I am content to die for my beliefs. So cut off my head and make me a martyr. The people will always remember it.

No, they will forget.

Hell does exist. God is a thought. God is an idea. It is a place. It is somewhere. Hell does exist, but its reference is to something that transcends all things.

Why we must tear ourselves apart for this Small Question of Religion.

Part one. All right, look, I know that none of us trust or expect much of our governments these days. That probably applies no matter what country you live in. But I don't think I'm really asking for a lot here. And I'm not going to demand that politicians stop lying or that they stop taking bribes that are dressed up to look like book advances or speaking fees. I'm not asking that their family members stop accepting bribes on their behalf. I don't like any of that. But again, I've learned to moderate my hopes for how far from rock bottom these people are capable of climbing. In fact, I'm at the point where I don't even care about the bribes. Yeah, they can keep them. They can keep the bribes. If I can just make a couple requests. Like, for example, next time that scientists have questions about how an infectious disease like, I don't know, how about syphilis? Develops over time in a human host, maybe we should not give the disease to a bunch of black people and then lie about giving them treatments for decades so that we can watch as a disease slowly destroys their minds and bodies.

Maybe we should not do that again. I'm asking for the bare minimum here. Or maybe next time a reclusive religious congregation with a weirdo leader comes onto the radar of one of your agencies, how about you arrest the guy while he's out on his morning jog, which he goes on predictably every day, instead of sending Delta Force to Waco, Texas, to oversee the massacre of the entire group. How about that? It's not a huge ask, or if you want, and I know I'm starting to get multiple with my requests here. Maybe I'm pushing my luck, but maybe if you want to send a bunch of us to war in a foreign country, can it please be for reasons that are not completely made up? Or here's another one. When our intelligence agencies go about their mission of gathering and analyzing information and carrying out covert operations, we understand, we're an understanding people. We get it. Sometimes things can get a little messy, little morally complicated. But what if next time one of your agents suggests working with a guy who's engaged in large scale trafficking of children for sex, maybe someone in your organization says that we should probably not do that.

Or is that too much? I know I made a lot of requests. Look, I'll compromise on the first three. Give people diseases, massacre American citizens, launch wars, on false pretenses, whatever. But is it too much to ask that if a federal prosecutor overseeing the investigation of a serial pedophile and child trafficker says on the record that he was told to back off by his superiors because the guy quote belongs to intelligence. Is it too much to ask that just one reporter in all the newsrooms in America would stick a microphone in this guy's face and ask him exactly what the fuck he meant by that? Anyone? Yeah, well, of course I'm talking about know it's a situation that seems almost too horrible to be plausible, right? Yeah, sure, intel agencies might have to skirt a bit of bourgeois morality here and there to do their jobs, but surely every agent of the CIA or FBI would resign in protest if they found out the agency was helping a mass pedophile avoid prosecution. Right now, I can say with certainty, with zero doubt, that any one of my twelve closest friends or relatives, if they were in that position, would not keep quiet about it.

I have no doubt about that. And so it sounds reasonable to us, to regular people. What kind of people would hear that and just move on? Like, what's that, boss? The mass child sex trafficker has a relationship with intelligence agencies and I should let him go? Agree not to prosecute any of his accomplices, even ones that turn up later that we don't know about, for crimes we don't know about yet? Hey, sure, boss, you got it. I can say that I don't know anybody who would do that, and I'll bet you can say the same about most of the people close to you. And so it just makes sense to regular people with an average understanding of ethics that there's no way the agencies would do that. Until you remember that no one in those agencies apparently had a problem working with south. American drug lords right as the crack epidemic was consuming American inner cities. And that no one seems to have spoken up when the decision was made to place us into an effective alliance with Al Qaeda in Syria and Yemen. Barely a decade after 911. You ever remember being asked about that?

Remember being asked if we wanted to fight on the same side as Al Qaeda in Syria and Yemen? Because I don't. But that's not the kind of question that it occurs to a normal person to ask, because a normal person thinks there's no way our government would put us into an alliance with Al Qaeda before the New World Trade Center was even finished rebuilding, but they did. Or how about Afghanistan? Remember when an army captain beat up an Afghanistan army officer that he found raping a little boy he got in trouble with that he got kicked out of the army and the rest of our troops got instructions that they were not to intervene in similar circumstances. Do not intervene if you encounter child rape, because bachabazi the recreational abuse of young boys was just a cultural difference that they were going to have to get over, learn to be tolerant about, and then come to find out, surprise, surprise. Sexual abuse of young boys by our allies in the Afghanistan security forces was pervasive throughout our occupation of the country. Quote, horrifying abuse at checkpoints makes the boys many unpaid and unregistered, hungry for revenge and easy prey for Taliban recruitment, often because there is no other escape from exploitative Afghan security force commanders.

Practically all of Aruz Gun's 370 local and national police checkpoints have Bachas. Those are little boys, some up to four, who are illegally recruited not only for sexual companionship, but also to bear arms. Again, these are little boys. Some policemen, they said, demand botchas like a perk of the job, refusing to join checkpoints where they are not available. End quote. The Taliban had banned that practice in 1996 and kept the ban in place until the invasion of 2001, when we took over and the ban was no longer enforced. So the Taliban started reaching out to these boys who were being kept as sex slaves by our allies, by the Afghanistan security forces, and saying to them, hey, help us kill your guards if you can and run away. Come to us, we'll take you in. That's a pretty easy sell. And so we got instances like this. Quote he said, the attacker this is a boy, a little boy who ended up attacking the police officers, afghanistan police officers. He said the attacker was the commander's own sex slave, a teenager called Zabihula. Late one night, he went on a shooting spree, killing seven policemen, including the commander, as they slept.

End quote. And so we end up in a war where up until this most recent summer, we were told that the enemy was so terrible that the threat was so great that we just had no choice but to ally with people who were engaged in systematic mass child rape. There was just no other option. Well, but there are other considerations. There are larger issues at play. The world is not all black and white. And I'm probably oversimplifying things, but I get all that. And that's why I'm limiting my requests. All I'm asking is that the people in our security and intelligence establishments get back on the same page as the rest of us in considering large scale child sex trafficking to be beyond the pale. I start with this because I often find that the biggest hurdle to clear when trying to get people to look squarely at what we know and what we can reasonably infer about the Jeffrey Epstein case is that for most people, it just sounds too horrible to be believable. Sure, the government's corrupt politicians lie, yada, yada, yada, but they wouldn't do that. But we know they would because they have, and they've done much, much worse.

It's hard to know where to start this story. And so I'll throw a dart at the map and start with a 2003 Vanity Fair story by the journalist Vicki Ward. Miss Ward was one of the people, one of the few people, who was on to Jeffrey Epstein very early, long before his first conviction back in the mid 2000s. Back in the early 2000s, Epstein was still getting press like this in New York magazine. Quote Jeffrey Epstein, international money man of mystery. He comes with cash to burn a fleet of airplanes and a keen eye for the ladies, to say nothing of a relentless brain that challenges Nobel Prize winning scientists across the country and for financial markets around the world. Ever since the Post's Page Six ran an item about President Clinton's late September visit to Africa with Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker on Epstein's customized Boeing 727. The question of the day has been, who in the world is Jeffrey Epstein? End quote. Once again, unsurprisingly American journalism does not miss an opportunity to be clown itself and to vomit all over the legacy of the real reporters who occasionally used to take up the profession.

Reporters like Vicky Ward, for example. She was writing for Vanity Fair in the early 2000s when she got an early lead on what the talented Mr. Epstein was up to behind the scenes. This is from the New York Times after Epstein was arrested more recently in 2019, quote, days after Jeffrey E. Epstein was arrested and charged with sex trafficking by federal prosecutors, the fallout spilled into the media world with a former Vanity Fair journalist, saying that she had been prepared to report on accusations of sexual misconduct against the Financier years ago, but that the magazine had declined to print them. The journalist Vicki Ward leveled her accusation against the magazine's former editor, Grayden Carter in several forums, including on her own Twitter account Slates, What Next podcast and Buzfeed's Am to DM talk show. As part of her reporting for an article published in Vanity Fair's March 2003 issue, ms. Ward said she had collected on the record accusations against Mr. Epstein from three women, two of whom said they were victims of sexual assault. Those accusations did not make it into the published version, end quote. And so you think, well, look, a magazine's got to be careful, right?

Vanity Fair is a big publication. They've reported on controversial stories in the past, and they got the experience to know where they stand. So maybe the stories didn't get through the magazine's tight vetting process. Maybe legal wouldn't let it through. Well, no. In fact, according to Ms. Ward, the story had already been through legal review and was approved, with the accusations included, but then just before the article went to print. All right. In recent months, the press has been digging into news about the late Jeffrey Epstein, his powerful friends, and the allegations that he sexually exploited dozens of underage girls for years the media had paid only intermittent attention to the Epstein story until an investigative series last year in the Miami Herald. NPR media correspondent David Fulkenflick's story might help explain why. It includes an early morning visit, a bullet and a dead cat. One morning some years ago, Vanity Fair's editor in chief Grayden Carter arrived at the magazine's offices in midtown Manhattan. A man was standing still by himself in the magazine's reception area behind locked glass doors. It was Epstein. John Connolly was a Vanity Fair contributing editor who reported on crime and scandal.

Jeffrey had somehow gotten into the Vanny Fair's office before Grayden one day, and he was torturing Grayden. Connolly says Epstein repeatedly beseeched and berated. Carter then and in subsequent calls don't report on the young women. Jeffrey Epstein would terrorize people. Vanity Fair eagerly dissected the missteps and foibles of society's elites and eagerly rubbed shoulders with them. And for years, Grayton Carter led the way on both. In 2002, Carter assigned a reporter to find out more about Jeffrey Epstein. Just who is this enigmatic financier, and why is he flying around with Bill Clinton and other celebrities? Here's. That reporter, Vicky Ward.

At the time, it was two pronged. You know, the mystery about Jeffrey Epstein was how he had made his money.

Ward spoke on Morning Edition last month.

It was also known that he would gather New York's rich and famous for dinner parties at his home. But there would be these very young women. The women were always part of the Jeffrey Epstein story.

In March 2003, Vanity Fair did publish a piece by Ward, taking a tough look at Epstein's lavish lifestyle and questioning the origins of his fortune. Connolly says Carter soon called to share an ominous development. The day it came out, there was a live bullet put on outside his house in Manhattan. Even in the absence of any evidence Epstein was involved, connolly tells NPR that both Carter and he considered the bullet a clear warning that wasn't a coincidence. Another former colleague tells NPR of a similarly anguished call from Carter about the bullet. In statements to NPR, Carter says the magazine never held back on Epstein because of any sense of threat or intimidation. Instead, Carter says Ward's reporting did not pass the legal threshold for publication. He says Vanity Fair took legal requirements seriously, especially when the subject was a private person who's therefore rigorously protected under libel laws. And he said Ward did not have three sources who met the magazine's legal threshold. For the first time, however, Maria and Annie Farmer are confirming publicly they spoke to Vicky Ward on the record in 2002. Their mother, Janice Farmer, says she did too. And they tell NPR they were crestfallen.

Vanity Fair didn't report their allegations of exploitation. I think it made it more difficult to not only get victims to speak out, but to get witnesses to speak out. David Boyce is a lawyer for the Farmer sisters. It was discouraging. I think it helped create the impression among many of the victims that the media was under Epstein's control that Epstein had all this power. By late 2006, John Connolly says he was interviewing other women in South Florida to see if there was another story for Vanity Fair to do as authorities investigated Epstein. Connolly tells me Carter soon received another shock. Let me stop you right there. You said a dead cat's head was put outside Grayden Carter's house. It was put on the stoop of his home up in the country. It was done to intimidate, no question about it. And it worked? Yeah, it did. Connolly says Carter called him to express anxiety for the safety of his children. Others tell NPR the dead cat was the talk of the office. And Connolly says he voluntarily stopped pursuing the subject for Vanity Fair. Well, it's natural to ask how someone like Epstein can get away with that.

Sure, he's rich, but so was Bill Cosby. Being speaker of the House of Representatives did not save Denny Hastert. It's very interesting. We've all heard the saying about journalism. The old saying if it bleeds, it leads. Meaning the news media is biased toward sensationalism in general. But if that's true, if they're just looking for sensationalism it's fair to wonder why every newspaper in the land does not have investigative teams devoted to the Jeffrey Epstein story. Billionaire playboy with deep connections to the rich and powerful running a massive multi state underage sex trafficking operation. Corroborated accounts from accusers about very well known people being involved. A federal prosecutor saying he was told to back off by his superiors because Epstein belongs to intelligence. I mean, at the height of the MeToo purge news outlets devoted teams of reporters to investigating important people for anything that might get them. Another know. The combination of gossip column salaciousness and reader interest with the conferred seriousness of reporting that was part of a movement for gender equality. It was just too good to pass up. But if there was ever a target rich environment for media outlets fighting tooth and nail for audience share, it's the Jeffrey Epstein story.

But no corporate news outlet seems to want anything to do with it. How could that be? It's not that they've looked deeply into it and just concluded that there's nothing there worth further investigation. That didn't happen. And in any case, that's never stopped them before. If they think they've got a story with the kind of guaranteed ratings that Epstein brings. Again, there have been some really beloved and powerful people think Denny Hastert who, if you're a little younger and unaware Denny Hastert is the highest ranking U. S. Official ever to serve a prison sentence. He was the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives. So second in line to the presidency, right behind the vice president. Guy with the same juice that Nancy Pelosi carries today. You don't get to a position like speaker of the House by public acclamation. It's not an American Idol vote by phone kind of thing. The people who get fingered for positions at that level come in two types. They've either spent decades building a very powerful social network so that when they're jostling with other power players who want that position, they've got more artillery to call in for backup or they're puppets or frontmen put up by others who think that they can control things from behind the scenes.

Denny Hastert was a bit of both. He was a very powerful guy in Washington, but he was easy to control for anyone who knew his secret, which was that speaker of the House of Representatives Denny Hastert was a, quote, serial child molester, in the words of the judge who eventually sentenced him to prison. And this was not in the early 18 hundreds or something, by the way, folks, this was the speaker of the House until 2007. Isn't that interesting? With all the mud that's flung back and forth between Democrats and Republicans? I mean, they call each other traitor, terrorist, murderer, Nazi, Communist. And so isn't it weird that almost nobody even remembers that the most powerful Republican congressman was imprisoned for molesting children less than 15 years ago? You think the Democrats would be just they would just be carpet bombing that fact all over the place reminding us every day about it and with some justice. This is a guy, Hastert, who built his early political career on this image of being a teacher and a coach and a mentor to young boys and he was a straight up predator. But nobody wants to talk about it.

It's one of the things that nobody really wants to talk about to the point that most people you bring it up and even people who remember it from the time they're like, oh, yeah, they kind of remember, but it's faded out of public memory. I can understand why people don't want to talk about it. I don't really want to talk about any of this stuff either. But maybe the people who should be talking about it are worried that if the public starts asking some pretty basic questions like how does a literal serial child molester rise through the ranks for decades to become the most powerful man in Congress without anybody noticing what he was up to? Why, when he was caught, did he get 13 months in prison? When we routinely give decades to drug offenders and people running Ponzi schemes and financial schemes or think about Bill Cosby, who I mentioned, or even Tiger Woods or Harvey Weinstein. When the eye of soron turned its gaze in their direction, that was it for them not to compare Tiger to what the other two were accused of, but just in the sense that there was this embarrassing scandal, this devastating scandal.

And it didn't matter that they were rich or powerful or had powerful friends or that a lot of people were invested in their success. It did not matter. Think about this. If Bill Gates or Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos got hauled in with dozens of underage girls, accusing them of sexual assault, each of them independently corroborating the other's accounts. Accounts that sync up with flight logs and visitor records and known travel of other people that they say were present. Sure, those guys would have certain advantages, like being able to hire the most expensive lawyers, or maybe being able to intimidate the girls into silence, or just benefiting from some residual public goodwill if it goes to trial. But if they couldn't keep those girls quiet and they couldn't intimidate them, and they didn't have a good story to explain their corroborated accounts, those guys would be on their way to prison. And also they'd be in the headlines every day because it's a crazy story with guaranteed public interest. And so the obvious question is, how is it that this guy, Jeffrey Epstein, who's rich and prominent, but he's not Bill Gates rich and prominent?

Maybe he was in control of a couple billion dollars and not all of it his, which is a lot. But it's not the kind of money that can put the US. Department of justice off you when there's dozens of underage girls willing to testify that you sexually assaulted them. How is it that this guy seems to be able to dictate terms to the US Department of justice? These are the people who took down John Gotti and Denny Hastert and Pablo Escobar. They weren't afraid to do that. This is Amy Roebach from ABC News, an anchor on the news show 2020. You may have heard this. It was released by Project Veritas a couple of years ago.

I've had the story for three years. I've had this interview with Virginia Roberts. We would not put it on the air. First of all, I was told, who's Jeffrey Epstein? No one knows who that is. This is a stupid story. Then the palace found out that we had her whole allegations about Prince Andrew and threatened us a million different ways. We were so afraid we wouldn't be able to interview Kate and Will. That also quashed the story. And then Alan Dershowitz was also implicated in because of the planes. She told me everything. She had pictures, she had everything. She was in hiding for twelve years. We convinced her to come out. We convinced her to talk to us. It was unbelievable what we had Clinton. We had everything. I tried for three years to get it on, to no avail. And now it's all coming out and it's like these new revelations, and I freaking had all of it. I'm so pissed, right? Like, every day I get more and more pissed because I'm just like, oh my God. What we had was unreal other women backing it up. Hey. Yep. Brad Edwards, the attorney, three years ago, saying there will come a day when we will realize jeffrey Epstein was the most prolific pedophile this country has ever known.

I had it all three years ago. So do I think he was killed 100%? Yes, I do. Because he made his whole living blackmailing people. Yeah, there were a lot of men in those planes, a lot of men who visited that island, a lot of powerful men who came into that apartment. Usually when I heard he was found in, I knew immediately. And they made it seem as though he made that suicide attempt two weeks earlier. But his lawyers claimed that he was roughed up by his cellmate around the neck. That was all, like, to plant the seed. And then I really believe it. Like, really believe it.

See, now we're getting somewhere. Who would have enough juice to suppress a story like this? Maybe not Bill Gates, but maybe the Queen of England. Maybe a guy like Bill Clinton, who was groomed for his role early on, first as a Rhodes scholar and then at Georgetown, where he studied under Carol Quigley with Prince Turkey Alfaisal in his class, the longtime head of Saudi intelligence. And Bill Clinton was in deep with the CIA in the 80s, when Colombian drug lords were flying their cocaine into Arkansas when he was governor there. And so maybe a guy like that Epstein was not powerful himself, but he had backing from some of the most powerful networks in the world. Partly because, as Amy Roebach said, he likely had some very dark blackmail on some very important people and partly because of who he was gathering that blackmail for. Which I think is the much more interesting and fruitful question. So let's dig into that. Anytime you're dealing with questions involving intelligence agencies, you are going to find yourself wading through a lot of circumstantial evidence. You'll run into the same thing if you try to investigate the intelligence agency's more rambunctious cousins, organized crime syndicates, and that's by design.

Everybody has a vested interest in keeping secrets. They know what happens to people who don't. And so you're not going to find written orders with signatures and detailed explanations of each party's role in the conspiracy. The evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was working with an intelligence agency is mostly circumstantial. It's likely to stay that way. But cases can be built on circumstantial evidence if it piles up high enough that the burden is shifted to the other side to make their case for why this is all one giant string of coincidences and misunderstandings, I'm working on this while the jury is still deliberating the fate of Ghislaine maxwell. Ghislaine. Maxwell was Jeffrey Epstein's occasional girlfriend, apparently, and according to federal prosecutors and many of his accusers, she helped recruit and groom young girls to be abused by Jeffrey Epstein, and that she would also participate in the abuse herself. That's what she's on trial for. A lot of people were hoping the maxwell trial would bring out a bit of the truth that died with Jeffrey Epstein in his prison cell. But really, this courtroom is not the place to make that case. And so those people have been disappointed if the prosecution starts veering off the main case, namely four known, identifiable, on the record victims of Epstein as well as people who know them, testifying that Maxwell participated in sexual abuse to get that conviction.

And they start talking about Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton and Donald Trump or what that guy meant when he said Epstein belonged to intelligence. Ghislaine maxwell is not charged with any of that. The job of investigating those related matters should, in an ideal world, or at least a moderately functional one, fall to the news media and maybe to the legitimate counterintelligence mission of the FBI. But this world is, of course, neither ideal nor functional. So instead you get me. There are researchers who have done a lot of legwork on the Epstein story, people like Whitney Webb and Ryan Dawson. If you're familiar with the work of those people, you're not going to learn really anything new here. I'm trying to put everything together in one place to kind of give people a brief. And if you've read whole books on this topic and everything, there's going to be things in here that I leave out. Just want to hit a lot of the key points to give people a baseline understanding of what we know and can reasonably infer about this situation. It's only been very recently that some mainstream sources were forced to admit that there are some interesting questions here.

Rolling Stone ran a story that was headlined was Jeffrey Epstein a spy? Who was written by our friend Vicky Ward, formerly of Vanity Fair. Quote back in 2002, when I was reporting on Jeffrey Epstein's finances for Vanity Fair magazine, he was not a household name. During that time, I paid a visit to the Federal Medical Center Devons in Devons, Massachusetts, to meet with an inmate, one Stephen Hoffenberg. We sat in a little room near a recreation area. Hoffenberg, dressed in the requisite orange jumpsuit while I, several months pregnant with twins, was dressed per prison requirements as shapelessly as possible. It was an absolutely intriguing meeting. Hoffenberg was serving 18 years in prison for committing a $450,000,000 Ponzi scheme in the 1980s. He'd been running Towers Financial, a debt collection and reinsurance business, and had worked alongside Epstein, who was a paid consultant. Hoffenberg told me that Epstein planned to turn Towers into a global colossus through illegal means. Hoffenberg told me with a sad grin that he represented a problem for Epstein because while they were working together, epstein had confided in him as to how exactly he made a career out of conning people and institutions, not least because the idea was that they would do it together.

Hoffenberg said that Epstein had a term for the perfect execution of the grift. He called it playing the box, which meant that he ensured that even if his crime was uncovered, the victim would be unable to do anything about it, either because of social embarrassment or because the money was tucked away in a place where they either couldn't find or couldn't get it again. This interview is from 2002, just before anybody knew who Epstein was. What Hoffenberg had failed to realize, he told me, is that Epstein would con him. Epstein would take 100 million of Tower's money, move it offshore, and meanwhile cooperate with US. Prosecutors against Hoffenberg, who was unable to do anything about this because he'd pleaded guilty, which meant that there was no trial and therefore no discovery. I can't prove all of Hoffenberg's claims, but some of them are accurate. I have discovered, for example, that Epstein certainly did cooperate against Hoffenberg and gave at least three interviews to prosecutors, and 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. Hoffenberg also knew something else Epstein wanted hidden.

According to Hoffenberg, he claimed that Epstein moved in intelligence circles, end quote. So this is in 2002, before Epstein was ever arrested the first time or the second time, before any accusations about him had publicly surfaced. And his business partner, he and Hoffenberg worked closely for several years, is telling a reporter back in 2002 that Epstein was connected to intelligence agencies. It would be just five or six years later, in 2007 or 2008, that the federal prosecutor down in Florida who was overseeing Epstein's case, alex Acosta, was told, according to his sworn testimony, that he was told by his superiors to back off of Epstein because Epstein quote, belongs to intelligence. Back to Ward, quote the Hoffenberg Epstein relationship was not something Epstein then pitching himself to vanity Fair as a money manager extraordinaire for billionaires only had volunteered to me. So when I gingerly raised Hoffenberg to Epstein and mentioned that I had documentation showing that the two were linked, the financier turned really nasty. He maintained he hardly knew Hoffenberg. He just consulted briefly on a couple of deals that he'd not been involved in any prosecution of Hoffenberg, and that if I wrote any different, things would turn out badly for me.

Here's exactly what he said. If there's any implication of wrongdoing, I will take legal action against you personally. I'm telling you so you understand I will be as harsh as I possibly can personally, not for the magazine, but you, because I had this discussion with you, this relationship is with you. You shouldn't risk your future for a job. And back to Ward. Now, Epstein's sensitivity regarding Hoffenberg was equal to his sensitivity on what he called the girls. He went berserk. If you mentioned either subject. In hindsight, one has to wonder if Hoffenberg presented an equally big problem, as the girls would. Hoffenberg told me that in the 1980s after Epstein left Bear Stearns. In ignominious circumstances, epstein was trained in moving money offshore, and that a mentor of Epstein's was someone Hoffenberg knew, a British defense contractor who died in 2011 named Douglas Lease. Hoffenberg claimed that Lease was an arms dealer. Lease's son Julian says that's not true. But the UK parliamentary record does mention Lease in reference to the Alia Mama arms deal of the early 1980s. I remember distinctly that in our first meeting, Hoffenberg told me that Lease was pivotal in understanding Jeffrey's Mo, because Lease had introduced him not only to aristocratic Europeans who Epstein subsequently fleeced, but to all sorts of people in the arms business, including the late Turkish born businessman Adnan Khashoggi, and allegedly the late media mogul Robert Maxwell.

Back in 2002, I didn't pay much attention to this. This was because Epstein breezily threw me off first. Epstein told me he'd never met Maxwell, and I asked him twice if he knew Lease, whom I had never heard of, and Epstein said no. The second time he elaborated douglas Lease, I think he was the father of somebody I knew. I think his son was friendly with ferranti. That's where that whole crowd comes in that you asked me about a long time ago. I think his name was Nicholas. It was sort of that 66th street building. I think they might have all lived there. So I forgot about Lease and I didn't bother to pursue the notion that Epstein had known Maxwell, end quote. Those three people that Miss Ward just mentioned douglas Lease, Adnan Khashoggi and Robert Maxwell those names will be familiar to people who have spent some time researching the deep politics of the late seventy s and throughout the 1980s. Sir Douglas Lease was a British arms broker, kind of a backroom deal maker, as well as an agent of British intelligence. According to Stephen Hoffenberg and others who knew Lease and Epstein at the time, back in the 80s when they were associated, lease is supposed to have been one of the key brokers of the largest arms deal in UK history with Saudi Arabia.

Took place back in the 1980s. Lease worked with a Saudi counterpart, another sort of guy who operated in the shadows, in those liminal spaces between sovereign entities. Another arms broker named Anand Khashoggi, who we just mentioned. Khashoggi was this larger than life sort of caricature of a decadent prince. He's not a Saudi prince, but just throwing around a ton of money. Everything gold, everything big. Donald Trump actually bought his yacht after Khashoggi eventually went to jail later on, and his name, his last name should sound familiar. He's the uncle of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist who was murdered and chopped up by Saudi agents in the Kingdom's Embassy in Turkey in 2018. So this is a family that's close to power. Khashoggi was very close to both Saudi and Israeli intelligence, and he almost served as an almost official go between for the two governments. Kind of an off the books diplomat. Back in the 1980s when the Reagan administration wanted to get weapons illegally to Iran during the Iran Iraq war, they asked Israel for help because Israel shared the same interest. Obviously, Israel and Iran hate each other now, but back then, right after the revolution, when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, what they were really worried about was Saddam Hussein and him getting too powerful if he conquered too much of it.

So, yeah, the Reagan administration wanted to get weapons to Iran to prolong the war. They ask Israel for help. And what does Israel do? Israel calls on the services of Adnan Khashoggi to make it happen. Both Khashoggi and Lise were the kind of guys that you called when you were a government that needed something done, but done discreetly. Lise was the bagman, bringing bribes to Saudi and British officials to make sure that the right companies got paid off in their big arms deal. Anan Khashoggi was an arms trafficker with connections all over the world who knew how to work around things like customs agents and national borders. Well, Epstein gets close with both of these guys. In the 1980s, he worked with both of them, and based on the above ground information, it's kind of hard to see what it is exactly that he would have been doing with them. Epstein was already on a private plane headed to a meeting at the Pentagon with Douglas Lease in 1981. When Epstein is just 28 years old and hasn't done anything really, when you look at his actual resume up to that point. I mean, let's take a moment.

And it will only take a moment because there's not much here to review what we know about Epstein up to this point in his life. In 1981, when he's on that plane with Douglas Lease, epstein had just left his job at the investment firm Bear Stearns after only five years, and he left under a cloud due to a regulatory violation. He was forced out in a deposition years later, investigators were hammering Epstein with questions about insider trading all the way to the CEO of the company. Well, before working at Bear Stearns, he had worked for two years teaching high school math, a job that he left amidst complaints that he was being inappropriate with his female students. Surprise, surprise. And that's it? That's it. That's his resume up to this point. He's a college dropout, but somehow got hired to teach mathematics at Dalton School, an elite private school in New York who presumably could hire any high school math teacher in the country, but went with this guy who had no college degree and no experience teaching. One of his students was the child of Ace Greenberg, who's a pretty well known vice president at Bear Stearns in big investment bank.

And Epstein's supposed to have befriended Greenberg and talked his way into a Wall Street job. So he apparently starts out as a junior trader but soon gets moved into a different area with the firm. Bearstern's CEO Jimmy Kane, who remained close to Epstein years later and who ran his shop in a way that Epstein would have appreciated, said, quote, he was not your conventional broker saying buy IBM or sell Xerox given his mathematical background. We put him in our special products division where he would advise our wealthier clients on the tax implications of their portfolios. He would recommend certain tax advantageous transactions. He's a very smart guy and has become a very important client for the firm as well. End quote. So let me translate that for the kids in the back. Epstein's job at Bear Stearns was to help rich people hide their money. And he did it for some very rich and some very important people, like Charles Bromfman, a billionaire from the Seagram's liquor fortune whose name will come up again later. And so that probably explains why Epstein maintained a strong relationship with Bear Stearns and personally with Jimmy Kane and Ace Greenberg, even after being forced out of the company for attracting the attention of regulators because he got caught doing exactly what they were paying him to do.

Maybe he got a little overzealous with it. And so now a picture, the beginnings of a picture, starts to emerge. Why would high powered arms brokers like Douglas Lease be on a private plane headed to a meeting at the Pentagon with a 28 year old college dropout, a failed high school math teacher and junior trader who just got fired from his investment banking job? He's there because he's not looking for a math tutor or for investment advice. He's looking for someone who knows how to hide and launder money. And that's what Epstein had spent five years at Bear Stearns learning how to do in later interviews. Epstein was always coy about his business during this period, but he was more open with it with people who knew him back in the past. He said he was a financial bounty hunter. That's what he was employed as after he left Bear Stearns for a few years in the early 80s, he was a financial bounty hunter. A guy named Jesse Cornbluth, who was friends with Epstein in the 1980s says that Epstein told him that he consulted for governments and companies and wealthy individuals to help them recover stolen money and that he also sometimes worked with people who had stolen a lot of money to help them hide it.

Another guy who knew Epstein in the 1980s says basically the same thing. Epstein told him he was a financial bounty hunter who specialized at hiding and finding money. And he also said that Epstein was one way or another connected to intelligence agencies. Well, Epstein had concocted this ridiculous story about what he was up to in those years after he left Bear Stearns and started managing money himself. He said his firm only accepted accounts of a billion dollars or more, which is just absurd. This guy's under 30 years old. He has no track record. No one's ever heard of any big trades he's made. But to even get him on the phone, you not only have to be a billionaire, but you have to have a billion dollars to invest just with him. It's just so stupid. I mean, one Wall Street guy who knew him back then tells a story about how he thought one time that he would do Epstein a solid. And so a wealthy friend of his was looking for a money manager to manage over $600 million for him. And so this guy offered to set Epstein up with him. But Epstein turned him down, not because his client list was full or he was too busy, but because the account was just too small for him to bother with.

Now, that's just obviously absurd. Someone with $600 million to invest doesn't audition for his money managers. They audition for him, especially in the 1980s. That's like a billion and a half dollars. Now, if you go to Goldman Sachs with a billion and a half dollars to invest, the CEO of the firm will greet you at the door before taking you on his private elevator to a conference room. Where Vice? Presidents of the company will give you a presentation explaining how you're going to have a whole team of analysts and traders assigned specifically to your account and how they're going to be able to draw on data and intelligence. Streams from around the world and how he'll be first in line for lucrative private investments and IPOs and mergers that are handled by Goldman Sachs. This is a kind of red carpet treatment you could expect at the most powerful investment bank in the country if you showed up with that kind of money. And supposedly this random guy who nobody really knows, who's been managing money for a few years on his own, supposedly just blows it off like it's beneath his notice. It's just silly.

And I think it's pretty obvious what was going on, which is that he didn't want the account because Jeffrey Epstein was not really running a hedge fund. People went around to players on Wall Street after the whole Epstein story blew up and asked people, people who'd know, have any of you guys ever worked with this dude? Do you know anyone who has worked with him or done a deal with him? Have you heard of any big deals he's done or big trades he's made? Someone like Epstein, just to explain to some of you who aren't familiar with this world, someone like this guy who is supposedly managing enough money for billionaires that his personal fees, which are often kind of 1% of the year's profit, is kind of standard. So if you're managing a billion dollars and the investments make 10%, 10% of a billion is 100 million, you as the manager get 1% of that. So a million dollars that year? Well, Epstein's making way more than a million. He's got the largest private residence in New York City. It's nine stories tall, like 40 or 50,000 sqft. It's worth $70 million. He's got the largest private residence in the state of New Mexico on a 7500 acre ranch.

He's got a private island with a temple on it, a fleet of aircraft, more homes all over the world. He was supposedly a billionaire, but you don't become a billionaire making 10 million or $20 million a year, that's not going to get you there. To get the kind of money that Epstein was showing and to get it in a relatively short period of time, really just less than a decade, six or seven years and he seems to be fully ramped up. You'd have to be making moves in the market that the whole world would see happening. Billionaires don't add a few shares of Microsoft to their e trade accounts. Billionaires take a position in the company, meaning they have meetings with various brokers who pull together enough shares and structure the purchase in a way that doesn't absorb all the liquidity and make the market go bonkers. Well, you don't do that for years without anyone else on Wall Street working with you or knowing anyone who worked with you or knowing about any deals or trades you've made or anybody who worked for you. A hedge fund is not just a guy at his computer making trades either.

Hedge funds have offices full of analysts and traders and economists and mathematicians and accountants. You name it. It's a company, it's a whole operation. Epstein didn't have any of that as far as we're aware. From Miss Ward's 2003 article, quote why do billionaires choose him as their trustee? Because the problems of the mega rich, he tells people, are different from yours and mine. And his unique philosophy is central to understanding those problems. Mrs. Epstein, very few people need any more money when they have a billion dollars. The key is to not have it do more harm than anything else. You don't want to lose your money, end quote. Well, again, a billionaire can have anybody manage his money. The biggest and most powerful firms in the world would fight over his account, but they're supposedly giving it to this nobody who got pushed out of his firm for a regulatory violation and where he wasn't even working as a trader, but a special products engineer. A field in which he'd be much more limited on his own without the institutional backing. And they're not giving it because he's just so brilliant and this eccentric genius who just has some intuition he's going to double our money, therefore we're going to take a risk by giving our billion dollars to this guy?

No, it's just they're giving it to him just because they want to preserve what they have well, that's just not how the world works. Give your money to any investment bank in the world and say, structure this in a conservative way that's going to make sure it's robust to turbulence and inflation and that I just don't lose what I have. Any investment bank in the world can do that for you. That's not why you go to a guy like Jeffrey Epstein in the real world. You go to a guy like Jeffrey Epstein to get things done that you don't want anybody else knowing about. It's easy to think of money laundering like it's sort of an afterthought to the criminal underworld, this boring but necessary appendage to the real crimes. But money laundering is as central to organized crime as it is to intelligence operations. Nothing happens without it. You're running some off the books operation like, I don't know, illegally selling weapons to Iran in order to raise money to illegally supply the Nicaraguan contrast. It's not like Iran can just wire $800 million to the CIA's checking account. These are massive sums of money that are really only dealt with by institutions, and you've got to move it around across board.

I mean, think about a four foot high pallet of cash of $100 bills is about $50 million. So moving around this kind of money, you have to be able to do it through institutions. And if you're doing that, then you're risking having it detected and tracked by people you don't want seeing it. You got to move it around again across borders without anyone knowing or if they find out, to make sure that there's a great legitimate sounding story, at least on first pass, about where this money came from and what it's doing. This is what Epstein learned to do at Bear Stearns. It's what he did there, and it helps explain why he was on a private plane with Douglas Lease the same year that Bear Stearns dropped him. It also helps explain why Lease would introduce him to another big arms dealer like Adnan Khashoggi. Guys like that don't need a banker. They've got bankers, but they always need good money launderers. The third name that I mentioned a few minutes ago was Robert Maxwell, the British publishing mogul. Douglas Lease introduced Epstein to Maxwell in the mid 1980s, and after getting to know him for a couple of years, robert Maxwell introduced Epstein to his favorite daughter, Ghislaine.

Maxwell. This is in 1988. Ghislaine. Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein, as is now well known, became lovers and confidants and partners in crime. But she also seems to have had a role assigned to her by her father as a sort of all in one manager or handler of Jeffrey Epstein. Through her father, she had access to the wealthy and powerful people that we now associate with Epstein, guys like Prince Andrew or the Clintons or whatever. It was through Ghislaine that he got to know these people, and she seems to have been something like his, I don't know, social manager. She would make connections and set them up with people, bring them to parties and events and manage his calendar. And his job was to show up and be Jeffrey Epstein, I guess. And her job was to set everything up and kind of manage the situation. Well, her father, Robert Maxwell, is a very interesting guy. A lot of people don't remember him today, especially in the US, or if they do, it's only because he's the father of the notorious Ghislaine Maxwell. But he was one of the most famous men in Britain and one of the wealthiest and most connected men on planet Earth, until his mysterious death in 1991.

Robert Maxwell's birth name was Abraham Lieb, and it would change a dozen times throughout his life. When he was 15, his name was Jan Ludwig Hyman binyamin Hoch, and Nazi Germany had just annexed a large chunk of his home country of Czechoslovakia. The next year, Hungary absorbed what was left, and Yan, coming from an Orthodox Jewish family, sees the writing on the wall. And so he escapes to France in May 1940, where he joins up with the Czechoslovakian army in exile, just in time for France to be overrun by the Germans. And so Jan is forced to escape again, this time to England, posing as a French soldier and using a surname that he copped from a brand of French cigarettes. It's a very resourceful guy, especially as a young man, 1617 year old kid. Once he gets to England, he links up with Czechoslovak and Zionist groups there, but eventually becomes frustrated with the Czechoslovak government in exile. And so he joins up with the British military. First an engineering corps, and then in 1943, he hooks up with a combat unit that saw action from the Normandy invasion all the way to Berlin.

He saw plenty of combat. He also participated in ugly business like interrogating captured Nazis. Later, he'd be implicated in a war crimes investigation for murdering unarmed German civilians. In January 1945, just a few months before the war's end, he was pinned by British General Bernard Montgomery with a Military Cross for storming a machine gun nest. The Military Cross was the second highest British military award at the time, same as a Distinguished Service Cross or a Navy Cross in the US. It's a high award. Yon made sergeant during the war and then received an officer's commission at the rank of captain right as the war was wrapping up in 1945. Well, again, you can tell this guy's a hustler, escapes two countries, has five or six names, joins two armies and fights his way through France to Germany, all before his 25th birthday. The guy's a hustler and a grinder, and he gets things done when he sets his mind to it. After the war, Jan was attached to the British Foreign Office and spent the next two years working for the British government's. PR and propaganda outfit in Berlin, where they put his considerable language skills to work.

According to one of his biographers later, he was eventually fluent in nine languages, which, I don't know, maybe that's a bit exaggerated, but certainly he spoke at least four or five. In 1946, he was naturalized as a British citizen and he used the contacts that he made during the war as well as those that he had from before the war back in Eastern Europe, to start up an import export business between the UK and the east. Most, if not all of Janhoe's immediate family had been killed during the war and like many Jews at the time, he was looking to Palestine as the only permanent solution to their troubles in Europe and elsewhere. Well, Zionism presented a bit of a problem because it ran headlong into official British interests and policy after the war. After facilitating it for years. Britain had begun severely restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine just before the outbreak of war because of the terrible effects that the emerging Jewish Palestinian conflict was having on Britain's relations with the Arab countries. And they continued this policy more or less after the war. By this point, the Zionists believe, the Zionists in Palestine believe that they're ready to handle the Arabs on their own, if only the British would simply get out of the country.

But it never was the official British policy to hand Palestine over to Jewish control. And they'd spent a lot of time and money fighting for and developing the region over the years. So the British were not eager to be driven off. And so to help motivate them, zionist terrorists began attacking British personnel in Palestine and assassinating British officials in other countries. They blew up the British headquarters at the King David Hotel, killing 91 people. They sent mail bombs to British officials back in England. They even sent a mailbomb to the White House addressed to President Truman, according to a memoir written by the man who served as the head of the White House. Mailroom under six presidents and an account that's confirmed by Truman's own daughter in her memoir you're martyr made listeners, so you already know this story. The Zionists still had their boosters in the British government, but by the late 40s, relations had deteriorated enough that things were difficult, especially on the ground. There was a great deal of hatred passing between the British and the Zionists there in Palestine, so that when the British were finally driven out of the country in 1948, they were very bitter about it and they slapped a weapons embargo on the emerging Israeli state just as war was coming with its Arab neighbors.

So to get people and weapons into Palestine, the Zionists were going to have to work through unofficial channels to get around the British blockade. And they drew on every thread that they could reach. For example, Lyndon Johnson, U. S. President after Kennedy, a jewish historian from Texas named Louis Gamalach studied LBJ's early relationship with the Zionists, which went way back. His aunt was a founding member of the Zionist Organization of America, and Gamalak found evidence that LBJ and his friend Jim Novi, who was a wealthy Zionist down there in Texas where LBJ operated, were involved together in smuggling weapons into Palestine in crates that were marked for Texas grapefruit. Gamalak doesn't really explain how the smuggling was accomplished, but it was not A-U-S. Government operation. It was something LBJ was doing on his own in violation of American law raising the money to buy large quantities of military hardware and getting that hardware off the books and then shipping it halfway around the world to a country under embargo by the British. That's a major operation that's handled by not just some guy that you met down at the bar. This is going to be handled by established smuggling outfits.

And if you're talking about smuggling in the midst of the total destruction of commerce and infrastructure following the Second World War, you're going to be dealing with organized crime. It was helpful that Jewish mobsters in the United States and other countries tended to be sympathetic to the Zionists because well, partly because both groups were at war in different ways with the Communists. Another string that the Zionists pulled on was that of a young Jewish war veteran turned import export businessman from Czechoslovakia, exactly the kind of person who would know how to get things from one place to another in the complicated post war environment. The new communist government in Prague made an agreement to ship weapons, many of them seized from the Germans to the Zionists in exchange for cash. But they still needed a way to get the gear down to Palestine. And that's where men like our current protagonist, Jan Hook, who got things from one place to another for a living, came in. The weapon shipments from Czechoslovakia that were facilitated by Janhok at the time were considered decisive in that first war against the Arabs, the Israeli War of Independence, especially because of the aircraft they delivered, aircraft which were the specific smuggling assignment of Jan Ludwig Hyman.

Binyam in Hoch, or actually, he had officially changed his name to better fit into British society by this point. So we will call him by his new name now robert Maxwell. In 1951, Maxwell still only 28 years old, really amazing when you think about it. He bought a small publisher of scientific books, and he gained the US and UK distribution rights for a much larger continental European publisher of scientific books. I don't know too many of the details of these businesses in the early days, but according to at least two of his biographers, maxwell had an effective monopoly editing and distributing scientific and engineering journals being translated into English out of Germany and other European countries. Before long, he had built the company into a major. Publishing house and had become extremely wealthy in the 1960s. He runs for and wins a seat in the House of Commons. In the early 1980s, he buys a group of six newspapers, including the Daily Mirror. A few years later, he buys McMillan, one of the big five English language publishers. He bought the New York Daily News. He tried with the billionaire Charles Bronfman of the Seagram's liquor fortune to buy the Jerusalem Post.

By the end of the 1980s, Robert Maxwell was one of the most famous men in Britain. He was one of the world's most well known publishers, and his empire was vast. His net worth, according to Forbes, was in the one to 2 billion range, which is maybe four or $5 billion today at a time when there were a lot fewer billionaires. Now every rando, hedge fund manager, college dropout, computer programmer has a billion dollars. That was not how it was back then. Was a combat veteran, a businessman, a linguist, a smuggler and an experienced propagandist with contacts across Europe, including behind the Iron Curtain as well as in Britain and the Middle East. Robert Maxwell was obviously very interesting to intelligence agencies after the war and throughout his life. The British Foreign Office and the FBI for a while suspected that he might have been working for the Russians. But most people who have researched the topic think this was probably a misunderstanding. Robert Maxwell. It's hard to relate to a guy like this. He was really this larger than life international figure who seemed to have almost perceived himself as a sovereign country. After all.

The leaders of actual sovereign countries cowtow to him all the time call on him to ask for favors and beg for his support and to draw on his connections around the world. He's not calling them for help. They're calling him for help. It's definitely true that Maxwell was doing things for the KGB and the Czechoslovakian communists in the 1960s, as did his friend Jeffrey Robinson, a former British MP who's been described as Maxwell's bag man during that same period of time. But Maxwell, I think, would not have felt like he was an asset of Soviet intelligence because he was not some normal citizen. He would have seen himself more like the way he was actually treated, which was as a sort of freelance unofficial diplomat who is a British citizen, but really he kind of exists in the liminal spaces between these established power structures. The FBI and British Foreign Office probably saw Maxwell sneaking around Eastern Europe, meeting with Soviet and KGB officials and thought he might be working on their behalf. But we know today that Maxwell only served two masters himself and the Zionist state of Israel. His association with Israeli intelligence began with smuggling weapons in the immediate post war years, and over the years his role grew as someone who had planes, yachts, contacts across the world, access to important people and legitimate business interests to provide excuses for international travel and meetings.

The Mossad. The Israeli Mossad put Robert Maxwell to many uses over the years. If the Masad needed to get a message to the head of the KGB without generating an official record, Maxwell delivered it. If the Mossad needed money for an operation, but it couldn't be seen as coming from them, maxwell would arrange to make it happen. And in general, he would just keep his eyes and ears, as well as the eyes and ears of the reporters working for him, open for anything that might be of interest to Israeli intelligence. In 1991, a man named Ari Ben Minashe approached several British news organizations with some stories about Robert Maxwell. Ben Minashe was an arms dealer and a ten year veteran of Israeli military intelligence. And he claimed that Maxwell and his foreign editor at the Daily Mirror, Nicholas Davies, were both longtime Assad agents, and that, among other things, maxwell had informed the Israeli government of the identity of the Israeli whistleblower Mordecai Vanunu in 1986, after Vanunu approached one of Maxwell's papers with evidence exposing Israel's long denied nuclear program. Ben Minashi also claimed that Maxwell had helped set a honey trap that led to Vinunu being kidnapped in Rome, then shipped off to Israel and thrown in prison.

And he also claimed that Robert Maxwell had played a role in what became known as the Iran Contra affair of the Reagan administration. I remember several years ago in my former life with the Department of Defense, one time we all had to attend a training evolution on how to recognize an insider threat, meaning fellow DoD employee or contractor who might leak classified information to foreign governments or other parties that the US. Government would not want to have it. They tell us to watch out for people who suddenly start showing a lot of money, or people who are known to gamble a lot or who owe a lot of money, things that might cause them to want to do something like sell military secrets to another country. As part of this training, they went through maybe a dozen real life historical examples of people who had done this, like, in recent decades, so that we could see the patterns and kind of get a profile of what to look for. But there's this strange, awkward elephant in the room. Out of the dozen or so real life examples, they covered all but two, maybe three shared one very obvious characteristic that nobody was mentioning.

Namely, that almost all of these espionage examples that they provided were carried out by Americans of certain ethnic origins who were leaking secrets to their ancestral homeland out of a feeling of national duty or pride as they go through. Three, four examples. Seven, eight, nine examples where this pattern holds. It's becoming a little awkward in the room because there's an obvious question to be asked, but one that no one doing this training really wants to answer, well, leave it to me. Everyone knows I am a bit of a troll, but my trolling usually has a purpose. The entertainment that I get out of it just sort of a side effect. Or maybe, if I'm being honest, one of the side effects of entertaining myself is that some actual purpose is also served. I like to think so. And so I raise my hand and I point out the obvious, that most of their examples involved Chinese Americans leaking to China, jewish Americans leaking to Israel, a Russian American leaking to Russia, etc. And I asked how we should handle that information as we go forth to spy and inform on our work colleagues, and you could hear a pin drop in the place.

This, by the way, is how you make yourself very popular with the rank and file and very unpopular with upper management. But I wouldn't have poked the bear if I didn't think they were all doing us a genuine disservice by not addressing the question, because it's an important question and relevant one. And so the trainer is clearly uncomfortable and doesn't want to answer the question. But at least he was honest. He told us not to consider that information at all, to put it out of our minds. I understand his discomfort. I got a bunch of raised eyebrows and dirty looks just for asking the question. It's a hard problem for a multi ethnic, multicultural, open society like ours. It's a genuinely hard problem over in China. Chinese intelligence probably has a file on every single person of European ancestry in their entire country. They're not putting anyone whose parents were German American in charge of their military research laboratories, and there aren't many people like that in China anyway. During the Cold War, we were able to call on ideological sympathy to recruit assets from behind the Iron Curtain. But we can't appeal to a foreigner's American patriotism or ethnic pride the way that other countries might be able to call on ethnic pride or nationalism to recruit assets in America.

Moreover, when you try to ferret out disloyalty in large groups where the pattern of offender is predictable but the vast majority of people are not a problem, things can go wrong very fast. It's really hard to be effective without casting a very wide net. But casting a wide net for potential traitors and saboteurs and subversives has been the cause of many of the ugliest events in human history. A few Japanese Americans help a downed Japanese pilot on the Hawaiian island of Nihau after Pearl Harbor, and pretty soon 120,000 Japanese are being rounded up and thrown into camps. So I can understand why the trainer just wanted to get through his course without addressing a topic that might not have any good answer, but that we know from experience has many bad ones. But I put him on the horns of a dilemma. I left him with only two choices, neither of them very good. He could do what he did and tell us not to notice what was very obvious and relevant information which would undermine his training by showing that the government is not so concerned about protecting military secrets that it would risk offending anyone.

Or he could go the other route and risk becoming the subject of an HR complaint for telling us to watch out for those sneaky Ruskies, Chinamen and Jews. Maybe there's a healthy acceptable middle ground in there, but I don't blame him for not wanting to find out. But we're not talking about nationalities or religions or ethnicities. We are talking about the behavior of governments and intelligence agencies. If someone brings up MKUltra or CIA interference in other countries, I don't pull up like, how dare you say that about Americans. The CIA is not synonymous with Americans, just like Chinese State Security is not synonymous with Chinese people and the Mossad is not synonymous with Jews. When we refuse to deal honestly with the history for fear of what people might do with this information, we just drive the discussion underground where it rots and festers and its stink reemerges at inconvenient and unexpected moments. Let's say your kid wanders accidentally onto Four Chan and someone there says something about the disproportionate number of Jews in the first Soviet governments and secret police and your kid thinks, Well, I've never heard that. I'm going to go ask my teacher.

Mrs. Silverstein. Mrs. Silverstein, I read online that a majority of the Communist secret police were Jewish. Is that true? And Mrs. Silverstein says, of course that's not true, and if you continue with that nonsense, you're going to end up in the principal's office, young man. He can't even really find much on Google. He has to use DuckDuckGo to get any straightforward information on the topic. And of course he finds out eventually that it is true and that this guy on Four Chan was the only one who didn't lie to him about it. Well, what other secret knowledge does the guy on Four Chan have? Oh, he says it wasn't just the early Soviet government. He says there's a global conspiracy by powerful Jews against white Christian countries. Well, he would ask Mrs. Silverstein about this or his parents because they should know, but he's already learned that they're either lying or part of the COVID up. And so now he's cut off from outside influences on the subject and he's in this whole rabbit hole. It's like a mental disease I've seen consume intelligent people before my very eyes. One day someone is criticizing the Masad and you're like, Right on.

Next day he's talking about USS Liberty. You're like, okay, before long you can't bring the guy into mixed company because he cannot get through a conversation without mentioning the Jews. This happens. This is to a great extent the result of having legitimate discussions on some of these topics. Controlled and shut down. It's not the result of a failure to control or shut down these discussions. This is a difficult obstacle to getting people to look squarely at the Jeffrey Epstein story. No one would worry much about suggesting that Jeffrey Epstein was being run by Russian intelligence. But everyone seems to know that they're walking on thin ice when they bring up the overwhelming circumstantial evidence of his involvement with Israeli intelligence that these are just tricks. And again, not tricks by nations or religions or ethnicities but by governments and intelligence agencies who want to control discourse for their own purposes. They're just tricks, and we should not fall for them. Part Two. Bill, I know what happened last night, and I know what's been going on since then. And I think you just might have the wrong idea about one or two things. Okay? He had a bruise on his face.

That's a hell of a lot less than he deserves. Listen, Bill, I don't think you realize what kind of trouble you were in last night. Who do you think those people were? Those were not just ordinary people there. If I told you their names I'm not going to tell you their names but if I did, I don't think you'd sleep so well. It have you seen this?

It?

Yes, I have. I saw her body in the morgue. Was she the woman at the party? Yes, she was, Victor. The woman lying dead in the morgue was the woman at the party? Yes. Well, Victor, maybe I'm missing something here. You called it a fake charade. Do you mind telling me what kind of fucking charade ends with somebody turning up dead? Okay, then let's cut the bullshit, all right? You've been way out of your depth for the last 24 hours. You want to know what kind of a charade? I'll tell you exactly what kind. That whole play acted, take me phony sacrifice that you've been jerking yourself off with had absolutely nothing to do with her real death. Nothing happened to her after you left that party that hadn't happened to her before. She got her brains fucked out. Period. When they took her home, she was just fine. And the rest of it is right there in the paper. She was a junkie. She OD. There was nothing suspicious. Her door was locked from the inside. The police are happy. End of the story. Come on. It was always going to be just a matter of time with her.

Remember, you told her so yourself. You remember, the one with the great tits who OD'd in my bathroom? Listen, Bill, nobody killed anybody. Someone died. It happens all the time. But life goes on. It always does until it doesn't. But you know that, don't you? When you're dealing with a situation like the Jeffrey Epstein issue and is potential connections to intelligence agencies, relationships with intelligence agencies for all of our sort of conspiratorializing about the CIA and all the stuff we do know about what intelligence agencies have gotten up to in the 20th century. Superficially, a lot of us are super, super cynical. They would do anything. They would overthrow governments just to help a corporation increase the bottom line, whatever it is. We have no problem theoretically believing that they would be capable of these things. But in reality, when we're confronted with something new, not something from history, something emerges, like this Epstein story. And most people, including myself, tend to have a sort of block that they have to overcome, where you still, despite all of that, have this sort of inborn base assumption that, no, they wouldn't do that. That's too far.

It's just not possible. That it's not possible. Somebody would have spoken up. It's just not possible. But the thing is, it's happened before. It's happened before in Northern Ireland. In the early 1960s, a young Ulsterman named Colin Wallace was recruited into the British Army's Public Relations and Psychological Operations branch in Northern Ireland. Up to this point, there hadn't really been much trouble between Catholics and Protestants for some time. And so at the time, the Northern Ireland assignment was kind of considered a sleepy assignment, place people would go to retire, things like that. And that's how it was when Wallace first got picked up there. But then the 1960s happened. Just about every country had its version of the 1960s. And so by 1968, Northern Irish Catholics were out in the streets protesting their political domination by the Protestants that were loyal to the British Empire. Fists in the air led to fists in the face. Fists led to bottles and rocks, which led to tear gas and bullets, which led to bombs. And before long, the dark era known as the Troubles had begun in Northern Ireland. And so all of a sudden, the Northern Ireland assignment for British military intelligence and administrative officials was no longer considered a retirement tour.

Suddenly, it was at the center of British foreign and, in a way, domestic policy. As far as the security services were concerned, it was the first priority. This was a view of the situation with which our guy Colin Wallace, the intelligence officer who was hired there that we're talking about, he actually agreed with this outlook. Know, he was one of those, know, the type who just finds his home in the military. Colin Wallace was he loves everything about the military, takes his duty completely seriously, buys into everything they tell him, believes whatever the official sources in his country tell him is going on. That's who this guy was just an unironic true believer in Northern Ireland. His job was to cause other people to believe the same way. With the beginning of the Troubles, his job had gone from a steady routine of, like a PR professional publicizing community outreach events and fielding mundane questions from the press to now being engaged in full on information warfare and black propaganda. Designed to help fight the war on Irish terror. And so, for example, the Provisional Irish Republican Army, which was the militant wing of the IRA that the British were struggling with in Northern Ireland, had gotten its hands on some Russian made rocket launchers at one point.

And these rocket launchers had a defect in the firing mechanism that often caused them to malfunction and occasionally explode on the user. The British authorities had captured a few of these and were able to figure out the cause of the failures. But they didn't want the IRA to figure it out. At least they wanted to delay them figuring it out as long as possible. And so they planted stories in the press. This is one of Colin Wallace's projects, planting stories in the press saying that the launchers had been found to be defective, but that it was due to something other than the firing mechanism, the trigger mechanism. It wasn't really meant to hold up over time. But if it distracts the IRA from the confident use of these rocket launchers for a while until they figured out, that would be considered a win, that was the kind of thing that he was engaged in. And fair enough, right, fair enough. Use of information ops in a troubled area with a counterinsurgency going on. Other times they would plant rumors in the press or among just the people about Irish rebel leaders and they would put out stories designed to cause the public to hate and blame the IRA for the violence.

Basic propaganda stuff. It was also his job to deal with any PR fallout from the mass roundups and detention without trial of large numbers of Irish Catholics. In 1972, a demonstration against this policy of roundup and internment without trial. A demonstration against this was fired upon by British soldiers. 14 unarmed people got killed, another twelve were wounded and things kind of kept escalating. Bombings became a regular occurrence. Ugly, small unit, street fighting and ambushes that don't end with one guy hoisting a flag up on top of a building in victory, but with the other guy being tied to a chair in a damp basement. So the British SAS is brought in. Special Air Service sort of their special Forces and many counterinsurgency experts with experience in Kenya and other parts of the world are brought in at a certain point, I believe. In 1973, responsibility for intelligence operations in Northern Ireland is transferred from the portfolio of Mi Six, which is Britain's foreign intelligence agency, like the CIA, to Mi Five, which is Britain's domestic intelligence agency. Sort of like the FBI, not exactly. But Mi Six had traditionally handled Northern Ireland even though it was technically a domestic operation because Ireland was a foreign country and it was just easier for the same agency to cover both Ireland and Northern Ireland.

But for some reason it was transferred to Mi Five. In the middle of all this trouble in the early seventy s and all the people involved say that things really began to change once Mi Five took charge. The information operations that Colin Wallace was taking part in became much more aggressive. They began planting completely false stories in the press, maligning Catholic leaders attempting to incite infighting and using these false stories to influence public opinion not only in Ireland but in Northern Ireland and in Britain itself. So they're propagandizing the British people now and Colin Wallace is going along with all this like a good soldier. I mean he's doing his job to fight the war on terror. That's how he's still approaching this. It's the kind of guy he know sir, yes sir. And over time he becomes just you read the reports and the testimony of people who were there, people he worked for, who worked for him and he becomes a major figure up there as far as like the middle management of the military intelligence apparatus is dealing with this area. Very respected, recognized expert on Northern Ireland and he's often brought in to answer questions and provide briefs to generals and high government officials.

And at 29 years old he becomes the youngest person ever to make Lieutenant Colonel in the British military. Or at least he was the youngest one at the time. Maybe that's what it is after Bloody Sunday. That bloodbath in 72 that I mentioned a second ago. Politicians back in Britain are starting to feel pressure to put an end to this whole problem in Northern Ireland and so they start making noises about peace negotiation. A Conservative government is in charge at the time and even they're talking about going to meet with leaders of the Irish Republican Army to try to work something out. The Labor Party opposition is talking openly about cutting a deal if they win the next election. And soon those meetings with the IRA do start to happen. And the security services in Northern Ireland, mi Five military intelligence they go into like full panic mode. They are just not having it. Quote in 1972, Prime Minister Harold Wilson met with IRA leaders in Dublin. And the next year, the Northern Ireland minister, Willie Whitelaw, made similar contacts. This utterly shocked opinion in every officer's mess in Ulster and in Mi Five who took over intelligence operations there from Mi Six in 1973.

Exactly like the French army before it in Algeria. These key circles within the British Army now decided that in order to prevent a sellout of the imperial position in the overseas Province by leftists Guy Malette, Harold Wilson or weak minded centrists Pierre Finlin Edward Heath, the military must ensure that the right sort of government came to power. Operation Clockwork Orange was precisely this an attempt to smear and undermine labor leaders and Tory wets alike. The short term aim being to prevent labor being elected in February 1974 and to depose the likes of Heath and Whitelaw from the Tory leadership. Anyone who helped the minority labor government in power was fair game thanks to Peter Wright's revelations. And Peter Wright was a high level British intelligence officer who wrote an expose about some of this. We are more or less familiar with what went on in this period, though it is important to say that Colin Wallace was the first to make public admission of these campaigns. Well before Wright homosexual smears were directed against Edward Heath, Jeremy Thorpe, Norman St, John Stevas and Humphrey Berkeley, bogus bank accounts showing corrupt earnings were contrived for Edward Short and Ian Paisley Wilson was seen as the beneficiary of, and a possible participant in the assassination of Hugh Gateskill.

Lists were drawn up of such notorious communists and communist sympathizers as Brian Walden, David Owen, Robert Mellish, John Stonehouse, Roy Hattersley and Regrentis. And even a bogus pamphlet on revolutionary strategy for the installation of socialism in Britain was contrived for off the record briefing of American journalists, the joint authors being Tony Ben, Stan Orm and Dennis Healey. One is tempted to say that even in the Mi Five officer's mess, the idea of Dennis Healy collaborating with Mr. Ben and Mr. Orm on anything at all must surely have required the assistance of a few double whiskeys. The unhappier truth is that the minds that made such things up were quite possibly stone cold sober. Colin Wallace excelled at these black propaganda operations and for several years enjoyed his work. Gradually, though, he became uneasy at the extent to which his job seemed to be mainly about smearing and undermining British politicians rather than combating terrorism in Ireland, moreover, the army was now making its own Northern Ireland policy in a breathtakingly independent way. When the Heath government brought in a power sharing executive in Northern Ireland with the Sunningdale agreement of December 73, many within the army seemed to have seen this as the beginning of the end.

Before long, a wet Tory or labor government would sell out to the IRA completely. Accordingly, when the Ulster Workers Council decided to launch a general strike to bring down the power sharing executive, not only did it receive sympathetic backing from the army, but there is even evidence that the strike was planned and encouraged by Mi Five and its adjutants in Army Intelligence and Information policy. To mask what was being prepared and to create an emotional following wind in Britain, it was decided to launch a publicity blitz about an IRA doomsday plot, a plan for the evacuation of 100,000 Catholics to the south and a scorched earth policy in the north. The plan had been drawn up by the IRA as a contingency plan against the possibility of a massive Protestant attack on Catholic areas of Ulster. It would now be presented as if it were an offensive strategy in its own right. When he saw what was being cooked up, Colin Wallace objected. The idea of the plot was several years old and had already been used back in 1972. He couldn't, he said, recycle such old stuff without losing credibility. But you don't have to.

He was told, we'll get the Prime Minister to do it. And so they did. On 13 May 1974, Harold Wilson announced a dramatic revelation to the House of Commons, a suitably purple version of the doomsday plot fed to Wilson by the army puppet masters. Wilson even went so far as to warn the House that there will be an attempt to misrepresent this information, which is a genuine find by the security authorities. But I can assure the House that these documents are genuine and not even put forward by the IRA themselves for any purpose except that in which it had in mind to pursue. Just twelve days later, under strong army pressure, wilson caved into the UWC strike and threw the power sharing executive to the wolves. Such incidents served to increase Wallace's concern that the army was moving away from its alleged primary role of fighting terrorism. Worse, he became uneasy that the increasing number of assassinations and bomb outrages against Catholics might be taking place with army encouragement, perhaps even with COVID army planning. So in October 1974, Wallace announced that he didn't wish to work on Clockwork Orange anymore, that he was resigning in order to go back to fighting terrorism, end quote.

And so, a few weeks after he makes that announcement that he'd be moving on, colin Wallace files another report. And this is a report about a boy's home, an orphanage, basically a boy's home in Northern Ireland, in the city of Belfast. It's called the Kinkora Boys Home. And this is actually the second time that Wallace had filed a report about this place. This boy's home was being run by a loyalist paramilitary leader, widely believed, very, very widely believed, quite reliably to be an agent of British Intelligence, a guy named William McGrath. Wallace starts seeing intelligence linking many high ranking Northern Irish and British officials to, well, to pedophiliac activities. And soon Wallace sees that the stories seem to revolve around this place. King Korra boy's home. It turns out that complaints had been made about sexual abuse happening at King Korra before, more than once, but they were always ignored. After Wallace satisfies himself that he has an idea of what's going on there, he brings the information to his superiors and he's ignored. And so he tries again. The second time here that we're talking about, and this time he's told to back off.

Another officer, an army captain named Brian Gemmel, also saw what was happening, tried to report it, but he was told to back off. This is from an article in the Belfast Telegraph, quote in emotional scenes, Richard Kerr, a former Kinkora resident who was sexually abused at the boy's home, has received an apology from the military intelligence officer who tried to expose the abuse. Brian Gemmel's words represent the first time Mr. Kerr has ever received an apology from the. Authorities who failed him. Mr Gemmel was warned off revealing the pedophile activity at the East Belfast home by Ian Cameron, a senior Mi Five officer, who told him that this was not a matter for the intelligence services or the army to be concerned with. Now. Mr. Gemmel believes it was part of a cover up of sex abuse by top people. He suspects that the intelligence services used such dark secrets as a way to control abusers who were politically influential. As a captain, Mr Gemmel put in an official report about King Korra to a senior Mi Five officer. But to his astonishment, he claims he was ordered to stop digging and to forget about it.

He now feels that he should have exposed it, whatever the consequences for his army career, end quote. And so Colin Wallace can't make any headway with his superiors, he decides that this is important enough to go to the press about. He's got a lot of connections in the press. He's interacted with these people for a long time, thinks he might be able to do that. And this is a quote from a review of a book about the Colin Wallace issue and Kinkora and Clockwork Orange and all this book by a journalist named Paul Foote called Who Framed Colin Wallace? It's a very good book. This is a review of it from a review in it in the London Review of Books. Quote no newspaper in the UK was willing to follow this obvious lead or even to publish the story, despite the fact that McGrath's associates constituted a virtual who's who of Protestant Ulster. What was going on at Kincora was that the destitute boys were being systematically sodomized and abused by McGrath and his friends, who included Kincora's official director and assistant director. This had been going on for many years, perhaps from as early as 1959, and repeated attempts by boys who had been raped to get the RUC interested in the matter had always failed.

Nothing in Foote's book is more heartbreaking than his recounting of how over 20 years, a series of boys, and sometimes their families and social workers, tried desperately and unavailingly to put a stop to their dreadful pain, humiliation and buggery, and how the police, the press and the authorities failed them over and over again. Quite clearly, neither the RUC nor army intelligence were at all keen for the Kinkora story to be broken. This was so partly because McGrath and his friends were extremely well connected within the Protestant establishment. But the truth may have been worse than that. Intelligence services around the world often find it useful to maintain luxury brothels, not just for what they learn from pillow talk, but as multipurpose centers of reward, blackmail and assignation. There was nothing luxurious about Kinkura, but its rarity in the Northern Irish context as an unlimited source of boys who could be buggered without mercy or publicity seems likely to have made it an especially useful intelligence asset. So in his insistent attempts to open up the King Korra story, colin Wallace was rocking the boat just as much as he was by refusing to have anything to do with Clockwork Orange.

Quote well, the Boy Scout, Colin Wallace, the naive Boy Scout, found out what kind of people he was messing with. Very soon, and this is from that same review quote there can be no other explanation for what then happened to Wallace. He was suddenly smeared in a number of press articles, transferred abruptly out of Northern Ireland, and as soon as he got to England, dismissed from the army on trumped up charges of having wrongly retained secret documents and given them to the press. What is truly remarkable is the speed and thoroughness with which Wallace was dealt with. One moment he was an indispensable man. The next, he was sacked, disgraced, persecuted, and made into a non person. The Ministry of Defense has ever since denied that Wallace had been an intelligence at all. Thereafter, steps were taken to prevent him from getting other employment, and he was endlessly miserably harassed. The author foote is scrupulous at every stage in trying to see whether a case against Wallace might not be made to stand up. And he makes it clear that he and Wallace do not see eye to eye about politics, Ireland, the army, or just about anything else.

But no fair minded person can read this book and doubt Wallace's story. The only question one is left asking is how naive Wallace was really being when he raised objections first to Clockwork Orange and then to King Korra. Surely he was both too senior and too intelligent not to have known that both matters were utter dynamite and that one could not simply sign off on an operation like Clockwork Orange, which involved key Mi Five and army operatives in acts of high treason. Was it not obvious that anyone who did try to sign off and then threaten to blow open the Kinkora scandal for good measure would be seen as a dangerous man who knew too much to be left alone? Far worse was to follow for Wallace. He at last gained a post as information officer for the Arun District Council in Sussex, for whom he worked with his customary zeal and success in various small ways, he continued to be the subject of official harassment and surveillance. But in April 1980, he finally consented to be an off the record source for a journalist seeking to probe the rumors of an Mi Five plot against the Harold Wilson government at almost the same time that these articles were published four years before the Spy Catcher disclosures.

Those are Peter Wright's book. The King Korra scandal finally surfaced to the press. This had nothing to do with Wallace, but the powers that be who had not wanted these skeletons out of the cupboard were doubtless confirmed in their view that it was too dangerous to have Wallace wandering around free. Three months later, Wallace was arrested, found guilty of the manslaughter of his friend Jonathan Lewis, and bundled off to jail whence he only emerged in December 1986. It is, however, worth pointing out that Wallace's account of the attempted destabilization of Heath and Wilson was taken deadly seriously where it mattered most. Clive Pointing describes the atmosphere inside the Ministry of Defense after Wallace had been jailed. There was never any suspicion that Wallace was making these stories up or that it was totally unfounded and very easy to rubbish. It was very much a matter that, okay, the story was being contained at the moment because he was in jail. But in a few years time he would be out again and could be expected to start making the allegations again, and then that would be a serious problem. Meanwhile, there was still kincora. The awkward question had to be faced as to why the boys of Kincora had gone on being raped and abused for 20 years, despite repeated complaints to the police and despite Wallace's complaints to Army Intelligence.

From all sides of the Irish political spectrum came accusations of a police and intelligence coverup. To make matters worse, it emerged that McGrath had apparently worked for Mi Six even before he became the archvillain of Kinkora and was given to boasting of his links with Mi Six and his friends in Mi Five. The first official inquiry by the McGonagall Committee was promised that no limits would be placed on its investigation. As soon as it met, however, it was told that it could not examine any matter the police were currently looking into or which was covered by criminal charges in the past or in the future. Since just about everything to do with the scandal was covered by criminal charges, including the possibility of a cover up, a majority of the committee's members resigned on the spot and the inquiry collapsed after less than a day, an occurrence unique in British history. James Pryor, then Minister for Northern Ireland, announced that the police investigation would continue. As for the question of whether there had been a cover up after Colin Wallace and others had drawn attention to the Kinkora scandal, this would be investigated by Sir George Terry, chief Constable of Sussex, who had just put Wallace away from manslaughter.

Better still, the man appointed by Terry to take charge of the Kincora inquiry was Gordon Harrison, who had been in charge of Wallace's prosecution. Unsurprisingly, no Terry report was ever issued. Instead, Terry merely appeared at a press conference with Sir John Herman, chief constable of the RUC. Which Terry was RUC is the Royal Ulster Constabulary. It's the police force there in Northern Ireland which Terry was supposed to have been investigating, where he announced, I am satisfied that there is no substance to allegations that Army Intelligence had knowledge of homosexual abuse at King Korra. Given that Wallace had provided exactly that knowledge to army Intelligence many years before. The polite word for Terry's conclusion was incredible, though it is fair to add that other words were used at the time by some. The Northern Ireland Alliance Party, moderate as ever, referred to Terry's conclusions as misleading and blatantly dishonest. James Pryor now found himself besieged by demands for another Kinkora inquiry, this time by a High Court judge. As befitted the gravity of the case, pryor paid fulsome tribute to Terry, accepted that there would have to be another inquiry. I e. That Terry's was unsatisfactory, but then set up a low level affair under Judge Hughes, a retired circuit judge.

Mr. Pryor did, however, specifically assure the House that it would be within Hughes terms of reference to investigate the allegation of a cover up. That is the question of why there had been no inquiry into Kinkora before 1980. Judge Hughes quickly developed other ideas on opening his inquiry. He said that what it was about was the administration of boys homes and that the inquiry would have nothing to do with the allegations carried on in the newspapers and on television that there was any kind of COVID up of the Kinkora affair or that there was a vice ring in operation. Hughes refused to interview not only those convicted of offenses against the King Cora Boys, but even Mr. Roy Garland, who had complained to the security forces about King Cora as long ago as 1972 and had specifically pointed the finger at William McGrath as the evil genius of the affair. Mr. Robert McCartney, QC, representing the King Cora boys. Could hardly contain himself. Are my wits leaving me a man who detonated an entire police inquiry and put the finger at a fairly early stage on the man subsequently convicted for some of the most brutal acts of sodomy is not a relevant or material witness.

At this point, this already extraordinary story becomes positively surreal. Wallace, asked to give evidence to the Hughes inquiry, agrees to do so only if he's allowed to tell everything and is granted immunity from prosecution under the Official Secrets Act for doing so. Just to be clear, he's not asking for blanket immunity. He's asking for immunity just for testifying about things that are covered under secrecy laws. This is turned down by Mrs. Thatcher personally. Wallace sends a whole file of notes to Number Ten, Downing Street for onward transmission to Hughes, but most of the documents mysteriously get stolen by Number Ten and are never supplied to Hughes. The Hughes report is another complete whitewash. Faced with a document from Wallace proving that he had raised the Kincora question back in 1974, hughes avers that it might have been a forgery and therefore can be ignored. A file of documents on Kincora is then sent on to Teddy Taylor, the right wing Tory MP who had shown great interest in the case. Taylor places this file in a locked cupboard in a locked office under a 24 hours a day police guard. It is nonetheless stolen, producing a furious complaint from David Owen, MP, that even the House of Commons is no longer safe from burglary.

End quote. So what's going on in a situation like this? What's going on here? Don't answer that yet. Here's another story, also from Britain. This is from the Manchester Evening News. Quote, the Westminster establishment turned a blind eye to child abuse allegations against former Rochdale MP Cyril Smith. For decades, a long awaited national inquiry has found smith and other high profile members of Parliament were protected from police action by their parties as their whips tried to avoid damaging gossip and scandal. The Independent inquiry into Child sexual abuse IICSA concluded in a damning assessment of political culture spanning years. The IICSA inquiry found that both in his case and in those of other suspected MPs, including the late Conservative Sir Peter Morrison, parties and other institutions effectively covered them up. Professor Alexis J, who chaired the inquiry, said, it is clear to see that Westminster institutions have repeatedly failed to deal with allegations of child sexual abuse. From turning a blind eye to actively shielding abusers. A consistent pattern emerged of failures to put the welfare of children above political status. The report found. Institutions including the Liberal Party and the police had known full well that both Smith and others had been abusing children.

However, it stated, for example, in the 1970s and 1980s, MPs, including Liberal politicians Sir Cyril Smith and Sir Peter Morrison, were found to be active in their sexual interest in children, but were protected from prosecution, it found. Okay, well, you would be justified in asking that's, end quote. You would be justified in asking what kind of a person, like, forget about the perpetrators for a second. What kind of person would cover for someone engaged in the serial sexual abuse of children? It's another part of it that is like, I think, a block to people really getting their arms around this. They just can't imagine that. I remember I was in high school journalism class many years ago and on the first day of the class, the teacher, the journalism teacher was giving us all a lecture that was meant to drive home the importance of certain journalistic principles. It was like a big intro, welcome to journalism. And he created a scenario. He said there was once a reporter who had multiple young women independently telling him that they had been raped in the same area of town by a guy with a matching description.

He does some homework corroborates their story, starts writing this story up, serial rapist loose on the West Side. And so then his phone rings and it's the police, it's the lead officer pursuing a case against a man that they believe to be the rapist. And he's heard that the reporter was writing a story about it. He talked to the victims and they told him that they had been speaking with this reporter, and so the cop has called him to ask for a favor. He said if the reporter runs the story tomorrow, the rapist is going to get spooked. He's going to cover all his tracks. They'll never catch him. And so can you just hold off for a few days while the cops tie up some loose ends and get what they need to actually nail this guy and get him off the street? After that, he'll have the exclusive on the story. Well, the reporter is a good citizen, and he wants to help out, so he agrees. And a week later, sure enough, the cops catch the guy. He admits everything. He's on his way to prison. He publishes his story the same day and lets it be known that he and the paper cooperated with law enforcement by delaying publication.

The next day, he's at his desk when a woman approaches and asks if he's the reporter who wrote that story. And he says he is. And she starts cursing at him and crying and says that in the days after you decided to delay your story, that man raped me. And I might have avoided that if you had done your job of letting the public know something as basic as the fact that there was a rapist prowling around the neighborhood. My teacher wanted to drive home the idea that a journalist stands outside of all political and judicial and even safety and national security concerns, that their God is not peace or justice or safety. Their only God is truth. That's the message he was pushing to us. He wanted us to understand journalism as an almost sacred calling that must be taken deadly seriously if an open society is going to be possible. Well, so he put this question to us, what would we have done in that situation? And he told us he asked us that question before. He kind of told us the punchline, the very end. And you find that your instincts can kind of betray you on that question.

I can't remember how I answered when he put the question to us, but for sure, a lot of the students said that they would have helped the cops by delaying the story for understandable reasons. But the thing we're talking about here, this is much less understandable. We're talking about something several levels beneath that, something that's much harder for normal people to relate to. Put yourself in that position where you're in some position of responsibility. You're a journalist at a major newspaper, TV network, or you're a police officer or intelligence official or some official with oversight over some given area, and you learn about systematic child sexual abuse taking place somewhere, but you're told to drop the issue and that there will be consequences for you if you keep on it. We've all got families to feed. None of us wants to be fired. But I just can't imagine that there are many people listening right now who are not pretty confident that you would refuse to stay quiet about it. We're not talking about embezling funds here. We're not even talking about leaking secrets to a foreign country. We're talking about raping little children. And so we regular people consider the issue, and we think, I don't really think there's a single person that I consider a friend who would go along with this.

And yet, for some reason, there always seems to be plenty of people willing to go along with it. Concentrated among government officials, teachers unions and school officials, high ranking law enforcement and intelligence officials, major media figures. This is from Buzfeed News. This was published just a few weeks ago, actually in December 2021. Quote, secret CIA files say staffers committed sex crimes involving children. Declassified CIA inspector general reports show a pattern of abuse and a repeated decision by federal prosecutors not to hold agency personnel accountable. Over the past 14 years, the Central Intelligence Agency has secretly amassed credible evidence that at least ten of its employees and contractors committed sexual crimes involving children. But only one of the individuals was ever charged with a crime. Prosecutors sent the rest of the cases back to the CIA to handle internally, meaning few faced any consequences beyond the possible loss of their jobs and security clearances. That marks a striking deviation from how sex crimes involving children have been handled at other federal agencies, such as the Department of Homeland Security and the Drug Enforcement Administration. CIA insiders say the agency resists prosecution of its staff for fear the cases will reveal state secrets, end quote.

How exactly would prosecuting a pedophile risk revealing state secrets? They don't say. If a pedophile works at McDonald's, prosecuting him is not going to risk divulging the secret to making McDonald's fries so good. Were these people engaged in their mission at the time that they were committing these crimes against children? Did the abuse have something to do with their work for the CIA? If not, then what the hell? Throw them out of the agency, hand them over to a prosecutor, and put them in prison. How does that endanger? State secrets? The fact that they're so resistant to putting them on the stand or to holding a trial and having discovery is, I say, pretty solid proof that we're not talking about janitors and food service workers here, but CIA employees engaged in sensitive intelligence work. This is at an organization where they are very sensitive to the possibility of their employees being vulnerable to bribery or blackmail. You get kicked out of the CIA if your credit score drops too low or if you owe too much money or you get popped on a drug test. Your clearance is suspended or revoked, and you're out of there.

And yet there are, what, 1012, maybe more, CIA employees engaged in serious offenses against children, and it gets swept under the rug. How are there so many the CIA is not that big of an organization, and these were not minor offenses. Not that any offense against a child's minor. These are very serious. Quote One employee had sexual contact with a two year old and a six year old. He was fired. A second employee purchased three sexually explicit videos of young girls filmed by their mothers. He resigned. A third employee estimated that he had viewed up to 1400 sexually abusive images of children while on agency assignments. The records do not say what action, if any, the CIA took against him. A contractor who arranged for sex with an undercover FBI agent posing as a child had his contract revoked. Only one of the individuals cited in these documents was charged with a crime. In that case, as in the only previous known case of a CIA staffer being charged with sexual crimes, the employee was also under investigation for mishandling classified material. End quote. So the one employee who was actually charged with a crime was already in trouble for something else, and they just decided to pile on.

Quote Four former officials who are familiar with how internal investigations work at intelligence agencies told BuzzFeed News there are many reasons that prosecutors might not pursue a criminal case. One of them, familiar with the workings of the CIA's Office of Inspector General, said the agency is concerned that in a criminal case, it could lose control of sensitive information. The former official who reviewed the declassified inspector general reports characterized the concern from CIA lawyers as we can't have these people testify they may inadvertently be forced to disclose sources and methods. The official, who noted the agency has had a problem with child abuse images stretching back decades, said they understand the need to protect sensitive and classified equities. However, for crimes of a certain class, whether it's an intelligence agency or not, you just have to figure out how to prosecute these people, end quote. End quote. Sexual crimes involving children, including the viewing of images of abuse, have been uncovered at other agencies that handle sensitive information. In a November 2009 report, the Department of Defense acknowledged that dozens of Pentagon staff members or contractors had such images. In 2014, the inspector general of the intelligence community found that two officials from the National Reconnaissance Office, which oversees America's spy satellites, acknowledged viewing images of child sexual abuse during polygraph examinations.

At a symposium in 2016, Daniel Payne, a top Pentagon security official, said that when workers computers were examined quote, the amount of child porn I see is just unbelievable. End quote. So you remember at the beginning of the previous episode when I said I just wanted to make one request from the regime, from the people in power, and I understand it's difficult and I don't expect a lot, so I'm really trying to limit my request to something realistic. Is it too much to ask that we don't have dozens or more pedophiles working in sensitive positions at the Pentagon and the CIA. How does that happen? There are minimalist and maximalist theories on what's going on in a situation like the one at the Kinkora boys home in Northern Ireland. Certainly the evidence which admittedly is circumstantial, but I talked about that in the previous episode. Things are going to be circumstantial. Know documents are destroyed, hidden, classified. You're dealing with an entire organization full of people who are committed to secrecy and misinformation. This stuff's going to be circumstantial. But the weight of circumstantial evidence indicates that a guy connected to British Intelligence and his staff were systematically abusing children at this boy's home, that the boys were being pimped out to outsiders, that several victims as well as intelligence whistleblowers have said that the crimes involved important people in Britain and Northern Ireland and that there was a concerted effort from multiple vectors to keep a lid on all of it, as much as possible.

That's pretty well established. Now some people take that information and jump to british Intelligence must have been running a brutally abusive orphanage for the specific purpose of catching prominent Irish and British citizens in compromising situations so that they can discredit or control them with blackmail. And maybe that's true. I don't put anything past them, but I think maybe a more likely scenario, one that you could maybe sell to a skeptic where they were basically these intelligence agencies discovered that the abuse was happening. They saw that there were prominent people involved and when reports started to float up to decision makers, they didn't say, wow, you can't prosecute him, he's our pedophile. They probably said, look, look, we know, we get it, it's disgusting and we hate this too, but we're in the middle of an investigation right now. We're running down leads on some very important people coming through here. We've heard some people in the place, we've placed surveillance on them and we've heard them talk about several important people who have come through here as abusers before and we've heard they might be coming back and we want to catch them. Don't you want to catch these people?

That kind of thing. And they say, we promise as soon as we get what we need. Oh yeah, we're right behind you, ready to arrest these animals. You see this kind of thing cop movies all the time and I assume versions of it happen in real know local cops have some drug dealer dead to rights and the FBI or DEA comes in and no, no, we've got a big multi state investigation going know they're going to change all the patterns we've learned, change out all the phones. We've tapped everything. If you let them know that we're on to them just to bust this nobody and so you need to back off. Whitey Bulger, the Irish mobster up in Boston, he was an FBI informant for years, very famously, and they literally let him get away with murder as long as he kept providing them with a stream of information on other things. In these situations, it's not like the investigators or the intelligence agents are necessarily cool with what's going on. They're just able to convince themselves that this criminal activity is less important than some bigger fish that they're trying to fry. When you're talking about drug dealers, it might just be a legit tactic to hold off on the street dealer if you think he might lead you to the distributor.

But consider the overall political situation in Britain and Northern Ireland at the time. These were years where pretty much everybody in the Harold Wilson Cabinet says that Mi Five was off the reservation running information operations against the government that it was supposed to be serving. They had investigators on politicians that they considered unfriendly, and they were scraping the bottom of the barrel for rumors and accusations against British politicians to air in the press. And so when we learn that during this same period of time, the agencies who were engaged in those operations were being notified that important people were engaging in sex crimes at a boy's home and that they ignored that, information and even attacked the people who were bringing that information to them, then that is some circumstantial evidence to put the onus on the defenders of Mi Five and military intelligence to make their case. They've abused whistleblowers, hidden information, lied and thrown up controlled investigations that avoid all questions about agency involvement or cover up. There's a somewhat different version of this kind of minimalist theory that seems to have been at play, I think, in a lot of famous cases in the US.

Over the years. I don't know how many of you have read the book Chaos by Tom O'Neill came out in 2019. It's a fascinating book where he documents his investigation, 20 year long investigation into the crimes of the Manson Family. And there's just no way that you can come away from that book thinking that we know everything about what happened with those Manson murders. I'll just leave it at that. You don't have to believe the maximalist alternatives. Like Charles Manson was a CIA asset who killed those people as part of his mission from the CIA. You don't have to believe that. But O'Neill demonstrates pretty definitively that the story everybody reads in Bugliosi's Helter Skelter, the canonical book on the Manson Family is just not true. He shows that Manson was in close, long term contact with men who were involved for many years. For sure. This is not even speculative. He establishes this manson was in close, long term contact for many years with guys who were involved with the CIA mind control program known as focused on plumbing the depths of the human psyche using hypnosis and drugs and other techniques in order to learn more about mind control and psychological warfare.

O'Neill shows that Charles Manson is continually let off the hook after being. Caught with drugs, illegal weapons, stolen cars, underage girls, underage girls who are drunk and high despite the fact that the entire time he's on parole and that his parole officer somehow only managed one parolee, manson himself, while most of his colleagues managed 30 or 40 parolees. And that that parole officer had intelligence connections and that after Manson moved to San Francisco during the Summer of Love, the parole officer quit being a parole officer and went to work in the government funded clinic where Manson and his family were visiting every week. This was during a time when intelligence agencies and law enforcement were very interested in the effects these new drugs were having on people. And so one of the things they did you can read about this in O'Neill's book, as well as other places, is that they set up drug houses around the Hate Ashbury Park where all the hippies were based in 67. And it was just ground zero, really, for hippie dumb in these years. And they set up these drug houses with secret rooms and one way mirrors.

And they got grad student research assistants who would go into these places. They were recruited to help with a study and their job was to basically just go out, find people, bring them into the house, and give them drugs so that the observers in the secret compartments behind the one way mirrors could watch what happened. And the students keep complaining as the project goes on because they keep saying they don't really know what it is that they're doing or what the point of any of this research is because it seems like they're just watching people get high and party. So all this is going on. And you have a clinic with at least two employees connected to the CIA. Both of them are focused on specifically on scientific work studying the effects of various drugs on human behavior, especially aggressive behavior. And Manson and his family are visiting this place every week during their formative period. He keeps getting arrested with stuff that should be an automatic felony, automatic parole violation, but he's always let off. The La. County Sheriff's Office raided the ranch where the Manson family was staying after the Manson murders took place.

During the raid, they found illegal weapons, drugs, underage girls, stolen cars, you name it. And despite pulling together the resources for one of the largest operations in the history of the La. County Sheriff's Department at the time, they decided to just let everybody go. And so you say, what's going on here? Manson definitely had cover from somewhere. And it was somewhere with enough juice to tell the La. County Sheriff that he's just going to have to eat the cost of this giant raid and look like a fool for ordering such a major operation that resulted in no charges. Someone with the weight to tell the California criminal justice system that the normal rules regarding parole violation don't apply to this guy. Normal people get violated just for not checking in or for not holding down a steady job while they're on parole or for leaving the city that they're living in without permission. Manson's caught with drugs, guns, little girls in a stolen car hundreds of miles from where he's approved to be, and nothing happens. Now, does this mean that Manson was a CIA agent? No. The CIA employs pedophiles, but even they seem to have their limits.

Does it mean that the CIA created Manson in an MKUltra lab just so he could go off the rails and do something that would discredit the hippie movement? This is one of the popular theories. If that had been their plan, they couldn't have done it much better. But maybe not. But what it might mean is that Manson was being monitored by people who were interested in seeing how his drug fueled mind control experiment would develop in the wild. People with enough pull to get Manson flagged as do not arrest until they lost interest in him and that at some point they lost track of him and he went on a rampage. And when they woke up that morning and realized what had happened, they said to each other, no, nobody can find out about this. Although sometimes I have to say, it can be hard to restrict myself to the minimalist version of some of these conspiracy theories. Like one over in Belgium a few years back. Sleepy, little peaceful Belgium when they're not extracting resources from the Congo. Something called the affair. A guy named Mark Dutreau. Europeans are usually familiar with this. Americans often are not.

It's a really chilling and horrible story. Mark Dutreau was a serial killer, a rapist and a pedophile. Arrested in Belgium in 1996. He had left home at 15 years old, drifting around homeless, supporting himself by prostitution. He married a woman when he was 20, but he beat and cheated on her, so that didn't last long. And in 1987, when he's 31 years old, he gets picked up by the police for the suspected kidnapping and rape of several young girls in recent years. One of his victims told police that Dutreau was not a lone actor, but that he was part of a gang led by two gang leaders, an Italian one and a crazy, stupid one. And so soon, police had custody of one of these accomplices who admitted to kidnapping two of the girls with Mark Dutre and another person, a woman who wasn't caught at the time. The two girls were never found. In June of 1985, the gang kidnapped an eleven year old and a few months later they grabbed a 19 year old. Three months after that, they take another girl who's 18 years old, and they continue this. They abduct more girls, rape them, take lewd pictures and video of them in February of 87.

It's when they're arrested, convicted, and they're put in jail and in jail, Dutro convinced someone that he deserved disability due to mental health problems. And so he starts receiving a one $200 a month disability stipend courtesy of the Belgian taxpayer, an arrangement which would continue after his release, which happened after just a few short years. Because despite the protests of the prosecutor on the case and the adamant opposition of the prison psychiatrist who had examined Dutreau and determined him to be unstable and highly dangerous, the Belgian Minister of justice overruled every other interested party and ordered early release for this man, Mark Dutro. Fast forward a few years to 1995, near Liege. Two eight year old girls, classmates, are walking home when they're kidnapped. Mark Dutreau took these two girls to one of his homes. He had seven homes. Some sources say he had ten homes and a lot of money in the bank. He had gone from being a drifter and never having a job to being independently wealthy. And nobody knows how he got his money. So he brings the girls to one of his homes, where he's constructed a dungeon in the basement and chains them up again.

It's hard for us regular people to imagine that people like this exist, but they do exist. Two months later, two of the Dutre gang kidnapped two more girls, brought them back to the house, and since the dungeons were holding the eight year olds, these two new abductees were put in chains in one of the bedrooms. Dutreau and the rest of the group tortured and sexually abused these girls for months. And then the two more recent victims were drugged. One day, they were taken to another location and killed by Mark Dutreau, who buried them alive, actually. So at this point, there's some intragroup drama among the kidnappers. And in the last month of 1995, dutrose arrested again for something to do with a stolen car. And he's held for four months until March of 96, when he returned home to find that the two eight year old girls in the dungeon had starved to death. In his absence, his wife, who was an elementary school teacher, admitted that she knew the two girls were imprisoned down there and that she had gone to that property every day to feed the dogs while Dutro was in jail, but did not give the girls any food or water and let them die.

When he got back and found them dead, Dutro buried their bodies on the property. Two months later, he and an accomplice kidnap a twelve year old girl who's thrown in the dungeon, beaten, starved, raped. Six weeks later, Dutro and an accomplice kidnap another girl who's 14 years old while she's walking home from a swimming pool. At this time, an eyewitness saw her get pulled into a van, and she was able to take down the license plate. And so, a few days later, Dutreau and his accomplice are arrested, and very soon they confess. Dutreau told the authorities about the dungeon and they were able to get the two imprisoned girls in time and to rescue them. They'd been in the dungeon, chained by the neck for 79 days. Dutro led police to bodies buried in three locations in his properties. Police found hundreds of homemade pornographic videos, including many of them involving the abuse of children. What happened next is what turned this criminal case into an affair, into the Dutro affair, one of the great public scandals in Belgian history, and eventually brought 300,000 Belgian protesters out into the streets. The name Dutro is so toxic, it's like Hitler or something.

Like one in three Belgians who had that name Dutro had it legally changed after this just to avoid the association in court. Mark Dutreau's attorney didn't deny any of the crimes that he was accused of, but he said Mark Dutreau had not acted alone. He was part of a child trafficking ring that included important Belgian citizens. And also his lawyer said that his kidnappings were often done with help from the police. Dutreau's accomplice told police that the kidnappings had not been spur of the moment, but that the girls were taken for other people who were paying customers. One prominent Belgian that Dutreux named as an accomplice was a wealthy businessman named Michel Nihol, who Dutreux claimed was his conduit to a network of wealthy and prominent pedophiles in Belgium. A reporter for The Guardian in the UK interviewed Niho and was told with confidence that the case would never go to trial. The article says he is confident that he will never come to trial and that the evidence against him will never be heard by any jury. He will never come to court, he said, because the information he has about important people in Belgium would bring the government down, end quote.

Well, the Belgian public soon learned why he was so confident as the criminal justice system began to do everything possible, apparently to screw up the case. News reports tell us that the early investigators on the case believed Dutero was tied into a larger human trafficking network with many other accomplices. The judge who was assigned to the case believed that Judge Jean Marc ConRo was his name and he came to believe that this other guy, Michel Neehal, the wealthy businessman, was the brains behind the operation and that Dutreau was just a henchman. And so he made a public call for this judge, made a public call for other victims to come forward. And some did. This is more from that Guardian piece. Quote regina Luff came forward after Judge Conoralp made an appeal to victims of pedophiles to tell police what they knew. Conoralp, the man who had arrested Dutreau and saved two teenage girls from his dungeon, was a hero in Belgium. Luff was the first of ten victims to come forward. She told investigators how from the age of twelve she'd been given by her parents to a family friend, Tony vandenbogert who had a key to their house.

He would collect her from school and take her away for weekends to sex parties where she was given to other men and secretly filmed having sex with them. It was highly organized, she says. Big business, blackmail. There was a lot of money involved. In 1996, she related her experience experiences to a police team under carefully filmed and supervised conditions. She described certain regular clients, including judges, one of the country's most powerful politicians, now dead, and a prominent banker. She gave the police the names by which she knew these men, detailed the houses, apartments and districts where she'd been taken with other children to entertain the guests. The entertainment was not just sex, she told police. It involved sadism, torture and even murder. And again she described the places, the victims and the ways they were killed. One of the regular organizers of these parties, she claimed, was the man she knew as Mish Jean Michel Nihol. A very cruel man. He abused children in a very sadistic way, she said. Also there, she said, was the young Dutreux. Dutreau was a boy who brought drugs, cocaine to these parties. He brought some girls, watched girls.

At these events. Nihol was sort of a party beast, while Dutreux was more on the side. Lou's testimony was vitally important. If true, it placed Dutreau and Niho, suspected accomplices in the latest child abductions together at the scene of similar crimes ten years before police began to check her story. But then something changed, end quote. All of a sudden, the judge, Conoramp, was removed from the case by order of someone very high in the establishment, and he was replaced by a judge who had never presided over a case before. This was his first time. In 2009, someone with access to the case leaked documents having to do with the Dutro investigation to WikiLeaks, who vetted the information and then put it out into the world. The writer Elizabeth Voss describes the content of these WikiLeaks revelations. Quote in 2009, WikiLeaks provided further information regarding the case via their publication of the Dutro dossier. Belgian authorities later attempted unsuccessfully to force WikiLeaks to remove the Belgian dossier. WikiLeaks summarized the Dutro case Dutro was a figure in the European criminal underworld and the case had connections to other underworld figures, to police corruption, and from there to Belgian political figures.

WikiLeaks Dutreau dossier shows large financial transactions, maps of numerous European countries and the presence of international currencies, including those of Morocco and Saudi Arabia. The dossier shows payments of hundreds of thousands of francs to Michelle Martin, Dutreux's ex wife, and to Dutreux's personal bank account. It appears to be a reasonable inference from these documents that Mark Dutreux and Michel Niho were not acting alone in their criminal enterprises. End quote. Voss describes how the initial crime scene investigation found many, many semen samples and hundreds of human hairs down in that dungeon which didn't match dutreau or any of his other arrested accomplices. So these are unknown people, but the samples are never analyzed beyond that. So you have a serial killer sex dungeon. Both the killer and his accomplices tell police that more people are involved, but they're not interested in analyzing unaccounted for semen and hair samples from the scene to figure out who some of those other people might be. I'm not a detective, but I've watched a lot of cop movies. I'm pretty sure that's not normal. Voss continues about the WikiLeaks content quote Much as in the lack of analysis of DNA material recovered from Dutreux's basement, the lack of investigation into Mark Dutreau's financial connections increased frustration over an appallingly inefficient legal procedure.

Mark Dutreau was an electrician living on Social Security benefits during the time of the crimes but nonetheless owned ten houses. The New York Times wrote on this point after several of the disappearances, Mr. Dutreau paid large sums of money into several bank accounts, with four years of being released from early from jail, where he had served time for rape and kidnapping. Mr. Dutreau, whose only official income was a welfare check, was worth an estimated 6 million francs, which is about one point two, one point three million dollars in 95, suggesting to investigators that he was acting for others higher up in a pedophile and prostitution ring. End quote. That's the New York Times. So we're just getting started here. Many of the police assigned to the case seem singularly uninterested in actually solving it, and those who are interested in solving it start to disappear or be taken off the case. More from Voss quote the investigation was also mired by an unusually high number of deaths in relation to the scandal. These included the son of a judge, police officers and even the chief prosecutor overseeing the case, the Guardian reported. Since Dutreau's arrest, 20 potential witnesses connected with the case have died in mysterious circumstances, fueling suspicions of a cover up reaching the highest levels.

The Guardian added that important evidence has also disappeared. The New York Times reported on the death of Hubert Masa, who served as the chief prosecuting attorney in Liege and was in charge of the investigation into the alleged pedophile murders committed by Mark Dutro. Masa was also the lead investigator of the 1991 gangland style slang of Andre Cools, the Socialist Party boss in Volonia. Masa's death during the Dutre case was termed a suicide. The main suspect in the Cools case also committed suicide. Unlikely suicides are not just an American political tradition. Continuing on quote Revelations of corruption resulting from Cool's death led to the disgrace of Willie Clays, a Belgian statesman and secretary general of NATO. Clays resigned from his leadership position after he was found guilty of corruption. The witness in the Dutre investigation, known as X Three, further identified Willie Clays as one of those present during alleged torture, sexual abuse and murder of children. The Washington Post also speculated that there may have been a connection between the Cools case and that of Dutro. The New York Times reported on the death of a son of a police officer involved with investigating Dutro.

Judge Poncelette's son, a police officer, was involved in another case in which Mr. Dutreau is implicated. He was investigating the trafficking of stolen cars in 1996 when he was shot and killed in an unsolved murder. The Irish Times and other media noted strange deaths among witnesses tied to the Dutro case, describing how Bruna Tuglia Faro, a scrap merchant who planned to testify against Dutro, was poisoned and his wife was burned to death in her bed. A sex club owner associated with Nihal was shot to death. Jean Van Pettigam, one of Dutreux's early accomplices, was yet another death associated with the investigation. He had spoken to authorities regarding his involvement with Mark Dutreau. According to European reports, he died when his Moped crashed into a bus. Dutreau also admitted murdering another accomplice, Bernard Weinstein. The many deaths surrounding the Dutro scandal fueled concerns that Dutreaux was part of a larger pedophile network that had gone unpunished, end quote. Well, I can't get any worse than that, right? Wrong. This is the journalist Ambrose Evans Pritchard of the UK Daily Telegraph in 2004. Quote The Belgian judge who saved two girls from Mark Dutro's pedophile dungeon broke down in the witness box yesterday, alleging high level murder plots to stop his investigation into a child sex mafia.

Jean Marc Conroe choked in tears on the fourth day of the trial, describing the bulletproof vehicles and armed guards needed to protect him against shadowy figures determined to stop the full truth coming out. Never before in Belgium has an investigating judge at the service of the Queen been subjected to such pressure. He said. We were told by police that murder contracts had been taken out against the magistrates. As the danger mounted, emergency measures were taken. Then he froze in silence and the court was adjourned until he recovered. He alleged that organized crime methods were used to discredit his investigation and to ensure that it ended in judicial failure. A hero to millions of belgians Judge Connerat was stripped of the Dutro case after he had dinner with families of the after he had dinner with families of the victims in October 1996, which was deemed a conflict of interest, end quote. And to be clear, he didn't, like go out to dinner with the victims families. He attended an event that was raising money for the victims and their families and that was declared to be a conflict of interest. And the higher ups used it as an excuse to pull him off the case and assign this new guy a new judge who never supervised an investigation before.

What makes it worse is that another judge assigned to the case had close personal ties to Michel Niho. As a lawyer. He'd represented Nihol's wife and his sister was godmother to Michelle Nihol's child. That was not declared a conflict of interest. That judge was not removed from the case, but Judge Connerat was removed from the case for a conflict of interest arising from attending a fundraising dinner for victims. Quote the removal of Judge Connerat resulted in workers going on strike and 300,000 people marching silently through Brussels in mass protest. Seven years later, for reasons that have no satisfactory explanation, it was seven years before Dutreau actually went to trial. Some of the families are boycotting the trial, describing it as a circus and saying that the inquiry effectively shut down the moment Judge Connorat departed. Addressing the jury of twelve at the Arlam Palae de justice yesterday, judge Connaro relived the moment in August 1996 when his team rescued the two girls, sabine Darden, twelve, and Letitia Delez, 14, from the cage beneath Dutrose house in the slums of Charleroy. He said the girls recoiled back into the cell when the 450 pound hidden door was pulled open, fearing that the pedophile band had come to get them.

As Dutreau coaxed them out, saying there was nothing to fear, they clutched onto him as their protector. He says they thanked and embraced him, which is truly disgusting. Judge Conorll says that shows how far they had been conditioned. It was machiavellian. In January 1996, Judge Conoro wrote to King Albert alleging that his investigations into crime networks were being blocked because suspects apparently enjoyed serious protection. He went on to say that the dysfunctional judiciary was breaking down as mafia groups took secret control of key institutions of the country. End quote. What? That sounds a little crazy, right? I mean, what are we talking about here? One or two perverts is one thing to believe, but how widespread and powerful a group of people are we supposed to be talking about here? One powerful enough not only to threaten witnesses and judges, but also enough to put the lid on an attempt to investigate this by the Belgian parliament. The chairman of a parliamentary inquiry that was set up to look into the Dutreau affair became so frustrated with what he was facing that he eventually wrote a book to lay it all out. Quote in further disclosures, which Belgium is doing its best to ignore, a book by the highly respected chairman of a parliamentary inquiry into the case claims into the case claims that his commission's findings were muzzled by political and judicial leaders to prevent details emerging of complicity in the crimes.

The families who have faced a nightmarish four years since their children disappeared and will have to wait another two years before Mr. Dutro is tried, have experienced scarcely credible official callousness during their ordeal. On top of police skepticism when they originally reported that their children had vanished and an incompetent police inquiry to trace them. The parents were even confronted by the original postmortem's gynecological revelations of assault during a live television appearance after the bodies were found. End quote. Like I said, the police investigators looking into the Dutro case seemed to be doing everything in their power to throw the case. Witnesses would come forward who would never be interviewed. Crime scenes would be contaminated in the most careless ways that implied it was done on purpose. Evidence was often lost or destroyed. Several of the victims families all complained that the police had been harassing and abusing them. Police, when they did find evidence, would fail to report it to prosecutors. The officers assigned to analyze the hundreds of hours of tapes found in Dutro's home never did so. In 1995, Dutreau's own mother made a police report that her son, who was already a convicted kidnapper and child rapist his own mother made a police report that her son was holding two young girls prisoner in his basement, and the police ignored her.

One time, when the two girls who ended up starving to death were still alive down in the dungeon, two police officers were assigned to go search Dutero's house, the one with the girls in the dungeon, after a neighbor had made a call about hearing screaming children. When the police got there to search the place, they never found the girls, despite the fact that they heard children screaming in the basement. The Belgian authorities had to admit that this error led directly to the death by starvation of the two little girls. So what happened to that officer? Maybe he didn't commit a crime. But a screw up like that on such a massive, high profile case where public confidence is already nonexistent? And now they learn that the cop who searched the home ignored screaming children who subsequently died of starvation? Surely his career is over, right? Surely he's lucky to be directing traffic or writing parking tickets in a Brussels slum, right? Wrong. From Elizabeth Voss. Quote despite such extreme incompetence, if that's what it was, marchau received a promotion to the position of police commissioner before his death in 2009. Marchau's promotion was viewed by many to have implied rewards for compliance in a deeply corrupt legal system that simultaneously punished those who acted on behalf of victims, as had Judge Kunarat.

Corruption allegations were further fueled by the words of Antilly, the Prosecutor General of Liege, who claimed bodies recovered from Dutreau's property were too decomposed to perform DNA analysis. However, BBC reported that autopsy states quite clearly that the bodies were not decomposed. Samples were taken. It is just that no one seems to know what has happened to the results. Why were the hairs which detectives gathered from the dungeon in Dutrose cellar never sent for DNA analysis? This blatantly, corrupt or incompetent process increased the gall of the Belgian public. End quote. And finally, I'll just read the last section of this piece again. This is Elizabeth Voss. I know I'm using a lot of her material here, but she wrote up a good summary, so I might as well use it and give her credit. There's a few bits in this section that I've already mentioned. Quote numerous women codenamed ex witnesses like X One, X Two, X Three because they're anonymous codenamed ex witnesses spoke to investigators working on the Dutro case, claiming to have suffered horrific abuses at the hands of a criminal network linked to Dutreux and Nihol, which had abused children in order to blackmail members of the Belgian establishment.

According to BBC, the ex witnesses placed Nihol and Dutreux at the scene of torture, rape and murder of multiple children. Along with other elite figures, Nihal was also accused of producing snuff films. The number of witnesses eventually reached to X Nine. The New York Times also reported on the book the X Files what Belgium Was Not Supposed to know about the Detroit Affair, which extensively documented the ex witnesses testimony. The book draws copiously from police files, transcriptions of the ex witnesses evidence, the fines of a parliamentary commission and other sources. Even if the ex witnesses testimony occasionally seemed irrational, the authors say the facts they described stand up to scrutiny. The first and most well known victim to come forward was Codenamed X One. Her real identity later revealed in the press as Regina Loof. The BBC described lOOF's testimony it was big business blackmail. There was a lot of money involved. Sessions were secretly filmed without the client's knowledge. The Guardian described Louvre's haunting allegations this entertainment was not just sex. It involved sadism, torture and even murder. And again she described the places, the victims and the ways they were killed. The New York Times also noted louver spoke of having been sold into prostitution by her grandmother and later introduced into a circle of orgies at which she had seen young children tortured and murdered.

The other ex witnesses, one of whom worked for the police, told similar stories of childhood abuse and described hunts at which children were chased through the woods with dobermans. Mr. Debates had each of Lou's statements checked out and discovered that she had inexplicably detailed knowledge of the unsolved murders of two young women in the 1980s that supported the thesis of a conspiracy. As noted by The New York Times, Lou's testimony was regarded as remarkably accurate to the point that she was able to correctly describe the scene of an unsolved murder. The BBC reported Lou's detailed testimony had included details of names and locations where members of the establishment had engaged in violent orgies with children. Louf alleged that Michel Nehol was a regular participant in events. Louf also claimed that children had been raped, tortured and murdered during these fetted gatherings, with the crimes often filmed for blackmail purposes. The guardian described. Lou's accuracy. At least one of the murders she described matched an unsolved case. What Lou had described was a macabre torture which had eventually killed a 15 year old she knew as Chrissy. It was a sort of bondage, she told me.

So her legs. And her hands and her throat were connected with the same rope. And so when she moved, she strangled herself. Further verifying the veracity of Luff's description, the Guardian wrote that the scene of the murder she claimed to have witnessed occurred in an underground mushroom form. The report states that the son of the former owner of the location had stated, I have never met Regina Luff. All I know is that she could not have described the house as well as she did. Unless she'd been there, it would be impossible to invent it. Luff's struggled to speak out on the horrific abuses she claimed to have experienced and witnessed. Ultimately, failed investigators who believed her testimony to be credible were removed from the investigation, and her real identity was leaked to the press. After Luff's identity was made public, her reputation was systematically destroyed. The BBC wrote that after her identity became known, a government owned TV station, RTBF, began a campaign, quote, designed to prove that Dutrell was an isolated pervert, kidnapping girls for himself, that there was no network, that Jean Michel Nihol was innocent, and Regina Luff was a liar. At this point, the public effectively gave up struggling to find real justice for Dutreau's victims.

To protest systemic corruption was now to be associated with insanity. And so outrage was morphed by shame into heavy silence. For years, the only answer to the known and unknown victims of Dutreau was the same a resounding silence. End quote. So then I said in the previous episode, and that I reinforced in this one, I'll reinforce again is that whenever you research stuff like this, you're going to encounter a lot of circumstantial evidence. This guy's spending a lot of time with that guy, transferring large sums of money to him. But of course, he had no idea that that guy was involved in anything illegal. And the money was for totally legitimate purposes. And I can't recall what it was when I'm asked in court. Government inquiry finds no evidence of a cover up. But the chairman of that inquiry says that he's received death threats and warnings against pissing off prominent people. A bunch of girls say that this or that prominent person was present or participated in abuse. But those girls, they have all sorts of problems, as many victims of horrific childhood sexual abuse do. And so you can't believe them. This is how it goes.

But we're not in court, you and me here, talking and thinking about this. We're not trying to put anyone in a cage. So we don't have the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. These are our governments. We have every right to look at all the facts, circumstantial or not, and decide that they require some answers. And if those answers are withheld or otherwise not forthcoming, I think it's reasonable to assume that there's a reason for that. The Belgian people figured that out. I mean, let's just review what we know here on this case. The Minister of justice overrules pretty much everyone in the chain of command to let a serial kidnapper and child rapist out of prison early. This guy has no discernible income, but he owns ten homes, has millions of dollars in the bank. Nobody knows how he and his accomplices and his lawyer and several victims all say that he was acting as part of a group that included wealthy and prominent people in Belgium. The authorities keep losing key evidence. The police show up to search the house of a guy who is a convicted kidnapper and child rapist. So they know whose house they're checking on.

They hear the sounds of screaming children downstairs, but they don't investigate, don't find the girls. The girls starve to death. The police admit that this killed the girls, and yet the policeman responsible is soon promoted to commissioner of the entire police department. The judge is pulled from the case for attending a benefit, while another judge was kept on the case despite being so close to one of the accused that his sister was the godmother to the accused child. The judge, the prosecutor and the chairman of the parliamentary inquiry are all on record saying that they were receiving threats and being told to stop looking into the case. All three of them complain that their attempt to get at the truth was being blocked from on high. The chief prosecutor dies under mysterious circumstances. 20 more witnesses and other people connected to the case die under mysterious circumstances in a short period of time. The press has no interest in anything except making the implausible case that Dutro worked alone and just for his own purposes. One of the victims, who named several prominent Belgians, had her identity leaked to the press, which went through her history and smeared her until she went away.

Well, how do you explain all of that? I know you can explain each one individually, no problem. You take one of those by themselves, authorities lose key evidence. Well, I mean, it happens, right? It does happen. But you take them all together and what do you make of that? How do you explain all of them? Because the thing is, if any one of them has a wrong answer, it becomes much more likely that they all have the wrong answers, right? The authorities lose key evidence. Maybe they did. But if they didn't, if they destroyed key evidence, then all of these other bullet points you have to start looking at with a more critical eye. If two of them turn out to be true, then the third one's got a lot better and so on, right? The biggest obstacle is that first one. Just that inability to believe that something like this is possible. Like when Jeffrey Epstein supposedly killed himself in his jail cell in New York, in a jail where there hadn't been a suicide in over 20 years. We have been told that a the two guards who were supposed to be checking on him every half hour fell asleep on watch.

B the two cameras on the tier containing Epstein's cell malfunctioned and a third camera with a view of his cell from across the way had unusable footage, and C we had very prominent people like Nancy Pelosi's daughter, Christine Pelosi saying openly that people were going down if Epstein talked. Nancy Pelosi's daughter tweeted this Epstein case is horrific, and the young women deserve justice. It is quite likely that some of our faves are implicated, but we must follow the facts and let the chips fall where they may, whether on Republicans or Democrats. Well, you can say that. Yeah, look, cameras sometimes malfunction. It's weird that all three malfunction, but it's not impossible. And so it doesn't prove anything. And I agree, it doesn't prove anything. Or you can say that Guards sometimes fall asleep on watch. It happens. It doesn't prove anything. And again, I agree, it doesn't prove anything. But you can't take those two things separately. You can't say, what are the chances that the Guards would fall asleep on watch or that cameras would malfunction. You have to say, what are the chances that all three cameras would malfunction on the same night that Epstein's guards fell asleep, which happened to be the night that he killed himself?

You have to say, what are the chances that all three cameras malfunction on the same night his guards fell asleep and he killed himself? And that it's totally unrelated that the attorney general overseeing the case, trump's attorney General Bill Barr just happens to be the son of the guy who gave Epstein his first job? Again, it can happen. It could just totally be a coincidence. Doesn't prove anything. Small world, I guess. But it's a little weird. Isn't it a little weird that 50 years after Epstein gets his first job, his arrest and death just happened to be overseen by the son of the guy that gave him the job? Both Attorney General Bill Barr and his father, Donald Barr were connected to the intelligence community. The father, Donald Barr, worked for the OSS during the war the Office of Strategic Services, which was the organization set up during World War II and which turned into the CIA after the war. And Bill Barr. The son worked directly for the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1974, when the son, Bill Barr, was working as a liaison to Congress in the lead up to the Church and Pipe Committee hearings, the father, Donald Barr, was the headmaster of prestigious private prep school in New York called the Dalton School.

Again, this is 1974. Donald Barr hires Jeffrey Epstein to teach math. Well, I should say so. I don't know if Barr himself hired him, but he oversaw the hiring. He was in charge when Epstein was hired to teach at this school. The thing is, Jeffrey Epstein didn't even have a college degree. He had no teaching experience whatsoever. This is a very prestigious school. You've got the sons and daughters of Wall Street CEOs going to school here, and their parents paid a lot of money for you. You would think that they could have just about any high school teacher in the country teach math for them. But for some reason, the administration under Donald Barr decided to hire a college dropout with no teaching experiences, which is weird. Not so weird that we should run around with our hair on fire over it, maybe, but weird? It's another thing to put in the bag. Just like it's weird that almost 50 years later, 45 years later, the attorney general who arrests Epstein just happens to be the son of the guy who gave him that first job. It's just weird. It gets weirder because Donald Barr, the father who hired him, very strange guy.

In addition to being a prep school headmaster and intelligence agent, donald Barr also dabbled in writing science fiction. Some of you may have heard about this. The year before Epstein was hired at Dalton School, he Donald Barr, the guy who gave Epstein that job. Father of Attorney General Bill Barr wrote a book called Space Relations a slightly gothic interplanetary tale. What is this book about? Glad you asked to keep it short. I'll just read from Wikipedia and I have read the book, and this summary is close enough. Quote in the future, humans have formed an intergalactic empire ruled by Aristocrats during a time of war with the Plyth, an empire of antlike alien bug people. Ambassador John Craig, a formerly liberal Earthman in his 30s is dispatched to the strategically important planet Kosar, a human colony that was settled by the Carlisle society as a place of exile for political extremists and now is ruled by an Oligarchical high council of seven nobles, each of whom is in charge of a different domain with its own traditions. Their boredom and absolute power have driven them to madness, to the point that Kosar's entry into the empire has been stymied by the Man Inhabited Planets treaties clause written by Craig against alliances with slave owning societies due to its practice of kidnapping humans to become illegal sexual playthings of the galaxy's super rich.

Craig, who is now campaigning to bring Kosar into the empire, had previously been to the planet when the passenger ship on which he was traveling on a return trip from the Beetlejuice Conference was captured by space pirates. While en route to Kosar, one of the pirates awakened Craig and the other prisoners to rape a 15 year old virginal redhead female captive in front of them. The rapist fellow pirates later hear of this and dock his pay as punishment for spoiling her market value. Craig then spent two years as a slave of the beautiful, sensual and sadistic Lady Morgan Sydney, the only female member of the Oligarchy with whom he became romantically involved. Together, they lived in her castle, ruling over and engaging in sexual relations with all those under their dominion, including an enslaved teenager at a clinic used to breed enslaved people. Craig is depicted as undisturbed by Lady Morgan's sadism. When he is ordered to sexually assault the enslaved teenager, he enjoys his participation in the act. End quote. Okay, you just add that to the pile of things that would have to be coincidental or irrelevant. Jeffrey Epstein, a human trafficker and predator who picked up vulnerable girls to use as sexual playthings and to have them around as props.

At least when he was entertaining the world's super. Rich was given his first job. A job for which he was totally unqualified by a man who was writing novels about Oligarchs kidnapping humans and using them as sex slaves, and who happens to be the father of the attorney General under whose watch Epstein was arrested, jailed and then died, and both of whom, father and son, either worked for the CIA or its predecessor agency. Again, doesn't prove anything. It's just strange. What is the headmaster of a high school doing writing novels about kidnapping and raping teenagers in the first place? I don't know. I want to tell you about one more incident. We've talked about the Kinkora Boys Home scandal in Northern Ireland, and I told you there's a great book on it called Who Framed Colin Wallace by the journalist and author Paul Foote. We also talked about Belgium's Dutreux affair, and, well, further reading on that one is the stuff of nightmares. I spared you the worst of it, and I don't recommend looking more into it. Well, specifically, I should say, just to clarify, that book that I mentioned earlier, the one that digs into the testimony of the ex witnesses don't read that book.

It's a nightmare. It's just an absolute nightmare. One of those things that doesn't leave you. This final incident that I'm going to tell you about started in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1987, when police responded to a call about two well dressed men and some children that were with them. It was nighttime, and the two men were outside in a park, apparently supervising these six children, who, it turned out, were aged two to eleven. When the police arrived, they found the children filthy and hungry, covered in bruises, covered in bites and sores, and they were described as behaving like animals, like unsocialized, not understanding simple words or knowing what very basic things were, their eyes kind of darting around. None of the children belonged to either of the two men, who were evasive and told different stories when police questioned them. The whole group had been traveling in a van, and the men said that they had been taking the kids to a special school for gifted children in Mexico. According to unredacted documents generated by the Tallahassee Police Department at the time, pictures of naked children were found in the van. Local officials in Florida said that at least two of the children showed signs of sexual abuse.

So the two men are arrested, the kids are placed in protection. The van was registered out of state and the children had spoken about living in Washington, DC. And so the Tallahassee cops reach out to US. Customs, which has a dedicated child trafficking and pornography task force to see if they might be able to provide some insight and help connect them with the right people in DC. And so customs agent named Ramon Martinez gets the case. And his first report begins like this quote on Thursday, February 5 eightya telephone by Sergeant Joanne VanMeter of the Tallahassee Police Department Juvenile Division. Sergeant Van Meter requested assistance in identifying two adult males and six minor children. The adult males were tentatively identified by TPD Tallahassee Police Department as Michael Hoolihan and Douglas Ammerman, both of Washington, DC who were arrested the previous day on charges of child abuse. The police had received an anonymous telephone call relative to two well dressed white men wearing suits and ties in Myers Park, Tallahassee apparently watching six dirty and unkempt children in the playground area. Hoolahan and Ammerman were near a 1980 blue Dodge van bearing a Virginia license plate number, the inside of which was later described as foul smelling filled with maps, books, letters with a mattress situated to the rear of the van, which appeared as if it was used as a bed.

And the overall appearance of the van gave the impression that all eight persons were living in it. The children were covered with insect bites, were very dirty, most of the children were not wearing underwear and all the children had not been bathed in many days, end quote. And so, in a follow up report, second report he files, he says quote upon being taken into custody, the adult white males refused to cooperate one of whom produced a business card with a name on one side and a statement on the other. The statement indicated that the bearer knew his constitutional rights to remain silent and that he intended to do so. Upon interviewing the children, the police officers found that they could not adequately identify themselves or their custodians. Further, they stated they were en route to Mexico to attend a school for smart kids. We were further advised the children were unaware of the function and purpose of telephones, televisions and toilets and that the children had stated that they were not allowed to live indoors and were only given food as a reward. End quote. And so this van, it turns out, is connected to two addresses in the Washington, DC.

Area. So Customs starts contacting other agencies and the DC. Metro Police to see if anybody knows anything. Turns out that someone did know something. A DC. Metro Police detective had had an open investigation into those two addresses since the previous year, when an informant had told him that the people who lived there were a cult engaged in bloody rituals and sexual abuse of children and that they were connected to an unsolved murder. The addresses were a duplex and then a warehouse they were owned and lived in by this communal living group calling itself the Finders. The police informant had also provided the names of the people living there and they matched up with the names of the men and the kids found in Tallahassee. So they found him pretty credible. It was soon determined that the two men picked up in Tallahassee were members of this group. The DC. Detective who had been investigating The Finders told Customs that he'd been trying to get probable cause to search these properties for quite a while and that this Tallahassee incident gave him the probable cause he needed. So Customs sent Agent Ramon Martinez to go participate in the raid with the DC police on these properties.

And this is from his report on that raid. Quote during the execution of the warrant, I was able to observe and access the entire building. I saw large quantities of children's clothing and toys, the clothing consisting of diapers and clothes in the toddler to preschool range. No children were found on the premises. There were several subjects on the premises. Only one was deemed to be connected with the Finders. The rest were renting living space from this individual. He was identified as Stuart Miles Silverstone, DOB 61941, US. Passport number 1095-8991. Silverstone was located in a room equipped with several computers, printers and numerous documents. Cursory examination of the documents revealed detailed instructions for obtaining children for unspecified purposes. The instructions included the impregnation of female members of the community known as Finders, purchasing children, trading and kidnapping. There were telex messages for you. Youngsters a telex machine is like a typewriter that was able to send secure peer to peer messages through the phone line to other telex machines on the same network. Kind of similar in function to a fax machine, except it was like a typewriter that you would type your message over and it would come out on a piece of paper.

On the other side, there were telex messages using MCI account numbers between a computer terminal believed to be located in the same room and others located across the country and in foreign locations. One such telex specifically ordered the purchase of two children in Hong Kong to be arranged through a contact in the Chinese Embassy there. Another telex expressed interest in bank secrecy situations. Other documents identified interest in high tech transfers to the United Kingdom, numerous properties under the control of the Finders, a keen interest in terrorism, explosives and the evasion of law enforcement. Also found in the computer room was a detailed summary of the events surrounding the arrest and taking into custody of the two adults and six children in Tallahassee, Florida, on the previous night. There was also a set of instructions which appeared to be broadcast via a computer network which advised participants to move the children and keep them moving through different jurisdictions and instructions on how to avoid police attention. One of the residents was identified as a Chinese national due to the telacs discovered referencing the Chinese Embassy in Hong Kong. He was fully identified for future reference. Wang Gengxin DOB 92747.

Place of birth Tianjin, People's Republic of China. Passport number 32499 entered the US on January 22, one nine eightymitted until December 30, 187. He is in the US as a graduate student in the Anatomy Department of Georgetown University. His visa was issued on November 1086 in London, England. Number one four three. End quote. Pretty strange. Gets stranger. The report continues a little bit further down. Quote special Agent Harold this was the other customs agent that was sent on this raid with Martinez. Special Agent Harold advised me that there were extremely large quantities of documents and computer equipment at the warehouse and that MPD Metro Police Department was posting officers inside the building there and sealing the building until morning, in which a second warrant for the premises would be obtained and executed. On Friday, February 6, 1987, I met Detective Bradley, who is the MPD detective who was on this case for a while at the warehouse on Fourth Street Northeast. I duly advised my acting group supervisor, special Agent Don Bloodworth. I was again granted unlimited access to the premises. I was able to observe numerous documents which described explicit sexual conduct between members of the community known as Finders.

I also saw a large collection of photographs of unidentified persons. Some of the photographs were nudes, believed to be members of the Finders. There were also numerous photos of children, some nude, at least one of which was a child on display and appearing to accent the child's genitals. I was only able to examine a very small amount of the photos at this time. However, one of the officers presented me with a photo album for my review. The album contained a series of photos of adults and children dressed in white sheets participating in a Blood ritual. The ritual centered around the execution of at least two goats. The photos portrayed the execution, disembowelment skinning and dismemberment of the goats at the hands of the children. This included the removal of the testes of the male goat, the discovery of a female goat's womb and the baby goats inside the womb, and the presentation of a goat's head to one of the children. End quote. So who are these people? This is not just some crazy family or cult living on a commune in the jungles of Guyana. The cops discovered a pretty serious operation here, one with a lot of interests and apparently global reach.

Quote further inspection of the premises. Again, this is from these customs agent reports. Further inspection of the premises disclosed numerous files relating to activities of the organization in different parts of the world. Locations I observed are as follows london, Germany, the Bahamas, Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Africa, Costa Rica and Europe. There was also a file identified as Palestinian. Other files were identified by member name or project name. The projects appeared to be operated for commercial purposes under front names. For the Finders, there was one file entitled Pentagon Break In and others which referred to members operating in foreign countries. Not observed by me but related by an MPD officer were intelligence files on private families not related to the Finders. The process undertaken appears to have been a systematic response to local newspaper advertisements for babysitters tutors, etc. A member of the Finders would respond and gather as much information as possible about the habits, identity, occupation, et cetera, of the family. The use to which this information was to be put is still unknown. There was also a large amount of data collected on various childcare organizations. The warehouse contained a large library, two kitchens, and a sauna hot tub and video room.

The video room seemed to be set up as an indoctrination center. It also appeared that the organization had the capability to produce its own videos. There were what appeared to be training areas for children and what appeared to be an altar set up in a residential area of the warehouse. Many jars of urine and feces were located in this area. I should also mention that both premises were equipped with satellite dish antennas. End quote. While Agent Martinez tries to stay engaged with this case, but pretty soon the DC. Metro Police seem to start stonewalling him. His final report, which was filed just a couple of months after that last one, said, quote on March 30, 180 Bradley of the Washington, DC metropolitan Police Department MPD I went to meet with Detective Bradley to review the documents seized pursuant to two search warrants executed in February 1987. The meeting was to take place on April 2 or third, 1980. On April 2, 1987, I arrived at MPD at approximately 09:00. A.m detective. Bradley was not available. I spoke to a third party who was willing to discuss the case with me. I was advised that all the passport data had been turned over to the State Department for their investigation.

The State Department, in turn, advised MPD that all travel and use of the passports by the holders of the passports was within the law and no action would be taken. This included traveled to Moscow, North Korea and North Vietnam from the late 1950s to the mid 1970s. End quote. Let's just pause there for a second. The founder and leader of the Finders group was a retired Air Force master sergeant named Marion Petty. The passport with visa stamps for Moscow, North Korea and Vietnam belonged to his wife, Isabel Petty. Isabel Petty, according to her husband's own public statements as well as declassified FBI documents, worked for many years at the CIA according to the FBI documents, she worked for the CIA from 1951 to 1971. CIA says she worked there from 52 to 61. So she worked for the CIA for at least one, maybe two decades. The CIA says she was a secretary, but it's not a simple thing for anybody to travel from the US. To Moscow, North Korea, north Vietnam at the height of the Cold War. The chances that an employee of the CIA would be traveling to those places on anything other than official business does not seem plausible.

Agent Martinez's report continues, quote the individual he's talking about, the DC. Cop who agreed to fill him in since Detective Bradley wasn't available. The individual further advised me of circumstances which indicated that the investigation into the activity of the Finders had become a CIA internal matter. The MPD report has been classified secret and was not available for review. I was advised that the FBI had withdrawn from the investigation several weeks prior and that the FBI Foreign Counterintelligence Division had directed MPD not to advise the FBI Washington field office of anything that had transpired. No further information will be available. No further action will be taken. End quote. Well, a few years later, when the Finders incident was raised in a congressional investigation, u. S. News and World Report put out a story on it. Quote one of the unresolved questions involves allegations that the Finders are somehow linked to the Central Intelligence Agency. Customs Service documents reveal that in 1987, when Customs agents sought to examine the evidence gathered by Washington, DC. Police, they were told that the Finders investigation had become a CIA internal matter. The police report on the case had been classified secret.

Even now, Tallahassee police complain about the handling of the Finders investigation by DC. Police. They dropped this case, one Tallahassee investigator says, like a hot rock. DC. Police will not comment on the matter. As for the CIA, high ranking officials describe allegations about links between the intelligence agency and the Finders as hogwash, perhaps the result of a simple mix up with D. C. Police. The only connection, according to the CIA, a firm that provided computer training to CIA officers also employed several members of the Finders. And that's not exactly true. This was actually a company owned by the Finders that was providing computer training to CIA officers. The many unanswered questions about the Finders case now have democratic Representative Charlie Rose of North Carolina, chairman of the House Administration Committee, and Florida's Representative Tom Lewis, a Republican more than a little exercised. Could our own government have something to do with the Finders organization and turn their backs on these children? That's what all the evidence points to, says Lewis. And there's a lot of evidence, I can tell you this. We've got a lot of people scrambling, and that wouldn't be happening if there was nothing here.

Perhaps. But the Finders say there is nothing there, at least nothing illegal. The Finders have never been involved in child abuse, pornography, Satanism. Animal slaughter or anything of the kind, says the group's leader, Marion David Petty. Petty, too, says the group has never been connected to the CIA. In an interview with us. News, Petty described the Finders as a communal holistic living and learning arrangement. The group numbers some 20 members. Petty says they do freelance journalism, research and competitor intelligence for a variety of mostly foreign clients. The Finders work for no foreign governments. Petty says their duplex in a residential northwest Washington neighborhood is decorated with global maps and bulletin boards. Residents of Culpepper, Virginia, 90 minutes from Washington, say that the Finders have operated an office there, too, from time to time. That office contained computer terminals and clocks referencing different time zones around the world. CIA officials say they referred all matters concerning the Finders and the police investigation to the FBI's Foreign Counterintelligence Division. FBI officials will not comment. Law enforcement sources say some of the Finders are listed in the FBI's classified counterintelligence files. None of this fazes petty. He says the CIA's interest in the Finders may stem from the fact that his late wife once worked for the agency and that his son worked for a CIA proprietary firm, air America.

Air America. You remember them from last episode, right? Air America was the CIA front company airline that was shuttling weapons and supplies and money and people and possibly, according to several witnesses who were involved, drugs in support of the paramilitaries that we were supporting in Laos during Vietnam. They changed the name eventually by having Air America absorbed by another company called Southern Air Transport, which was also a CIA front and which was central to the Iran conquest scandal, running money and weapons to the Middle East and Central America, and at least according to several people who were involved, bringing cocaine to the United States. So the son of the founder of this Finders group, who is himself the founder, is a retired Air Force master sergeant. I don't know which field. I'd be interested to know if he was involved in intelligence. The son of that guy used to work for that company, Air America, and the wife of this guy used to work for the CIA and had a passport stamped from that period of time with Moscow, North Vietnam and North Korea. And their properties are strewn with global maps and telex machines connected to overseas locations and mentions of members operating in other countries.

And the group owned a company that provided computer training to CIA officers. But it's all just a coincidence. Only a crazy person would believe that it wasn't all just a coincidence. I'll tell you what. This has taken longer than expected. I think we're up to about 2 hours right now. So we are going to have to do one more Epstein episode to drive things home. And then I'll stop. I promise. I'm really tired of it, to be honest. I appreciate you guys sticking with me through this Sorted series. I am looking forward to being done with it and moving on. Part three.

While we're denouncing, let me ask you about QAnon. It is this theory that Democrats are a satanic pedophile ring and that you are the savior of that. Now, can you just once and for all state that that is completely not true QAnon in its entirety?

I know nothing about QAnon.

I just told you I know very little.

You told me, but what you tell me doesn't necessarily make it fact. I hate to say that I know nothing about it. I do know they are very much against pedophilia. They fight it very hard, but I know nothing about they believe it is.

Run by the deep.

There has been an awakening. Have you felt it?

Borders of QAnon were out in full force at Princess.

In the last few months, a bizarre conspiracy theory has taken roots firmly on the fringes. They call it red pilling.

Imagine enjoying your time at a pizza parlor when a man walks in with an assault rifle. Customers at Comet Ping Pong in DC were terrified, as you can imagine.

We were in the middle section where the ping pong tables are, and I was playing Ping pong. We finished our meal. I was playing Ping Pong with my wife, and my kids were playing at the table next to us. And basically a person walked in, kind of tall, slender white guy who walked straight into the back room. Followers believe that a cabal of pedophiles runs the United States. News Night has seen data that shows a huge spike in interest in this.

Conspiracy theory during the pandemic.

But what is QAnon? Well, the man said he was there.

To investigate pizzagate, a hashtag referring to a fake news article claiming that Hillary Clinton and her campaign chief were in a child trafficking ring in the restaurant's back rooms.

They call it red call it red.

Call it they call it red pill.

Anyone who likes a good story as much as I do is going to be in danger of becoming a sucker for conspiracy theories. After all, that's what a conspiracy theory is. It's just a story, right? Conspiracy theories come in all shapes and sizes, from a group of people working together to embezzle funds, from their company to a group working to overthrow a government. Many of the best conspiracy theories involve governments themselves, for obvious reasons, right? For one thing, especially since the end of the Second World War, government operations have taken on a level of official secrecy that previously probably wouldn't have been tolerated or else simply wouldn't have been relevant to the state's needs. Another reason is that in the age of nuclear weapons, which made kinetic warfare between powerful states very difficult or almost impossible, information operations became a much more important part of statecraft. NATO and the Warsaw Pact only engaged directly in serious military conflict over client states. A few times in places like Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan. But their operations to subvert and incite and confuse and to direct local proxies using information warfare were constant in global. When governments are engaged in large scale, systematic deception as a means of statecraft, it means that attentive people are going to notice over time that there are a lot of holes in the official narrative.

Recently declassified documents, for example, have shown that a unit run out of London by the British Foreign Office during the Cold War was running black propaganda campaigns designed to, quote, encourage racial tension, sow chaos and incite violence in Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia, parts of the world that probably have enough of those things. And I don't think they needed more operations in the Muslim world had the explicit goal this was the explicit policy goal of encouraging Islamic extremism and discrediting moderate Muslim leaders. Several reasons for doing that. One of them was to encourage terrorism and revolution among Muslims in the Soviet Union. The propaganda, which again was created out of an office of the UK government, actually incited hatred against Israel in order to appear authentic to the people reading it. We know that British intelligence services were engaged in similar operations in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. I spoke a bit about that in episode two. It's extremely strong evidence that Mi Five even targeted British politicians that it feared would moderate the government's policy toward Northern Ireland. Of course, in the United States, we all know about Cointel Pro, the FBI's secret operation to destabilize and discredit left wing activists in groups like the Black Panthers.

Cointel Pro operators did things like manufacture fake evidence that the Black Panther leaders were sleeping with each other's wives for the explicit purpose of getting them to kill each other. In 1970, the FBI planted stories in the press accusing an actress and left wing activist named Jean Seberg, who was married to a French diplomat, of being pregnant from an affair with a Black Panther leader. She and her husband knew that it wasn't true, but the public humiliation turned Seaberg into basically a recluse, and the stress of the whole thing caused her to lose the baby, and the trauma of the miscarriage ground her down even further. And a few years later, she committed suicide. Most of us are familiar with how the Gulf of Tonkin resolution allowing Lyndon Johnson to go to war in Vietnam was based on an incident that turns out never happened. People still argue over whether the Bush administration was lying or simply wrong about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction. But what we do know is that the decision to go to war in Iraq was made in the days immediately after 911 and that there was a conscious effort within the administration to play up shaky intelligence that supported the WMD thesis and to downplay stronger evidence to the contrary to include personal and career attacks against officials and the few journalists who actually questioned the story.

I was just a kid at the time of the first Gulf War in 1991, but even still, I remember feeling shocked and horrified when a 15 year old Kuwaiti girl was brought before the US. Congress for a televised, nationally televised, very well publicized congressional hearing. And she claimed to have seen Iraqi soldiers going into hospitals to throw babies out of their incubators. They didn't tell us at the time that that little girl that they'd brought in for that testimony was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador who lived in Washington, DC. With him, and that the entire testimony was scripted and coached. We learned that later, and the news didn't get nearly as much coverage as the girl's original testimony. This is how our governments operate now. As a matter of course. This is normal. They feel no obligation to disclose even basic information that would be crucial to our ability to make decisions on critical questions like whether or not we should go to war. And they consider many of them in good faith. I think that it's actually a national security imperative that the people know as little as possible about what they're doing.

Because why, if the people knew the truth, they might decide to take a course other than what the people on the inside, the people who think about these things, who see the big picture, believe is in the best interest of the country. And so, as a result, our understanding of history since the end of the Cold War is and unfortunately, probably always will be, an extremely distorted picture, mixing fact with lies purposely planted in order to hide and confuse the truth. Was this an environment in which conspiracy theories are going to grow like weeds if the reasons given for every war since Korea have turned out to be false? And who knows? Maybe I'm just not red pilled on the Korean War yet, and intelligence and law enforcement agencies have driven people to murder and suicide by spreading false rumors in the press, it's safe to say that nothing is beyond the pale for these people. Institutions and media organizations that might have previously been able to speak with some credibility, some authority to the general public have publicly beshitted themselves so thoroughly that there's no one anymore around with the credibility to put the kibosh on a buddy conspiracy theory because they say so.

Or, as Walter Cronkite used to say, because that's the way it is. There's nobody like that. And so when we're fed a story which powerful people have motive, capability, and opportunity to lie about, and when the story itself doesn't pass basic logical smell tests, no one cares anymore that the New York Times doesn't find it worth reporting on or that the FBI doesn't think it's worth investigating. If anything, that just adds to the suspicion these days. Of course, this doesn't mean that all conspiracy theories are true. And that's the problem. In fact, pushing implausible, maximalist versions of a conspiracy theory that's edging up against a guarded truth is one way that intelligence agencies have thrown people off their scent over the years. The very term conspiracy theory seems to have actually been created by the CIA to put a negative spin on attempts to uncover things that it would rather keep hidden. I remember back when the pizza gate stuff came out after the release of the Podesti emails by WikiLeaks in 2016. You remember that? And for those of you who don't remember the story or who've put it out of your mind, it went like this john Podesta had been a fixture in Washington DC for some 50 years.

He worked for several Democratic politicians and committees through the in 1988, he and his brother Tony Podesta started up the Podesta Group. It was called the Podesta Associates. At the time, this was a lobbying company that became what many people considered the most powerful democrat lobbying firm in Washington DC. Well, John Podesta had met Bill Clinton in 1970 when they both worked for the same senator. And when Clinton became president in the 1990s, podesta came in and served in high positions in the administration throughout his entire tenure, eventually becoming Clinton's chief of staff. In 2003, he started the center for American Progress, which is one of the Democratic party's main private propaganda outfits. And I don't say that to caste dispersions. Both sides have them. In 2016, when Hillary Clinton needed a campaign manager, she called John Podesta. And so all this is simply to say Podesta is one of those people, and there's a whole class of them in both parties who never runs for office, never heads up a government agency, but just always seems to be around and in the mix in Washington DC. So anyway, while many people are picking through the emails looking for more evidence that the Clinton campaign worked with the DNC to fix the party primary in her favor against Bernie Sanders, and other people are arguing over whether the email dump was a Russian operation and whether Donald Trump had anything to do with it.

Some lurkers in the dark corners of the internet were digging up emails that didn't really seem to make a lot of sense if you took them literally, and they decided that these emails were actually coded messages describing nefarious acts. For example, in one email, somebody writes to Podesta that a realtor had found a handkerchief with a map that seems pizza related. Is it yours? If so, I can mail it to you. And Podesta replies that it's his, but nothing to worry about. Well, once you decide that that's a code phrase because it does seem know. But once you decide that's a code for something else, and you swap out certain keywords like map and pizza with, I don't know, children and other things, then all you have to do is run a search through the emails for pizza and map. And lo and behold, it turns out that out of many thousands of emails, there are a handful that look pretty dark when this circular logic is applied to them. And so now you got tons of people on Reddit and four Chan and Twitter message boards going through every email with a fine tooth comb, looking for suspected code words and trading theory about what it all means.

Well, someone went back to 2011, 2012, years before any of the pizza gate stuff was ever a thing, and found a tweet from Andrew Breitbart, founder of the website Breitbart, where he wrote, quote, how Prague guru progressive guru John Podesta isn't a household name. As a world class underage sex slave op cover upper defending unspeakable dregs escapes me. End quote. Freaking shots mean. Again, this is years before the Podesta email leaks, years before anyone had ever mentioned anything to do with this stuff. Now, granted, Breitbart was a conservative bomb thrower, but he was also a businessman who had to worry about things like libel and slander lawsuits. But it's almost as if he was daring John Podesta to take him to court and have it out around the same time, after Congressman Anthony Weiner of New York, who was also the husband of Hillary Clinton's longtime top assistant and confidant Huma Abedin, got caught sexting. Just insane that his name is Weiner. The Matrix breaks more every day that Anthony Weiner got caught sexting and sending lewd pictures of himself to underage girls, which Andrew Breitbart had been publicly alleging for a while. Something for which Breitbart was attacked by Wiener and the Democratic Party machine and much of the mainstream media.

Once he got caught and that came out, andrew Breitbart went onto the Fox News show Red Eye and had this exchange. Hey, Andrew, is this, like, gotta be the strangest two days of your life?

Why are you asking Andrew any questions?

Wait, are you the expert?

Does he, like, know stuff about you're?

Right. I didn't think of that. Don't go away. Wiener gay. Yes, it has been. I haven't eaten all day. All I have is adrenaline coursing through my veins. It's the most surreal experience. You have no perspective when something like this happens of this epic level. I haven't looked at the Internet to see the comments section. I haven't retweeted any vile hate against me, which is actually a relief. In 48 hours. I'm like, I'm jonesing for some hate. Well, the interesting thing, it's hard to play ping pong when you don't have any opposition because normally the people that tweet you hate are not tweeting because they've been humiliated. I don't see anything. Why did you change the subject to the sport of ping pong? I don't know. Yeah, you're weird that way. I am. I certainly am. I want to talk about the extra picture. Yes. So back to 2016. These Podesta emails come out and people start finding what they thought was suspicious material, and then they see these old Andrew Breitbart statements and they were like, that's weird. Well, the next thing had happened was people noticed an email that mentioned the Podestas going to let's call it a party, I guess.

They went to an event called Spirit Cooking by the performance artist Marina Abramovich. So people asked, well, what, pray tell, is spirit cooking? And so they went and found out. And what they discovered was a giant VAT of jet fuel to pour all over the pizza gate brush fire. The first thing they found were all the pictures of Marina Abramovich dressed in red, posing with occult imagery like a goat's bloody head or snakes wrapped around her head and neck and in her mouth. She had had a relationship and had actually promoted the Brazilian cult leader known as John of God, who you may have seen in the news a few years ago. He's now spending the rest of his life in prison after it turned out that his operation was actually a giant human trafficking and sex slave op that often preyed on young girls. Marina maybe can be forgiven for that little mistake. Oprah. And a lot of famous people promoted that guy, so I guess it's fine. And so then someone found details on the event in question. Spirit Cooking was an art installation by the performance artist Marina Abramovich that was apparently used as the setting for a private dinner she gave for some of her donors and supporters.

And this is the event to which the Podesta brothers were invited. I use the term art very loosely here, although from everything I've ever seen, that is the case with pretty much all performance art. Sorry. If there's any performance artists out there, I am an admitted philistine when it comes to all contemporary art. So who knows? Maybe there's something truly beautiful hidden just beneath the surface of something like Abramovic's Spirit Cooking, which takes up several rooms decorated with cryptic sayings, painted in pig's blood on white walls. Maybe there's something beautiful hidden in there. Up on the white walls, painted in pig's blood. Mix fresh breast milk with fresh sperm milk. Drink on earthquake nights. In one corner is an effigy of a human infant completely covered in pig's blood, as if a bucket of the stuff had been thrown on it. On another wall, with a sharp knife cut deeply into the middle finger of your left hand. Eat the pain. A lot of this is just silly art school edgelord bullshit, but at one Spirit Cooking event attended by Lady Gaga, there are pictures of her with Abramovich eating something off of a mock corpse lying in a naked tub of what's supposed to be blood.

Another wall, fresh morning urine sprinkle over nightmare dreams. In another room, small dolls are positioned as if they're copulating. You get the idea. Well, with people already spun up, this got merged with the code talk theories and the breitbart stuff and turned into a much more sweeping theory, not just about pedophilia but satanic ritualistic pedophilia involving the wealthy and powerful. People start trawling through the emails looking for any mention of the word pizza and they come across this other guy named James Olifontis and his Washington DC restaurant Comet Ping Pong Pizza. And that also didn't help matters because it turned out that Alafontis was not only a Democratic donor and former boyfriend of Democrat operative and founder of Media Matters, David Brock, but somehow, despite being a humble pizza salesman, was listed by GQ magazine as one of the 50 most powerful people in Washington DC. I don't know. And then it turned out that he used a picture of an old Roman statue of Antonus, the boy lover of the Emperor Hadrian as his Instagram picture and that there were pictures of things like small children taped to tables and other pictures and comments that without any context looked pretty strange.

And then another pizza joint two doors down from Comet Ping Pong called Besta Pizza, which is now closed, had as its logo a pizza slice that was styled into a sort of triangular spiral that declassified FBI files show is a symbol commonly used among pedophiles to signal their preferences to each other. So none of this helped. People found out that Comet Ping Pong hosted musical acts that have a sort of, I don't know, a sort of surrealist, creepy David Lynch meets Pink Flamingos esthetic, I guess one of them was a strange outfit called Heavy Breathing. The lead singer, female lead singer who always wore a mask and went by the name Majestic Ape who apparently jokes about pedophilia in several of her songs. And the band cuts these creepy, very lurid, surrealist promo videos for their albums and shows. It's the kind of thing that if you just see it like today, if I were to show it to you, you would just roll your eyes and it's just again, Edge Lord art school bullshit. But it's also the kind of thing that if you're already three quarters of the way down the rabbit hole after spending all night going through threads about spirit cooking and cheese pizza are going to add more fuel to the fire.

Another band hosted at Comet Ping Pong Pizza, which markets itself as a place for kids. Another band that they hosted was called Sex Stains. And one of their music videos, one of the only two music videos they have as far as I could tell, shows the band singing and dancing in a room full of children's toys, one of which is a giant block with the symbol that the FBI says is the one pedophiles use to identify themselves to each other. Basically a spiral, but instead of in the shape of a circle, it's in the shape of a triangle. The music video actually ends with one of the singers seated by herself in the room next to the block with the symbol facing it, sweating and holding out her hands in some weird manner. That is, I don't know what she's doing with her hands, but it's clearly directed at that block or at the symbol. And so, like I said, if you're already in this mode, it's 03:00 a.m. You've been up all night reading Reddit and Chan threads on this stuff. You see this band called Sex Stains very clearly emphasizing a symbol that the FBI says is common among pedophiles playing at this pizza place run by a guy with kids taped to tables on his instagram and the teenage boy lover of a Roman emperor as his avatar.

And that this pizza joint owner is somehow one of the 50 most powerful people in Washington. And that the pizza place shows up several times in the Podesta emails, which also contain other apparently strange references to pizza related maps drawn on handkerchiefs and so forth. And that all these people are also into weird performance art, pagan ritual events where they eat food off of bloody mock corpses and drink fluids that they're supposed to pretend are blood and breast milk in rooms with infant effigies covered in pig's blood and creepy messages written in pig's blood all over the walls. Well, maybe not you. Maybe not me, but some of the millions of people out there on the internet decided that maybe there's a satanic child trafficking ring involving the most powerful people in the country being run out of a pizza place in Washington DC. And by God, if no one else is going to do anything about it, they're going to grab their rifle and go have themselves a look. So that's what happened. And I even told you about Tony Podesta's art collection again. Tony Podesta is John Podesta's brother. John Podesta was the Clinton campaign manager whose emails were leaked.

That started the whole mess. Back in 1988, John and Tony started a DC lobbying firm. John stepped back from official duties in the work in the Clinton administration, but the two continued to work closely together again. Over the years, that lobbying firm became one of, if not the most powerful lobbying firm in Washington DC. Certainly on the Democrat side. Well, Tony is a big art collector. He's an appreciator of the arts. In the June 2015 issue of Washington Life magazine, he is profiled as a patron of the arts, and he shows off some of what he has hanging in his house. One is a sculpture by a female artist, a woman named Louise Bourgeois, of a headless naked body in an extreme backward arch. It's called the Arch of Hysteria, and some people noticed that it is nearly identical to a photograph taken by the serial killer rapist and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer of one of his victims, whose head Dahmer had removed before placing the corpse in an extreme backwards arch position with knees and elbows touching the ground. This sculpture that Podesta has weighs about 2000 pounds, and Podesta said it required extensive renovations to the house to build in the support it needed to hang from the ceiling.

He said it was intended to be a permanent part of the house itself and will never leave. Now, Louise Bourgeois did create this sculpture a year after Dahmer the Dahmer case was publicized, but there are sketches of the piece that go back way before any of that. So that's not what she was doing, but it got people going and then people look closer at the paintings on Podesta's walls. In the photographs in this magazine article, three of the paintings are by a Serbian artist named Biliana Jordjevic and are very creepy depictions of children, some of whom are made to look dead. One of the paintings Podesta has on display and these are full poster size paintings, they're centerpieces of the rooms that Podesta has them in. In one of them, a young girl in a short skirt with black eyes and a dead or sort of drugged out look on her face is sitting on a bar stool against a tile background. The tile is a running theme in art with a lot of her paintings. A lot of her paintings depicting children in drained swimming pools or what look like bathrooms or shower areas.

Podesta has one of them, a very large painting in a sitting room. The painting looks like it's maybe six or 7ft tall, ten or 12ft wide. It dominates the room. It's called Synchronized Swimming and it shows a bunch of young girls lying in a circle at the bottom of a drained swimming pool with leaves all around them. And they're all drawn in the same creepy manner, with dead looks on their faces, almost as if they're in a trance, many of them with black eyes. The other painting he has by this artist is in the same room. It's also a large piece and it is unmistakably a painting of two dead young girls lying in either a river or a pond. Djevik has a whole series of these and many of them are much more explicit, showing children in their underwear, tied up Bondage style, in like drained swimming pools. One of them shows a single very young girl in her panties up against the wall, facing the wall in a tiled bathroom or shower. One shows several young girls in their panties, lined up on their knees, facing the wall of a drained swimming pool with their hands behind their backs, with what look like nooses or ropes hanging from above.

Another one has two young girls in their panties hanging by a strap under their arms. Another one of a single dead girl lying in a river or a pond. They're pretty direct, sexually suggestive images of child abuse, as the artist herself admits in an interview. In a 2004 interview with Tony Podesta, he was asked about other artists. He admired. And one of the few he listed was a sculptor or I don't know if they're actually sculptures or some other method, let's just say the plastic arts. They make statues of some kind by this woman named Patricia Piccini. I'm sorry, picchinini, whom the magazine article emphasized as one of Podesta's most favorite among the artists that were listed. Well, she makes these really nightmarish sculptures of deformed children and little girls on beds with some weird nude demon wrapping its long claws around her. Kids, sleeping in bed with some hairless, pig monster spooning them. And the pig monster has weird pustules containing more monsters coming out of its back. Another one has a deformed child on the back of a horned goat. There's a lot of scrotums, a lot of mouths that look like sphincters and vaginas with gross things coming out of them or kids playing with them.

Monsters leering over small children as they sleep. It's really awful stuff. One of them has a small boy trapped in a spider's nest with several bulging eggs about to hatch. Just creepy like concept art for a surrealist horror movie. Another artist that Podesta mentions as one of his most favorites is a woman named Kim Noble. Kim Noble is a British woman who has spent much of her life in mental hospitals, in asylums, suffering from schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder. That's what we used to call multiple personality disorder. Well, several of her personalities make art, if you can call it that, and many of them depict scrawled children style drawings of extremely gruesome acts of molestation and child abuse. The style of them is something you would expect to see from a four or five year old kid scribbles and basically would amount to stick figures. But it's all very, very clear what's being depicted. It's just done in a rudimentary way. Many of the abusers in these pictures don't look human. They look like demons or humanoid monsters of some kind. And in one of them, there's several adults standing around urinating on the heads of several small children who were on their knees.

Others show children huddling in cages, while two blacked out adult sized figures with strange claw like hands loom over them. Another one shows a person standing on a platform near two girls hanging from a wall. Several of them show extreme depictions of sexual abuse of children, while several other people are standing around in a circle watching it happen. Just very sick stuff from a woman in her defense, like a woman who herself is very sick, which just makes the entire thing feel about a thousand times nastier to me. The idea of some rich asshole like Tony Podesta posing for pictures and hmm, yes, I quite admire the paintings of the artist Kim Noble, when what they're talking about is a mentally ill woman who suffered frequent extreme sexual abuse between the ages of one and three, the trauma of which literally broke her mind. And now there's people like Toni Podesta buying up her paintings of what happened. Like oh, yes, the one where the demon is forcing the child to give him fellatio is startling in its use of color. Fuck off. There's a lot of people out there say, Ah, so what? Yeah, they're into transgressive art.

That's nothing new. Maybe it's not your thing, but just because they like eating dinner off naked corpses in a room with creepy messages written in pig's blood all over the wall doesn't mean anything except that they're into weird stuff. Just because they hang paintings of dead children by an artist who specializes in painting half naked, abused and dead children, what's the difference between that and someone listening to heavy metal songs about the devil? Does that make them devil worshippers? No, it doesn't make them devil worshippers, and that's not my point. I'm not saying we should put these people in jail, although yeah, well, I'll just leave it at that. I'm not saying we should put these people in jail for their taste in art. I'm just saying that in a diverse country where the people hold a range of values, but where the vast majority fall somewhere on the spectrum, that is more conservative than thinking it's cool for an adult man to hang paintings of dead kids on his walls. That those people us, who our government is theoretically supposed to serve. I know. Har har. I should do a stand up special with zingers like that.

That we are within our rights to say to some of the most powerful people in Washington, DC. Hey, what's with all the pictures of the dead kids? And expect an answer. Or why is this guy who owns a pizza joint who is somehow listed as one of the 50 most powerful people in the capital city of the most powerful country in the world, what's with his creepy Instagram with pictures of tied up kids? And why is he hosting bands that joke about pedophilia and display symbols the FBI says are pedophile secret Dakota rings? And why do the people with dead kids on their walls who wield so much power in Washington seem so interested in this guy? Not because there's a satanic child trafficking operation that they're guilty until proven innocent of, but just because what is all this? Who are you people? Maybe it wouldn't be appropriate to ask these questions of the guy down the block. Although I bet most of you wouldn't let your kids hang out at that house. If my kid had a friend and he was at his friend's house and I saw his dad had those paintings hanging from his walls, that guy had better stay away from my kid on pain of an ass beating.

But fine. People are into what they're into. I don't have to be around it. My kids don't have to be around it. But it's now my business what the guy down the block is into, fine. But these are normal questions to ask of people with so much power over our government. But when those questions are asked, when they were asked, we don't get anything like an answer. You get shouted down, you lose your job in the media. Like Ben Swan, did you get your accounts banned on social media? Well, when that's how these things are handled. And to be clear, I get why they're handled this way. They're handled this way because the guy with the pictures of dead kids on his wall is not going to have an explanation for that. That's going to satisfy most of us. So as soon as he starts talking about it and trying to explain, he's already lost again. This is america. So most people who don't work for the big tech companies interpret the First Amendment pretty broadly. If you want to paint dead, tied up, abused half naked kids, paint dead, tied up, abused, half naked kids.

If you want to pay a small fortune to hang them on the wall of your living room, knock yourself out. But you're not having a hand in determining education policy in America. You're not helping decide whether it's okay to perform gender reassignment surgery on eight year olds. When you have paintings of tied up, dead eight year olds on your wall, you lose your position on a local school board for having sexually suggestive pictures of dead kids on your wall. And so this really begs a larger question, which gets to an aspect of the Jeffrey Epstein story that I think is really difficult for normal people. It was difficult for me for a long time the question of what exactly is going on with these people in elevated political circles in DC high society, that this guy would feel comfortable hanging these pictures on the wall of a living room where he hosts parties in which he showed off in a DC. Society magazine. If I was into pictures of dead, abused kids, I would at least hide them before company came over. I would certainly put them away before the magazine photographer showed up to profile my house.

I mean, DC. Is a cutthroat city where people gladly take any little thing out of context if they can to destroy somebody else. But apparently pictures of dead kids and weird blood ritual dinner parties are just so normal that you can advertise them in magazines and throw parties in the rooms where they're hanging. So let's finally start to get around to Jeffrey Epstein. I know that's what we're here to talk about. Some of you are out there saying, okay, fine, so these people are freaks, but what does that have to do with Jeffrey Epstein? We've been waiting several months for this episode. Well, some people think it has everything to do with you know, conspiracy theories tend to grow like mold until they congeal together into one big mess. Once, people who were already on this train remembered that Bill Clinton, who John Podesta worked for in the White House for eight years and whose wife, John Podesta, was running a presidential campaign. For once, people remembered that Bill Clinton was apparently good enough buddies with Jeffrey Epstein to show up on the flight logs of his private plane 26 times. They said, well, yeah, of course, that makes total sense.

And so Epstein got taken up into the larger theory, tying all this together into one big plot. And now, to be clear, I don't buy that. I don't think that's true. I certainly don't have any evidence that it's true. My point in bringing all this up is a little bit different is to paint a picture, since that's one of the themes today, apparently a picture of a world where a guy like Jeffrey Epstein could operate as long as he did out in the open and still get fawning attention from many of the richest and most powerful people in the country. Because it's not like people didn't know what Jeffrey Epstein was up to. He didn't name his private plane the Lolita Express. Other people gave it that name. Lolita, for those of you who aren't up on what literary people consider high art, is a 1955 novel about a man who kidnaps and repeatedly rapes a twelve year old girl for two years. The author was inspired by a real case from 1948 in which a serial child molester kidnapped a twelve year old girl and traveled across the country having his way with her.

And Jeffrey Epstein's airplane was nicknamed by other people. The Lolita Express. People knew what was going on when Jeffrey Epstein was arrested and jailed for exploiting underage girls in the mid two thousand s. I don't know how old a lot of you guys were, but that was a very public affair. If you were focused on like, football games or watching Barney the Dinosaur or whatever, you might not have been plugged into it, but the people who were in that world were very plugged into it. It was very, very well known, a very, very public affair. Nobody who had the slightest idea who Jeffrey Epstein was at all was unaware of what happened. Well, Bill Clinton rode on the Lolita Express 26 times. One of Epstein's partners in crime, a guy he did all this stuff with, for sure, a guy who ran a modeling agency that he used as a front for sex trafficking named Jean Luke Brunell. More on him later. He only rode Jeffrey Epstein's plane 25 times. This is a guy who was very close to Epstein, a guy who visited Epstein 70 times during his 13 month stay in jail more than once a week, even though Epstein's deal let him out on work release for 12 hours a day, six days a week.

And so a guy that close to him, who was definitely involved in Epstein's sex crimes, rode on his private plane fewer times than Bill Clinton. Now, if I Darryl Cooper, if I wanted to meet with Bill Clinton or Bill Gates, I assume that somebody on their staff would do a Google search and go to Bill and say, hey, boss, we found a reddit thread where Samanon called him a fascist. Gonna have to take a pass on this meeting. But apparently running a Google search and finding countless articles in major publications describing Epstein's conviction for child prostitution not a deal breaker. There's a picture of Bill Clinton in an airport with a big smile on his face getting a massage from Shantae Davis, one of the girls Epstein was abusing and who he was using as his personal masseuse at the time. Now, I'm not saying Bill Clinton is a pedophile, although I will say he is almost certainly a rapist. Several friends of Juanita Broderick back up her specific account of being raped by Clinton in an Arkansas hotel room in 1978. Even many Democrats and liberals are starting to admit this. One of her friends says she found her curled up and crying with a cut and swollen lip that Clinton had given her.

Now, I'm not saying Bill Clinton's a pedophile. I'm not saying he did anything nefarious with Jeffrey Epstein, but I will say that if it's true that Epstein was in the business of blackmailing powerful men by putting them in compromising positions with underage girls and he couldn't get Bill Clinton a likely rapist with so little impulse control that he couldn't wait to get out of the Oval Office before hooking up with his 18 year old White House intern. If he couldn't get Bill Clinton when Epstein had over two dozen plane trips, including ones to Bangkok, Thailand, and his private sex island, if he couldn't get some dirt on that guy under those circumstances, then he was terrible at his job. To get back to my point, when we regular folks ask what to us seem like pretty basic questions like how could a guy everyone knows went to jail for sexually abusing underage girls continue to operate in high society? Like it's all good. When we ask those questions, we often find it hard to come up with any good answers. And so many people settle for absurd ones like Bill Clinton saying, oh, I just didn't know anything about Epstein's past.

It's just totally absurd. But who's going to call him on it? Some podcaster? Or Harvard professor and celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who three separate Epstein accusers have accused of abusing them? When asked about a massage he got at Epstein's house said, oh, well, I kept my underwear on. He literally said that. But regular know we don't want to think about this stuff. It's disgusting. And it all just seems too unbelievable because regular people we don't know anybody who could hop onto a guy's private plane named after a book about a pedophile. Find several underage girls who are not his daughters on the plane with you get offered a massage from them in your underwear and just carry on like it's all good. That's not how we work. Regular people hear these stories and they think, look, sure, these things do happen. I've seen the stories in the newspapers. But the people who are involved, the people who do these things, are very rare, aberrations. These people are monsters. Jeffrey Epstein was a monster. What are all these people doing with a monster? I think when you take a look at the behavior and inclinations of many people of that social class, not only in America, but in many countries, and not only today, but going back a long time, the obvious answer is that to those people, he is not a monster.

If you hopped onto that plane after just coming from dinner off a bloody corpse's belly put on by a guy who has pictures of dead kids on his walls, then this rich guy being surrounded with a half dozen teenage girls probably is not that. Know what would be shocking? What would have totally ruined his image and ensured that no one would be caught dead with him, would have been saying, like, he supported Donald Trump, or that the COVID vaccines don't seem to be working as advertised. But unrelated, teenage girls flying on your pedophile plane giving massages to anybody that you ordered them to. Par for the course. Par for the course. In Washington, DC. Even Epstein himself did not hide what he was up to. In the New York Times, reporter James B. Stewart wrote about a time that he went to interview Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein knows he's a New York Times reporter, and Epstein spoke openly about his proclivities. He blames society for being so hung up on the issue. Quote he said criminalizing sex with teenage girls was a cultural aberration and that at times in history it was perfectly acceptable. He pointed out that homosexuality had long been considered a crime and was still punishable by death in some parts of the world.

End quote. The year after Epstein got out of jail the year after he got out of jail for this, katie Couric and George Stephanopoulos, both extremely famous TV presenters, came over to his place for dinner. Harvard University posted a page talking about what a great guy he was and how much he donated to charity. I remember a few years ago reading another article in the New York Times about a French novelist. I know as soon as I say that alarm bells are going off. A French novelist named Gabriel Matzneff getting pulled up on pedophilia charges. And the article was titled a Pedophile Writer Is on Trial. So Are the French elites. This novelist had enjoyed the patronage and friendship of famous fashion designers yves Saint Laurent, artists, even presidents of France. Francois Hallon was a big supporter and friend of his. He'd been a star, a real star. A lot of awards, real star in French literary circles. For years, he had a widely read column in a popular magazine, and all of his books were pornographic novels about pedophilia, which, it turned out, drew on his own experiences with young children. Literally. His breakthrough novel, in 1974, was called under 16 Years Old.

The article, New York Times article talks about all these prominent people who were still supporting him. And then there's this line the support of Mr. Matzneff. This is a quote from The New York Times the support of Mr. Matzneff reflected an enduring French contradiction a nation that is deeply egalitarian, yet with an elite that often distinguishes itself from ordinary people through a different code. Of morality, a different set of rules, or at least believing it necessary to defend those who AHA, see, now we're getting a little bit warmer. See, Matsneff doesn't apologize, doesn't deny any of the accusations, though he does defend himself. Quote in the recent interview with the Times, Mr. Matznev angrily defended himself, saying that he wrote about what many others did in secret, especially in the years following the May 1968 countercultural revolution. He says, Even the silly things I might have done during those euphoric years of freedom, I wasn't the only one. What a hypocrisy. End quote. And you know what? He's damn well right about that. He's telling the truth. The French painter Paul Galgan was celebrated throughout the 20th century, even though everybody knew he made frequent trips out to Tahiti to impregnate eleven and twelve year old girls.

When the ultra famous British TV presenter Jimmy Savile was discovered to have spent decades raping hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children, including at a children's hospital where he would volunteer and do fundraisers for, it immediately came out that everybody had always known Savile like kids. A London police officer once described catching Jimmy Savile in a parked car late at night with a young girl, and his excuse for not intervening was that attitudes were different at the time. Quote they turned a blind eye to 15 year olds, but never considered that as pedophilia. You can't blame Leeds City Police for what everyone in the country was doing. I'm not saying that's right, but it was the attitude at the time. They all knew Jimmy Savile liked them young. It was the culture, end quote. And you know what? He's telling the truth. Know. Everybody knows about Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey and the rest. But sexual exploitation has been a major theme in Hollywood as long as it's been around, including sexual exploitation of children. Go watch Amy Berg's documentary An Open Secret, for, among other things, that will make your skin crawl agents and publicists of famous child actors, people you've heard of and seen their movies.

They're agents and publicists selling photos of their young clients to known sex offenders. After the Savile case was in the news in Britain, the writer Neil Linden wrote an article in the telegraph about the culture in which something like that, like the Jimmy Savile case, could happen. He wrote, quote the difference between horribly predatory and exploitative criminal acts such as Jimmy Savile's and our own behavior was blurred, confused and muddled. We had lost sight of the essential distinction between everybody having a good time together and some people having their abominable idea of a good time at the expense of individuals who couldn't exercise free adult choice in the matter. End quote. Lyndon wrote that he was having nightmares about being picked up by the police for things that he had done in earlier decades. He said he imagined many ultra famous men that he knew back in the 1970s were similarly lying awake at night, quote, ransacking their memory to ask whether they ever crossed the line between indecency and illegality. End quote. Well, for that to happen, it means that indecency was the order of the day. He writes, quote Anybody who lived through the post pill, pre AIDS period of the last century and was connected with the worlds of media, politics and entertainment will have emerged with their undies clean only if they were also wearing a chastity belt.

Everybody was banging away on the edge of that line. I did my share as a rather pretty boy. I also had to learn how to dodge away from unwelcome advances, but that was an essential rite of passage for a young adult. There was no doubt what was being sought by the flamboyant Labor MP friend of Leon Britain who laid his hand on my knee at the Members Tea Room in 1973, nor what was expected by the global rock superstar who invited me to his dressing room after a show. Both Parliament and the music business were sexual hothouses where Libidos ran riot. I worked in various divisions of the BBC in the 1970s, and as was said by Wilfred Death, when he was peripherally caught up in the operation utree inquiries, I can confirm from my personal experience that it was a heaving carnival of orgiastic sex in which lines of legality and decency were obscured almost to the point of invisibility. Everybody who lived through that period and took a share of its promiscuous sexual pleasures has some enduring responsibility for the permission that was extended to the creeps. We were all working in the same buildings.

We all shared the same canteens in lavatories. We went to the same parties. I was told about Savile in 1976. If I, who was of no importance at all at the BBC, had heard that Savile was a predatory pedophile, I will bet a pound to a million pennies that senior executives must have heard the same. Yet it never crossed my mind for an instant that there was an important story in Jimmy Savile. Esther Ranson, another BBC presenter at the time, has admitted it didn't occur to her either. Why not, when the article? He tells us why. Because any semblance of moral order had been thrown out the window by these people in the 1960s, and the stories they were hearing about people like Jimmy Savile were common around the same time, 1970s, back when Jeffrey Epstein got his first job teaching math at an elite New York high school. He was fired from that job just a few years later. Several students have been interviewed about that time and talk about his inappropriate behavior toward the teenage girls. It was the talk of the school about how he would show up uninvited to student parties looking for a good time.

But that's not why he was fired. According to the school, he was fired for performance issues, which I guess should not have been a huge surprise for a 20 year old with no teaching experience or even teacher training. The guy who was the headmaster of the school around the time Epstein was hired was a guy named Donald Barr. Donald Barr probably would not have found Jeffrey Epstein's behavior particularly disturbing, because, see, Barr, he had a hobby. He liked to write pulp Sci-Fi novels, and one of the novels he wrote right around this time in the 1970s is called Space Relations. Here's a summary. I've read it, but this is close enough. I pulled this from Wikipedia. Quote in the future, humans have formed an intergalactic empire ruled by Aristocrats during a time of war with the Plyth, an empire of antlike alien bug people. Ambassador John Craig, a formerly liberal Earthman in his 30s is dispatched to the strategically important planet Kosar, a human colony that was settled by the Carlisle society as a place of exile for political extremists and now is ruled by an Oligarchical high council of seven nobles, each of whomus is in charge of a different domain with its own traditions.

Their boredom and absolute power have driven them to madness, to the point that Kosar's entry into the empire has been stymied by the man inhabited planet's treaties clause written by Craig against alliances with slave owning societies due to its practice of kidnapping humans to become illegal playthings of the galaxy's super rich. Craig, who now is campaigning to bring Kosar into the empire, had previously been to the planet when the passenger ship on which he was traveling on a return trip from the Beetlejuice Conference was captured by space pirates. While en route to Kosar, one of the pirates awakened Craig and the other prisoners to rape a 15 year old virginal redheaded female captive in front of them. The rapists fellow pirates later hear of this and dock his pay as punishment for spoiling her market value. Craig then spent two years as the slave of the beautiful, sensual and sadistic Lady Morgan Sydney, the only female member of the Oligarchy with whom he became romantically involved. Together, they lived in her castle, ruling over and engaging in sexual relations with those under their dominion, including an enslaved teenager at a clinic used to breed enslaved people.

When Craig stumbles on in hints of an alien invasion, he realizes he must escape to save humanity. Craig is depicted as undisturbed by Lady Morgan's sadism. When he is ordered to sexually assault the enslaved teenager, he enjoys his participation in the act. Well, that's an interesting story. You guys rushing out to buy that book? That's an interesting story. Very interesting story from the guy who gave Jeffrey Epstein his first job. A job. Epstein was entirely unqualified for teaching math at a very prestigious prep school where celebrities and CEOs sent their kids, even though he was a 20 year old college dropout with no teaching experience and from which he was fired for performance. A couple of years later, after Barr, the guy who hired him, had left the school. Donald Barr himself is a very interesting guy. Actually, you might recognize that last name. Back during the second world war, donald barr served in the office of strategic services, the OSS, which was the US. Government organization that became the CIA after the war. Donald Barr's son was also a CIA man, serving as a legal intern, but serving in a critically important role as an intern as the liaison between the Central Intelligence Agency and congressional investigators during the contentious pike and Church Committee hearings in the mid 70s.

He must have done a good job, because the head of the CIA at the time was a man by the name of George H. W. Bush. And about a decade later, he got himself elected president. And when he needed a new attorney general to clean up the mess left in the wake of multiple scandals involving the Reagan era intelligence agencies, most notably Iran Contra, he called that same legal intern who had helped shepherd the CIA through its troubles with Congress in the man named Bill Barr. Well, Bill Barr did his duty, went back into the private sector until two and a half decades later, when another president, this one not a big fan of the Bushes guy named Trump, needed an attorney general himself. Well, about six months after Bill Barr became Donald Trump's attorney General, his Department of justice arrested Jeffrey Epstein. So the CIA connected attorney general, who has Jeffrey Epstein arrested and in whose custody Epstein dies under extraordinarily OD circumstances, just happens to be the son of a CIA connected guy who wrote pulp Sci-Fi novels about elite underage sex slavery and gave Epstein his first job? What a coincidence. How strange.

How strange. Here's another thing I found strange, although I've received conflicting information on this, so take this part with a grain of salt. Is that nexium group NXIVM instead of A-U-I don't know if you remember. This is a couple years ago during the Trump administration. It was this group that was broken up in New York right around the same time that Epstein got taken down. The leader of the group, it was called a Know in. All the legal indictments and everything, the leader and his lieutenants, several of whom were wealthy heiresses and a famous actress, were arrested and indicted on multiple charges of sex trafficking. And it was a very weird outfit. The leader, Keith Rainier, seems to have been some kind of guru and the group showed really classic hallmarks of being a cult. Well, the reason I found this interesting that this group was broken up around the same time that Epstein was taken down, is that the two most important members of the group, the leaders who were directly subordinate to Keith rainier himself and the two who provided most of the funding for the group. There were two sisters, last name of Bronthman, who were heiresses to the multibillion dollar seagrams liquor fortune.

The Bronthmans were wealthy Jewish tobacco farmers in Moldova back in the day, who moved with all their servants to Canada during the great Jewish emigration from the Russian empire in the late 18 hundreds. Once in Canada, they got into the liquor business and became extremely wealthy during Prohibition in the United States, where by some accounts, their distilleries supplied up to 40% of the illicit liquor in the US. During that period. So very, very major players. And to operate in that environment at that time meant being involved with organized crime. And the Bronfman outfit was listed as part of the national Crime syndicate organized by Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky. The mob. The Mafia. Well, the family came up over the years in Canadian investigations of extortion, bribery, money laundering, other non street level mob type activity. But the investigations were always squashed or fell apart, and the Bronfman family continued to grow in prominence. In 1928, they bought the liquor company Seagrams, which was a pretty small outfit at the time, but which, with the help of the Canadian government over the years, they grew into, at one point, the largest liquor company in the world.

By the 1960s, the Bronfman family had become the single biggest private landowner in Canada. Very powerful people. Well, those two Bronfman sisters, these heirs who were members of this nexium group that got taken down for being a cult and sex trafficking operation, their father and uncle helped to co found an organization called the Mega Group. In the late 1990s, which began as a consortium of 20 Canadian and American Jewish billionaires who met officially twice a year to discuss Jewish issues and Israeli foreign policy issues. Two areas that are somewhat uniquely mixed in Israel, most governments don't take an active interest in groups of their dominant ethnic group living overseas. The German government doesn't consider Germans in America or Brazil to be its people. It doesn't treat them and their interests as a matter of German foreign policy. But Israel, for religious and historical a lot of reasons, does consider Jewish communities and other countries to be part of its business. And so this Mega Group has coordinated philanthropic efforts for things like Birthright Israel, which is a program that encourages young diaspora Jews to take a fully funded, guided trip to Israel designed to create a bond between them and that country.

The group's efforts led to the creation of organizations to fund Jewish day schools and summer camps, things like that. But the group also coordinates lobbying efforts with regard to Israeli interests in their respective countries. They also commission studies for the Israeli government, including for Israeli intelligence. And they provide guidance to the Israeli government on how to best navigate the political waters of their own countries. Nothing legally wrong with any of this, by the way. Every country in the world is allowed to do it. The Israelis have just proven to be very good at it over the years. So don't hate the player. I have a theory, actually, about where the name Mega Group actually came from, but it is just a theory. Some people just think it means Mega donors. Back in the 1990s, President Clinton was spending a lot of his time and a lot of his political capital on negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians. After an agreement was reached on the withdrawal of Israeli troops from part of the West Bank in 1997, the Clinton administration, serving as guarantor of the agreement, sent two letters to describe US. Commitments in the matter one to the Israelis and one to the Palestinians.

Well, naturally, the Israelis wanted to know what the letter to the Palestinians said. And so the US. National Security Agency. The NSA intercepted a communication from the Israeli ambassador in Washington, D. C to the Mossad station chief there. The Mossad is Israel's CIA. Basically, there's a little difference. And the ambassador sent a communication to the Masad station chief in Washington, DC. That was intercepted by the NSA. And in the communication, he asked him to get a copy of this letter for the Netanyahu government back in Tel Aviv. He asked the Masad station chief if he could use Mega to get the letter. And so the NSA intercepted another communication, this one between that same Mossad station chief and his boss back in Israel. And he said, hey, the ambassador wants me to get a copy of this American letter, and he wants me to use Mega to get it. Can I do that? And his boss told him, no, that is not something we use Mega for. And so alarm bells went off in the US. Intelligence community. What's going on here? Who is mega. What is mega. The FBI launched a major counterintelligence investigation.

They thought Mega might be referring to some high placed Israeli mole in the White House. All of it ended up in the press. And the Clinton administration was actually pretty upset about this by all accounts, because at the time, Bill was trying to present himself as a credible broker for peace. Well, two years later, Clinton's on the ropes, completely embroiled in the Monica Lewinsky scandal and his impeachment. He's essentially a lame duck president. Two years before leaving office, Monica Lewinsky testified under oath to the special counsel that before their affair went public and when they were still seeing each other, clinton told her that the phones in her apartment were being tapped by a foreign embassy. In a 1999 book, journalist Gordon Thomas claims that the Israelis were the tappers and that they had some 30 hours of recordings between Clinton and Lewinsky, including a lot of phone sex. And that in 1998, when the Lewinsky scandal was in full swing and one month before the 1998 US midterm elections, the Israelis used the tapes to blackmail Clinton. Another book, written in 2014 by Daniel Hauper, who was the online editor of the Weekly Standard at the time, came to the same conclusion from different sources that during the 1998 Y River meetings between the Israelis and Palestinians brokered by the US.

That Netanyahu pulled Clinton aside to make him aware of the tapes as leverage to get him to release Jonathan Pollard, who was a Jewish American spy who had been in prison for a while for leaking classified information to the Israelis and whose release was sort of a cause celeb in Israel until he was released in 2015. Well, up until that point in 1998, clinton had been categorical in his refusal to even discuss the issue. From the time he took office in 1993 until October 1998, the time of this alleged meeting between him and Netanyahu, he refused to even discuss it. And indeed, the very next month, the New York Times reported that Clinton had suddenly reversed course on the issue, outraging the US. Intelligence community so much that CIA Director George Tennant threatened to resign in protest if Clinton let Pollard out of jail anyway. Some people think that Mega didn't refer to an individual, but to a group. And this Mega group we're talking about, this is what some people think and that this Mega group we're talking about already existed. In 1997, when those calls were intercepted talking about Mega and only came out into the open in 1999, an Israeli official lent at least some support to this theory when, while making an official denial that the Israelis had a mole in the White House, he said, maybe Mega is not an individual.

Maybe it's a code name for a group or a method. Maybe I have a more straightforward hypothesis, I think. I think the guys who founded the Mega group were just basically trolling the Clinton administration. And you have to understand the administration made the investigation of alleged Israeli spying very public. Like they could have kept it under wraps. They made it very public. It was on the front pages of all the big papers with details including actual text of intercepted calls about this codename Mega. There was all sorts of speculation in the press. Who is mega. Is mega in the White House. Is it a spy network? What are the Israelis up to? Is it a leaker in the CIA? And this was done at a time when the US. Was brokering negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians. So the whole effort could be and likely was seen by the Israelis as an attempt by the Clinton administration to put pressure on the Israelis to make concessions. Well, once Clinton was a lame duck in the middle of his impeachment, and Netanyahu had him over a barrel with 30 hours of illicit talk between him and Monica.

I mean, you can imagine how that would have played out a month before the 1998 election in the middle of Clinton's impeachment process, just days of the explicit tapes being played on national television during the impeachment proceedings. That these guys who formed the mega group, they were like, hey, Bill, look at us over here. It's the mega group. I think they were just trolling him. That's just my theory. I could totally be wrong. But the timing and the nature of the group itself make it very hard to imagine that it was just pure coincidence. Something was certainly going on. So anyway, the guy who co founded this mega group with the Bronfmans was a Jewish American businessman named Leslie Wexner. Les Wexner is the owner of Limited Brands, which has included many very popular shopping mall retailers like Abercrombie and Fitch Express, Bath and Bodyworks, Victoria's Secret. So very wealthy guy, as you can imagine. Well, if you follow the Jeffrey Epstein case at all, then you've heard the name Les Wexner because Wexner was Epstein's, I don't know, patron, I guess, handler. Epstein met Wexner in the mid 80s around the same time that he met Ghislaine and Robert Maxwell.

And the nature of their relationship was always very difficult to understand, but it was extremely close. I mean, in 1991, Les Wexner, who a huge business mogul, wealthiest man in the state of Ohio, signed full power of attorney over all his interests to Jeffrey Epstein, who at the time was this basically unknown 38 year old whom Wexner had only met a few years back. And I mean full power of attorney, meaning Epstein could transfer and dispose of his assets. He could hire and fire Wexner's employees. He could borrow money in Wexner's name. He could sign Wexner's tax returns. It's not the kind of guy, or rather the kind of thing that you'd expect any guy who's a billionaire who's not on his deathbed or something to give to anyone, let alone to this guy. Epstein was supposed to have made his fortune as a money manager, but nobody's ever heard of anyone whose money he managed except for supposedly one guy, Les Wexner. I mentioned that one of the companies Wexner owned was Victoria's Secret. One of the things that Epstein would do is use his position with Wexner to pose as a Victoria's Secret talent scout to try to get into bed with aspiring models, basically a modeling industry version of what Harvey Weinstein and half the producers in Hollywood did with aspiring starlets over the know.

Hey, sweetie, you're cute. There's a lot of cuties out there, though. What can you offer me that they can't? It's the most obvious thing in the world that guys in that position. I can make you a movie star or a Victoria's Secret model, which is sort of the equivalent in the modeling industry, I guess. Or I can pick that other pretty girl over there or that one over there because turns out there's a lot of pretty girls running around who want to be on film. It's always been obvious that creeps could and did take advantage of their position. It's so obvious. There would be jokes about the casting couch or going to see the producer in movies, and everybody knew what they were laughing at. Epstein's friend and fellow predator I mentioned earlier, Jean Luc Brunel, he ran a managing and talent scouting agency for models, which again, is pretty much the best front any sex trafficker or predator could dream up. Brunel got high on his own product for years, sometimes abusing his position of power, other times just by force, including, according to the French government, raping underage girls. Brunel provided a steady stream of young girls to Epstein's operation.

Epstein bragged to one of his victims that he had had sex with at least 1000 of Jean Luc Brunell's girls. So these two were in deep. In fact, Epstein had provided the seed money for Brunel to open the modeling agency that served as the hub for all this. And people had known all this for years, by the way. Back in 1988, the show 60 Minutes did an expose on Brunel and another modeling executive and aired witness testimony about how Brunell created a culture where women were routinely drugged and sexually abused. After Jeffrey Epstein was arrested this last time, jean Luke Brunell apparently believed he was next because he immediately went into hiding. He was eventually arrested trying to flee the country and charged with rape of minors by the French government. But can you guys guess? I'll give you 3 seconds to guess. Oh, you all got it right. He was found dead in apparent suicide by hanging in his prison cell. That's just so shocking. I know. Well, apparently when Brunel wasn't around to provide these girls, epstein had to use other means. And luckily for him, his boss patron client godfather Guy Les Wexner owned Victoria's Secret.

In the mid 1990s, two Victoria's Secret executives got word that this guy, who they didn't really know much about, didn't really trust, but who seemed to have a whole lot of influence with their boss, Les Wexner. They started getting reports that Epstein was doing the same thing with Victoria's Secret models and would be models posing as a talent scout in order to sexually abuse them. And so the two executives went to Les Wexner and told him all this, but nothing happened. While could a relative nobody a relative nobody money manager or whatever like Jeffrey Epstein, who had only known Wexner for a few years at this point. How could he get away with that? I don't know. Why would a guy like Wexner entrust his fortune to a guy like Epstein rather than some established firm someplace he could sue if they screwed it up or screwed him over? Don't know. Why would Wexner give Epstein, for free the largest private residence in Manhattan a house that was estimated to be worth $70 million at the time of Epstein's arrest? Don't know that either. Epstein's lavish estate in Ohio, which was the second most expensive estate in the entire state the number one spot being Les Wexner's residence was also formally owned by Wexner and so was Epstein's private plane which was not some little Cessna or Learjet, by the way.

It was a custom equipped Boeing 727. And there's no public record of any actual transaction for them. But they were Wexner's, and then they were Epstein's. Those things happened. Don't know why, but they happened. Wexner also made Epstein CEO of the Wexner Foundation the nonprofit he used to dispose of much of his wealth. This is from the New York Times. Quote, virtually from and I you know, I know a lot of you guys know very well that I don't think a whole lot of outfits like the New York Times but I'm trying to use the enemy sources to make my case here. Quote, virtually from the moment in the 1980s that Mr. Epstein arrived on the scene in Columbus, Ohio where L Brands Limited Brands was based mr. Wexner's friends and colleagues were mystified as to why a renowned businessman in the prime of his career would place such trust in an outsider with a thin resume and scant financial experience. Mr. Moroski, vice president of Limited Brands at the time, looked into Mr. Epstein's background and was not impressed. I tried to find out how did he get from a high school math teacher to a private investment advisor?

Mr. Muroski said. There was just nothing there. Representatives of Mr. Wexner and Elle Brands refused to share even basic details of the work that Mr. Epstein performed for Mr. Wexner. It isn't clear that there was any official agreement detailing Mr. Epstein's role or compensation. Representatives for Mr. Wexner and the company declined to answer questions about what investments Mr. Epstein made for Mr. Wexner, how any such investments performed and whether Mr. Epstein was ever audited or provided Mr. Wexner with documentation about the services he was providing. Longtime colleagues and friends of Mr. Wexner soon found themselves getting iced out of his life. Jim Duberstein for decades. Attended Ohio State University football games and dinner parties with Mr. Wexner. They even invested in real estate together. Shortly after Mr. Epstein showed up, he was late for a meeting with Mr. Duberstein at Mr. Wexner's office. When mr. Epstein did arrive, he put his feet up on Mr. Wexner's desk, Mr. Duberstein recalled. Mr. Wexner joined the meeting by phone and instructed Mr. Epstein to treat his old friend like family. Soon, though, Mr. Duberstein and Mr. Epstein had a disagreement. Mr. Duberstein doesn't recall what it was about, and Mr.

Wexner cut Mr. Duberstein completely out of his life. He repeatedly called and sent letters to Mr. Wexner hoping to rekindle the long time friendship. Mr. Wexner never replied. His allegiance apparently went to Epstein. Mr. Duberstein said, Les Wexner, until the time he quit talking to me, was probably the finest person I ever met in my life. He was the most charitable, the most generous, the most understanding. I have nothing but praise for him. And then he just cut his umbilical cord. From the outset, Mr. Epstein's role extended far beyond that of a traditional money manager. From the late night in the late 1980s, mr. Wexner started building Limitless, a 316 foot yacht. Mr. Epstein managed its construction and design, said Craig To FOIA, who captained Mr. Wexner's ships for 15 years, about the power of attorney agreement, giving Epstein power over all of Wexner's affairs. It takes a vast amount of trust to give someone total control, said William P. La Piana, an associate dean at New York Law School and trust and estates expert who reviewed the document at the request of the Times. Essentially, what this means is I can sign your name to anything for the next 16 years.

That document gave Mr. Epstein unmatched authority over Mr. Wexner's financial affairs, and it corresponded to a period in which Mr. Epstein came to control or own valuable assets that previously belonged to Mr. Wexner or his companies, end quote. Epstein is also known to have sexually assaulted at least one woman. Unless Wexner's home in, you know, just very strange relationship, and you can probably see why many people have speculated and to be clear, it's just speculation, but many people have speculated that Epstein might have some kind of extremely compromising blackmail on Wexner. What is the best explanation for all this? I don't really understand it, and as far as I can tell, pretty much nobody else does, including people who are, again, very close to Les Wexner. To circle back, that was kind of a long roundabout. I was saying that I found it very interesting that the sex trafficking operation Nexium was taken down right around the same time that Epstein was arrested. Given that Nexium was funded and largely run by the Bronfman sisters, whose father and uncle had co founded the Mega group with Jeffrey Epstein's sugar daddy, Les Wexner. Epstein's operation, in my opinion, in a lot of people's opinion, almost certainly had to do with sexual blackmail.

And although I haven't seen any explicit evidence of it, nexium seems like an ideal outfit to run something like that. So these two weird, sexually exploitative sex slave operations are taken down at the same time. And the people who run them are each one direct step down from the two guys who co founded an organization with links to Israeli intelligence. Just seems like a strange coincidence. And for the record, I have no information that it's not a coincidence. And one of the nexium group's members, the former Battlestar Galactica actress Nikki Klein, I've talked to her about this. She insists that the group has been misrepresented. And she's told me in conversation that she doesn't think there's any connection simply because the Bronfman sister's, Father Charles, was very much against them being involved with the group fact, which seems to be backed up in at least some public accounts. So I don't know. Just another one of those strange things. There's a lot more about Les Wexner, like how he arranged for Southern Air Transport, the CIA front airline and successor to Air America, to be relocated to his hometown in Columbus, Ohio, after Southern Air had been outed as running illegal weapons and possibly drugs during the Iran Contra scandal.

Air America, the predecessor, you may remember from part two of this series, is the CIA front airline used to run covert operations in Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War, including possible, probable, I would say drug running to help fund local warlords who were on our side there. And Air America was the operation for which the son of the leader of the Finders cult used to work. Again, that's all in episode two in Columbus. Much of Southern Air's Transport is supposed to have consisted of Wexner's products being shipped from Hong Kong into Ohio. The whole thing is another can of worms. I wanted to get more into Iran Contra in this series just for background on what a lot of the players around Epstein were up to at the time. But it's just way too big of a story, and I'll probably do a series on 80s intelligence operations one of these days, so I'm going to leave it there. But another Epstein connection to Israeli intelligence was through Ahud Barak, former Israeli prime minister and the head of Israeli military intelligence in the 1980s when Epstein was getting his start. Barack has downplayed his relationship to Epstein since Epstein went down, but there really is no downplaying it.

Jeffrey Epstein accuser, Virginia Jewfrey, alleged that Barack was one of the men that Epstein made her have sex with when she was a teenager. To be clear, I don't know if that's true, but that's what she says. And to be honest, a lot else of what she says has been corroborated, but I don't know if it's true. In 2003, not long after Ahud Barak left office as Prime Minister of Israel, the Wexner Foundation, which was still under the sway of Epstein, paid Barack $2.3 million, supposedly to write two papers, one about the Palestinian conflict and another that he just never got around to writing. But the Wexner Foundation let him keep the money anyway. Apparently they didn't care much about the papers, probably because that's not really what the payment was for. Barack was a frequent visitor to Epstein's residences. They were seen together a lot. He was forced to admit that after surveillance footage came out proving it. The two men apparently remained close for many years because in 2014, Epstein bankrolled a startup called Reporty Homeland Security, now called Carbine 911, that Ahud Barak cofounded with a few other former members of Israeli intelligence.

A former Israeli military intelligence officer named Ari Ben Manashe, who is a controversial figure but I'll get to the controversy in a minute. Has written about an operation that he was involved with during Barack's time as head of Israeli military intelligence in the Reagan administration. Had been working with the Israelis to smuggle and sell illegal weapons to Iran during the Iran Contra war I'm sorry. The Iran Iraq war. And then using the proceeds from those sales to fund Central American paramilitaries to whom Congress had also forbidden any funding or support. After a series of very public atrocities in the early 80s. This is the Iran Contra scandal. All of this was extremely illegal. Could plausibly be described as treason? To be honest, if treason means providing aid and comfort to America's enemies, and these were declared enemies of America, not just declared by them, but declared by the US congress. Well, Ben Menace says when these operations required someone to launder the money that was getting thrown around and moving across borders, one of the men that they called for help was Robert Maxwell, whom Ben Minashe says obliged by creatively moving money in and out of his company coffers and pension funds.

Robert Maxwell, you'll remember from episode one, is the father of Ghislaine. Maxwell, jeffrey Epstein's girlfriend and partner in crime. Robert Maxwell was also, without a doubt, an Israeli intelligence agent moving at the highest echelons of power in the United Kingdom. I covered some of his story in the first episode of this series, but it really only scratched the surface. Maxwell had ties to Soviet and British intelligence going back to the Second World War, when he worked in information operations for the British in Berlin, and when he used his contacts back home in the Eastern Bloc where he was from, to set up an import export business, moving things between the east and Britain. This involved a lot of smuggling in a ruined postwar Europe, but Maxwell was well connected, very resourceful, very quickly made a name for himself. In 1948, a few years after the war, his skills were put to use smuggling military hardware to the Zionist movement during the Israeli war against the Arabs. He became a British citizen, changed his name to Robert Maxwell, and expanded a small business distributing scientific journals into a gigantic publishing empire. By the 1960s, he was important enough to be elected to Parliament, and it was during that decade, according to ari Ben Minashe that he had a meeting with Yitzak Shamir, who was currently at that time the head of Mossad operations in Europe.

And Shamir convinced Robert Maxwell that he had a duty, a responsibility, to do what he could to help the Israeli government in any way he could. Maxwell was sold, and from then on, he served as an unofficial liaison between Israeli intelligence and Eastern bloc countries that they couldn't meet with on the record. Using his business operations as cover for what were really kind of off the books diplomatic trips, maxwell shows up in the story of a very elaborate and hard to understand 1980s conspiracy theory involving a piece of software commissioned by the US. Government called Promise with no e at the end. Very complicated story. But the software itself, from what I can tell, is basically a networked database that would allow local police departments, the courts, federal law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and so forth to share and cross reference the information that they all had on people and organizations around the world. Which was not the easiest thing to do back then before the Internet was fully set up. Well, the owners of the company who developed the software said that the software was simply stolen from them by the department of justice after they developed it, and they received at least some vindication for that accusation in court.

Even the House Judiciary Committee that looked into the matter found, quote there appears to be strong evidence, as indicated by the findings in two federal court proceedings as well as by the committee investigation, that the Department of justice quote, acted willfully and fraudulently and quote, took, converted and stole Inslaw that's the company who developed it in SLAW's enhanced promise by, quote, trickery, fraud and deceit. End quote. The goal, according to several investigative reporters, some people who were involved with the case, as well as according to Ari Ben, menace for the US. Government in doing this was to market and sell the software to foreign countries so that once it was installed and in use, built in backdoors could be used to infiltrate their computer networks. Which all sounds like a crazy spy movie, but then you have to remember cases like Crypto AG. Crypto AG was a Swiss firm that manufactured encryption gear founded in the 1950s whose owner had made a deal with William Friedman, the national security agency's chief of cryptography, to provide the US. Government with technical information that would allow us to crack the codes of anybody using the machines, as well as which countries and organizations were using the machines.

Well, in 1970, the CIA just got rid of the middleman, and with west German intelligence, the west German intelligence agency BND secretly purchased Crypto AG itself through front companies. The CIA bought out the German share in 1993 and from then on ran the company itself. And Crypto AG became by far the largest manufacturer and distributor of cryptography gear. In the world being the chief provider for dozens of countries, corporations, all of which the US was able to listen in on the entire time. We're talking Iran, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Eastern Europe, dozens of countries. And the CIA continued to operate that company until 2018. So you can imagine that they have this incredibly important intelligence collection program like the crypto AG thing going on. But now, in the late 80s, when this is happening, this new computer technology is starting to catch on, and people whose job it is to see which way the wind's blowing say that this is the future. And so it becomes plausible that the US government wanted to sell this software around the world with new digital backdoors to get around encryption that cryptoag's operations didn't deal with. They weren't about digital stuff.

I mean, of course we know the NSA has basically done that in the years since. The only question is whether the promised software was stolen as part of an early attempt to do it. I think it's plausible. It does seem strange that the US government would try to steal a private company's software. But of course, if it stayed in private hands, and this is the kind of software that would need, like, regular updates, it would need to be customized for this country, customized differently for that country, and whoever made it was going to have an ongoing relationship with the clients. And so if it stayed in private hands, they would have to be in on the scam, if indeed it was a scam. Well, according to several witnesses at the time, during the court cases and congressional investigations, the US government provided a copy of this software to the Israeli government. Those were only allegations until 2016, when DOJ documents were declassified that confirmed indeed, the software was given to an Israeli traveling under the name Joseph Ben Orr. Only Joseph Ben Orr is not a real person. His real name was Rafi Etan, and he was the head of an Israeli intelligence agency known as Lekem or Lakam.

See it both ways. It's an acronym for the Bureau of Scientific Relations. Rafi Etan is a very well known Israeli intelligence officer because he led the kidnapping and extradition operation to bring the escaped Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann back to Israel to face trial. I mean, it was probably one of, if not the biggest triumph in Israeli intelligence history. And he led the operation. So very famous guy, very high up. And so from early on, Rafi Haitan was a very bold intelligence agent, and he kept that attitude when he was leading an agency. In addition to running the promise operation, he also worked, and this is a fact he worked with Arnon Milchin, who is a very famous Hollywood producer who's made movies like La. Confidential, Pretty Woman, Gone Girl, Falling Down, revenant the recent movie Northman, a whole bunch more major player in Hollywood. Well, Eton worked through Arnon Milchin who has worked with Israeli intelligence over the years to compromise an American aerospace engineer who ran a company called Milco to illegally smuggle hundreds of American nuclear weapons parts to Israel in direct violation of US. Law. Rafa Tan was also the one who ran Jonathan Pollard, the Jewish American spy who got busted in 1985.

And it was after that that Aitan had to step back from his official role as head of Lakem. So anyway, and I know this stuff gets hard to know, I'll get to the point. According to several French and American investigative journalists and according to Ari Ben Menace, who worked directly under Rafa Eitan during this period when they needed someone to set up front companies to market the modified promise software to countries that Israel wanted to compromise, now that they have the software, they reached out to Robert Maxwell. And so Robert Maxwell bought, and this part at least is true robert Maxwell bought small Israeli computer business called DeGem and used it to sell the software to Brazil, Chile, Colombia, eastern Bloc countries, Middle Eastern countries, countries all over the world. US. And Israeli intelligence were actually making tens of millions of dollars selling their own spy software to foreign countries. Anyway, all this is really just to further cement the case, which is not really even disputed anymore, even by people who are skeptical of this whole thing, that Robert Maxwell was 100% a committed Israeli intelligence agent. Ari Bin Minashe, by the way, I said that I would get to this is controversial because, well, in my opinion, because he tends to blend his speculation with what he actually knows to be true.

From his experience where there are points in his story where maybe he doesn't have direct firsthand knowledge of what was going on, like little gaps, he tends to fill them in himself. And when he does it, he doesn't say, this is me speculating. He just kind of does it. And so sometimes his accounts can seem a little implausible on certain points. But there's no doubt that he was a highly placed officer of Israeli military intelligence in the 1980s, and there's no doubt that the Israeli government has certainly lied about that fact, saying he was just a low ranking translator who never left his office. We know that's not true because Benashe has produced his Israeli government passport in court. In other words, not his personal passport, his government passport in court, showing that he traveled on official business to dozens of countries during that period. The director of Israeli Military Intelligence at the time, General Yehoshua Sagi, said that Ben Minashe worked directly for him. He had only started with military intelligence in 1977, but he rose very quickly after the iranian revolution in 1979 because once the americans and israelis shared an interest in getting illegal weapons to the Iranians, ben Menace emerged as somebody who spoke hebrew, farsi and English fluently and who knew the United States very well.

See, it spent time there in the late 1980s as the cold war was winding down, and George h. W. Bush was busy cleaning up various messes he'd made running US. Intelligence out of the vice president's office the last eight years. Ben menace was one of those messes. In addition to taking out Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian president and drug lord who'd helped us get arms to the Nicaraguan Contras and taking out Adnan Khashoggi, the Saudi arms dealer who had helped broker deals for us in the iran contra operation and taking out various Colombian drug lords that we had allowed to operate free from US. Interference. As long as they were providing support to the contras, there were a lot of messes to clean up. Obviously, that's just a sliver of them. Ari Ben Minashe this same time was arrested and charged with trying to sell three C 130 aircraft to Iran as a private citizen. Now, I don't know if you've ever seen a C 130, they are a large four turboprop military transport aircraft made by Lockheed Martin. So I'm not sure how as a private citizen, ben Minashe was supposed to have been getting his hands on these things to sell to Iran or how he was going to get them there.

He was in jail for about a year, awaiting and during the trial and in court, ari bin Minashe didn't deny that he had set up a deal to sell those aircraft to Iran. Instead, he based his entire defense on presenting evidence that he had done so on behalf of the Israeli government in cooperation with the Americans. Well, after he'd been in jail about a year, the jury agreed that he had made the deal on behalf of the Israeli government and acquitted him. When the journalist Gordon Thomas sent a copy of his book Gideon Spies, which details much of what I just discussed to Rafi Etan. Etan said that he had no criticisms of the book and responding to the Israeli government's attempts to try to squash the story, he said that Ari Ben Menace quote is telling the truth. That's why they squashed it. End quote. Final points on this part. After Ben Menace was acquitted and was quite bitter that Israel was ready to just let him get burned like that, he went to several US and UK press outlets to tell them what he knew about Robert Maxwell and his foreign editor at the Daily Mirror, Nicholas Davies, that they were, in fact, agents of the Israeli Mossad.

He claimed that the two had helped set up the Israeli kidnapping of a whistleblower named Mordecai Venunu, who had told the world about Israel's nuclear program. That those two, Maxwell and Davies, had helped basically set him up, lure him to a hotel room with a honey trap in Rome so that he could be kidnapped and brought back to Israel and put in prison. Which that part certainly happened at first. His story was ignored because who the hell is Ari Ben Minashe? But then the respected investigative journalist Seymour Hirsch, who's famous investigative journalist uncovered the Mili massacre, uncovered the Abu Gray prisoner abuse scandal, among many other things, he told the same story in a book after independently corroborating Ben Minash's account. Robert Maxwell was famous for using both the courts and his media empire to destroy anybody who criticized him. So the rest of the British press wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. And Maxwell went after Seymour hirsch hard. He sued seymour Hirsch had things, bad things printed about him in all of his papers and magazines. But he had things turned around on him when Hirsch made his case in court, so that in the end, maxwell ended up having to pay Hirsch a settlement for libel against him and to pay all of Seymour Hirsch's legal fees.

Maxwell had plenty more trouble by this point. It was emerging by now that for years he had been stealing countless millions of dollars from his company and its pension fund to pay for his own lavish lifestyle and to pay off personal debts. Ben Minashe says that Maxwell used to move money in and out of those accounts to help Israeli intelligence launder money for its operations, and that the Israelis would always turn around a little later and make the accounts whole by means that could be explained legitimately, at least on first pass. But that once Maxwell started doing this, he said, well, if I can do it for Israeli intelligence, why can't I do it for myself? And so he started skimming money for himself with the intention of replacing know when things got better, when business picked up or whatever. Only as happens in things like that, his expenses and his debts piled up, and he wasn't able to replenish the money that he was taking for himself, and he had to take more and more to pay the debts over time. And the problems just grew and got covered up until they couldn't be covered up anymore.

In 1991, with Maxwell's whole empire in collapse, ben Minashe alleges that he went that he, Robert Maxwell, went to the Israelis in a panic and demanded that somehow they help him. They have to help me. You have to help me. I've done so much for you, you got to help me. But that they said, this is already too public. We can't do anything to help you when this is already everything's already out there. There's nothing we can do. And so Maxwell, according to beminashe completely desperate, threatened to go run his mouth if the Israelis didn't help him. And that is not something you do to Israeli intelligence. In November 1991, a month after two British members of parliament brought up Maxwell's masad ties in parliament, which then allowed the British media to start discussing the issue without fear of libel suits, because they could say they weren't making the claim themselves. They were just discussing what was being discussed in Parliament. Maxwell was out on his yacht near the Canary Islands when, in the middle of the night, no one's sure why, he seems to have somehow fallen off his boat and died. Well, despite his disgrace, robert Maxwell's body was brought back to Israel, and his funeral was attended by six current or former heads of Israeli intelligence as well as prime ministers and Israeli presidents.

The prime minister at the time, Yitzak Shamir, the man who had convinced Maxwell back in the 1960s to recommit himself to the Zionist cause, gave a eulogy and said that Robert Maxwell had, quote, done more for the state of Israel than can today be said, end quote. And his body was buried in the most prestigious plot in Jerusalem on the Mount of Olives, facing the Western Wall. So you have this guy, Jeffrey Epstein, his closest friend, girlfriend, procurer of young girls, co abuser of young girls is the favorite daughter of Robert Maxwell, a lifelong, highly placed Israeli intelligence agent. Epstein's patron is Les Wexner, a billionaire with ties to Israeli intelligence through the Mega group and a lot more. Further involvement with other Zionist causes. And Wexner, for reasons nobody can understand, turns his entire operation over to Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein, according to several people who knew him back in the 1990s, used to claim to be working with intelligence agencies. The US. Attorney who oversaw his initial case that put him in jail, which included dozens of girls claiming that he had molested them. Cut him a sweetheart deal guaranteeing there wouldn't be no federal prosecution of his crimes for him or anybody who was involved, even if those people weren't named yet and it came out later.

Cut him that sweetheart deal and is on the record saying that he did it because he was told by his bosses that Epstein belonged to Intelligence. Epstein was closely connected with Ahud Barak, former head of Israeli military intelligence. He dispensed money to Barack through the Wexner Foundation and later funded a business Barack set up with other former Israeli intel officers. Epstein got his first job teaching math at an elite high school from a former OSS agent and was later arrested and committed suicide under the watch of that guy's son, Bill Barr, who also worked for the CIA. Early on, he had associations with international arms brokers like Douglas Lease and Adnan Khashoggi. Which reminds me, I haven't even mentioned the fake Austrian passport from the 1980s that had Epstein under a false name as a Saudi citizen, which was found in his safe, along with many of the thousands of images of underage girls. Neither of you mentioned how back in 1996 a reporter for the New York Times home section was invited to do a review of Epstein's giant Manhattan home he got from Les Wexner and describes a bathroom quote hidden beneath a stairway lined with lead to provide shelter from attack and supplied with closed circuit television screens and a telephone, both concealed in a cabinet beneath the sink.

The reporter just moves on like, oh, cool, a hidden bathroom filled with CCTV screens lined with lead to prevent to provide shelter from attack. Cool. No big deal. Let's talk about the crown molding in the living room. It's amazing. To be fair, I guess it was 1996 and the reporter didn't know that Jeffrey Epstein was running a pedophile blackmail operation on behalf of Israeli intelligence. Allegedly. It's impossible to be exhaustive in this story, partly because there's just so much and partly because of what I said near the beginning of the first episode. When you're talking about intelligence agencies, you're just always going to have holes in your story. Shaky information, partial know lies, secrecy, disinformation everywhere. I can't prove that Epstein was running a blackmail operation, although I think if you could get the witnesses who have made various on the record statements about that to say the same things in court, you probably have a decent chance of getting a conviction. I'm no lawyer, but I can't prove it. The girls Epstein abused are smeared by guys like Alan Dershowitz because guess what? Girls who are systematically sexually abused as children often end up with a few issues when they get older.

Sometimes they have emotional problems, sometimes they fall into drugs or alcohol. That's what happens. And abusers always use that to discredit them. But still, like in the media and the public discourse, it makes their cases somewhat less than perfect. Although thankfully we at least have the jury's agreement with their testimonies in the Ghislaine. Maxwell case. The truth is, we are never going to get the full story about Jeffrey Epstein. I hate saying that. Just like we're never going to get the full story about what happened to JFK. It's sad, but that is the know, people are killed, documents are destroyed. This is the kind of thing people take with them to their and of course, Epstein took his own story to the grave. Would have been a good story too. You remember this tweet from Christine Pelosi, daughter of Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the United States House of Representatives, quote, this Epstein case is horrific and the young women deserve justice. It is quite likely that some of our faves, their favorites, are implicated, but we must follow the facts and let the chips fall where they may, whether Republicans or Democrats. End quote. I remember when he was arrested, me and everybody else I knew who was basically up on this story.

First we couldn't believe that it actually happened. We couldn't believe he'd actually been arrested. And then the very next thought was, well, he's dead. There's zero chance that this is going to trial. There's no way that's going to happen. And apparently I wasn't being too mean. Give me a break. His lawyers describe him as being in good spirits and they still don't believe he committed suicide. They were spending the lawyers I'm talking about were spending 8 hours a day with Epstein discussing his legal strategy because he'd pled not guilty and planned to fight the case. It's not like he didn't have any case to make. I mean, the federal government, despite all the evidence, it was out there. The federal government had given him a non prosecution agreement promising not to indict him for any of the crimes they knew about. And the new stuff they brought up, it wasn't nearly as damning as what they'd had on him back in 2008. And that time, he'd managed to get just 13 months in jail, where he got his own wing of the jail with his own private security guards, and he was let out on work release, quote, unquote, 12 hours a day, six days a week, whatever work release means for a fake hedge fund manager with no clients anyone's ever heard of.

And after he served that easy sentence, it was right back to hanging with Bill Gates and Ahud Barack and living in his mansion and going to his private sex temple on his island. We're supposed to believe that he managed to commit suicide in a prison where nobody has committed suicide for decades? Two weeks after he was found unconscious with neck injuries on his floor, saying that his cellmate, a juiced up corrupt cop charged with multiple murder, quadruple murder, had assaulted him, which the jail apparently believed at least a bit, because they transferred him to another cell with a different cellmate in case it was a suicide attempt. The jail ordered that Epstein was required to always be with a cellmate and that the guards had to check in on him every 30 minutes. And on August 9, for reasons nobody can explain, his cellmate was removed from the cell. And then Oopsie, the two guards on duty fell asleep and failed to check on him for several hours. And then Epstein, who's 6ft tall, somehow managed to hang himself from the lower bunk of his bed and hanged himself with enough force to break four small bones in his neck that several forensic experts have said very rarely break when people are hanged, usually only by strangulation.

And he hanged himself from the bottom bunk with enough force to break four rarely broken neck bones, but not with enough force to knock over the bottles, the small bottles and medicine containers standing upright on the rail of the top bunk when police took photos of the scene. In the immediate aftermath, the two surveillance cameras that were monitoring the outside of his cell, they malfunctioned. It's just the darndest thing. You know how technology is. And all this under the watch of a CIA connected attorney general whose dad wrote pulp Sci-Fi novels about planets, whose elites were engaged in mass scale sex slavery of the commoners, and who gave Epstein his very first job. And I don't know how much of that is relevant. I just know that for the official story to be true, all of it has to be irrelevant. And I think that's a bit of a stretch. Okay, guys, I'm sorry I took so long to get this out. This story makes me insane. I really have not wanted to think or talk about it, and hopefully I won't have to for a while. There is more to this story, there always is, but I am going to leave it here.

The final thing I'll say is all this talk in here about Israel, about Jewish American billionaires and Jewish American spies, I know that these things can be touchy topics in a way that talking about Russian American billionaires or Chinese American spies is not. So I will just say one last time we are not talking about any people in general or any ethnicities or even countries. We're talking about governments, and specifically about intelligence agencies. This isn't about Jews, it isn't even about Israel, and it's not even really about the Israeli government, or the American government for that matter, because 99.9% of even high ranking people in those governments have no idea when stuff like this goes on. This is about specific acts of tightly organized, highly secretive intelligence agencies. And so the final thing I'll say is that there is a reason, beyond government secrecy that someone like Jeffrey Epstein could get away with something like this for so long, and that is that he moved around in a slice of the world where people did not find what they were seeing particularly alarming. You and I might walk into a guy's house and find him surrounded by teenage girls who are not related to him and think it's a bit strange when he offers to have one of them give you a massage in the other room.

But not Bill Clinton, not Alan Dershowitz, not a lot of people, apparently. We have a right to hold these people who wield so much power over us to higher standards. We find out Bill Gates is hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein, getting massages from girls. Okay, fine, maybe it was innocent. Whatever, go be a billionaire. But you're not sitting at the table deciding COVID policy in America. Oh, Bill Clinton, you got a massage on camera from one of Epstein's victims. Another victim claims that you abused cool. You know, he said, she said. Maybe you're guilty, maybe not. But no, sorry, you're not moving back into the White House because your wife wants to be President. If that's a problem, she should have divorced you back when you raped Juanita Broderick or hooked up with an 18 year old in the Oval Office. Folks, these people are not like you and me. And I think it is about time, at least in some very basic ways, like how we feel about sex with minors. For that to change you. Thanks for listening.

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