Let me begin this messy story by telling you that I grew up on the South Side of Chicago, in a lower middle class, racially mixed ward that also included the University of Chicago and a few upper middle class neighborhoods. It was controlled by an elected Democratic party leader named Marshall Korshak, an attorney whose brother was Sidney Korshak. As I would learn in high school, Sidney was the most powerful mob boss in Chicago. He oversaw drugs, prostitution, police payoffs and had ties to the corrupt International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Decades later, when I was at the New York Times, Jeff Gerth, an expert on the financing of organized crime, and I published, after months of interviews, a four-part series on the newspaper’s front pages focused on Sidney and his control of racketeering, prostitution, and vice in Chicago.
The date the first installment of our series was to appear was delayed at the last minute because of a sudden Teamsters strike that kept the Sunday New York Times and its Korshak revelations from being distributed around the country for days. The senior editors at The Times understood why the strike had taken place, but that fact was never published.
Our reporting involved two long background interviews with Roy Cohn, the prominent New York mob lawyer and fixer who had famously served as counsel for Senator Joseph McCarthy when he was on the House Un-American Activities Committee during the postwar Red Scare and later as a mentor to New York businessman Donald Trump. Once assured we were speaking privately, Cohn provided a firsthand view of the link between politics and crime as well as the way certain prominent senators were kept supplied with pretty women.
So I knew the sort of man Jeffrey Epstein was when he first became known for providing airplanes for various politicians, including a former president, and later for running what seemed to me to be a series of a high-end whorehouses at no charge for prominent men, many high up in the world of American business and New York finance.
And so when I learned the story I’m about to tell, I wanted nothing to do with it.
I’m telling it now because I have been told that specific evidence about Epstein’s connections to foreign and domestic intelligence services, particularly Mossad and the FBI, though they do exist in government files, have yet to be the subject of materials made public by the Trump administration’s Justice Department and have not come under scrutiny by the Congress and the media.
I had a distressing discussion of the Epstein affair with a well-informed international source I’ve known for a long time. He suddenly volunteered last fall to talk about what he knew about Epstein. His point was that if all the details were to come out about Epstein and Israel it could cause problems for the past and present members of some in the Trump administration, as well as for senior officials in prior Democratic administrations.
My source knew an old friend, the son of a man who left a kibbutz in northern Israel to make money in private business in Tel Aviv. During the 1980s in Tel Aviv, the son—he was far from a whiz kid, so I gathered—was recruited by and eagerly agreed to join Mossad. He became an agent. He was trained in the use of advanced covert Israeli-made photography and recording equipment. In 1982 Yasser Arafat and his senior aides were defeated and the Palestine Liberation Organization’s leadership was expelled from Lebanon. One of the agent’s first assignments was to bug what he thought were the vacation homes of senior PLO officials in their new quarters in Tunisia.
The agent apparently did well enough to be rewarded with a more challenging assignment in the following years—to fly to New York City, buy off-the-shelf listening devices and cameras and covertly install them in a room of Epstein’s apartment in New York City. He was explicitly told to purchase off-the-shelf camera equipment in New York for the risky mission, but, as he sadly related to his friends, he didn’t follow those instructions and instead relied on the high-end equipment on which he had trained for Mossad.
The young Israeli told his boyhood friends that his operation had been compromised and the FBI caught him and immediately realized—given his nationality and the use of expensive Israeli gear—that Israel was aware of Epstein’s client list and its obvious blackmail and extortion potential in the world of international trade and intelligence collection. My source doesn’t know whether Epstein, in turn, provided the FBI with any of the tape recordings or videos. Did he go further, and supply both Israel and the FBI with films and recordings?
Will these questions ever be answered? Was the Epstein-provided sex as a mechanism for collecting information—for whom? Was it blackmail material? Or was Epstein simply making rich friends in high places? In any case, he now had potentially compromising audiotape recordings and videos of prominent men in government and high-end professional life.
The point is Epstein’s ties as an ongoing asset to the FBI kept him out of trouble and also left a large and politically devastating collection of recordings and films that have yet to be discussed publicly or even acknowledged by the Justice Department or the FBI, as well as by the Trump White House. I should note that no one I spoke to for this report mentioned any specific information linking Trump to the Epstein whorehouse.
I shared this account with a sophisticated American official whom I have learned to trust over the years. He told me that there was yet to be a serious nonpartisan investigation of the role of some senior members of the FBI who knew of and abetted Epstein’s collection of compromising videos.
Epstein was seen in 2016 as a possible source for dirt on Trump by the Clinton campaign, the official told me, “because they wanted to get rid of Trump. But Epstein was too smart to get involved.” He added that Epstein became “an asset” for the FBI, while the CIA had done “an analysis of his assets” but “was not interested in him because he was not reliable and had no tactical intelligence.” He has learned during a long career, the official told me, not to become a fan of any president.
This account raises more questions than it answers, but even the most bare-boned analysis of Epstein’s actions, taken in what amounts to plain sight, demands the immediate release of whatever evidence has been withheld by the Justice Department.
All of this mess begs for a resolution, however, or the beginning of one, as happened when I wrote in late 1974 in the New York Times about the CIA’s spying on American demonstrators against the Vietnam War. Those stories led to a major investigation of the Central Intelligence Agency by an independent committee of Senators led by Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat, and John Tower, a Texas Republican.
We need another bipartisan committee today to get answers for the American people to questions that need to be asked and answered. Let’s call it the Epstein Committee.