The Epstein Story Isn’t Just American—It’s an International Intelligence Problem

Two former CIA clandestine officers explain why the real “files” aren’t just in DOJ hands, and why the global angle changes everything.

Welcome back to The Red Letter.

One of the strangest things about the Jeffrey Epstein story is how it’s been flattened into a domestic political food fight, as if all the answers are sitting in one filing cabinet inside the Justice Department.

They’re not.

Epstein wasn’t just a Florida criminal case. It wasn’t just a Manhattan scandal. He had created an international ecosystem: money, status, planes, passports, kompromat, and a rotating cast of gatekeepers who made the whole thing function. And once you accept that, the story looks less like a “mystery” and more like something far more disturbing: A machine that powerful people across borders found useful, until it threatened to expose them.

I recently sat down with John Sipher and Jerry O’Shea, two former CIA clandestine officers for their podcast Mission Implausible. For decades their job was to understand deception, how influence is built, how networks work, how secrets move. And they were blunt about something that should be obvious but rarely gets said out loud:

If Epstein was global, then multiple governments almost certainly have pieces of this.

The “conspiracy theory” problem

They’re right about another thing too: this is the rare story where the actual facts sound like a conspiracy theory because the cast list is ridiculous.

You start listing the names, the money, the access, the meetings, the institutions, and it sounds like you’re spinning a yarn. But then you look at what’s been reported, litigated, unearthed in emails, flight logs, and depositions and you realize the horrifying part isn’t the speculation. It’s the baseline reality.

As Adam Davidson, an executive producer on Broken: Jeffrey Epstein, a podcast that I hosted, put it: this is the rare case where “completely batshit conspiracy theory turned out to be completely true.”

That doesn’t mean every theory is real. It means the core structure is so grotesque and sprawling that it becomes easy for people to hang additional conspiracies off it.

So I tried to do something in this conversation that I think is overdue: separate what we can say with confidence from what we still don’t know.

What is clear: Epstein was a fixer who trafficked in leverage

In the transcript, I described Epstein this way: an international con man who was repeatedly found useful to powerful people because he offered access, introductions, and leverage.

One of the most consistent patterns in the Epstein universe was using sexual embarrassment as currency. There was the unspoken understanding that if you crossed a certain line in his world, you were compromised.

That’s not a spy thriller. That’s power.

And it explains why so many men stayed close even after Epstein’s conviction and registration as a sex offender because there was something in it for them.

The international angle: who else holds the files?

Cipher raised a point I’ve been thinking about for a while: Americans tend to act like the U.S. Justice Department is the only vault. But if this network touched royals, financiers, foreign elites, and international travel routes, then it’s reasonable that other governments, especially allies, were tracking parts of it too.

We talked about MI6 tracking Prince Andrew, which has been reported by his unofficial biographer Andrew Lownie in his bestseller Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, and the broader question of how a royal moving through business and diplomatic circles wouldn’t be watched by his own system.

And then there’s the Maxwell family, which is its own geopolitical fever dream.

The Maxwell bridge: the story didn’t start with Epstein

If you only know the Epstein story from the American headlines, you miss the prologue: Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine’s father, which I broke down in my second podcast Power: The Maxwells. (It’s like if Succession had a spy plot-line.)

I explained in the conversation why Maxwell matters: he wasn’t a random rich guy. He was a publishing power broker, Murdoch-level influence, whose rise and fall still raises profound questions about espionage, money, and who was protecting whom.

In Ghislaine Maxwell’s interview with deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, she suggested her father vouched for Epstein for a finance job, despite Epstein being a college dropout with a reputation as a sex pest even early on.

That’s not proof of a grand unified theory. But it is a flashing red arrow toward the question that never goes away: How did Epstein get threaded into elite circles so quickly and who opened the doors?

The trafficking reality: why so few victims have been able to come forward

One of the hardest parts of the conversation, and of this reporting, is the human cost.

We touched on what the FBI estimated (a thousand victims), versus how many women have publicly come forward (closer to a couple dozen).

There are a hundred reasons survivors don’t come forward: fear, shame, stress, NDAs, threats, and the simple reality that the men implicated had wealth, lawyers, and the ability to retaliate.

We also discussed the modeling pipeline, how recruiting foreign women with promises of opportunity could function as trafficking infrastructure, especially when passports can be taken and women are isolated from their families.

And we talked about Virginia Giuffre’s account: being sent abroad, including Thailand, and how she ultimately escaped, marrying quickly and moving as far away as possible.

The details change victim to victim. The through-line doesn’t: this was global.

The political question everyone asks: was Trump central?

Davidson and I addressed the question that now dominates the discourse: where does Trump fit into all of this?

What Adam said is important, because it’s not just “he’s president now, so we’re picking on him,” it’s that during the height of Epstein’s sex trafficking operation, Trump wasn’t a passerby. He was a central figure in that scene.

That does not automatically answer what every reader wants answered. But it does push back against the idea that Trump is being dragged into the story unfairly because of politics.

And then there’s the moral reality Davidson put plainly: Even if someone didn’t personally commit the worst acts, spending serious time in Epstein’s world meant being around an environment where it was clear what was happening and doing nothing.

That’s the part that still makes me sick.

It’s not just that Epstein was depraved. It’s that there are all these other men walking around without any consequences. Survivors have had to relive the disappointment over and over when institutions stall, politicians posture, and accountability never quite arrives.

The central question isn’t going away: How did one network run so openly for so long and why have so few people paid a price?

If you want to understand Epstein, don’t start with the loudest theories. Start with the incentives. The access. The money. The leverage. The institutions that normalized it. The people who benefited from silence.

That’s not a conspiracy theory.

That’s power.