Jeff and the Red Sparrows
Spy Versus Spy
On March 2, 2018, the spy movie Red Sparrow was released. Jennifer Lawrence played a sidelined Russian prima ballerina recruited to Sparrow School, a secret intelligence service that trains young women to use their minds and bodies as weapons against Russia’s enemies.
The day the movie was released, four tickets were purchased on Jeffrey Epstein’s American Express card for a 7 pm showing. The next day, Epstein was emailing about a design for jackets and sweaters featuring “red pigeons” with American flag colors and the words “RED GOLBYS.” Golby is a transliteration of the Russian word for pigeon or dove.
Later that summer, Epstein emailed his pal, hotel heir Tom Pritzker, asking if he had seen Red Sparrow, to which Tom replied, “3 times.” Epstein then boasted about his “Red Pigeons” design, explaining that “each girl has a tee shirt and a hoodie with the badge and her initials.”
He described the badges as “merit badges.”
By the summer of 2018, Epstein had been running his transcontinental sex trafficking operation for nearly a decade, with an increased focus on recruiting “girls” from Eastern European and Eurasian cities and villages. It would be another six months before Julie Brown’s exposé of Epstein’s Palm Beach trafficking operation and sweetheart deal was published.
But his male friends – especially guys who were in on the game, like Pritzker – would have been well aware of his pimping. Anyone who visited his mansion or island would have noticed the presence of barely legal (if that) sylphs with Slavic accents.
The question of Epstein’s intelligence connections hangs over the entire story. Was he or wasn’t he? And if he was, who was he working for? CIA? Mossad? KGB? All of the above?
It is the plutonium pit of the case, the box no one in authority has seemingly been able – or wanting – to crack open.
So was he joking with the red sparrow “badges” and jackets for “the girls”? Was he burnishing his reputation as Coney Island’s Bondstein? Or was he brazenly celebrating the success of a honeypot and kompromat operation?
By 2018, at the very least, Epstein and his coterie were aware of his reputation as an international man of mystery, and he and his johns were secure in their impunity.
Our discovery of Epstein’s red sparrow badges and clothing prompted us to take another, closer look at two Russian women in his orbit. They arrived not from the backwoods of Eurasian impoverishment – his preferred hunting grounds – but from the highest levels of post-Soviet Russian politics and power. One of them, Masha Drokova, was close enough to Putin to have worked with his top strategist. The other, Svetlana Pozhidaeva, is the daughter of a reputed Russian KGB officer and a brilliant, multilingual graduate of Russia’s top foreign service school.
Both women sailed through Epstein-world during the height of his international trafficking operation. Both went on to successful careers in Silicon Valley. And both have denied being spies, despite numerous allegations.
Based on these new discoveries in the files, Pozhidaeva appears to have been more deeply enmeshed in the sex trafficking op than Drokova, who worked openly for Epstein as a PR agent, after arriving in the U.S. having trained under Putin’s brilliantly diabolical strategist Vladislav Surkov.
Pozhidaeva used a variety of pseudonyms while dating wealthy and powerful men and secretly reporting back to Epstein about them, sometimes referencing what seemed to be specific objectives, such as “the two year project” or “getting the ring.” One Middle Eastern billionaire she dated knew her as “Selana.” She sometimes emailed Epstein under the name “Mégane Lemiel” (“le miel” means honey in French, a possible nod to a honeypot operation).
In dozens of emails and texts with Epstein, Pozhidaeva checks in from private jets and various points around the globe, hunting “girls” or “pussy” for him. She also seems to have been one of his primary recruiters post-2010, not only bringing them in but grooming them, traveling with Jean-Luc Brunel on recruiting trips and reporting back to Epstein on the men. For example:
The emails often show her asking Epstein how to handle requests for sex, including when to submit and how long to remain involved. In one exchange, he literally scripts how she should speak to tech investor Josh Fink, one of the men she was dating, lying to, and reporting back to Epstein about. She forwards Epstein a dozen text messages from Fink, including discussions on Elon Musk, for comment.
In a 2013 exchange below, she talks about needing “to do Elon and the Russian first” and discusses her relations with Fink, Saudi billionaire Mohammed Jameel (referred to as MJ), and Todd Meister, the son of the accountant who first introduced Epstein to his great benefactor, the gnomic billionaire Lex Wexner.
Five months after Epstein’s death, Pozhidaeva went to Russia and meticulously erased her real name from all the registries there. She is now living in the United States under a new name and has proclaimed herself an Epstein victim. She filed for compensation from the fund and has recently announced that she is receiving mental health assistance through the Epstein victims’ program.
In a 2012 exchange with Musk, Epstein invited him to hang with Svetlana and have “fun” in Paris. Elon sounded interested.
Epstein also seemed to be using her as bait when inviting Musk to St. Bart for News Years Eve 2012. “I will leave svetlana and jenn on st bart , for ny eve. enjpy [sic],” he wrote. Musk replied, perhaps with more caution than Epstein had hoped: “Ok, we could perhaps get together for lunch on the 31st.”
Now that we know all of her pseudonyms, Pozhidaeva turns out to have been the mystery girl Epstein persuaded to dress in a Snow White costume and have “fun” with former Barclays CEO Jes Staley. In the first email below, Epstein tells her that Brett Ratner is “going to film a big movie, Snow White” and urges her to get a costume. The odious Ratner was one of the producers on the 2012 film Mirror Mirror, a live-action fairy tale comedy based on the Grimm Brothers story. (Ratner went on to be accused of a range of sexual misconduct, fled Hollywood, and was rehabilitated by Melania, who had him direct her recent “documentary.”)
The next day, Pozhidaeva reports on the encounter, and within minutes, Epstein receives a satisfied report from Staley before asking him which character he would like next.
Drokova immigrated to the U.S. in 2014 and ran publicity campaigns for clients including Gett, Houzz, HotelTonight, and Masquerade. In 2019, she was named to the Forbes 30 under 30 list.
In one 2017 email with Epstein, they discuss Jeff Bezos. Drokova remarks that Bezos seems nice but not as “special” as Epstein as it “was very, very clear from the first moment I saw you that you are special. and I won’t say if it totally feels like he is special.”
Last month, Mother Jones published a profile of Drokova, who is now operating in Silicon Valley as a financier under the name Maria Bucher. She is an investor in Valar Atomics, a nuclear power startup launched by a young entrepreneur with ties to Idaho Christian nationalist Doug Wilson and funded in part by Peter Thiel.
Before becoming a Valley “founder,” Drokova was such a Putin superfan that she was once featured in a documentary called Putin’s Kiss and remained involved in pro-Putin events as recently as 2019. She has since publicly denounced (on Twitter) her Russian affiliations. “I gave up my Russian passport years ago, can’t return without risking my freedom, and have publicly opposed the Putin regime,” she wrote. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, she also denied engaging in espionage: “It’s been a long time since I divided people into us versus them,” she said. “I’m not a spy, even though that sounds romantic.”
Six months before his death, Epstein remained deeply connected to both women, who also clearly interacted with one another. In January 2019, he emailed with Drokova about Pozhidaeva at Davos.
In March, Pozhidaeva told him that she and Masha were collaborating on ways to rehabilitate his reputation in the wake of renewed attention on his Palm Beach conviction.
Investigative journalist Craig Unger has been writing about Epstein’s Russian girls for years. In his book “American Kompromat,” he pegs Donald Trump as a “Russian asset” and discusses the potential red sparrows in his and Epstein’s orbit.
In a recent Substack piece, one of Unger’s sources, Yuri Shvets, a former major in the KGB, talked about the mystery of Pozhidaeva:
She was in one of the best, most prestigious academic institutions in Russia … She could make a breathtaking career in the Foreign Office or in any foreign company working in the Moscow office. She would make a great career. But instead she goes into the so‑ called modeling business? … Of course, we know what Epstein was doing with the ladies. But in this particular case, Epstein takes her and introduces her to renowned American and international scientists. How could someone as intelligent and well educated as Pozhidaeva become an activist for women while possibly seeking patronage from Jean‑ Luc Brunel and Jeffrey Epstein, who directed and participated in human trafficking and the rape of underage girls for more than two decades?
According to Shvets, Putin was obsessed with American tech and would have flooded the zone with spies to get access to it. For Putin, getting into Silicon Valley “would have been the equivalent of penetrating the Manhattan Project in World War II.”
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Didn't Acosta once claim that one reason for the sweetheart deal was that he was told Epstein was "ours"/ an asset?
One of the best pieces on the Epstein saga I've read lately. Thank you.