The Heir Apparent

Exclusive: Jeffrey Epstein was more than just the sometimes lover and best friend of Robert Maxwell’s daughter, Ghislaine. Epstein inherited the publishing baron’s entire spy business.

Robert Maxwell’s and Jeffrey Epstein’s life stories have extraordinary parallels, and now new evidence suggests those ‘coincidences’ were the result of operational design.

Last week on the Narativ podcast, Jeffrey Epstein’s former business partner Steven Hoffenberg claimed Epstein inherited Maxwell’s spy business. The business came along with sizeable funds looted from a CIA slush fund, an existing partnership with famed arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and access to the PROMIS surveillance software.

If Maxwell and Epstein were not standalone operatives, were they two-parts of a multi-generational intelligence operation?

Part 1: Epstein and Maxwell

Joining the panel for the first time this week the brilliant @GregOlear and returning strategic analyst @EricGarland and organized crime researcher @Lincolnsbible.


Maxwell was a legendary publisher with extraordinary access to world leaders, Epstein, a brilliant Wall Street financier who was able to open the door to any celebrity from Manhattan to Hollywood. Both men wielded Kompromat with the agility of experienced intelligence assets, which they both were.

Maxwell and Epstein were agents for Israeli military intelligence, but Maxwell’s first loyalty was to Russia’s KGB and its successors.

Their physical bond was through Maxwell’s daughter Ghislaine who would later become Epstein’s “best friend,” but there was far more at play than just the wandering eye of a publishing icon’s daughter.

Hoffenberg tells me that Ghislaine and Epstein executed the takeover of Maxwell’s business according to a plan devised initially by arms dealer Sir Douglas Leese, for whom Epstein worked in the early ’80s in London. According to Hoffenberg, Robert Maxwell himself signed off on the inheritance pact.

PART 2: The Iran-Contra Nexus

Iran Contra was the nexus that allowed Maxwell and Epstein’s lives to intersect. Maxwell was running arms for Israeli Military Intelligence while Epstein was doing the same for Britain’s MI6 under Leese’s auspices.

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I interviewed Maxwell’s handler, Ari Ben Menashe, a year ago, and he confirmed he was introduced to Epstein in London in the ’80s by Maxwell. Ben Menashe says Maxwell wanted to give Epstein a leg up in the intelligence world as he expected Epstein would marry his daughter. 

PART 3: The Final Years

Considering both Epstein’s and Maxwell’s lives ended so tragically and mysteriously decades apart, whatever it was that connected them was not just sensitive; the details, if published, would have to be so damning as to justify their deaths.

In part three, we trace the last years of Robert Maxwell’s life that brought him closer to Queen Elizabeth. Privately he worked with Mikhail Gorbachev in what was eventually billed as the collapse of the Soviet Union.


For all its appearances, the end of the Soviet Union was not the end of a battle between the two great superpowers, nor was it the beginning of a new democratic age in Russia.

With America’s guard down, Russia’s covert operation entered a new phase recruiting U.S. public figures like Donald Trump into the KGB while covertly injecting their assets into the U.S. under the cover of the refusenik program.

Once in place, agents and organized criminals penetrated America’s organized crime families and rolled up bosses from La Cosa Nostra.

With so many confirming facts and the accounts of first-hand witnesses, we’re seeing what appears to be the outline of a Russian-Israeli intelligence operation that began after the Second World War and lasted at least 80 years.

We know a fair amount about what Epstein and Maxwell did, but we are yet to understand how this unlikely alliance of intelligence agencies, nations and powerful families came together, and why?


Thanks to @SHoffenberg, @GregOlear, @LincolnsBible and @EricGarland for their invaluable expertise on this story and the podcasts.


These podcasts are available on your favourite podcast player.


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