
I find this to be rather in line with my expectations for power.
There’s no shortage of institutions protecting various kinds of predator from the Roman Catholic Church down to your local subculture scene. It seems like a profoundly persistent problem.
You might ask… well, what can we do about it?
And to that the big answer is to continue to remind public officials of this and to create bipartisan support for answers. You might want to check out https://epsteinjustice.com/home and see if you can pitch in.
The only way any of this is going to get better is if we push for it. And that starts with the truth.
Wrapping Up
OK, so, this took so much longer than I expected because as usual with Epstein there’s a million rabbit trails we didn’t touch.
I think there are at least two more weeks of Epstein stuff but I could probably dig at this for years w/o success.
In the mean time I’m going to rest.
See y’all next week.
-S