EPSTEIN AND RUSSIA
- Paul Hansbury
- 10 hours ago
- 5 min read
As the US Department of Justice released staggering volumes of material relating to convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, I did my best not to take too much interest. But as the world learns more about Epstein's vast professional network and activities, a new question has come to the fore: some journalists and politicians started asking about the five-thousand-or-so references to Russia in the files, or the one-thousand mentions of Vladimir Putin. A Daily Mail headline captures the tabloid mood: 'Epstein's sex empire was "KGB honeytrap".' (Never mind that Russia's security services have long since shed that name.)
Poland's prime minister Donald Tusk said that his country will investigate links between Epstein and Russia's secret services, fuelling suggestions that the Epstein paedophile scandal has the Kremlin's fingerprints on it. In the United Kingdom, this line is being amplified by Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent who penned the notorious dossier on Donald Trump's ties to Russia. Steele has been doing the rounds of British television and radio saying that it is 'likely' Epstein was recruited by the Russian intelligence services to gather compromising material (kompromat in Russian) on public figures in the West.
I should say that Steele's arguments seldom convince me. Salacious dossier claims aside, he always seems to speak in media with an unfounded level of confidence in his speculations. Quite how someone so cavalier with facts came to head MI6's Russia desk is beyond me. He has mastered the art of spouting headline-grabbing drivel. I guess I am missing something, since I would have thought that much intelligence work involves not rushing to unfounded conclusions, and not attracting the news headline writers.
At first blush, a few thousand mentions of Russia in several million pages does not sound all that significant. Without reading the files – and I have no plans to! – it is hard to say for sure but we have some context: Bill Gates is mentioned 2,522 times, Woody Allen 7,251 times, and Peter Mandelson 5,633 times (source: the Daily Mail's searchable database). Still, the journalists trawling through the materials are bringing to light whatever evidence they find in the files. Accordingly, it is possible to make a few comments on the claim that Epstein might have been a Russian spy.
