The Empire's Vizier: Epstein and the new Middle East
The slow unsealing of the Epstein record has pulled Donald Trump, and many others wielding the reins of power and finance, back into a world they once tried to edge away from; a world where diplomacy, money, and sexual exploitation moved through the same corridors.
As Congress forced the Justice Department to release the largest tranche so far of material the administration had hoped to bury, Trump’s name resurfaced in the margins of calendars, visitor logs, and deposition fragments from the years when Epstein was soliciting sex from minors and moving trafficked girls through his properties.
In the mired nexus of pedophilia and empire-shaping, Epstein was an enthusiastic broker. Vulnerable children, often from outside the US, and political favors were the bonding agent holding the circuits of power together.
Who was Jeffery Epstein?
Whitney Webb’s extensive research in “One Nation Under Blackmail Vol. I and II” presents a meticulously organised chronology of “the sordid union between intelligence and organized crime that gave rise to Jeffrey Epstein.” In her 1000+ pages, Webb, the investigative reporter at MintPress News, has relied on first-person testimonies from both perpetrators and victims, as well as legal filings and police reports.
Before he assumed the helm of a well-oiled sex-trafficking and war-making empire, Epstein had a rather insignificant upbringing. Born in 1953 to two European Jewish immigrants in New York, Paula and Seymour, Jeffery attended school, played the bassoon and a couple of decades later failed to graduate from New York University where he studied Mathematical Sciences.
Despite his lack of credentials, in 1974 he was hired at the Dalton School by writer, Office of Strategic Services/OSS officer, and then-Dalton school principal Donald Barr. At Dalton, Epstein taught mathematics to high school students at the much-vaunted Ivy-track prep school in New York City. The school’s periodical The Daltonian memorialized his short tenure, lauding his “unique philosophy of integrating physical exercise with spiritual and mathematical stimulation,” documented Whitney Webb.
According to several Dalton alumni testimonies, he was a devoted attendee of student parties, where he incurred wide odium for paying “persistent attention” to teenage girls. Two years later, he was plucked from this seeming insular obscurity by Alan Greenberg, then-CEO of the investment banking titanic Bear Stearns, notorious for its seismic collapse in the financial meltdown of 2008.
Greenberg had been a parent of two children who studied under Epstein’s tutelage. He was allegedly so mesmerized by Epstein’s genius that he facilitated the latter’s meteoric rise from a junior assistant and “glorified runner” to a floor trader on the American Stock Exchange, managing heavy-weight accounts, in just under four years by 1980.
This was Epstein’s doorway into the upper echelons of money, sex trafficking, and arms circulation. Other reports hint at another characteristic which Greenberg saw glistening in Epstein’s eyes. Greenberg’s own daughter, with whom Epstein had an incredibly “friendly” relationship. His personal proclivities ensured him access, and his tenacity secured his position as “fixer,” the one he would go on to take until the grave.
The years following his abrupt departure from Bear Stearns in 1981, are perhaps the most obscure in Epstein’s life. By his own account, he left the banking behemoth to run a private hedge-fund business “only for billionaires.” Of the laundry list of “billionaire” accounts, Epstein cut his teeth into the arms trafficking racket in 1987 on behalf of a British arms dealer.
Webb writes, in the words of Steven Hoffenberg, a previous mentor of Epstein in the post-Stearn years, the dealer in question was one Sir Douglas Leese, with whom Epstein “was a major participant and principal in the arms trafficking and money laundering operations […] for Israel, for what they were doing in the United Kingdom.”
Filling the void
On the other side of the Atlantic, precisely in the middle of it, an army captain turned financier fell off-board his 50-meter yacht “The Lady Ghislaine,” to meet his death in the winter of 1991. Ian Robert Maxwell, a Czechoslovakian by birth, and British by asylum, was a media magnate and feigned philanthropist.
Maxwell was also referred to as “Israel’s superspy,” not least for his involvement in creating, and building the infrastructure for an Israeli intelligence “trapdoor” to be installed in the newly-minted PROMIS software. This software, initially created as a digitization tool for the US Department of Justice, passed on to Mossad through Maxwell, and tweaked, provided “Israeli intelligence with a direct window into the operations of its enemies and allies,” relayed Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon in their book “Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul.” To write this book, Thomas and Gordon compiled more than 4,000 pages-worth of interviews with primary and secondary sources who orbited Maxwell’s world.
With Maxwell’s death, into the vacuum stepped the young man who had spent the previous decade slipping through the cracks of America’s upper crust like a well‑oiled needle—Jeffrey Epstein. For Maxwell’s death did not merely remove a media mogul. It displaced an operator. It unmoored a network. And as with all unmoored things in the world of intelligence, someone had to catch the line before it drifted too far from shore.
Epstein was ready, but he was not alone.
The devil comes with a double
In the days after Robert Maxwell’s body was pulled from the sea, his youngest daughter moved through New York with a kind of stunned, feral grief that quickly hardened into purpose. Ghislaine Maxwell understood better than any of her siblings what her father had been, what he had carried, and what he had left behind when he vanished at sea.
She inherited not his empire, that had collapsed under debt and espionage scandals, but the instincts that built it, the compulsions that animated it, and the Rolodex that made it dangerous. She also inherited the eyes of the people who had once depended on her father.
Israeli intelligence officers, London fixers, publishing-world intermediaries, the lingering remnants of Eastern European networks Maxwell had stitched together in the 1980s—many of them watched her in those early months to see whether she would step into the vacuum or disappear.
She did neither. Instead she reached for Epstein.
They had met years earlier in New York, sometime in the late 1980s, introduced through the same social lattice that had always surrounded Maxwell Senior. But it was after her father’s death, after the family fortunes imploded, after the empire dissolved into receivership and scandal—that Ghislaine attached herself to Epstein with an intensity that confused many who knew her.
Together, they preyed on young, vulnerable girls with glitzy promises of financial security and scholarships, abused them, and offered them up to powerful men
What looked, from a distance, like a romantic connection was something more utilitarian, more strategic, a merging of two displaced orbits. She provided entrée into circles her father once dominated. He provided the liquidity, discretion and criminal ambition she no longer had the infrastructure to command.
Together, they preyed on young, vulnerable girls with glitzy promises of financial security and scholarships, abused them, and offered them up to powerful men. This operation did not create leverage for blackmail in the upper echelons of society, but a relationship of mutually assured destruction, stabilized by genuine shared desires for the taboo.
What Maxwell built, an empire of deception, money‑shuffling, arms brokerage, kompromat collection, and the quiet embedding of Israeli intelligence officers across Europe and the Middle East—did not vanish in 1991. It needed a steward, someone with the moral flexibility of a vacuum, the social viscosity to slip unnoticed into the salons of Manhattan, the palaces of the Gulf, the ministries in Tel Aviv.
Ghislaine supplied the keys. Epstein supplied the engine. Together they built something sleeker and far more dangerous than anything Robert Maxwell had managed in his lifetime. The old architecture survived—but now it had new custodians.
Old plans, new region
By 2013, the Syrian people’s uprising against their government had been deliberately commandeered into a civil war for the country’s sovereignty. The Israeli establishment saw this moment of manufactured and bloody chaos, as a window of opportunity to realize long sought-after dreams, least of which was receiving formal recognition of the Syrian Golan Heights under Israeli sovereignty.
It was not, then, the well-documented despotism of Bashar Al-Assad’s government which moved the bleeding hearts, and firepower, of the Israelis, Europeans, and the Americans to ensure his demise. But it was the pursuit of unrestricted access to Syrian land, infrastructure, and a defanged government pliable enough for Israel’s expansionist regional plans, which set off the last decade of interference.
Ehud Barak, certain for years that Assad would fall quickly, stepped out of public life after his party collapsed and slipped instead into a quieter circuit of boardrooms and security conversations.
Barak was not only accused of violent rape by one of Epstein’s most public victims, Virginia Giuffre—according to her memoir and court filings—he also used his connection to Epstein for backroom political maneuvers. The recently leaked trove of emails shows Barak leaning on Epstein copiously for gossip from Russian and European elites, hints from former American security chiefs, and guidance on when to approach the head of Mossad.
At the same time, Barak courted Viktor Vekselberg of the Renova Group. The consulting work promised money, but more importantly it opened a corridor into Russia’s political inner circle. Epstein followed each step, urging Barak not to move too quickly and shaping the language he used with Israeli intelligence. With quiet approval from Israeli intelligence, the two men tried to coax Moscow toward a managed transition in Damascus that would remove Assad without threatening Russia’s position in Syria.
Barak drafted an op-ed arguing that only Russia could engineer an end to the war by securing Syria’s chemical weapons and guiding the country into a new order. Epstein pushed him to sharpen the message and warn against delay. American newspapers demanded specifics that Barak refused to supply, and the piece finally appeared in the UK DailyTelegraph in a gentler form.
The real effort centered on the 2015 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. Barak sought a private meeting with Vladimir Putin, and Epstein stayed close, reporting movements of European officials and repeating that Putin wished to see him.
Barak leaned on Vekselberg to secure him a last minute registration to the conference. Barak would register for the forum under his consulting firm Hyperion EB, for a bigger chance at meeting Putin.
A senior aide of Putin’s provided a direct line. The meeting took place quietly, and Barak later wrote that the messages exchanged had reached the “top players.” Snowden’s sudden arrival in Moscow the next day altered the landscape once again.
Two months later, sarin rockets struck Ghouta. The images gave pretext for President Obama to seek congressional approval for strikes. Epstein urged Barak to revive his earlier argument and to link Syria to Iran.
When John Kerry remarked that Assad could avert strikes by surrendering his chemical arsenal, Russia seized the comment and turned it into a proposal. Washington and Moscow soon negotiated a framework dismantling Syria’s stockpile, reflecting the outline Barak had drawn.
A little more than a decade later, at the foreground of Israel’s thrashing genocidal spree in the region, Assad fled to Moscow in the dark of night. In his place, came ex-Al-Qaeda commander turned smirking peacenik, Ahmed Al-Joulani.
The seeing eye of genocide
Epstein would later inherit Robert Maxwell’s keys to the trapdoor. In 2005, he invested seed money to the tune of $40 million into Peter Thiel’s startup—which would later become the surveillance colossus Palantir. Palantir’s role in the Gaza genocide allowed Israel to automate the mass killing campaign. Algorithms forged by Thiel’s software giant trained themselves to predict patterns in human behavior until a person became a cluster of probabilities, and once rendered that way, the distance between analysis and annihilation melted into nothing. Gaza became the testing ground.
Lavender, the software that graded Palestinians in the besieged enclave by a numerical threat score, assigned numbers to teenagers, shopkeepers, teachers, and mothers, “recommending” them as targets in Israel’s crosshairs. Habsora (the Gospel), the program that pulled new targets out of satellite images and intercepted whispers, fed an endless stream of coordinates into the cockpits that circled overhead, and bombed mercilessly. Through Palantir, even posthumously, Epstein’s fingerprints linger in the Middle East Israel is continuously re-sculpting through brute force.
Beyond the grave
In July 2019, Epstein was arrested in Florida on charges of sex trafficking minors and conspiracy to traffic underage girls between 2002 and 2005, spanning his properties in New York and Palm Beach. Prosecutors accused him of operating a network that coerced girls—some younger than 18—into sexual acts, and of encouraging the recruitment of others. While awaiting trial at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, he was found unresponsive in his cell.
Despite being under strict suicide watch, his cause of death was written up as suicide. Before his death, he had expressed the desire to have his body cryogenically preserved so that he might live again once the right technology becomes available.
Another back-channel was laser-focused on Iran. As the nuclear framework neared completion, Barak argued publicly against it while relying on Epstein to reopen the Moscow corridor. Epstein connected him to Sergey Belyakov and advised him on how to present his expertise to Putin’s advisers. After the 2015, forum Barak returned with meetings secured at high levels and wrote to Epstein with quiet thanks for arranging it.
In the ensuing decade, Israel would relentlessly target Iran’s nuclear capabilities, whether by assassinating top scientists and high-ranking army officers or launching a 12-day indiscriminate assault which killed 935 people, including 38 children, under the guise of trammeling Iranian nuclear development in 2025.
Another character in the motley crew taking charge of re-shaping the Middle East in Israel’s shadow, is Tom Barrack. Barrack surfaced in the leaked pages, in between soliciting images of “girls,” to “make him smile.” He lodged himself squarely in the networks etched by Epstein as a conduit to Trump’s ear. Even after the latter’s death, Barrack carries the mantle. In 2024, he was sworn in as the US ambassador to Turkey, and later appointed as Trump’s special envoy for Syria and Lebanon.
In recent televised appearances, Barrack relayed the US and Israel’s vision for the region. Barrack envisions a Middle East where colonial borders are irrelevant and power—not national rights—defines outcomes. He promotes transactional politics, favors Israeli military dominance, urges neutralizing Iran’s allies, and backs flexible “guerrilla” actors over states. He frames Palestinian identity as expendable and supports redrawing regional realities to suit American and Israeli strategic interests.
The slow unraveling of Epstein’s web reveals more than a lurid tale of trafficking and wealth. It exposes a fragile global architecture where intelligence networks, private capital, and political power intersect—often shielded from scrutiny. From Manhattan salons to Middle Eastern battlefields, the legacy of this nexus continues to shape geopolitics long after Epstein’s death. The question is no longer who knew, but who enabled, who benefited, and who will govern in its shadow next.