Jeff's Foreign Affairs
Part One: Mom, Dad, and Iran Contra
The Epstein saga is often portrayed as a sex abuse case. It is true that Jeff Epstein was an industrial-scale trafficker and rapist. But his malign influence wasn’t limited to the victims. In this occasional series, “Jeff’s Foreign Affairs,” we look at released texts, emails and documents in the context of his involvement in concurrent international events.
The Coney Island college dropout and professional pervert was enmeshed in foreign affairs as early as the 1980s, when, in his early 30s, he somehow proved himself useful to British arms dealer Douglas Leese and Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. By the 1990s, he clearly considered himself an untouchable 007 character, bragging about being connected to the CIA. He had, by our count, 16 passports – some possibly obtained fraudulently from the State Department using false claims of lost documents.
By the time he was arrested in 2019, he had numerous powerful sheiks and Arab princelings on speed dial. Released emails and texts show him communicating with, referring to and setting up meetings on the fly with them for Steve Bannon, Ehud Barak and others.
These relationships went back decades. It’s gone unnoticed so far that Epstein was in Israel at the inception of one of the sneakiest schemes of the anti-communist Reagan years: the Iran-Contra affair. In 1985, he was residing at least part-time in London. He took his parents, Seymour and Paula, on an 11-day trip to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem (his first known visit to the Middle East) at the end of November and early December. We know about this because of a note in the birthday book Ghislaine Maxwell put together for his 50th birthday. Seymour recalled that they “visited my wife’s relatives” and “stayed at the Plaza hotel in Tel Aviv where we went to my son’s friend’s wedding.” They then spent “about 4 days” in Jerusalem, where “Jeff hired a limo to take us around.”
For Paula and Seymour, this was a dream trip, paid for by their phenomenally successful son. For Jeff, it may have been something more. The Epstein family’s trip to the Holy Land coincided precisely with a few significant historical moments. Four days before they flew, Jonathan Pollard was arrested in the U.S. as an Israeli spy after attempting – and failing – to seek refuge at the Israeli embassy. The trip also coincided with days of critical activity in Israel by Americans involved in a secret weapons-for-money transfer through Israel between a faction of the Reagan administration and Iran.
Iran-Contra is today shorthand for the Reagan administration’s covert scheme to finance the “Contra” anti-communist forces (ok death squads) in Nicaragua using money from American-made weapons funneled through Israel to Iran. Officially, the U.S. was not doing business with Tehran since the revolutionaries had taken 66 embassy staff hostage. They were released on Reagan’s inauguration day in January 1981, very much a non-coincidence, and part of an undercover plot to help Reagan win known as the “October Surprise.” Journalist Craig Unger has covered it in detail. (Epstein would later share office space in New York with one of the key players in that caper, Stan Pottinger.)
Four years later, Iran was still holding a small number of Americans hostage. Two shipments of American weapons in fall 1985 had secured the release of one of them. In November 1985, elements of the Reagan administration were still back-channeling with Tehran while publicly insisting they “do not negotiate with terrorists.”
The day before the Epstein family arrived in Tel Aviv, the U.S. sent a clandestine shipment of 18 HAWK anti-aircraft missiles through Israel to Iran as part of the ongoing secret arms arrangement. The Israeli arms brokers, however, sent obsolete parts instead of the ones requested by Iran.
National Security Council staff member Oliver North was in a bind. He contracted his friend, retired Air Force Major General Richard Secord, to arrange and pay for the transport of missiles to Iran. Secord chartered the CIA’s Southern Air Transport as a Panamanian firm Amalgamated Commercial Enterprises (ACE), which would later be used to buy planes and funnel money from Switzerland.
According to congressional Iran-Contra investigation records, Secord – dispatched by North – was in Israel at the exact same time as Epstein and his mom and dad. He might even have gotten the idea for diverting the funds there and then, inspired by the Israelis.
Sometime between November 25 and November 30, 1985, Secord received a $1 million payment for helping transport the HAWK missiles to Iran. The money was wired from a private citizen, U.S. businessman Al Schwimmer, into Secord’s bank account at Crédit Suisse. But news reports and investigations suggested it may have been possible that the funds came from the Israeli government.
CIA planes, under cover of Secord’s ACE charter, made a first transfer in November 1985. Epstein and Les Wexner eventually brought the same airline to Columbus, Ohio, and used it (officially anyway) to ship Wexner’s sexualized-girl clothing around the world.
In early December, the Contras got the first tranche of money – $800,000. It would not be the last. The source of the millions Tehran used to buy weapons was none other than Epstein’s old friend in the arms business, Adnan Khashoggi, who borrowed the money from notorious CIA-connected bank BCCI and advanced the Iranians at least $5 million, according to records.
Now back to Jeff, Seymour, and Paula. Mom and dad were back in New York by December 4, 1985, and we will almost certainly never know if they knew about their son’s connections to Adnan Khashoggi.
Sure, it could all be a coincidence: Nice American family tours Jerusalem, eats hummus, prays at the Wailing Wall, and visits relatives, while secret weapons backchanneling happens nearby. Nothing to see here.
But over the next three decades, Epstein continued dabbling in the military hardware business. And he grew his Middle East network with special friendships among the Gulf oil tyrants. Jared Kushner gets official credit for the Abraham Accords, which publicly formalize existing back-channel friendships between Arab oil powers and Israeli leaders – waters in which Jeff had long been paddling.
Epstein seems to have been instrumental in laying the groundwork. By the time Trump was elected in 2016, he was pals with powerful sheiks and leaders from Dubai to Abu Dhabi to Riyadh.
On November 22, 2018 – a month and a half after Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s goons murdered American journalist Jamal Khashoggi (after chopping off his fingers one by one) – Bannon dispatched a short email to Epstein telling him MBS was on a reputational rehabilitation tour, “headed to see our friends.” Epstein replied “Z?” – a reference to another Gulf leader, Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan, president of the UAE.
Epstein’s fingerprints can even be found on the first papal visit to a Gulf Arab state three months before it became public. The same MBZ extended the invitation.
Despite the pitch for papal harmony, it was pretty clear Epstein’s heart was elsewhere. A year earlier, in an exchange with his protege and Bill Gates’ assistant Melanie Walker*, he invited Gates to what he called an “all-hands meeting” about Israel at his Paris pad.
Walker responded, “Peace mtg?”
Epstein replied, “No peace boring and not happening. GROW UP”.
*Melanie Walker was an aspiring model who has said Trump introduced her to Epstein in the 1990s. She briefly lived in the 66th Street building where Epstein housed his models. Epstein put her through med school and she eventually became his “science advisor” before moving on to work with Gates… who she then introduced to Epstein.
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What’s striking about this account is how thoroughly it confirms that Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t merely a deviant aberration operating on the margins, but a grotesquely successful embodiment of a certain American male ideal. If we want to understand his power, we have to stop treating him solely as a monster and start seeing him as what many men quietly admire: hyper-confident, transgressive, socially omnivorous, plugged into money, intelligence, geopolitics, and sex with apparent impunity.
Epstein’s appeal to rich and powerful men was not mysterious. He projected mastery—over networks, secrets, women, and states. He moved easily among arms dealers, intelligence cut-outs, Gulf royalty, financiers, and political operatives, always implying that he knew more than he said and that rules were for other people. That posture maps closely onto a widely admired heterosexual alpha-male fantasy: effectiveness without accountability, appetite without restraint, and access without consequence.
Seen this way, the sexual crimes are not an accidental add-on to his power but part of the same ethos. Many men would recoil from Epstein’s scale of abuse, but far fewer object in principle to “a little” transgression, especially when it appears to be rewarded with status and protection. The admiration isn’t for the rapes themselves; it’s for the aura of untouchability that seemed to license everything else.
Burleigh’s reporting underscores this point by showing that Epstein’s real currency was usefulness. He wasn’t welcomed into elite circles because people were fooled about who he was; he was welcomed because who he was fit comfortably within existing norms of male power—norms that prize boldness, secrecy, leverage, and a willingness to operate in moral gray zones. If Epstein shocks us, it’s less because he was alien than because he reveals, in exaggerated form, what is already tolerated, envied, and sometimes aspired to.
Until that ideal is confronted, Epstein will keep being misread as a singular pathology rather than as a cautionary exemplar of where a certain model of masculinity, when fully indulged, actually leads.
Indespensable. Thank you.