Epstein links to Putin stoke fears he was a Russian agent

When Jeffrey Epstein offered up a young woman as a dinner companion to Prince Andrew, he assured the then-British royal that she was “Russian, beautiful and trustworthy”.

The convicted paedophile made the promise in an exchange of emails in 2010, telling the now disgraced Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor: “I have a friend who I think you might enjoy having dinner with.”

The email is among the 3 million documents in the Epstein files that the US Department of Justice (DoJ) released on Friday, along with 180,000 images and 2000 videos.

They show that young Russians were among the women that Epstein offered up for sex to rich and powerful men from around the world.

But the huge cache of files has hinted at a darker connection with Russia: that Epstein could have been a longstanding agent working for Moscow. Among the files are 1056 documents that name Vladimir Putin and more than 9000 that refer to Moscow.

They suggest Epstein was granted audiences with the Russian president, even after the American financier was convicted in 2008 of procuring a child for prostitution.

In 2010, Epstein sent an email to an associate offering to help them obtain a Russian visa, saying: “I have a friend of Putin’s, should I ask him?”

Some have suggested the recruitment of Russian escorts shows Epstein may have been running a classic “kompromat” operation – luring influential business tycoons, media moguls, statesmen and politicians into sexual encounters with the women and recording the encounters for purposes of blackmail.

The concept of blackmail was uppermost in his mind in an email he wrote in 2015 to Sergei Belyakov, Russia’s then deputy minister of economic development and a graduate of the FSB (Russian intelligence) Academy.

Epstein told him: “A Russian girl from Moscow … is attempting to blackmail a group of powerful biznessmen [sic] in New York. It is bad for business for everyone involved.”

In a subsequent email sent to himself, he appears to map out a strategy for dealing with the woman and thwarting her blackmail attempt.

“You should know that I felt it necessary to contact some friends in FSB,” Epstein wrote.

He warned the woman that trying to blackmail an American businessman who was planning to invest in Russia would make her, in the eyes of the FSB, “vrag naroda” – Russian for an “enemy of the people”. She would be dealt with “extremely harshly”, he said.

But in addition to threatening her, he planned to pay her off, giving her $US50,000 a month “for the next two years” in exchange for her dropping her blackmail attempt.

Emails contained in the latest release of DoJ documents reveal the lengths that Epstein and his associates went to in order to recruit attractive young Russian women.

They include email requests to book flights for models and escorts from Moscow to Paris and Moscow to New York. In an email written in 2010 to a person whose name has been redacted, Epstein wrote: “Tomorrow I’m organising a dinner for some new Russian girls … see you at 10.”

In 2012, he received an email from a redacted sender, which read: “I have 2 Russian girls for you to meet, one 21, another 24. One skinny, another curvy and super cute.”

In an email that Epstein wrote in 2013, there is a claim that Bill Gates needed medicine “to deal with the consequences of sex with Russian girls” and a further claim that the Microsoft founder tried to conceal his sexually transmitted infection from his then-wife, Melinda.

A spokesman for Gates has described the claims as “absolutely absurd and completely false”.

An intelligence source told the Daily Mail: “You have Andrew, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Bill Clinton and all the rest placed in compromising positions on an island bristling with technology. It’s the world’s largest honey-trap operation.”

The high-profile personalities who are named in the files all deny wrongdoing.

Tanya Kozyreva, a Kyiv-based reporter who focuses on high-level corruption worldwide, wrote: “Epstein reportedly had contact with Russian officials and Putin himself. Many of his girls were Russian. Powerful Western elites passed through his orbit. What are the odds this wasn’t a classic Russian kompromat operation – and that DoJ is just ignoring the elephant in the room?”

Epstein was allegedly recruited into the murky world of espionage by Robert Maxwell, the late British publishing tycoon who is believed to have worked for Mossad, the Israeli spy agency. The introduction was reportedly made by an oil tycoon who was on the payroll of Russian intelligence.

Maxwell, whose daughter, Ghislaine, became Epstein’s long-standing girlfriend, died in 1991 after apparently falling overboard from his yacht in the Atlantic. There have long been suspicions that he was murdered, perhaps by Israeli agents.

In an email written in 2018, Epstein quoted an investigative story published by The Mirror, which said the British businessman had threatened Mossad, which then murdered him.

The story said: “[Maxwell] told them that unless they gave him £400m to save his crumbling empire, he would expose all he had done for them.

“In that time, he had free access to Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street, Ronald Reagan’s White House, to the Kremlin and to the corridors of power throughout Europe.

“Maxwell passed on all the secrets he learned to Mossad in Tel Aviv. In turn, they tolerated his excesses, vanities and insatiable appetite for a luxurious lifestyle and women.”

By 2011, Epstein appeared to have built up such a rapport with the Russians that he was having meetings with Putin. In September of that year, he received an email from an unidentified associate who discussed an “appointment with Putin” during a forthcoming trip to Russia.

The email read: “Spoke with Igor. He said last time you were in Palm Beach, you told him you had an appointment with Putin on Sept 16 and that he could go ahead and book his ticket to Russia to arrive a few days before you.”

The newly released files suggest Epstein had another meeting set up with the Russian leader in 2014, although it is not clear if it went ahead. It may have been cancelled after Russian-backed forces shot down a Malaysia Airlines aircraft in July 2014, killing nearly 300 people on board.

The planned meeting with Putin now seemed to be “a bad idea after the plane crash”, a Japanese go-between told Epstein.

Other newly released files show that Epstein told Thorbjorn Jagland, the then secretary general of the Council of Europe and a former prime minister of Norway, that he could advise Putin on the best way to handle US President Donald Trump before a key summit between the two leaders in Helsinki.

Epstein said he could offer “insight” on the American president to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. “It is not complex. [Trump] must be seen to get something. It’s that simple,” Epstein wrote.

The latest batch of Epstein files also reveal suspicions among Western intelligence agencies that Epstein was working as an agent for Mossad.

The FBI was informed by a source that “Epstein was close to the former prime minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, and trained as a spy under him”.

In a declassified memo, the FBI said that a confidential human source “became convinced Epstein was a co-opted Mossad agent”.

Barak, who worked in Israeli military intelligence earlier in his career, visited Epstein’s New York townhouse more than 30 times between 2013 and 2017.

The Telegraph, London

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