The CIA and Jeffrey Epstein
"some kind of symbiosis"
Not so long ago I bragged a little about Julian Dorey calling TrueHoop’s Epstein research “some of the best shit I have ever read.” That was kind of him.
But watch that whole episode, which of course I did, and it included something that I didn’t digest so well. The guest on that episode of Julian’s show is former CIA officer John Kiriakou. Kiriakou’s a fascinating guy who has scored a lot of points with me for his repeated truth-telling, very much including going to prison for blowing the whistle on CIA torture. He is the opposite of mealy-mouthed. I wish we had many more insiders speaking in public with Kiriakou’s candor.
But in that episode, Kiriakou pours cold water on the idea Epstein worked for the CIA. He explains that he worked near a lot of high-level insiders, who talked about Adnan Khashoggi all the time. And he says he never heard the name Epstein in all his years there.
On the one hand, I gotta respect that that guy knows a crapton more than me about the CIA. He worked there!
But on the other hand … I began a working list of CIAish things around Epstein.
1968 Leon Black’s dad Eli bought a famously CIA-connected business, United Fruit. A few years later, he fell to his death from the window of that business high above midtown Manhattan.
Mid-1970s The CIA falls under Congressional scrutiny for excesses. One of the young lawyers arguing for the right to destroy documents from programs like MK-Ultra was William Barr, Donald Barr’s son who would end up being the Attorney General when Jeffrey Epstein died in prison.
1977 Leon Black brought his dad’s business network (especially Carl Lindner who took over United Fruit after Eli Black’s death) to his job for Michael Milken at Drexel Burnham Lambert.
1980 Epstein leaves the Dalton School, run by former OSS (the Office of Special Services was the precursor to the CIA) officer Donald Barr, and joins Bear Stearns where former OSS officer William Casey was the firm’s private attorney from 1976 until Casey was appointed to run the CIA under Ronald Reagan. Whitney Webb’s One Nation Under Blackmail has fascinating insight into this period at Bear Stearns, with credible assertions that Epstein’s eventual departure from Bear may have had something to do with allegations of insider trading, and a knot of well-connected insiders that included Dennis Levine from Drexel Burnham Lambert.
1981 Reagan appoints William Casey to run the CIA, which is still battling Congress. “The business of Congress is to stay the [expletive] out of my business” Casey reportedly told Loch K. Johnson.
1982 David Fischer is appointed U.S. ambassador to the Seychelles, which has become a hotbed for the kinds of offshore money movements that are common for the investors in this story, and for the CIA. From Jake Bernstein in The Laundromat: “As Ambassador Fischer and his staff dug deeper into the criminal activities flowing through the Seychelles, including Mafia and Middle Eastern use of the island’s banks for money laundering, the local CIA station chief showed him a strange message Langley sent. It was for the station chief’s eyes only, from Director Casey, and read: ‘You are hereby instructed never to report, never to use any assets or any resources to pursue anything regarding international fraudulent banking operations in the Seychelles.’”
1985 The CIA built a covert pipeline to ship weapons to Iran, in cahoots with John Stanley Pottinger—who shared office space with Epstein. Dropsite News: “The Senate Foreign Relations Committee later found that the CIA was involved in planning the arms deals and had met with Hashemi in Pottinger’s office. … Decades before Epstein became a household name, former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe wrote in his 1992 memoir that Barak feared Peres or the Americans would discover the slush fund bank accounts where the arms profits were hidden, and take the money for themselves. Ben-Menashe claimed that Barak arranged for media mogul Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, to launder the Iran weapons profits through his companies’ accounts, and hide the money in Soviet banks where they could not be touched by the Americans.”
1986 Drexel Burnham Lambert falls apart with the arrests of Dennis Levine, Michael Milken, and Ivan Boesky. Boesky traveled with armed security, worked for a time for the Rothschilds, reportedly told people he had been in the CIA in Iran, and worked in a New York City building at 650 Fifth Avenue secretly owned by the Shah of Iran, who was himself reportedly installed by the CIA.
1986 Microsoft’s IPO is banked by Alex. Brown. All kinds of people associated with Epstein, like Bill Gates and Steve Sinofsky can trace their fortunes to this day—as can NBA figures Steve Ballmer and Paul Allen. Alex. Brown, though, now seems trickier: it was run at the time by A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard who we now know was likely CIA all along. There are many reported instances of CIA using the kinds of sex traps associated with Epstein, and of Epstein forming something like his own intelligence operation within Microsoft. (Sinofsky, for instance, is in a long-term relationship with a doctor named Melanie Walker who had previously been Epstein’s science advisor, and sent Epstein insidery and at times sex-themed insight from Microsoft.) In this period, Alex. Brown also ran the IPO of Oracle, the source of the Ellison family fortune, which is now purchasing a huge chunk of media, including CNN, where they are largely expected to have a chilling effect on free speech.
1995 Epstein is part of a small group, with Lynn Forester de Rothschild, that spends a day on a private tour of the CIA with then-director John Deutsch. Handwritten notes suggest topics included information warfare, global emergencies, proliferation, and economic intelligence.
1997 Buzzy sells Alex. Brown to Bankers Trust and it soon becomes part of Deutsche Bank. Epstein’s banking records show that some of his most active accounts were at “DBAB” an acronym that evidently stands for Deutsche Bank Alex Brown.
1997 Steve Hoffenberg goes to prison for a Ponzi scheme at Towers Financial. Hoffenberg would later tell Dylan Howard that his business partner Epstein did not get in trouble because “he was needed by the CIA or the FBI for intelligence, because he was manipulating the American intelligence for the overseas organizations: MI6, the Israelis, and the Saudis. That’s what he was doing.”
2001 A UK media report says Epstein told people he worked for the CIA.
2001 After 9/11, as the CIA’s executive director, Krongard reportedly helped set up ‘black sites’ where terrorism suspects were taken” for the enhanced interrogation treatment that caused John Kiriakou to become a whistleblower.
2003 Cheryl Krongard, Buzzy’s spouse, works at Apollo Global.
2005 Buzzy Krongard is a moving force in creating In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm, which provides early funding for Peter Thiel’s Palantir.
2011 Buzzy Krongard becomes a boardmember and major shareholder of Apollo Global.
2013 Apollo co-founder Josh Harris begins Epstein correspondence.
2016 Apollo co-founder Marc Rowan meets Ariane de Rothschild at Epstein’s house.
2016 Apollo purchases one of the CIA’s favorite vendors, Blackwater, which is deeply connected to Krongard.
2019 In Steve Bannon’s videotaped interview with Jeffrey Epstein, Epstein explains that the key break of his career came from David Rockefeller. The CIA was founded by the Dulles Brothers, who began as Sullivan & Cromwell attorneys representing Rockefeller businesses. John Foster Dulles married Janet Pomeroy Avery, who was reportedly a cousin to the Rockefellers.
2021 Jay Clayton, from Sullivan & Cromwell, the law firm most associated with the CIA, joins the Apollo board. Apollo founder Leon Black’s sister is a Sullivan & Cromwell partner.
2025 Jay Clayton assumes control of the Southern District of New York, which we now know has masses of evidence of crimes by Epstein’s co-conspirators, but has not prosecuted them.
I am not ready to make any big declarations about anyone in this story taking direct orders from Langley. But without even entering the juicy CIA territory of BCCI, the United Arab Emirates, and so much more … it’s tough to imagine the CIA had nothing whatsoever to do with this Epstein operation. Let’s keep an open mind, you know?
So it felt pretty good to see this: John Kiriakou’s views have evolved. On his own podcast, Kiriakou recently talked to author Nick Bryant. They ended up discussing Joe Biden’s CIA head William Burns, who served from 2021-2025.
JOHN KIRIAKOU: Some observers have speculated that Epstein may have had ties to intelligence services. I’ve been very public that I believe he was a Mossad access agent. And it seems to me, Nick, that in these latest documents it goes well beyond that, that he actively sought ties to the CIA, to the FBI, to MI5, MI6, maybe the Germans, maybe the Russians. What are you seeing in the actual documents to prove credible evidence suggesting involvement by some of these agencies or other countries?
NICK BRYANT: It was either Forbes or the Wall Street Journal, I can’t remember which one, which said that Jeffrey Epstein had three meetings with Bill Burns, before Burns was named CIA director. And Bill Burns said that, and this was after Jeffrey Epstein had been a convicted child molester. Bill Burns said that he went to Epstein for financial counseling, because he was going into the private sector.
Well, they met a lot more than three times. And you’ve got documents where Peter Thiel and Jeffrey Epstein and William Burns are getting together and meeting, which is very frightening to me, to have that triumvirate getting together. But obviously, Bill Burns and Jeffrey Epstein had, I think, a fairly close relationship, and I think that, I mean, his prior excuses are just absurdly disingenuous. There was some kind of symbiosis there.
JOHN KIRIAKOU: That makes me so angry. I even wrote an Op-Ed, at the very start of the Biden administration, when Burns was named CIA director saying this actually is a great pick, because Burns is a professional, he’s been the deputy secretary of state, he was ambassador to a half a dozen countries, he’s going to be the adult in the room. And here he was in this weird relationship with Epstein the whole time. Makes me sick to my stomach. Crazy.
NICK BRYANT: A guy like Bill Burns, I mean, he looks clean. If you just look at him on the outside, you look at his history, the guy looks clean. But then all of a sudden this latest tranche of documents comes out, and he’s not clean. And he was lying about getting together with Jeffrey Epstein. And who knows what the hell Bill Burns and Peter Thiel were talking about.
Now we’re all getting on the same page! The CIA is impossible to extricate from this story.
And there’s another fun little part of that conversation. Kiriakou asks about the cameras Epstein had hidden everywhere. Bryant talks a bit and then concludes: “Our checks and balances, in this country, is blackmail.”
Kiriakou’s response?
“Yeah you can say that again.”
Thank you for reading TrueHoop!