Mike Benz is one of our top experts on ‘The Deep State’
Mike Benz: “Jeffrey Epstein Was Working With the CIA Since 1981.” As the debate rages over the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case, Foundation for Freedom Online founder Mike Benz
As the debate rages over the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case, Foundation for Freedom Online founder Mike Benz took a close look at Epstein’s history with the intel community talking to host Jesse Kelly. Benz has promised a deep dive on the topic soon.
Mike Benz: Epstein was working with the CIA in the early 1980s at the very start of his career after he left Bear Stearns. In 1981, right after leaving Bear Stearns, Jeffrey Epstein created a one-person for-profit company in his one-bedroom New York apartment. It was called the Intercontinental Assets Group, and it held itself out as an international bounty hunter for high-net-worth individuals to both recover money and shield money internationally. Right away in 1981, he starts this company that basically helped royalty and high-net-worth individuals basically recover loan debts or assets owed to them that were held in cryptic offshore bank accounts, as well as helping them structure their own assets in a way that would make it difficult or impossible for others to collect those assets.
And in 1982, just one year into that, he got a fake passport, an Austrian passport, listing his residence as Saudi Arabia. This is a fake passport. This was recovered by the FBI in 2019 when they drilled a hole in Jeffrey Epstein’s safe and recovered this. Prosecutors held this passport up at the Ghislaine Maxwell trial. Now, this fake passport was so good that it was able to go through four different country checkpoints. It had a false name, but Jeffrey Epstein’s photo, so that he could get back and forth. And why Saudi Arabia? Well, because Jeffrey Epstein, one of his main clients for the group that he set up in 1981, was Adnan Khashoggi.
Adnan Khashoggi was the CIA arms runner for the Iran-Contra affair when Congress blocked the U.S. federal government through a congressional law called the Bolan Amendment, with the Democrats controlling the House of Representatives, banning any U.S. funds from being directed to the overthrow of the Nicaraguan Sandinista government. And the Reagan White House and National Security Council and Central Intelligence Agency wanted to do it anyway. They were left with a problem, which was that the CIA had been neutered during the Jimmy Carter years. There had been prohibitions on the categories of covert activity it could do, and the Bolan Amendment from Congress blocked them from using U.S. aid funds or State Department funds to run the operation.
Enter Jeffrey Epstein and Adnan Khashoggi, his client. During the Iran-Contra affair, which dogged the entire Reagan administration when all this came out, the U.S. was selling arms together with Israel to Iran, which is kind of ironic as the current geopolitics of Israel-Iran play out around missiles flying overhead earlier this month between those two countries. Israel and the U.S. were selling weapons to Iran at that time through Adnan Khashoggi, the Saudi arms dealer who had been working with the CIA for 30 years.
In fact, this all came out in formal, under-oath testimony from the Paris office of BCCI, which was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, one of the largest banks in the world, which was effectively a CIA proprietary bank for running arms to the Mujaheddin when the CIA was creating the Islamo-terrorist network that would later become Al Qaeda and then ISIS. Adnan Khashoggi was a client of that bank, together with the CIA, and the head of the head of the Paris branch said that Adnan Khashoggi personally told him that he was working for the Central Intelligence Agency and Jeffrey Epstein was his money bundler. This is at the height of the Cold War, mind you.
And so you see this relationship going back to the early 1980s. In 1985, Jeffrey Epstein becomes linked up with Les Wexner in Columbus, Ohio. Les Wexner was the head of what at the time was the largest retailer in the entire United States, limited brands, famous for Victoria’s Secret and many, many others. Les Wexner’s tax attorney, Arthur Shapiro, was murdered in a gangland style assassination in 1985, the day before he was set to testify in an IRS grand jury investigation. The IRS had been looking into the Wexner empire’s finances and failure to, I think, file taxes for something like five years and seven years of investigation. Arthur Shapiro, who ran that, was supposed to testify to the IRS grand jury just one day before he was gunned down.
It was right after that that Jeffrey Epstein appears to meet Les Wexner and then go on to have durable power of attorney over the entire Wexner enterprise. In 1993, Jeffrey Epstein personally negotiated the sale, the transfer of Air America, which would then become Southern Air Transport, a CIA proprietary airline straight from Miami, where it got busted as part of the Iran-Contra gun trafficking and narcotics trafficking in order to run this illicit operation in Iran-Contra. That very airline used Jeffrey and that Jeffrey Epstein was a critical part in the structuring of this CIA operation. He then negotiated the transfer of that CIA airliner straight to Columbus, Ohio, where the Wexner empire was based for the primary purpose of transporting the limited cargo between Ohio and Hong Kong, which is another one of these narco states. Hong Kong was won by the British during the opium wars and has been kind of a lawless gun and drug running zone ever since.
How does one get to be the financial bundler for the CIA’s main arms, illicit arms trafficker in the Middle East without having any scrutiny from the Central Intelligence Agency? How does one personally negotiate the transfer of a CIA proprietary airline? By the way, Southern Air Transport declared bankruptcy in Columbus, Ohio, the very day the CIA put out an acknowledgement of Air America’s role in the gun running and narco trafficking in Iran-Contra. Subsequent to that, the US State Department personally made Jeffrey Epstein the tenant on the lease for one of the second largest residents in all of New York City. This residence was seized from the government of Iran as the US was putting sanctions on it and then personally leased out to Jeffrey Epstein. How do you have the State Department as your personal landlord? Do you think you or I, Jesse, could score something like that?
The State Department then ended up in a legal dispute with Jeffrey Epstein because Jeffrey Epstein subleased that apartment to the defense lawyer for the “French Connection” and “Pizza Connection” drug scandals (Ivan Fisher), where you had CIA involvement in narco trafficking that was effectively dealt, you know, hushed over in this trial through this very defense lawyer that Jeffrey Epstein then leased the State Department building seized from Iran from. What I’m trying to communicate here is that every aspect of the Jeffrey Epstein story is part of the restructuring of intelligence work after the scandals of the 1970s when the CIA was barred from doing activity directly. And that’s when USAID came into the picture and took the baton from CIA and these and the NGO apparatus that we’re now living under with the National Endowment for Democracy and Internews and the US Agency for US Institute of Peace and the web of private contractors and private financiers in order to be the front men for CIA operations. Jeffrey Epstein was present at creation of that entire apparatus. There is zero chance on God’s green earth that there are no CIA files on this guy.
And the fact that this justice department has effectively pointed us to the FBI when this is a CIA job is not a good look for transparency.
