0:03

I'm content to die for my beliefs.

0:08

So cut off my head. And

0:11

make me a martyr. The

0:14

people will always remember it. No.

0:20

They will forget. It

0:30

is a place. It is somewhere. Hell

0:34

does exist. But

0:37

its reference is to something that transcends

0:41

all thinking. I

0:46

must go. Why must we

0:48

tear ourselves apart for this small

0:50

question of religion? Part 1

0:59

Alright look. I

1:01

know that none of us trust

1:03

or expect much of our governments these

1:06

days. That

1:09

probably applies no matter

1:11

what country you live in. But

1:14

I don't think I'm really asking for a lot here. And

1:18

I'm not going to demand that politicians

1:20

stop lying or that they stop

1:22

taking bribes that are dressed up to look

1:25

like book advances or speaking fees.

1:28

I'm not asking that their family members stop

1:30

accepting bribes on their behalf. I don't

1:33

like any of that. But again,

1:35

I've learned to moderate my hopes for how far

1:38

from rock bottom these people are capable of climbing.

1:42

In fact, I'm at the point where I

1:44

don't even care about the bribes. Yeah, they can keep

1:46

them. They can keep the bribes. If

1:49

I can just make a couple requests.

1:53

Like for example. Next

1:55

time that scientists

1:58

have questions about... about how

2:00

an infectious disease like, I

2:02

don't know, how about syphilis develops

2:05

over time in a human host. Maybe we

2:07

should not give the disease to a

2:09

bunch of black people and then lie

2:11

about giving them treatments for decades so

2:13

that we can watch as a disease slowly

2:16

destroys their minds and bodies. Maybe we should

2:18

not do that. Now

2:20

again, I'm asking for the bare minimum here.

2:23

Or

2:25

maybe next time a reclusive

2:27

religious congregation with a weirdo leader

2:31

comes onto the radar of one of your agencies.

2:33

How about you arrest the guy while he's out on his morning

2:35

jog, which he goes on predictably every day

2:38

instead of sending Delta Force to Waco,

2:40

Texas to oversee the massacre of the entire

2:42

group. How about that? It's not

2:44

a huge ask.

2:46

Or if

2:48

you want, and I know I'm starting to get multiple

2:51

with my requests here. Maybe I'm pushing my luck, but maybe

2:53

if you want to send a bunch of us to war

2:55

in a foreign country, can it please be

2:57

for reasons that are not completely made

2:59

up? Or here's

3:01

another one. When

3:04

our intelligence agencies go about their

3:06

mission of gathering and analyzing

3:08

information and carrying out covert

3:11

operations, you know,

3:13

we understand, we're an understanding people. We get

3:15

it. Sometimes things can get a little

3:17

messy, a little morally complicated. But

3:20

what if, what if next

3:24

time one of your agents suggests

3:26

working with a guy who's engaged

3:28

in large scale trafficking of children

3:31

for sex, maybe

3:33

someone in your organization says that we should

3:35

probably not do that. Or

3:38

is that too much? I know I made a lot of requests. Look, I'll

3:40

compromise on the first three, okay? Give

3:42

people diseases, massacre American

3:45

citizens, you know, launch wars on false pretenses,

3:47

you know, whatever. But is it too much to

3:50

ask? That if a federal

3:52

prosecutor overseeing the investigation

3:55

of a serial pedophile and child trafficker

3:59

says on the record, that he was told to

4:01

back off by his superiors because

4:03

the guy quote belongs to intelligence

4:07

is it too much to ask that just one reporter

4:10

in all the news rooms in America would

4:13

stick a microphone in this guy's face and ask

4:15

him exactly what the fuck he meant by that

4:19

anyone yeah

4:22

well

4:24

of course I'm talking about Jeffrey Epstein

4:28

it's you know it's a situation

4:32

that seems almost too horrible to be plausible

4:34

right yeah sure

4:37

Intel agencies might have to skirt

4:39

a bit of bourgeois morality here and there to do

4:41

their jobs

4:44

but surely

4:45

every agent of the CIA or

4:48

FBI would resign

4:50

in protest if they found out the agency

4:52

was helping a mass pedophile avoid prosecution

4:55

right now I

4:57

can say with certainty with

5:00

zero doubt that

5:03

any one of my 12 closest

5:05

friends or relatives if they were in that

5:07

position would not keep quiet about it I

5:09

have no doubt about that and

5:12

so it sounds reasonable to us to

5:14

regular people you know what kind of people would

5:17

hear that and just and just move on like

5:19

huh what's that boss the mass child

5:21

sex trafficker has a relationship with

5:23

intelligence agencies and I should let him go

5:25

agree not to prosecute any

5:28

of his accomplices even ones that turn

5:30

up later that we don't know about for crimes we don't

5:32

know about yet hey sure boss

5:34

you got it like I can

5:36

say that I don't know anybody who would do

5:38

that and I'll bet

5:40

you can say the same about most of the people close

5:42

to you and so it just makes sense to regular

5:45

people with an average

5:47

understanding of ethics that there's

5:49

no way the agencies would do that

5:53

until you remember that no

5:56

one in those agencies apparently had a problem

5:58

working with South American drug lords right

6:00

as the crack epidemic was consuming American

6:03

inner cities. And

6:06

that no one seems to have spoken up when

6:09

the decision was made to place us into an effective

6:11

alliance with Al Qaeda

6:13

in Syria and Yemen barely a decade after

6:15

9-11. You ever

6:18

remember being asked about that? Remember being

6:20

asked if we wanted to fight on the same side as Al

6:22

Qaeda in Syria and Yemen? Because

6:24

I don't. But

6:26

that's not the kind of question that it occurs

6:29

to a normal person to ask because a

6:32

normal person thinks there's no way our government

6:34

would put us into an alliance with Al Qaeda before

6:37

the new World Trade Center was even finished

6:39

rebuilding.

6:42

But they did.

6:44

Or how about Afghanistan? Remember

6:47

when an army captain beat up an Afghanistan

6:49

army officer that he found raping a little boy? He

6:52

got in trouble with that. He got kicked out of the army. And

6:55

the rest of our troops got instructions that

6:57

they were not to intervene in similar circumstances.

7:00

Do not intervene if you encounter child

7:03

rape because Bacha Bazi,

7:06

the recreational abuse of young boys,

7:08

was just a cultural difference that they were going to have

7:11

to get over, wanted to be tolerant about. And

7:15

then come to find out, surprise surprise, sexual

7:17

abuse of young boys by our allies

7:20

in the Afghanistan security forces was

7:22

pervasive throughout our occupation

7:25

of the country.

7:26

Quote,

7:27

horrifying abuse at checkpoints makes

7:29

the boys, many unpaid and unregistered,

7:32

hungry for revenge and easy prey for Taliban

7:35

recruitment, often because there is

7:37

no other escape from exploitative Afghan

7:39

security force commanders. Practically

7:44

all of Aruz guns, 370 local

7:46

and national police checkpoints have

7:48

Bacha's. Those are little boys. Some

7:50

up to four who are illegally recruited

7:53

not only for sexual companionship but

7:55

also to bear arms. Again, these

7:57

are little boys. Some

7:59

police... they said, demand bachas like

8:02

a perk of the job, refusing to join

8:04

checkpoints where they are not available." End

8:06

quote. The

8:09

Taliban had banned that practice in 1996

8:12

and kept the ban in place until the invasion

8:15

of 2001 when we

8:17

took over and the ban was no longer enforced.

8:20

So the Taliban started

8:23

reaching out to these boys who were being kept as

8:25

sex slaves by our allies, by

8:27

the Afghanistan security forces, and

8:30

saying to them, hey, help us. Kill

8:32

your guards if you can and run away. Come to us.

8:34

We'll take you in. That's a pretty easy

8:36

sell. And so we

8:39

got instances like this. Quote,

8:41

he said the attacker, this is a boy,

8:44

a little boy, who ended up attacking the

8:46

police officers, Afghanistan police officers,

8:49

he said the attacker was the commander's

8:51

own sex slave, a teenager called

8:53

Zabihullah. Late

8:56

one night he went on a shooting spree, killing seven

8:58

policemen, including the commander, as they slept.

9:01

End quote. And

9:03

so we end up in a war where, up

9:05

until this most recent

9:08

summer, we were told

9:10

that the enemy was so terrible,

9:13

that the threat was so great, that

9:16

we just had no choice but to

9:18

ally with people who were engaged in systematic

9:21

mass child rape. There was just no other

9:23

option. Well,

9:26

but there are other considerations. There

9:29

are larger issues at play. The

9:32

world is not all black and white, and

9:34

I'm probably oversimplifying things. But

9:37

I get all that. And that's why

9:39

I'm limiting my requests. All

9:43

I'm asking is that the people in

9:45

our security and intelligence establishments

9:48

get back on the same page as the rest

9:51

of us in considering large scale child

9:53

sex trafficking to be beyond the pale.

9:57

I start with this because... I

10:00

often find that the biggest hurdle to clear

10:02

when trying to get people to look squarely at

10:04

what we know and what we

10:06

can reasonably infer about the Jeffrey

10:09

Epstein case is that for most people

10:11

it just sounds too horrible to be believable. You

10:14

know, sure the government's corrupt, politicians lie

10:16

yada yada yada, but they wouldn't do that. But

10:19

we know they would. Because

10:22

they have. And they've done much

10:24

much worse. It's

10:27

hard to know where to start this story.

10:30

And so I'll throw

10:32

a dart at the map and start

10:34

with a 2003 Vanity Fair story

10:36

by the journalist Vicky Ward. Ms.

10:39

Ward was one of the people,

10:42

one of the few people who was on to Jeffrey Epstein

10:44

very early. Long before his first

10:46

conviction back in the mid 2000s. Back

10:48

in the early 2000s, Epstein was still getting

10:51

press like this in New York magazine. Quote,

10:54

Jeffrey Epstein, international

10:56

money man of mystery. He

10:58

comes with cash to burn, a fleet

11:00

of airplanes and a keen eye for the ladies

11:03

to say nothing of a relentless

11:05

brain that challenges Nobel Prize

11:07

winning scientists across the country and

11:10

for financial markets around the world. Ever

11:13

since the post, page six, ran

11:15

an item about President Clinton's late September visit to

11:17

Africa with Kevin Spacey and

11:19

Chris Tucker on Epstein's customized

11:23

Boeing 727. The

11:25

question of the day has been, who

11:27

in the world is Jeffrey Epstein? End

11:29

quote. Once

11:32

again, unsurprisingly,

11:35

American journalism does not miss an opportunity

11:37

to be clown itself and to

11:40

vomit all over the legacy of the real

11:42

reporters who occasionally used to take up the

11:44

profession. Reporters like Vicki

11:46

Ward, for example, she

11:49

was writing for Vanity Fair in the early 2000s when

11:52

she got an early lead on what the talented

11:54

Mr. Epstein was up to behind the

11:56

scenes. This is

11:58

from the New York Times after Epstein's death. Epstein was

12:00

arrested more recently in 2019, quote, days

12:03

after Jeffrey E. Epstein was arrested

12:06

and charged with sex trafficking by federal

12:08

prosecutors, the fallout spilled

12:10

into the media world with a former Vanity Fair

12:12

journalist saying that she had been prepared to

12:14

report on accusations of sexual misconduct

12:17

against the financier years ago, but

12:20

that the magazine had declined to print them. The

12:23

journalist, Vicki Ward, leveled her

12:25

accusation against the magazine's former

12:27

editor, Graydon Carter, in several forums,

12:30

including on her own Twitter account, Slates,

12:32

What Next podcast, and Buzzfeed's

12:35

AM2DM talk show. As

12:38

part of her reporting for an article published in

12:40

Vanity Fair's March 2003 issue, Ms. Ward said, she

12:43

had collected on-the-record accusations

12:46

against Mr. Epstein from three women,

12:48

two of whom said they were victims of sexual assault.

12:51

Those accusations did not make it into the published

12:54

version, end quote. And so you think,

12:56

well, look, a

12:58

magazine's gotta be careful, right? Vanity

13:01

Fair's a big publication, they've reported on

13:03

controversial stories in the past, and

13:06

they got the experience to know where they stand.

13:09

So maybe the stories didn't get through the magazine's

13:11

tight vetting process. Maybe legal wouldn't let

13:13

it through. Well, no. In

13:15

fact, according to Ms. Ward, the

13:17

story had already been through legal review

13:20

and was approved with the accusations

13:22

included, but then, just

13:25

before the article went to print. All

13:28

right, in recent months, the press has been digging

13:30

into news about the late Jeffrey Epstein,

13:33

his powerful friends and the allegations

13:35

that he sexually exploited dozens

13:37

of underage girls. For years,

13:40

the media had paid only intermittent

13:42

attention to the Epstein story until an investigative

13:45

series last year in the Miami Herald.

13:47

NPR media correspondent David Fulkenflick's story

13:50

might help explain why. It includes

13:52

an early morning visit, a bullet, and

13:55

a dead cat.

13:56

One morning some years ago, Vanity Fair's

13:58

editor-in-chief, Graydon Carter,

13:59

arrived at the magazine's offices in

14:02

Midtown Manhattan.

14:03

A man was standing still, by himself,

14:05

in the magazine's reception area, behind locked

14:08

glass doors. It was Epstein.

14:10

John Connolly was a Vanity Fair contributing

14:12

editor who reported on crime and scandal.

14:15

Jeffrey had somehow gotten into

14:17

the Vanity Fair's office before grading one day,

14:20

and he was torturing

14:22

Graydon. Connolly says Epstein repeatedly

14:24

besieged and berated Carter, then and

14:26

in subsequent calls, don't report on the young

14:28

women. Jeffrey Epstein would terrorize people.

14:31

Vanity Fair eagerly dissected the missteps

14:33

and foibles of society's elites, and eagerly

14:35

rubbed shoulders with them. And for years, Graydon

14:38

Carter led the way on both.

14:40

In 2002, Carter assigned a reporter

14:42

to find out more about Jeffrey Epstein. Just

14:44

who is this enigmatic financier, and

14:46

why is he flying around with Bill Clinton and other

14:49

celebrities? Here's that reporter, Vicki

14:51

Ward.

14:51

At the time, it was two-pronged. You

14:54

know, the mystery about Jeffrey Epstein

14:56

was how he had made his money.

14:58

Ward spoke on Morning Edition last month.

15:00

It was also known that he would gather

15:02

New York's rich and famous for

15:05

dinner parties at his home,

15:07

but there would be these very young women.

15:10

The women were always part

15:12

of the Jeffrey Epstein story.

15:14

In March 2003, Vanity

15:16

Fair did publish a piece by Ward taking

15:18

a tough look at Epstein's lavish lifestyle

15:21

and questioning the origins of his fortune.

15:23

Connolly says Carter soon called to

15:25

share an ominous development. The day

15:28

came out, there was a live bullet put

15:30

on Graydon's, you know, outside

15:33

his house in Manhattan. Even in the absence

15:35

of any evidence Epstein was involved, Connolly

15:38

tells NPR that both Carter and he considered

15:40

the bullet a clear warning. That wasn't

15:42

a coincidence. Another former colleague

15:44

tells NPR of a similarly anguished call

15:47

from Carter about the bullet. In

15:49

statements to NPR, Carter says the magazine

15:51

never held back on Epstein because of any sense

15:53

of threat or intimidation. Instead,

15:56

Carter says Ward's reporting did not pass the

15:58

legal threshold for publication.

16:00

He says Vanity Fair took legal requirements

16:02

seriously, especially when the subject was

16:04

a private person who's therefore rigorously

16:06

protected under libel laws. And he said

16:09

Ward did not have three sources who met the magazine's

16:11

legal threshold.

16:12

For the first time, however, Maria and Annie

16:15

Farmer are confirming publicly they spoke

16:17

to Vicki Ward on the record in 2002. Their

16:20

mother, Janice Farmer, says she did too. And

16:23

they tell NPR they were crestfallen Vanity Fair

16:25

didn't report their allegations of exploitation.

16:27

I think it made it more difficult to not

16:30

only get victims to speak out, but to

16:32

get witnesses to speak out. David Boyce

16:34

is a lawyer for the Farmer Sisters. It was discouraging.

16:38

I think it helped create the

16:40

impression among many of the victims that

16:43

the media was

16:46

under Epstein's control, that Epstein

16:48

had all this power. By late 2006,

16:50

John Connolly says he was interviewing other women

16:52

in South Florida to see if there was another

16:55

story for Vanity Fair to do, as authorities

16:57

investigated Epstein. Connolly tells

16:59

me Carter soon received another shock. Let

17:02

me stop you right there. You said

17:04

a dead cat's head was put

17:06

outside Graydon Carter's house? It was put

17:09

on the stoop. I was home up in the country.

17:11

It was done to intimidate, no question about

17:13

it.

17:14

And it worked? Yeah, it did. Connolly

17:16

says Carter called him to express anxiety for

17:18

the safety of his children. Others tell NPR

17:21

the dead cat was the talk of the office. And

17:23

Connolly says he voluntarily stops pursuing

17:25

the subject for Vanity Fair. Well,

17:27

it's natural to ask how someone like Epstein

17:30

can get away with that. Sure,

17:33

he's rich, but so was Bill

17:35

Cosby. Being

17:38

Speaker of the House of Representatives did not save

17:40

Denny Hastert. It's

17:43

very interesting. We've all heard the saying

17:46

about journalism, the old saying, if it bleeds,

17:48

it leads, meaning the

17:50

news media is biased toward sensationalism

17:53

in general. But if that's

17:55

true, if they're just looking for sensationalism,

17:58

it's fair to wonder why every news newspaper

18:00

in the land does not have investigative teams

18:02

devoted to the Jeffrey Epstein story. Billionaire

18:07

playboy with deep connections to the rich and powerful

18:09

running a massive multi-state

18:12

underage sex trafficking operation, corroborated

18:16

accounts from accusers about very well-known

18:19

people being involved, a federal

18:21

prosecutor saying he was told to back off

18:23

by his superiors because Epstein belongs

18:26

to intelligence. I

18:28

mean at the height of the Me Too purge, news

18:30

outlets devoted teams of reporters to investigating

18:34

important people for anything that might get them another

18:36

scalp. The combination of gossip

18:39

column, salaciousness and reader interest with

18:41

the conferred seriousness of reporting

18:43

that was part of a movement for gender equality, it

18:45

was just too good to pass up. But if

18:47

there was ever a target rich environment

18:50

for media outlets fighting tooth and nail

18:53

for audience share, it's the Jeffrey Epstein story.

18:57

But no corporate news outlet seems to want

18:59

anything to do with it. How

19:01

could that be? It's

19:04

not that they've looked deeply into it and just

19:06

concluded that there's nothing there worth further investigation.

19:10

That didn't happen. In

19:12

any case, I've never stopped them before if they think

19:14

they've got a story with the kind of guaranteed ratings

19:16

that Epstein brings. Again,

19:20

there have been some really beloved and

19:22

powerful people.

19:23

Think Denny Hastert,

19:25

who if

19:26

you're a little younger and unaware, Denny

19:29

Hastert is the highest ranking US official

19:31

ever to serve a prison sentence. He was

19:33

the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives,

19:35

so second in line to the presidency

19:38

right behind the Vice President, guy

19:40

with the same juice that Nancy Pelosi carries

19:43

today. You

19:45

don't get to a position like Speaker of the House by

19:48

public acclamation. It's not an

19:51

American Idol vote by phone

19:53

kind of thing. The people who get fingered for positions

19:55

at that level come in two types. They've

19:58

either spent decades... building

20:00

a very powerful social network so

20:02

that when they're jostling with other power players

20:05

who want that position, they've

20:07

got more artillery to call in for backup,

20:10

or

20:12

their puppets or front men put up by others

20:14

who think that they can control things from behind the scenes.

20:16

Denny Hastert was a bit of both. He

20:19

was a very powerful guy in Washington, but

20:22

he was easy to control for anyone who knew his

20:24

secret, which was that Speaker

20:26

of the House of Representatives Denny Hastert was

20:28

a quote, serial child molester,

20:31

in the words of the judge who eventually sentenced

20:33

him to prison. And

20:36

this was not in the early 1800s or something, by

20:39

the way, folks. This was the Speaker of the

20:41

House until 2007.

20:44

Isn't that interesting?

20:46

With all the mud that's flung

20:48

back and forth between Democrats and Republicans,

20:51

I mean, they call each other traitor, terrorist,

20:54

murderer, Nazi, communist. And

20:57

so isn't it weird that almost nobody

20:59

even remembers that the most powerful

21:02

Republican congressman was imprisoned

21:04

for molesting children less than 15 years

21:07

ago? You think the Democrats

21:09

would be just, they would just be carpet

21:11

bombing that fact all over the place.

21:14

They're

21:14

reminding us every day about it and with

21:16

some justice.

21:18

This is a guy, Hastert, who built his early

21:20

political career on this image of being a

21:22

teacher and a coach and a mentor to young boys,

21:25

and he was a straight up predator. But

21:29

nobody wants to talk about it. It's

21:31

one of the things that nobody really wants to talk about,

21:33

to the point that most people bring it

21:36

up and even people who remember it from the time, they're like,

21:38

oh, yeah, they kind of remember it, but it's faded out

21:40

of public memory. I

21:43

can understand what people don't want to talk about. I

21:45

don't really want to talk about any of this stuff either.

21:49

But maybe the people who should be talking

21:51

about it are worried

21:53

that if the public starts asking some pretty basic

21:56

questions, like how does a literal

21:58

serial child malign.

21:59

Rised through the ranks for

22:02

decades to become the most powerful man

22:04

in Congress without anybody noticing what he

22:06

was up to. Why,

22:08

when he was caught, did he get 13 months

22:10

in prison when we routinely give

22:13

decades to drug offenders and people running Ponzi

22:16

schemes and financial schemes? Or think

22:19

about Bill Cosby, who I mentioned, or even

22:22

Tiger Woods or Harvey Weinstein. When

22:25

I saw him turn its gaze in their

22:27

direction, that was it for them. Not

22:30

to compare Tiger to what the other two were accused of,

22:32

but just in the sense that there was this

22:34

embarrassing scandal, this devastating

22:36

scandal. And it didn't matter

22:38

that they were rich or powerful or had

22:41

powerful friends or that a lot of people

22:43

were invested in their success. It did not matter.

22:46

And think about this, if Bill Gates

22:49

or Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos

22:52

got hauled in with dozens

22:55

of underage girls accusing them of sexual

22:57

assault, each of them independently

22:59

corroborating the other's accounts, accounts

23:02

that sync up with flight logs and

23:04

visitor records and known travel

23:06

of other people that they say were present, sure,

23:09

those guys would have certain advantages. Like

23:12

being able to hire the most expensive lawyers

23:14

or maybe being able to intimidate the girls

23:16

into silence or just benefiting

23:19

from some residual public

23:21

goodwill if it goes to trial.

23:23

But if they couldn't keep those girls quiet

23:27

and they couldn't intimidate them and

23:29

they didn't have a good story to explain

23:32

their corroborated accounts, those

23:34

guys would be on their way to prison. And

23:37

also, they'd be in the headlines every

23:40

day because it's a crazy story

23:42

with guaranteed public interest.

23:45

And so the obvious question is, how

23:48

is it that this guy,

23:51

Jeffrey Epstein, who's rich and prominent,

23:54

but he's not Bill Gates rich

23:56

and prominent, maybe he

23:58

was in control of a couple billion dollars. dollars

24:00

and not all of it his which is a lot but

24:03

it's not the kind of money that can put the US

24:05

Department of Justice off you when there's dozens

24:07

of underage girls willing to testify

24:09

that you sexually assaulted them. How

24:13

is it that this guy seems

24:15

to be able to dictate terms to the US

24:17

Department of Justice? These are the people

24:19

who took down John Gotti and Denny

24:22

Hastert and Pablo Escobar. They weren't

24:24

afraid to do that. This

24:27

is Amy Robach from ABC

24:30

News, an anchor on the news show 2020.

24:33

You may have heard this, it was released by Project

24:35

Veritas. I've had

24:37

the story for three years. I've had this interview with Virginia

24:39

Roberts. We would not put it on the air. First

24:42

of all I was told who's Jeffrey Epstein.

24:44

No one knows who that is. This is the stupid story.

24:46

Then the palace found

24:48

out that we had her whole

24:50

allegations about Prince Andrew and threatened

24:53

us a million different ways. We

24:56

were so afraid we wouldn't be able to interview Kate

24:58

DeWill that we

25:00

that also quashed the story. Then

25:03

Alan Dershowitz

25:05

was also implicated in because of the plane.

25:08

She told me everything. She had pictures. She

25:10

had everything. She was hiding for 12 years. We

25:12

convinced her to come out. We convinced her to talk

25:14

to us. It was unbelievable

25:17

what we had. Clinton. We had everything.

25:19

I

25:21

tried for three years to get

25:23

it on to no avail and now it's all

25:25

coming out and it's like these new revelations

25:28

and I freaking had all of it.

25:30

I'm so pissed

25:32

right

25:32

now. Every day I get more and more pissed

25:34

because I'm just like oh my god. What

25:38

we had was unreal. Other

25:40

women backing up. Hey. Ran

25:44

Edwards the attorney three years ago saying

25:46

like, like, we there will come

25:48

a day when we will realize Jeffrey Epstein was the most prolific

25:51

pedophile this country has ever known. I

25:54

had it all three years ago. So

26:02

do I think he was killed 100%? Yes,

26:04

I do. Because he made

26:07

his whole living blackmailing people.

26:17

There were a lot of men in those planes, a lot

26:19

of men who visited that island,

26:22

a lot of powerful men who came into

26:24

that apartment. We

26:31

were like, are you offended? I

26:34

knew immediately. And

26:39

they made it seem as though he made that suicide

26:42

attempt two weeks earlier, but his lawyers claimed

26:44

that he was roughed up by his

26:46

cellmate around the neck. That

26:48

was all like, to plant the seed.

26:51

And

26:53

then, I really believe it. Like,

26:56

really believe it. See,

26:58

now we're getting somewhere.

27:00

Who would have enough juice to suppress

27:02

a story like this?

27:05

Maybe not Bill Gates,

27:07

but maybe the Queen of England. Maybe

27:10

a guy like Bill Clinton, who

27:13

was groomed for his role early

27:15

on, first as a Rhodes Scholar and then at Georgetown,

27:18

where he studied under Carol

27:20

Quigley with Prince Turkey Al-Faisal

27:22

in his class, a long time head of Saudi intelligence.

27:26

Bill Clinton was in deep with the CIA in the

27:28

80s when Colombian drug lords were flung their cocaine

27:30

into Arkansas when he was governor there. And

27:33

so, maybe a guy like that. Epstein

27:37

was not powerful himself, but he had

27:40

backing from some of the most powerful networks

27:42

in the world. Partly because,

27:45

as Amy Robach said, he

27:47

likely had some very dark blackmail on some

27:49

very important people. And partly because

27:52

of who he was gathering that blackmail

27:54

for. Which

27:56

I think is the much more interesting and

27:58

fruitful question. So let's dig

28:00

into that. Any

28:04

time you're dealing with questions involving

28:07

intelligence agencies, you

28:09

are going to find yourself wading through

28:11

a lot of circumstantial evidence. You'll

28:15

run into the same thing if you try to investigate the intelligence

28:18

agencies' more rambunctious cousins' organized

28:21

crime syndicates. And that's by design.

28:24

I mean, everybody has a vested interest in keeping

28:26

secrets. They know what happens to

28:28

people who don't. And so you're

28:30

not going to find written orders with signatures

28:33

and detailed explanations of each party's role

28:35

in the conspiracy. The

28:37

evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was working with an intelligence

28:40

agency is mostly circumstantial.

28:43

It's likely to stay that way. But

28:45

cases can be built on circumstantial evidence

28:47

if it piles up high enough that

28:50

the burden is shifted to the other side to make their

28:52

case for why this is all one giant

28:54

string of coincidences and misunderstandings.

28:59

I'm working on this while the

29:02

jury is still deliberating

29:04

the fate of Ghislaine Maxwell. Ghislaine

29:08

Maxwell was Jeffrey Epstein's

29:11

occasional girlfriend, apparently. And

29:14

according to federal prosecutors and many of

29:16

his accusers, she helped recruit

29:18

and groom young girls

29:20

to be abused by Jeffrey Epstein. And she would

29:23

also participate in the abuse herself. That's what

29:25

she's on trial for. A

29:28

lot of people were hoping the Maxwell trial would

29:30

bring out a bit of the truth that died with Jeffrey

29:32

Epstein in his prison cell. But,

29:35

you know, really, that was this

29:38

courtroom is not the place to make that case. And

29:40

so those people have been disappointed. If

29:42

the prosecution starts veering off the

29:45

main case, namely foreknown,

29:48

identifiable, on the record victims of

29:50

Epstein, as well as people who know

29:52

them, testifying that Maxwell participated

29:55

in sexual abuse to get that conviction,

29:58

and they start talking about Prince Andrew. Andrew, and

30:00

Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump, or what

30:02

that guy meant when Epstein, when he said Epstein

30:05

belonged to intelligence. Ghislaine

30:07

Maxwell is not charged with any of that. The

30:10

job of investigating those

30:13

related matters should, in an

30:15

ideal world, or at

30:17

least a moderately functional one, fall

30:20

to the news media, and

30:22

maybe to the legitimate counterintelligence mission

30:25

of the FBI. But this world

30:27

is, of course, neither ideal nor functional, so

30:29

instead you get me.

30:34

There are researchers who have done a lot

30:36

of legwork on the Epstein story. People

30:39

like Whitney Webb and Ryan Dawson,

30:41

if you're familiar with the work of those

30:43

people, you're not going to learn really anything new here.

30:45

I'm trying to put everything together in one place

30:48

to kind of give people a brief, and

30:51

if you've read whole books on this topic and everything,

30:53

there's going to be things in here that I leave out. I

30:55

just want to hit a lot of the key points to

30:58

give people a baseline understanding of what

31:00

we know and can reasonably infer about this

31:02

situation. It's

31:05

only been very recently

31:07

that

31:08

some mainstream sources were forced to

31:10

admit that there are some interesting questions

31:12

here. Rolling Stone

31:14

ran a story that was headlined, Was Jeffrey

31:17

Epstein a Spy? It was written by our

31:19

friend Vicky Ward, formerly of Vanity Fair.

31:23

Quote,

31:25

Back in 2002, when I was reporting

31:27

on Jeffrey Epstein's finances for Vanity

31:29

Fair magazine, he was not a

31:31

household name. During that time,

31:34

I paid a visit to the Federal Medical Center,

31:36

Devins and Devins, Massachusetts, to meet with an

31:38

inmate, one Steven Hoffenberg. We

31:42

sat in a little room near a recreation area.

31:44

Hoffenberg dressed in the requisite orange jumpsuit,

31:47

while I, several months pregnant with twins,

31:49

was dressed per prison requirements, as

31:52

shapelessly as possible.

31:54

It was an absolutely intriguing meeting.

31:57

Hoffenberg was serving 18 years in prison.

31:59

prison for committing a $450 million

32:02

Ponzi scheme. In the 1980s,

32:04

he'd been running Towers Financial, a debt

32:07

collection and reinsurance business, and had

32:09

worked alongside Epstein, who was a paid

32:11

consultant. Hoffenberg

32:13

told me that Epstein planned to

32:15

turn Towers into a global

32:17

colossus through illegal means. Hoffenberg

32:21

told me with a sad grin that he represented

32:23

a problem for Epstein because while they were working

32:25

together, Epstein had confided in him

32:28

as to how, exactly, he made a

32:30

career out of conning people and institutions,

32:32

not least because the idea was that they would do

32:35

it together. Hoffenberg

32:37

said that Epstein had a term for the perfect

32:40

execution of the grift. He called

32:42

it playing the box, which

32:44

meant that he ensured that even if his

32:46

crime was uncovered, the victim would be unable

32:48

to do anything about it, either because of social

32:51

embarrassment or because the money

32:53

was tucked away in a place where they couldn't

32:55

either couldn't find or couldn't get it. This

32:59

again, this interview is from 2002, before

33:02

anybody knew who Epstein was. What

33:05

Hoffenberg had failed to realize, he told

33:07

me, is that Epstein would con him. Epstein

33:10

would take $100 million of Towers money,

33:13

move it offshore, and meanwhile cooperate

33:15

with US prosecutors against Hoffenberg,

33:18

who was unable to do anything about this because

33:20

he'd pleaded guilty, which meant that there was no

33:22

trial and therefore no discovery.

33:26

I can't prove all of Hoffenberg's claims,

33:29

but some of them are accurate. I

33:31

have discovered, for example, that

33:33

Epstein certainly did cooperate against

33:35

Hoffenberg and gave at least three interviews

33:37

to prosecutors and that had the case

33:39

gone to trial, a source with knowledge says

33:42

it would have likely turned out far worse

33:44

for Epstein than for Hoffenberg. Hoffenberg

33:47

also knew something else Epstein wanted hidden,

33:49

according to Hoffenberg. He claimed

33:51

that Epstein moved in intelligence circles.

33:55

End quote. Epstein

34:01

was ever arrested the first time or the

34:03

second time before any

34:05

accusations about him had publicly surfaced

34:09

and his business partner, he and

34:12

Hoffenberg worked closely for several years,

34:14

is telling a reporter back in 2002 that Epstein

34:18

was connected to intelligence agencies. It

34:22

would be just five or six years later in 2007 or 2008 that the federal

34:24

prosecutor down in Florida who was

34:29

overseeing Epstein's case, Alex Acosta,

34:31

was told according to his sworn

34:34

testimony that he was told

34:37

by superiors to back off of Epstein

34:39

because Epstein quote belongs to

34:41

intelligence.

34:45

Back to Ward quote,

34:46

the Hoffenberg-E Epstein relationship

34:48

was not something Epstein then pitching

34:51

himself to Vanity Fair as a money manager extraordinaire

34:54

for billionaires only had volunteered

34:56

to me. So when I gingerly raised

34:58

Hoffenberg to Epstein and mentioned that

35:00

I had documentation showing that the two were linked,

35:03

the financier turned really nasty. He

35:06

maintained he hardly knew Hoffenberg. He

35:08

just consulted briefly on a couple of deals

35:11

that he'd not been involved in any prosecution

35:13

of Hoffenberg and that if I wrote any different things

35:15

would turn out badly for me. Here's

35:18

exactly what he said. If

35:20

there's any implication of wrongdoing I will

35:23

take legal action against you personally.

35:25

I'm telling you so you understand. I will

35:27

be as harsh as I possibly can personally.

35:30

Not for the magazine but you because

35:33

I had this discussion with you. This

35:35

relationship is with you. You

35:37

shouldn't risk your future for a job.

35:41

Back to Ward.

35:43

Now Epstein's sensitivity regarding

35:45

Hoffenberg was equal to his sensitivity

35:47

on what he called the girls. He

35:50

went berserk if you mentioned either subject.

35:53

In hindsight one has to wonder if Hoffenberg

35:55

presented an equally big problem as the

35:57

girls would.

35:59

Hoffenberg told me that in the 1980s,

36:02

after Epstein left Bear Stearns in

36:04

ignominious circumstances, Epstein

36:06

was trained in moving money offshore

36:09

and that a mentor of Epstein's was someone Hoffenberg

36:11

knew—a British defense contractor

36:14

who died in 2011 named Douglas Leith. Hoffenberg

36:19

claimed that Leith was an arms dealer. Leith's

36:22

son Julian says that's not true, but the

36:24

UK parliamentary record does mention Leith

36:27

in reference to the Al Yamamah Arms deal of

36:29

the early 1980s. I

36:31

remember distinctly that in our first meeting, Hoffenberg

36:33

told me that Leith was pivotal in

36:36

understanding Jeffery's MO because

36:39

Leith had introduced him not only to

36:41

aristocratic Europeans who Epstein

36:43

subsequently fleeced, but to

36:45

all sorts of people in the arms business, including

36:48

the late Turkish-born businessman Adnan

36:51

Kishogi and, allegedly,

36:53

the late media mogul Robert Maxwell.

36:57

Back in 2002, I didn't pay much attention

37:00

to this. This was because Epstein

37:02

breezily threw me off. First

37:04

Epstein told me he'd never met Maxwell, and

37:07

I asked him twice if he knew Leith, whom

37:11

I had never heard of, and Epstein said no. The

37:13

second time he elaborated, "'Douglas

37:16

Leith,

37:17

I think he was the father

37:18

of somebody I knew? I think

37:20

his son was friendly with Ferranti. That's

37:23

where that whole crowd comes in that you asked me about a long

37:25

time ago.

37:26

I think his name was Nicholas? It

37:28

was sort of that 66th Street building. I

37:30

think they might have all lived there.' So

37:33

I forgot about Leith, and I didn't bother

37:35

to pursue the notion that Epstein had known

37:38

Maxwell." Those

37:43

three people that Ms. Ward just mentioned, Douglas

37:46

Leith, Adnan Kishogi,

37:49

and Robert Maxwell,

37:53

those names will be familiar to people who spent

37:55

some time researching the deep politics

37:58

of the late 70s and throughout the 1980s.

38:01

So

40:00

yeah, the Reagan administration wanted to get weapons to

40:02

Iran to prolong the war They asked Israel for help

40:05

and what Israel do is real calls on

40:07

the services of Adnan

40:09

kashoggi to make it happen Both

40:13

kashoggi and lise were

40:16

the kind of guys that you called

40:18

when you were a government that needed something done

40:20

but done discreetly

40:24

Luis was the bag man bringing bribes

40:26

to Saudi and British officials to

40:29

make sure that the right companies got paid off

40:31

in their big arms deal Adnan

40:34

kashoggi was an arms trafficker with connections

40:36

all over the world who knew how to work around things

40:39

like customs agents and national borders Well,

40:42

Epstein gets close with both of these guys in

40:44

the 1980s. He worked with both of them And

40:48

based on the above-ground information

40:51

It's

40:52

kind of hard to see

40:54

what it is exactly that he would have been

40:57

doing with them The

40:59

Epstein was already on a private plane Headed

41:02

to a meeting at the Pentagon with Douglas

41:04

lease in 1981 when Epstein is just 28 years

41:06

old and Hasn't

41:10

done anything really when you look at his

41:12

actual resume up to that point I mean, let's take a moment

41:15

and it will only take a moment because there's not much here

41:18

To review what we know about Epstein up to this

41:20

point in his life In 1981

41:23

when he's on that plane with Douglas lease Epstein

41:26

had just left his job at the

41:28

investment firm bear Stearns after only five years

41:31

He laughed under a cloud due to a regulatory

41:33

violation He was forced

41:36

in in a deposition

41:38

years later Investigators

41:40

were hammering Epstein with questions

41:42

about insider trading all the way to the CEO

41:45

of the company Well before

41:47

working at Bear Stearns, he had

41:49

worked for two years teaching high school

41:51

math The job that he left

41:54

amidst complaints that he was being inappropriate

41:56

with his female students surprise surprise And

42:00

that's

42:03

it. That's it. That's his resume up to this point.

42:05

He's a college dropout, but somehow

42:07

got hired to teach mathematics at Dalton

42:09

School, an elite private school

42:11

in New York, who presumably

42:14

could hire any high school math teacher in the country, but

42:17

went with this guy who had no college degree

42:19

and no experience teaching. One

42:22

of his students was the child of Ace

42:25

Greenberg, who's a pretty well-known vice

42:27

president at Bear Stearns and Big Investment

42:29

Bank. And Epstein's supposed to have

42:31

befriended Greenberg and talked his way into a Wall

42:33

Street job. So

42:36

he apparently starts out as a junior trader,

42:38

but soon gets moved into a different

42:40

area with the firm. Bear Stearns CEO

42:43

Jimmy Cain, who remained close

42:45

to Epstein years later and

42:47

who ran his shop in

42:49

a way that Epstein would have appreciated, said,

42:53

quote, he was not your

42:55

conventional broker saying buy IBM

42:57

or sell Xerox. Given his

42:59

mathematical background, we put him in our special

43:02

products division, where he would advise

43:04

our wealthier clients on the tax implications

43:07

of their portfolios. He

43:09

would recommend certain tax advantageous

43:12

transactions. He's a

43:14

very smart guy and has become a very important

43:16

client for the firm as well, end

43:18

quote. So let me translate

43:20

that for the kids in the back. Epstein's

43:24

job at Bear Stearns was to help rich

43:26

people hide their money. And

43:29

he did it for some very rich and some very

43:31

important people, like Charles Bronfman,

43:34

a billionaire from the SeaGrams Liquor Fortune,

43:37

whose name will come up again later. And

43:40

so that probably explains why Epstein

43:42

maintained a strong relationship with Bear Stearns

43:45

and personally with Jimmy Cain and Ace

43:47

Greenberg, even after

43:49

being forced out of the company for attracting the attention

43:51

of regulators, because he got caught

43:53

doing exactly what they were paying him to

43:56

do. Maybe he got a little overzealous with it. And

43:59

so now I pick. the beginnings of a picture starts

44:01

to emerge. Why

44:04

would high powered arms

44:06

brokers like Douglas Leith be

44:09

on a private plane headed to a

44:11

meeting at the Pentagon with a 28

44:14

year old college dropout, a failed high

44:16

school math teacher, and junior

44:18

trader who just got fired from his investment

44:20

banking job? He's

44:23

there because he's not looking for a math tutor

44:25

or for investment advice. He's

44:27

looking for someone who knows how to hide

44:29

and launder money. And that's what

44:31

Epstein had spent five years at Bear Stearns

44:34

learning how to do. In

44:37

later interviews, Epstein was always

44:40

coy about his business during this period,

44:42

but he was more open with it with people who knew him back in the

44:44

past. He said he was

44:46

a financial bounty hunter. That's

44:49

what he was employed as after

44:52

he left Bear Stearns for a few years in the early eighties. He

44:54

was a financial bounty hunter. Guy

44:57

named Jesse Kornbluth, who was friends with

44:59

Epstein in the 1980s, says that Epstein told

45:01

him that he consulted for governments and

45:04

companies and wealthy individuals to help them

45:06

recover stolen money, and that he also

45:08

sometimes worked with people who had stolen

45:10

a lot of money to help them hide it. Another

45:14

guy who knew Epstein in the 1980s says basically

45:16

the same thing. Epstein told him he was a financial

45:18

bounty hunter who specialized

45:20

at hiding and finding money. And he also

45:23

said that Epstein was one way or another

45:25

connected to intelligence agencies. Well,

45:29

Epstein had concocted this ridiculous

45:32

story about what he was up

45:34

to in those years after he left Bear Stearns

45:36

and started managing money himself. He

45:39

said his firm only accepted accounts

45:41

of a billion dollars or more, which

45:44

is just absurd. You know, this

45:46

guy's under 30 years old. He

45:48

has no track record. No

45:51

one's ever heard of any big trades he's made,

45:53

but even get them on the phone. You

45:56

not only have to be a billionaire, but you

45:58

have to have a billion dollars. to invest

46:01

just with him. It's

46:04

just so stupid. I mean one Wall Street

46:06

guy who knew him back then tells a story

46:08

about how he thought one time that he would do Epstein

46:11

a solid and so a wealthy

46:13

friend of his was looking

46:15

for a money manager to manage over 600 million

46:17

dollars for him and so this guy offered to

46:19

set Epstein up with him but

46:21

Epstein turned him down. Not because his

46:23

client list was full or he was too busy

46:26

but because the account was just too small

46:28

for him to bother with. Now

46:31

that's just obviously absurd. Someone

46:34

with 600 million dollars to invest doesn't audition

46:36

for his money manager. They audition for him. Especially

46:40

in the 1980s that's like a billion and a half dollars

46:43

now. If you go to Goldman Sachs

46:45

with a billion and a half dollars to invest the

46:48

CEO of the firm will greet you with the door

46:50

before taking you on his private elevator

46:53

to a conference room where vice presidents

46:55

of the company will give you a presentation explaining

46:58

how you're gonna have a whole team of analysts

47:00

and traders assigned specifically

47:02

to your account and how they're gonna

47:04

be able to draw on data and intelligence

47:06

streams from around the world and how he'll be first

47:09

in line for lucrative private investments

47:11

and IPOs and mergers that are handled

47:13

by Goldman Sachs. You know this is a kind of red carpet

47:16

treatment you could expect at the most powerful

47:18

investment bank in the country if

47:20

you showed up with that kind of money and supposedly

47:23

this random guy who

47:26

nobody really knows who's been managing money for

47:28

a few years on his own supposedly just

47:30

blows it off like it's beneath his notice.

47:33

It's just silly and I think it's pretty obvious what was

47:35

going on which

47:37

is that he didn't want the account because Jeffrey Epstein

47:40

was not really running a hedge fund. People

47:43

went around to players on Wall Street after the whole

47:46

Epstein story blew up and asked people, people

47:48

who'd know, have any of you

47:50

guys ever worked with this dude? Do

47:53

you

47:54

know anyone who has worked with him

47:57

or done a deal with him? Have

47:59

you heard of any big deals he's done or

48:01

big trades he's made. Someone

48:04

like Epstein, just to explain

48:06

to some of you who aren't familiar with this

48:09

world, someone like this guy who

48:11

is supposedly managing enough money

48:13

for billionaires that his personal fees,

48:17

which are often 1% of the year's

48:19

profit is kind of standard. So if you're managing

48:21

a billion dollars and the investments make 10%, 10% of

48:23

a billion is 100

48:26

million, you as the manager get 1% of that. So

48:29

a million dollars that year, well

48:32

Epstein's making way more than a

48:34

million. He's

48:37

got the largest private residence in New York

48:39

City. It's nine stories tall, like 40 or 50

48:41

thousand square feet. It's

48:43

worth 70 million dollars. He's

48:46

got the largest private residence in the state

48:49

of New Mexico on a 7,500 acre ranch. He's

48:53

got a private island with a temple on it, a

48:56

fleet of aircraft, more

48:58

homes all over the world. He

49:03

was supposedly a billionaire, but you don't become

49:05

a billionaire making 10 million or

49:08

20 million dollars a year. That's not going to get

49:10

you there. To get the

49:12

kind of money that Epstein was showing and

49:14

to get it in a relatively short period of time, really just

49:17

less than a decade, six or seven years

49:19

and he seems to be fully ramped up. You'd

49:23

have to be making moves in the market that the whole

49:25

world would see happening. Billionaires

49:28

don't add a few shares of Microsoft to their

49:30

E-Trade accounts. Billionaires

49:34

take a position in the company, meaning

49:37

they have meetings with various brokers who

49:39

pull together enough shares and structure

49:42

the purchase in a way that doesn't absorb all

49:44

the liquidity and make the market go

49:46

bonkers.

49:47

You don't do that

49:49

for years without

49:51

anyone else on Wall Street working with you or

49:54

knowing anyone who worked with you or

49:57

knowing about any deals or trades you've made

49:59

or anybody

49:59

worked for you. A hedge

50:02

fund is not

50:03

just a guy at his computer making trades either.

50:05

Hedge funds have offices

50:07

full of analysts and traders and

50:10

economists and mathematicians and accountants, you

50:12

name it.

50:13

It's a company, it's a whole operation. Epstein

50:15

didn't have any of that

50:17

as far as we're aware.

50:20

From Miss Ward's 2003 article, quote,

50:23

why do billionaires choose him as their trustee?

50:27

Because the problems of the mega-rich, he

50:29

tells people, are different from yours and

50:31

mine. And his unique philosophy

50:33

is central to understanding those problems.

50:36

This is Epstein. Very few people need

50:38

any more money when they have a billion dollars. The

50:41

key is to not have it do more

50:43

harm than anything else. You don't

50:46

want to lose your money, end quote. Well

50:50

again, a billionaire can have anybody

50:52

manage his money. Okay,

50:54

the biggest and most powerful firms

50:57

in the world would fight over

50:59

his account. But

51:02

they're supposedly giving it to this nobody

51:05

who got pushed out of his firm for

51:07

a regulatory violation and where he wasn't even

51:10

working as a trader but a special products

51:12

engineer. A

51:14

field in which he'd be much more limited on on his own

51:17

without the institutional backing. And they're

51:20

not giving it because he's just so brilliant

51:22

in this eccentric genius

51:24

who just has some intuition

51:26

he's gonna double our money. Therefore we're gonna

51:29

take a risk by giving our billion dollars

51:31

to this guy. No, it's just they're giving it to him

51:33

just because they want to preserve what they have. That's

51:36

just not how the world works.

51:39

You give your money to any investment bank

51:41

in the world and say structure this

51:43

in a conservative way that's gonna make sure it's

51:45

robust to turbulence and inflation

51:48

and that I just don't lose what I have. Any investment

51:50

bank in the world can do that for you. That's

51:52

not why you go to a guy like Jeffrey Epstein.

51:56

In the real world you go to a guy like Jeffrey

51:59

Epstein to get things done.

53:09

Douglas

54:01

Leese introduced Epstein to Maxwell

54:05

in the mid-1980s and after getting to know

54:07

him for a couple years, Robert Maxwell

54:09

introduced Epstein to his favorite

54:11

daughter, Ghislaine Maxwell. This was

54:13

in 1988. Ghislaine

54:16

Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein, as is now well

54:18

known, became lovers in confidence

54:21

and partners in crime. But

54:25

she also seems to have had a role

54:29

assigned to her by her father as

54:32

a sort of all-in-one manager

54:34

or

54:35

handler of Jeffrey Epstein.

54:40

Through her father, she had access to the

54:42

wealthy and powerful people that we now

54:44

associate with Epstein, guys like Prince Andrew

54:46

or the Clintons or whatever. It was through

54:48

Ghislaine that he got to know these people. And

54:52

she seems to have been something like his, I don't know, social

54:54

manager. She would make connections

54:56

and set him up with people, bring him to

54:58

parties and events and manage his calendar.

55:01

And his job was to show up and

55:03

be Jeffrey Epstein,

55:05

I guess. And her job was to set everything up

55:07

and kind of manage the situation. Well,

55:10

her father, Robert Maxwell,

55:13

is a very interesting guy. A

55:16

lot of people don't remember him today, especially in the

55:18

U.S. or if they

55:20

do, it's only because he's the father of the notorious

55:23

Ghislaine Maxwell. But

55:25

he was one of the most famous men in Britain and

55:27

one of the wealthiest and most connected men on

55:30

planet Earth until his mysterious

55:32

death in 1991. Robert

55:36

Maxwell's birth name was Abraham

55:38

Leib, and it would

55:40

change a dozen times throughout his life. When

55:44

he was 15, his name was Jan Ludvik,

55:46

Hyman Bin Yemenhoch, and

55:49

Nazi Germany had just annexed

55:51

a large chunk of his home country of Czechoslovakia. The

55:55

next year, Hungary absorbed what was left

55:57

in Jan, coming from an Orthodox Jewish

55:59

family. family sees the writing

56:01

on the wall and so he escapes to France

56:04

in May 1940 where he joins

56:06

up at the Czechoslovakian army in exile just

56:08

in time for France to be overrun by the Germans.

56:13

And so Jan is forced to escape again, this

56:15

time to England posing as a French

56:17

soldier and using a surname that he caught

56:19

from a brand of French cigarettes. It's a very resourceful

56:22

guy, especially as a young man, 16, 17 year

56:24

old kid. Once

56:26

he gets to England, he

56:29

links up with Czechoslovak and Zionist

56:32

groups there, but eventually

56:34

becomes frustrated with the Czechoslovak government

56:36

in exile and so he joins up with

56:38

the British military, first in engineering

56:40

corps and then

56:43

in 1943 he hooks up with a combat unit

56:45

that saw action from the Normandy invasion

56:48

all the way to Berlin. He

56:50

saw plenty of combat. He also participated

56:53

in ugly business like interrogating captured

56:55

Nazis. Later

56:57

he'd be implicated in a war crimes investigation

57:00

for murdering unarmed German civilians.

57:04

In January 1945, just a

57:07

few months before the war's end, he

57:09

was pinned by British General Bernard Montgomery

57:11

with a military cross for storming a machine

57:13

gun nest. The military

57:16

cross was the second highest British military

57:18

award at the time, same as a distinguished

57:21

service cross or a Navy cross in the US.

57:23

That's a high award. Jan

57:27

made sergeant during the war and then received

57:30

an officers commission at the rank of captain right

57:32

as the war was wrapping up in 1945. Well again, you can tell

57:36

this guy's a hustler. Escapes

57:38

two countries, has five or six names,

57:41

joins two armies and fights his way through

57:43

France to Germany all before his 25th

57:45

birthday. The guy's a hustler

57:48

and a grinder and he

57:50

gets things done when he sets his mind to it. After

57:54

the war, Jan was

57:56

attached to the British Foreign

57:58

Office and spent the next two years years working for the

58:00

British government's PR and propaganda outfit

58:03

in Berlin where they put his considerable

58:05

language skills to work. According

58:07

to one of his biographers later, he was eventually

58:10

fluent in nine languages, which I

58:12

don't know, maybe that's a bit exaggerated, but certainly

58:14

he spoke at least four or five. In 1946,

58:19

he was naturalized as a British citizen

58:23

and he used the contacts that he made during

58:25

the war as well as those that he had

58:27

from before the war back in Eastern Europe to

58:30

start up an import-export business

58:32

between the UK and the East.

58:36

Most, if not all, of Jan Hoek's

58:39

immediate family had been killed during the war

58:42

and like many Jews at the time, he was

58:44

looking to Palestine as the only permanent solution

58:47

to their troubles in Europe and elsewhere. Zionism

58:51

presented a bit of a problem because it ran

58:53

headlong into official British interests

58:56

and policy after the war. After

58:59

facilitating it for years, Britain

59:01

had begun severely restricting

59:03

Jewish immigration to Palestine just

59:05

before the outbreak of war because of the terrible

59:08

effects that the emerging Jewish-Palestinian

59:10

conflict was having on Britain's relations with the

59:12

Arab countries and they continued

59:15

this policy more or less

59:17

after the war.

59:19

By this point, the Zionists

59:22

in Palestine believed that they're

59:25

ready to handle the Arabs on their own, if

59:27

only the British would simply get out of the

59:29

country, but it never was

59:31

the official British policy to hand Palestine over

59:33

to Jewish control and they'd spent

59:36

a lot of time and money fighting for and developing

59:38

the region over the years, so the British were not eager

59:40

to be driven off and so to help

59:42

motivate them, Zionist

59:44

terrorists began attacking British personnel

59:47

in Palestine and assassinating

59:49

British officials in other countries. They

59:53

blew up the British headquarters at the King David

59:55

Hotel, killing 91 people. They

59:58

sent mail bombs to British officials. officials

1:00:00

back in England. They

1:00:02

even sent a mail bomb to the White House

1:00:04

addressed to President Truman, according

1:00:07

to a memoir written by the man

1:00:09

who served as the head of the White House mail room

1:00:11

under six presidents, and an account

1:00:13

that's confirmed by Truman's own daughter in her memoir.

1:00:17

You're Martyr Maid listeners, so you already know this story. The

1:00:21

Zionists still had their boosters in the British government,

1:00:24

but by the late 40s, relations

1:00:26

had deteriorated enough that

1:00:31

things were difficult, especially on the ground. There was a great

1:00:33

deal of hatred passing between the British and

1:00:35

the Zionists there in Palestine, so that

1:00:37

when the British were finally driven out of

1:00:40

the country in 1948, they were very bitter about

1:00:42

it, and they slapped a weapons embargo

1:00:44

on the emerging Israeli

1:00:46

state just as war was coming with its Arab

1:00:48

neighbors. So to get people

1:00:50

and weapons into Palestine, the Zionists were going

1:00:53

to have to work through unofficial channels

1:00:56

to get around the British blockade, and

1:00:58

they drew on every thread that they could reach.

1:01:02

For example, Lyndon Johnson, US

1:01:04

president after Kennedy, a

1:01:07

Jewish historian from Texas

1:01:09

named Louis Gamelok, studied LBJ's

1:01:11

early relationship with the Zionists, which

1:01:14

went way back. His aunt was a founding member

1:01:16

of the Zionist Organization of America, and

1:01:19

Gamelok found evidence that

1:01:21

LBJ and his friend Jim Novy, who

1:01:23

was a wealthy Zionist down there in Texas where

1:01:25

LBJ operated, were

1:01:27

involved together in smuggling weapons into

1:01:29

Palestine in crates that were marked for Texas

1:01:32

grapefruit. Gamelok

1:01:35

doesn't really explain how the smuggling

1:01:37

was accomplished, but it was not a US government

1:01:39

operation. It was something LBJ

1:01:42

was doing on his own in violation

1:01:44

of American law. Raising

1:01:48

the money to buy large quantities

1:01:50

of military hardware and getting

1:01:52

that hardware off the books and

1:01:54

then shipping it halfway around the world to

1:01:56

a country under embargo by the British.

1:02:00

That's a major operation, okay,

1:02:02

that's handled by not just

1:02:04

some guy that you met down at the bar. This

1:02:06

is going to be handled by established smuggling

1:02:09

outfits. And if you're

1:02:11

talking about smuggling in the midst of the

1:02:13

total destruction of commerce

1:02:16

and infrastructure following the Second World War,

1:02:18

you're going to be dealing with organized crime. It

1:02:22

was helpful that Jewish

1:02:24

mobsters in the United States and other countries

1:02:26

tended to be sympathetic to the Zionists,

1:02:29

partly because both groups were at war in

1:02:31

different ways with the Communists. Another

1:02:34

string that the Zionists pulled on was that of

1:02:37

a young Jewish war veteran turned

1:02:40

import-export businessman from Czechoslovakia,

1:02:44

exactly the kind of person who would know how to get things

1:02:46

from one place to another in a complicated

1:02:48

post-war environment. The

1:02:51

new Communist government in Prague made

1:02:53

an agreement to ship weapons, many of them seized

1:02:56

from the Germans, to the Zionists

1:02:58

in exchange for cash, but

1:03:00

they still needed a way to get the gear down

1:03:02

to Palestine. And that's where men like

1:03:05

our current protagonist, Jan Hoch,

1:03:08

who got things from one place to another

1:03:10

for a living, came in. The

1:03:12

weapon shipments from Czechoslovakia that

1:03:14

were facilitated by Jan Hoch at

1:03:17

the time were

1:03:19

considered decisive in that first war

1:03:21

against the Arabs, the Israeli War of Independence, especially

1:03:24

because of the aircraft they delivered, aircraft which

1:03:26

were the specific smuggling assignment of Jan

1:03:29

Ludwig, Hyman Benjamin Hoch. Or

1:03:33

actually, he had officially changed his name to

1:03:36

better fit into British society by this point, so we

1:03:38

will call him by his new name now, Robert

1:03:40

Maxwell. In 1951,

1:03:44

Maxwell, he's still only 28

1:03:46

years old, really amazing when you think

1:03:48

about it, he bought a small publisher

1:03:51

of scientific books, and

1:03:53

he gained the US and UK distribution

1:03:56

rights for a much larger continental European

1:03:58

publisher of scientific books. I

1:04:01

don't know too many of the details of these businesses in the

1:04:03

early days, but according to at least two

1:04:05

of his biographers, Maxwell

1:04:07

had an effective monopoly editing

1:04:10

and distributing scientific and

1:04:12

engineering journals being translated

1:04:14

into English out of Germany and other European

1:04:17

countries. Before

1:04:19

long, he had built the company into a major publishing

1:04:22

house and had become extremely wealthy.

1:04:25

In the 1960s, he runs for

1:04:28

and wins a seat in the House of Commons.

1:04:31

In the early 1980s, he buys a

1:04:33

group of six newspapers, including The Daily

1:04:36

Mirror. A few years later,

1:04:38

he buys McMillan, one of the big five English-language

1:04:41

publishers. He bought the

1:04:43

New York Daily News. He tried

1:04:45

with the billionaire Charles Bronfman of

1:04:47

the Seagrams Liquor Fortune to buy the Jerusalem

1:04:50

Post. By

1:04:52

the end of the 1980s, Robert

1:04:54

Maxwell was one of the most famous men in Britain.

1:04:57

He was one of the world's most well-known publishers,

1:04:59

and his empire was vast. His

1:05:03

net worth, according to Forbes, was in the $1 to $2

1:05:05

billion range, which was maybe

1:05:07

$4 or $5 billion today, at a

1:05:10

time when there were a lot fewer billionaires. Now

1:05:13

every rando hedge fund manager or college dropout

1:05:15

computer programmer has a billion dollars. That

1:05:17

was not how it was back then. He

1:05:21

was a combat veteran, a businessman,

1:05:23

a linguist, a

1:05:25

smuggler, and an experienced

1:05:28

propagandist with contacts across Europe,

1:05:30

including behind the Iron Curtain, as well as in

1:05:32

Britain and the Middle East. Robert

1:05:34

Maxwell was obviously very interesting

1:05:37

to intelligence agencies after the war

1:05:39

and throughout his life. The

1:05:42

British Foreign Office and the FBI

1:05:44

for a while suspected that

1:05:46

he might have been working for the Russians, but most

1:05:49

people who have researched the topic think

1:05:51

this was probably a misunderstanding. Robert

1:05:54

Maxwell,

1:05:56

it's hard to relate

1:05:57

to a guy like this.

1:05:59

He was really this larger than life international

1:06:03

figure who seemed to

1:06:05

have almost perceived himself as

1:06:07

a sovereign country. After

1:06:10

all, the leaders of actual sovereign countries

1:06:13

kowtow to him all the time, calling

1:06:15

him to ask for favors and beg for his support

1:06:18

and to draw on his connections around the

1:06:20

world. He's not calling them for help, they're calling him for

1:06:23

help. And

1:06:25

it's definitely true that Maxwell was doing things

1:06:27

for the KGB and the Czechoslovakian

1:06:30

communists in the 1960s, as

1:06:32

did his friend Jeffrey Robinson, a former

1:06:34

British MP who's been described as Maxwell's

1:06:36

bag man during that same period of time. But

1:06:40

Maxwell, I think, would not have felt like

1:06:43

he was an asset of Soviet intelligence

1:06:45

because he was not some normal citizen. He would

1:06:48

have seen himself more like the way he was

1:06:50

actually treated, which was as

1:06:52

a sort of freelance, unofficial

1:06:55

diplomat who, he's a

1:06:58

British citizen, but really he kind of exists

1:07:00

in the liminal spaces between these established

1:07:02

power structures. The

1:07:06

FBI and British Foreign Office probably saw

1:07:08

Maxwell sneaking around Eastern Europe, meeting

1:07:11

with Soviet and KGB officials and

1:07:13

thought he might be working on their behalf, but we

1:07:16

know today that Maxwell only

1:07:18

served two masters, himself

1:07:21

and the Zionist state of Israel. His

1:07:25

association with Israeli intelligence

1:07:27

began with smuggling weapons in the immediate post-war

1:07:30

years, and over the years his role grew.

1:07:32

As someone

1:07:34

who had planes, yachts,

1:07:37

contacts across the world, access

1:07:39

to important people, and

1:07:41

legitimate business interests to provide

1:07:44

excuses for international travel and meetings,

1:07:47

the Israeli Mossad put Robert

1:07:49

Maxwell to many uses over the years. If

1:07:53

the Mossad needed to get a message

1:07:55

to the head of the KGB without

1:07:58

generating an official record, Maxwell

1:08:00

delivered it. If the

1:08:03

Mossad needed money for an operation, but

1:08:05

it couldn't be seen as coming from them, Maxwell

1:08:08

would arrange to make it happen. And

1:08:11

in general, he would just keep his eyes

1:08:13

and ears, as well as the eyes and ears of

1:08:15

the reporters working for him, open for anything

1:08:18

that might be of interest to Israeli intelligence. In 1991,

1:08:24

a man named Ari Ben Menashe

1:08:27

approached several British news organizations

1:08:29

with some stories about Robert Maxwell. Ben

1:08:33

Menashe was an arms dealer and a

1:08:35

10-year veteran of Israeli military

1:08:37

intelligence. And he claimed that

1:08:39

Maxwell and his foreign editor at

1:08:41

The Daily Mirror, Nicholas Davies,

1:08:44

were both longtime Mossad agents and

1:08:47

that, among other things, Maxwell

1:08:49

had informed the Israeli government of the identity

1:08:51

of the Israeli whistleblower, Mordecai

1:08:53

Venunu, in 1986, after

1:08:56

Venunu approached one of Maxwell's papers

1:08:58

with evidence exposing Israel's long-denied

1:09:01

nuclear program. Ben

1:09:04

Menashe also claimed that Maxwell

1:09:06

had helped set a honey trap that led

1:09:08

to Venunu being kidnapped in Rome, and then

1:09:11

shipped off to Israel and thrown in prison. And he

1:09:13

also claimed that Maxwell had played

1:09:15

a role in what became known as

1:09:18

the Iran-Contra affair of the

1:09:20

Reagan administration. I

1:09:25

remember several years ago, in

1:09:28

my former life with the Department of Defense, one

1:09:31

time we all had to attend a training evolution

1:09:34

on how to recognize an insider threat,

1:09:37

meaning a

1:09:39

fellow DOD employee or contractor

1:09:41

who might leak classified information to foreign

1:09:43

governments or other parties that the U.S. government

1:09:45

would not want to have it. They

1:09:48

tell us to watch out for people who suddenly

1:09:51

start showing a lot of money, or people

1:09:53

who are known to gamble a lot or who owe a

1:09:55

lot of money, things that might cause

1:09:58

them to want to do something like sell military money. secrets

1:10:00

to another country. As part

1:10:02

of this training they went through maybe a dozen

1:10:06

real-life historical examples of

1:10:08

people who had done this like in recent decades so

1:10:11

that we could see the patterns and kind of get a profile

1:10:13

of what to look for. But there's

1:10:15

this strange awkward elephant in the room.

1:10:18

Out of a

1:10:20

dozen or so real-life examples

1:10:22

they covered, all but two,

1:10:24

maybe three shared one

1:10:28

very obvious characteristic

1:10:30

that nobody was mentioning. Namely

1:10:33

that almost all of these espionage examples

1:10:35

that they provided were carried out by

1:10:37

Americans of certain ethnic origins

1:10:40

who were leaking secrets to their ancestral

1:10:43

homeland out of a feeling of

1:10:46

national duty or pride. As

1:10:49

they go through three, four

1:10:51

examples, seven,

1:10:53

eight, nine examples where this pattern

1:10:56

holds it's becoming a little awkward in the room because

1:10:58

there's an obvious question to be asked but one

1:11:01

that no one doing this training really wants

1:11:03

to answer. Well,

1:11:06

leave it to me. Everyone knows I'm

1:11:09

a bit of a troll but you know my

1:11:11

trolling usually has a purpose. The

1:11:13

entertainment that I get out of it is sort

1:11:15

of a side effect or maybe

1:11:17

if I'm being honest one of the side

1:11:19

effects of entertaining myself is that some actual

1:11:22

purpose is also served. I like to think so. And

1:11:25

so I raise my hand and

1:11:27

I point out the obvious that most of their

1:11:29

examples involved Chinese Americans

1:11:31

leaking to China, Jewish Americans

1:11:34

leaking to Israel, a Russian American

1:11:36

leaking to Russia, etc. And

1:11:38

I asked how we should handle that information

1:11:41

as we go forth to spy and inform

1:11:43

on our work colleagues and you can hear

1:11:45

a pin drop in the plays. This

1:11:48

by the way is how you make yourself very popular

1:11:50

with the rank and file and very unpopular

1:11:52

with upper management. But

1:11:55

I wouldn't have poked the bear if I didn't think they were all doing

1:11:57

us a genuine disservice by not addressing

1:12:00

the question because it's an important question and

1:12:03

relevant one. And so the trainer's

1:12:05

clearly uncomfortable and doesn't

1:12:07

want to answer the question but at least he was honest. He

1:12:09

told us not to consider that information at

1:12:12

all, to put it out of our minds. I

1:12:16

understand his discomfort. I

1:12:19

got a bunch of raised eyebrows and dirty looks

1:12:21

just for asking the question. It's

1:12:25

a hard problem for a multi-ethnic,

1:12:28

multicultural, open society like ours.

1:12:31

It's a genuinely hard problem. You

1:12:33

know, over in China, Chinese

1:12:36

intelligence probably has a file on every

1:12:38

single person of European ancestry

1:12:40

in their entire country. And

1:12:43

they're not putting anyone whose

1:12:45

parents were German

1:12:47

American in charge of their military research

1:12:50

laboratories. And there

1:12:52

aren't many people like that in China anyway.

1:12:56

During the Cold War, we were able

1:12:58

to call on ideological

1:13:01

sympathy to recruit assets

1:13:03

from behind the Iron Curtain. But

1:13:06

we can't appeal to a foreigner's American

1:13:08

patriotism or ethnic pride the way that

1:13:11

other countries might be able to call on

1:13:14

ethnic pride or nationalism to

1:13:16

recruit assets in America. Moreover,

1:13:20

when you try to ferret out disloyalty

1:13:23

in large groups where

1:13:25

the pattern of offender is

1:13:27

predictable but the vast majority of people

1:13:30

are not a problem, things can go wrong very

1:13:32

fast. It's

1:13:34

really hard to be effective without casting

1:13:36

a very wide net, but casting a wide net

1:13:38

for potential traders and saboteurs and

1:13:41

subversives has been the cause

1:13:43

of many of the ugliest events in human history.

1:13:47

A few Japanese Americans help

1:13:49

a downed Japanese pilot on the Hawaiian island

1:13:52

of Nihau after Pearl Harbor and

1:13:54

pretty soon 120,000 Japanese are

1:13:56

being rounded up and thrown into camps. why

1:14:00

the trainer just wanted to get through

1:14:02

his course without addressing a topic

1:14:04

that might not have any good answer, but

1:14:07

that we know from experience has many bad ones.

1:14:12

But I put him on the horns of a dilemma and

1:14:14

I left him with only two choices, neither of them very

1:14:16

good. He could do what he did and tell

1:14:18

us not to notice what was very obvious

1:14:21

and relevant information, which would undermine

1:14:23

his training by showing that the government is

1:14:25

not so concerned about protecting military secrets

1:14:28

that it would risk offending anyone,

1:14:30

or he

1:14:31

could go the other route and risk becoming

1:14:34

the subject of an HR complaint for telling

1:14:36

us to watch out for those sneaky Ruskies,

1:14:39

Chinaman, and Jews. Maybe

1:14:41

there's a healthy, acceptable middle

1:14:44

ground in there, but I don't blame him for not wanting

1:14:46

to find out. But

1:14:48

we're not talking about nationalities

1:14:52

or religions or ethnicities. We

1:14:55

are talking about the behavior of governments

1:14:58

and intelligence agencies. If

1:15:01

someone brings up MKUltra or CIA

1:15:04

interference in other countries, I don't pull up like,

1:15:06

how dare you say that about Americans. The

1:15:09

CIA is not synonymous with Americans.

1:15:13

Just like Chinese state security is not synonymous

1:15:15

with Chinese people and the Mossad is not

1:15:17

synonymous with Jews. When

1:15:21

we refuse to deal honestly with

1:15:23

history for fear

1:15:25

of what people might do with this information,

1:15:28

we just drive the discussion

1:15:30

underground where it rots and festers

1:15:33

and its stink re-emerges at

1:15:35

inconvenient and unexpected moments. Let's

1:15:39

say your kid wanders accidentally onto

1:15:41

4chan and someone there says something

1:15:43

about the disproportionate number of Jews and the

1:15:45

first Soviet government and secret police. And

1:15:48

your kid thinks, well, I never heard that.

1:15:51

I'm going to go ask my teacher, Mrs. Silverstein.

1:15:54

Mrs. Silverstein, I read online that a majority

1:15:57

of the Communist secret police were Jewish. Is that

1:15:59

true? and

1:18:00

intelligence agencies who want to control

1:18:02

discourse for their own purposes. They

1:18:05

are just tricks and

1:18:07

we should not fall for them. Part 2

1:18:13

Bill I

1:18:17

know what happened last

1:18:22

night and

1:18:24

I know what's been going

1:18:28

on since then. And

1:18:32

I think

1:18:36

you

1:18:38

just might

1:18:41

have the wrong idea about one or two

1:18:43

things. Part 2 Part 3

1:18:52

Part 3 Part 3

1:19:00

Okay, he had a bruise on his face. That's

1:19:04

a hell of a lot

1:19:06

less than he deserves. Listen Bill, I don't think you

1:19:08

realized what kind of trouble you were at last night. Who

1:19:12

do you think those people were? If

1:19:16

I told you their names, I'm

1:19:19

not going to tell you their names, but if I did, I don't

1:19:22

think he'd sleep so well. Have you

1:19:24

seen

1:19:26

this? Yes,

1:19:48

I have. I

1:19:54

saw her body in the morgue. Was

1:20:02

she the

1:20:05

woman at

1:20:08

the party? Yes.

1:20:16

She

1:20:16

was. She

1:20:21

was. Victor,

1:20:33

the

1:20:36

woman lying dead in the morgue is

1:20:40

the woman at the party. Yes?

1:20:44

Yes?

1:20:50

Well, Victor, maybe I'm

1:20:51

missing something

1:20:54

here. You called

1:20:56

it a fake charade.

1:21:00

Do you mind telling me what kind

1:21:02

of fucking charade ends

1:21:05

with somebody turning out the game?

1:21:13

Okay, then let's

1:21:15

cut the bullshit, all right? You've

1:21:18

been way out of your depth for the last 24 hours.

1:21:20

You want to know what kind of a charade? I'll tell you exactly

1:21:23

what kind. That

1:21:26

whole play acted, take me,

1:21:28

phony sacrifice that you've been jerking yourself

1:21:30

off with had absolutely nothing to do

1:21:32

with her real death. Nothing happened

1:21:34

to her after you left that party that hadn't happened to her

1:21:37

before. She got a brain stuck down. When

1:21:42

they took her home, she

1:21:44

was just fine.

1:21:46

And the rest of it is right there in the paper. She was

1:21:49

a junkie. She OD'd. There

1:21:51

was nothing suspicious. Her door was locked from the inside.

1:21:53

The police are happy. End of the story. Come

1:21:58

on. It's always gonna

1:22:00

be just a matter of time with her. Remember,

1:22:03

you told her so yourself. You remember the one with

1:22:05

the great tits who owed Dean in my bathroom. Listen,

1:22:25

Bill, nobody

1:22:27

killed anybody. Someone

1:22:29

died. It happens all the time. Life

1:22:33

goes on. It always

1:22:35

does. Until it doesn't. But

1:22:40

you know that, don't you?

1:22:42

You're dealing with a situation like

1:22:45

the Jeffrey Epstein issue and his potential

1:22:49

connections to intelligence agencies, relationships

1:22:52

with intelligence agencies. For

1:22:56

all of our sort of conspiratorializing

1:23:00

about the CIA and all the

1:23:02

stuff we do know about what intelligence

1:23:05

agencies have gotten up to in the 20th century,

1:23:07

superficially, a lot of us are super, super

1:23:09

cynical. You know, like, oh, they would do

1:23:12

anything. They would overthrow governments

1:23:14

just to help a corporation increase

1:23:16

the bottom line. Whatever it is, we have no

1:23:18

problem theoretically believing

1:23:21

that they would be capable of these things.

1:23:24

But in reality, when we're confronted with something

1:23:27

new, not something from history, something

1:23:29

emerges like this Epstein story.

1:23:34

And most people, including myself,

1:23:36

tend to have a

1:23:37

sort of block that they have to overcome where

1:23:40

you still, despite all of that, have

1:23:43

this sort of inborn base

1:23:46

assumption that, no,

1:23:48

no, they wouldn't do that. Like, that's too far.

1:23:51

It's just not possible. But it's not possible.

1:23:55

And somebody would have spoken up. There's just,

1:23:58

it's just not possible. But

1:24:01

the thing is, it's happened before. It's

1:24:05

happened before in Northern Ireland. In

1:24:08

the early 1960s, a young

1:24:11

Ulsterman named Colin Wallace

1:24:13

was recruited into the British Army's

1:24:16

public relations and

1:24:18

psychological operations branch in Northern

1:24:20

Ireland. Up

1:24:23

to this point there hadn't really been much trouble

1:24:25

between Catholics and Protestants for

1:24:27

some time. And so at the

1:24:29

time, the Northern Ireland assignment

1:24:32

was kind of considered a sleepy assignment.

1:24:35

People would go to retire, things

1:24:37

like that. And that's how it was when Wallace

1:24:39

first got picked up there. But then the

1:24:42

1960s happened. Just

1:24:44

about every country had its version of the 1960s.

1:24:48

So by 1968, Northern Irish

1:24:50

Catholics were out in the streets protesting

1:24:53

their

1:24:54

political domination by the Protestants that

1:24:56

were loyal to the British Empire. Fists

1:25:00

in the air led to fists in the face.

1:25:04

Fists led to bottles and rocks which

1:25:06

led to tear gas and bullets which led to bombs.

1:25:09

And before long, the dark era known as

1:25:12

the Troubles had begun in Northern

1:25:14

Ireland. And so all of

1:25:16

a sudden, the

1:25:19

Northern Ireland assignment for British military

1:25:22

intelligence and administrative

1:25:24

officials was no longer considered a

1:25:26

retirement tour. Suddenly

1:25:29

it was at the center of British foreign

1:25:31

and in a way domestic policy. As

1:25:34

far as the security services were concerned, it

1:25:36

was the first priority. This

1:25:41

was a view of the situation

1:25:44

with which our guy, Colin

1:25:46

Wallace, the intelligence officer who

1:25:48

was hired there that we're talking about, he actually

1:25:51

agreed with this outlook wholeheartedly. He

1:25:54

was one of those guys you

1:25:57

know the type who just finds his

1:25:59

home in the military. He

1:26:01

loves everything about the military, takes

1:26:04

his duty completely seriously,

1:26:06

buys into everything they tell him, believes

1:26:10

whatever the official sources in his country

1:26:12

tell him is going on. That's who

1:26:14

this guy was, just an unironic true

1:26:17

believer. In

1:26:19

Northern Ireland, his job was

1:26:22

to cause other people

1:26:25

to believe the same way. With

1:26:27

the beginning of the Troubles, his

1:26:29

job had gone from a steady

1:26:33

routine of a PR professional,

1:26:35

publicizing community outreach

1:26:38

events and fielding

1:26:40

mundane questions from the press,

1:26:43

to now

1:26:44

being engaged in full on

1:26:46

information warfare

1:26:49

and

1:26:50

black propaganda designed

1:26:53

to help fight the war on Irish

1:26:55

terror. For

1:26:57

example, the

1:27:00

provisional Irish Republican Army, which

1:27:02

was the militant wing of the IRA

1:27:04

that the British were struggling with in Northern Ireland,

1:27:07

had gotten its hands on some Russian-made

1:27:09

rocket launchers at one point. These

1:27:12

rocket launchers had a defect in the firing

1:27:15

mechanism that often caused them to malfunction

1:27:17

and occasionally explode on the user. The

1:27:20

British authorities had captured a few of these and

1:27:22

were able to figure out the cause of the failures,

1:27:24

but they didn't want the IRA to figure

1:27:26

it out, at least they wanted to delay

1:27:29

them figuring it out as long as possible. And

1:27:32

so they planted stories in the press, it

1:27:34

was one of Colin Wallace's projects,

1:27:37

planting stories in the press saying that the launchers

1:27:39

had been found to be defective, but

1:27:41

that it was due to something other than the firing

1:27:44

mechanism, the trigger mechanism. It

1:27:47

wasn't really meant to hold up over time, but if

1:27:50

it distracts the IRA from the confident

1:27:52

use of these rocket launchers for a while

1:27:55

until they figured out that would be considered a win,

1:27:57

that was the kind of thing that he was engaged in. And

1:28:00

fair enough, right? Fair enough

1:28:02

use of information ops in a troubled

1:28:05

area with a counterinsurgency going

1:28:07

on. Other

1:28:10

times they would plant rumors in

1:28:12

the press or among just the people

1:28:14

about Irish rebel leaders. And

1:28:18

they would put out stories designed

1:28:20

to cause the public to hate and

1:28:22

blame the IRA for the violence, basic propaganda

1:28:25

stuff. It was also his job

1:28:27

to deal with any PR fallout

1:28:30

from the mass roundups and

1:28:32

detention without trial of

1:28:35

large numbers of Irish Catholics. In 1972,

1:28:40

a demonstration

1:28:42

against this policy of round

1:28:44

up and internment without trial, a

1:28:46

demonstration against this was fired upon

1:28:49

by British soldiers. Fourteen

1:28:51

unarmed people got killed, another 12 were wounded.

1:28:55

And things kind of kept escalating. Bombings

1:28:57

became a regular occurrence. Ugly,

1:29:01

small unit street fighting and ambushes

1:29:05

that don't end with

1:29:08

one guy hoisting a flag up on top

1:29:10

of a building in victory, but with the other

1:29:12

guy being tied to a chair in a damp basement.

1:29:18

So the British SAS has brought in special

1:29:20

air service, sort

1:29:22

of their special forces. And

1:29:26

many counterinsurgency experts with

1:29:28

experience in Kenya and other parts of the world

1:29:31

are brought in. And

1:29:33

at a certain point, I

1:29:35

believe in 1973, responsibility

1:29:39

for intelligence operations in Northern Ireland

1:29:41

is transferred from the portfolio of

1:29:43

MI6, which is Britain's

1:29:46

foreign intelligence agency like the CIA,

1:29:49

to MI5, which is Britain's

1:29:52

domestic intelligence agency, sort

1:29:54

of like the FBI. Not exactly, but MI6

1:29:58

had traditionally handled Northern Ireland. Ireland

1:30:00

even though it was technically a domestic operation

1:30:03

because Ireland was a foreign country and

1:30:06

it was just easier for the same

1:30:08

agency to cover both Ireland and Northern

1:30:10

Ireland but for some reason it was transferred

1:30:14

to MI5 in the middle of all this trouble in

1:30:16

the early 70s and

1:30:18

all the people involved say

1:30:21

that things really began to change once

1:30:23

MI5 took charge. The

1:30:27

information operations that Colin Wallace was

1:30:29

taking part in became much more aggressive. They

1:30:33

began planting completely false

1:30:36

stories in the press, aligning Catholic

1:30:38

leaders, attempting to incite infighting and

1:30:41

using these false stories to influence public opinion not only

1:30:46

in Ireland but in Northern Ireland and

1:30:48

in Britain itself. So they're propagandizing the British

1:30:51

people now. And

1:30:57

Colin Wallace is going along with

1:30:59

all this like a good soldier and he's doing his job

1:31:01

to fight the war on terror. That's how

1:31:03

he's still approaching this. It's the kind

1:31:05

of guy he is, you know, sir yes sir. And

1:31:09

over time he becomes just,

1:31:12

you read the reports and

1:31:14

the testimony of people who were there, people

1:31:16

he worked for who worked for him and he becomes

1:31:19

a major figure up there as far

1:31:21

as like the middle management of the military

1:31:24

intelligence apparatus is dealing with

1:31:26

this area. A very respected, recognized

1:31:29

expert on Northern Ireland

1:31:31

and he's often brought in to answer questions and provide

1:31:33

briefs to generals and high government officials

1:31:37

and at 29 years old he becomes the youngest

1:31:39

person ever to make lieutenant colonel in the British

1:31:42

military or at least he

1:31:44

was the youngest one at the time. Maybe that's what

1:31:46

it is. After

1:31:49

Bloody Sunday, that bloodbath

1:31:51

in 72 that I mentioned a second ago, politicians

1:31:55

back in Britain are starting to feel pressure to

1:31:57

put an end to this whole problem

1:31:59

in Northern Ireland.

1:35:59

Accordingly, when the Ulster Workers Council

1:36:02

decided to launch a general strike to bring

1:36:04

down the power-sharing executive, not

1:36:07

only did it receive sympathetic backing from

1:36:09

the Army, but there is even evidence

1:36:11

that the strike was planned and encouraged

1:36:14

by MI5 and its adjutants in

1:36:16

Army Intelligence and Information Policy. To

1:36:19

mask what was being prepared and to create

1:36:22

an emotional following wind in Britain, it

1:36:25

was decided to launch a publicity blitz

1:36:27

about an IRA doomsday plot,

1:36:30

a plan for the evacuation of 100,000 Catholics

1:36:33

to the south and a scorched earth policy

1:36:35

in the north. The

1:36:37

plan had been drawn up by the IRA

1:36:39

as a contingency plan against the possibility

1:36:42

of a massive Protestant attack on Catholic

1:36:45

areas of Ulster. It would now

1:36:47

be presented as if it were an offensive

1:36:49

strategy in its own right. When

1:36:52

he saw what was being cooked up, Colin Wallace

1:36:55

objected. The idea of the plot

1:36:57

was several years old and had already been used

1:36:59

back in 1972. He couldn't,

1:37:02

he said, recycle such old

1:37:04

stuff without losing credibility. But

1:37:06

you don't have to, he was told. We'll

1:37:09

get the Prime Minister to do it. And

1:37:11

so they did. On 13 May 1974,

1:37:14

Harold Wilson announced a dramatic revelation

1:37:17

to the House of Commons, a suitably

1:37:19

purple version of the doomsday plot fed

1:37:21

to Wilson by the Army puppet masters. Wilson

1:37:25

even went so far as

1:37:27

to warn the House that there will be

1:37:29

an attempt to misrepresent this information,

1:37:32

which is a genuine find by the security

1:37:34

authorities. But I can assure the House

1:37:36

that these documents are genuine and

1:37:39

not even put forward by the IRA themselves

1:37:41

for any purpose except that in

1:37:43

which it had in mind to pursue. Just 12

1:37:47

days later, under strong Army pressure,

1:37:50

Wilson caved into the UWC

1:37:52

strike and threw

1:37:54

the power-sharing executive to the wolves. Such

1:37:57

incidents served to increase Wallace's consistency.

1:40:00

also saw what was happening, tried to

1:40:02

report it, but he was

1:40:04

told to back off. This is from an

1:40:06

article in the Belfast Telegraph, quote, in

1:40:09

emotional scenes, Richard Kerr,

1:40:11

a former Kincora resident who was sexually

1:40:14

abused at the boy's home, has received

1:40:16

an apology from the military intelligence

1:40:18

officer who tried to expose the abuse.

1:40:21

Brian Gemmell's words represent the first

1:40:23

time Mr. Kerr has ever received an apology

1:40:26

from the authorities who failed him. Mr.

1:40:28

Gemmell was warned off revealing the

1:40:30

pedophile activity at the East Belfast

1:40:33

home by Ian Cameron, a senior

1:40:35

MI5 officer who told him

1:40:37

that this was not a matter for the intelligence

1:40:39

services or the army to be concerned with. Now

1:40:42

Mr. Gemmell believes it was part of a cover-up

1:40:45

of sex abuse by top people. He

1:40:47

suspects that the intelligence services used

1:40:50

such dark secrets as a way to control

1:40:52

abusers who were politically influential.

1:40:55

As a captain, Mr. Gemmell put in an official

1:40:58

report about Kincora to a senior MI5

1:41:00

officer, but to his astonishment,

1:41:02

he claims he was ordered to stop digging

1:41:04

and to forget about it. He now feels

1:41:07

that he should have exposed it, whatever the consequences

1:41:09

for his army career, end quote.

1:41:13

And so Colin Wallace can't

1:41:15

make any headway with his superiors. He decides

1:41:18

that this is important enough to go to the press about.

1:41:20

He's got a lot of connections in the press. He's interacted

1:41:23

with these people for a long time. He thinks

1:41:25

he might be able to do that. But, and

1:41:27

this is a quote from a review

1:41:29

of a book about the Colin Wallace issue

1:41:32

in Kincora and Cogwork Orange

1:41:34

and all this, a book by a journalist named

1:41:36

Paul Foote called Who Framed

1:41:38

Colin Wallace. It's a very good

1:41:40

book. This is a review of it from a review

1:41:43

in the London Review of Books, quote, no

1:41:46

newspaper in the UK was willing to follow

1:41:48

this obvious lead or even to publish

1:41:50

the story. Despite the fact that McGrath

1:41:53

Associates constituted a virtual

1:41:55

who's who of Protestant Ulster. What

1:41:58

was going on at Kincora was that the

1:42:00

destitute boys were being systematically

1:42:02

sodomized and abused by McGrath

1:42:04

and his friends, who included King Cora's

1:42:06

official director and assistant director.

1:42:09

This had been going on for many years, perhaps

1:42:12

from as early as 1959, and

1:42:14

repeated attempts by boys who had been raped

1:42:17

to get the RUC interested in the matter

1:42:19

had always failed. Nothing

1:42:22

in Foote's book is more heartbreaking than

1:42:24

his recounting of how over twenty years

1:42:27

a series of boys and sometimes their families

1:42:29

and social workers tried desperately

1:42:32

and unavailingly to put a stop

1:42:34

to their dreadful pain, humiliation,

1:42:36

and buggery, and how the police,

1:42:39

the press, and the authorities failed

1:42:41

them over and over again. Quite

1:42:44

clearly, neither the RUC nor

1:42:46

Army Intelligence were at all keen for

1:42:48

the King Cora story to be broken. This

1:42:51

was so partly because McGrath

1:42:53

and his friends were extremely well connected

1:42:56

within the Protestant establishment, but

1:42:58

the truth may have been worse than that. Intelligence

1:43:01

services around the world often find it

1:43:03

useful to maintain luxury brothels,

1:43:06

not just for what they learn from pillow talk,

1:43:08

but as multi-purpose centers of reward,

1:43:11

blackmail, and assignation. There

1:43:14

was nothing luxurious about King Cora, but

1:43:16

its rarity in the Northern Irish

1:43:19

context as an unlimited

1:43:21

source of boys who could be buggered without mercy

1:43:23

or publicity seems likely to have

1:43:25

made it an especially useful intelligence

1:43:28

asset. So in his insistent

1:43:30

attempts to open up the King Cora story,

1:43:33

Colin Wallace was rocking the boat just as

1:43:35

much as he was by refusing to have anything

1:43:37

to do with Clockwork Orange. Quote, Well,

1:43:41

the Boy Scout, Colin Wallace,

1:43:43

the naive Boy Scout, found

1:43:46

out what kind of people he was messing with very soon.

1:43:48

And this is from that same

1:43:50

review. Quote, There can be

1:43:52

no other explanation for what then

1:43:55

happened to Wallace. He was suddenly

1:43:57

smeared in a number of press articles, transferred

1:44:00

abruptly out of Northern Ireland, and as

1:44:02

soon as he got to England, dismissed from the army

1:44:04

on trumped-up charges of having wrongly retained

1:44:07

secret documents and given them to the press. What

1:44:10

is truly remarkable is the speed and

1:44:12

thoroughness with which Wallace was dealt with.

1:44:15

One moment he was an indispensable

1:44:17

man, the next he was sacked, disgraced,

1:44:20

persecuted, and made into a non-person.

1:44:23

The Ministry of Defense has, ever since,

1:44:26

denied that Wallace had been an intelligence at all.

1:44:29

Thereafter steps were taken to prevent

1:44:31

him from getting other employment, and he was endlessly,

1:44:34

miserably harassed. The

1:44:37

author Foote is scrupulous at every stage

1:44:40

in trying to see whether a case against Wallace

1:44:42

might not be made to stand up, and

1:44:45

he makes it clear that he and Wallace do not

1:44:47

see eye to eye about politics, Ireland,

1:44:49

the army, or just about anything else. But

1:44:52

no fair-minded person can read this

1:44:55

book and doubt Wallace's story. The

1:44:57

only question one is left asking is

1:45:00

how naive Wallace was

1:45:02

really being when he raised objections first

1:45:04

to Clockwork Orange and then to Concoral. Surely,

1:45:07

he was both too senior and too intelligent

1:45:10

not to have known that both matters were uttered

1:45:12

dynamite, and that one could not simply

1:45:15

sign off on an operation like Clockwork

1:45:17

Orange, which involved key MI5

1:45:19

and army operatives in acts of high treason?

1:45:23

Was it not obvious that anyone who did

1:45:25

try to sign off, and then threatened

1:45:27

to blow open the concora scandal for good

1:45:29

measure, would be seen as a dangerous

1:45:32

man who knew too much to be left alone?

1:45:36

Far worse was to follow for Wallace. He

1:45:39

at last gained a post as information

1:45:41

officer for the Arun District

1:45:43

Council in Sussex, for whom

1:45:45

he worked with his customary zeal and success.

1:45:48

In various small ways, he continued to be the subject

1:45:51

of official harassment and surveillance, but

1:45:53

in April 1980, he finally consented

1:45:56

to be an off-the-record source for a journalist

1:45:58

seeking to probe the rumors of an MI5

1:46:00

plot against the Harold Wilson government.

1:46:04

At almost the same time that these articles were published,

1:46:06

four years before the Spycatcher disclosures,

1:46:09

the Kincora

1:46:12

scandal finally surfaced to the press. This

1:46:15

had nothing to do with Wallace, but the powers

1:46:17

that be, who had not wanted these skeletons

1:46:20

out of the cupboard, were doubtless confirmed

1:46:22

in their view that it was too dangerous to have Wallace

1:46:25

wandering around free. Three months

1:46:27

later, Wallace was arrested, found

1:46:29

guilty of the manslaughter of his friend

1:46:31

Jonathan Lewis, and bundled off to jail,

1:46:34

whence he only emerged in December 1986. It

1:46:36

is, however, worth pointing out

1:46:40

that Wallace's account of the attempted destabilization

1:46:43

of Heath and Wilson was taken deadly

1:46:46

seriously where it mattered most. Clive

1:46:48

Pointing describes the atmosphere inside

1:46:51

the Ministry of Defense after Wallace had been jailed.

1:46:54

There was never any suspicion that Wallace was

1:46:56

making these stories up, or that it was totally unfounded

1:46:59

and very easy to rubbish. It was

1:47:01

very much a matter that, okay,

1:47:03

the story was being contained at the moment

1:47:05

because he was in jail, but in a

1:47:07

few years' time he would be out again

1:47:09

and could be expected to

1:47:11

start making the allegations again, and

1:47:13

then that would be a serious problem. Meanwhile,

1:47:17

there was still Kincora. The

1:47:19

awkward question had to be faced as to

1:47:21

why the boys of Kincora had gone on

1:47:23

being raped and abused for 20 years

1:47:26

despite repeated complaints to the police

1:47:29

and despite Wallace's complaints to Army

1:47:31

intelligence. From all sides

1:47:33

of the Irish political spectrum came accusations

1:47:36

of a police and intelligence cover-up. To

1:47:38

make matters worse, it emerged that McGrath

1:47:41

had apparently worked for MI6 even

1:47:43

before he became the arch-villain of Kincora

1:47:46

and was given the boasting of his links with

1:47:49

MI6 and his friends in MI5. The

1:47:53

first official inquiry by the McGonigal

1:47:56

Committee was promised that no limits

1:47:58

would be placed on its investigation.

1:48:00

As soon as it met, however, it was told

1:48:02

that it could not examine any matter the police

1:48:05

were currently looking into or which was

1:48:07

covered by criminal charges in the past

1:48:09

or in the future. Since just about everything

1:48:12

to do with the scandal was covered by criminal charges,

1:48:14

including the possibility of a cover-up, a

1:48:17

majority of the committee's members resigned

1:48:19

on the spot and the inquiry collapsed

1:48:21

after less than a day, an

1:48:23

occurrence unique in British history. James

1:48:27

Pryor, then Minister for Northern

1:48:29

Ireland, announced that the police investigation

1:48:31

would continue. As for the question

1:48:33

of whether there had been a cover-up after Colin

1:48:35

Wallace and others had drawn attention to the Kincora

1:48:38

scandal, this would be investigated

1:48:40

by Sir George Terry, Chief

1:48:43

Constable of Sussex, who had just put

1:48:45

Wallace away for manslaughter. Better

1:48:47

still, the man appointed by Terry

1:48:50

to take charge of the Kincora inquiry was

1:48:52

Gordon Harrison, who had been in charge of

1:48:54

Wallace's prosecution. Unsurprisingly,

1:48:57

no Terry report was ever issued.

1:49:00

Instead, Terry merely appeared at a

1:49:02

press conference with Sir John Herman, Chief

1:49:05

Constable of the RUC, which

1:49:07

Terry was the

1:49:10

Royal Ulster Constabulary, which Terry

1:49:12

was supposed to have been

1:49:16

investigating, where he announced, I

1:49:18

am satisfied that there is no substance

1:49:20

to allegations that Army Intelligence had

1:49:23

knowledge of homosexual abuse at Kincora.

1:49:26

Given that Wallace had provided exactly that

1:49:28

knowledge to Army Intelligence many

1:49:31

years before, the polite word for

1:49:33

Terry's conclusion was incredible, though

1:49:35

it is fair to add that other

1:49:37

words were used at the time by some. The

1:49:40

Northern Ireland Alliance Party, moderate

1:49:43

as ever, referred to Terry's conclusions

1:49:45

as misleading and blatantly

1:49:47

dishonest. James

1:49:49

Pryor now found himself besieged by

1:49:51

demands for another Kincora inquiry, this

1:49:54

time by a High Court judge, as befitted

1:49:56

the gravity of the case. Pryor

1:49:59

paid fulsome tribute to the court. to Terry, accepted

1:50:01

that there would have to be another inquiry, i.e.

1:50:03

that Terry's was unsatisfactory, but

1:50:06

then set up a low-level affair under

1:50:08

Judge Hughes, a retired circuit judge.

1:50:11

Mr. Pryor did, however, specifically

1:50:13

assure the House that it would be within Hughes'

1:50:16

terms of reference to investigate the allegation

1:50:18

of a cover-up, that is, the question

1:50:20

of why there had been no inquiry into

1:50:22

King Corps before 1980. Judge

1:50:25

Hughes quickly developed other ideas. On

1:50:28

opening his inquiry, he said that

1:50:31

what it was about was the administration

1:50:33

of boys' homes, and that the inquiry would have nothing

1:50:35

to do with the allegations carried on in the newspapers

1:50:37

and on television that there was any kind of cover-up

1:50:40

of the King Corps affair, or that there was

1:50:42

a vice ring in operation. Hughes

1:50:45

refused to interview not only those

1:50:47

convicted of offenses against the King Corps of Boys,

1:50:50

but even Mr. Roy Garland, who had complained

1:50:52

to the security forces about King Corps as long

1:50:55

ago as 1972, and had

1:50:57

specifically pointed the finger at

1:50:59

William McGrath as the evil genius of the

1:51:01

affair. Mr. Robert McCartney,

1:51:03

QC, representing the King Corps of

1:51:05

Boys, could hardly contain himself. Are

1:51:08

my wits leaving me? A man who

1:51:10

detonated an entire police inquiry

1:51:12

and put the finger at a fairly early stage

1:51:14

on the man subsequently convicted for

1:51:17

some of the most brutal acts of sodomy is

1:51:19

not a relevant or material witness? At

1:51:23

this point, this already extraordinary

1:51:25

story becomes positively surreal. Wallace,

1:51:29

asked to give evidence to the Hughes inquiry, agrees

1:51:31

to do so only if he's allowed to tell everything,

1:51:34

and is granted immunity from prosecution under the

1:51:36

Official Secrets Act for doing so. Just

1:51:40

to be clear, he's not asking for

1:51:42

blanket immunity. He's asking

1:51:44

for immunity just for testifying

1:51:47

about things that are covered under secrecy

1:51:50

laws. This is

1:51:52

turned down by Mrs. Thatcher personally.

1:51:55

Wallace sends a whole file of notes to

1:51:57

number 10 Downing Street for onward transmission

1:51:59

to Hughes. but most of the documents mysteriously

1:52:02

get stolen by number 10 and are never supplied

1:52:04

to Hughes. The Hughes report

1:52:07

is another complete whitewash. Faced

1:52:09

with a document from Wallace proving

1:52:11

that he had raised the Kincora question back in 1974,

1:52:15

Hughes avers that it might have been a forgery and

1:52:17

therefore can be ignored. A

1:52:19

file of documents on Kincora is then

1:52:21

sent on to Teddy Taylor, the right-wing

1:52:23

Tory MP who had shown great interest

1:52:25

in the case. Taylor places

1:52:28

this file in a locked cupboard in a locked

1:52:30

office under a 24-hour-a-day

1:52:32

police guard. It is nonetheless

1:52:35

stolen, producing a furious

1:52:37

complaint from David Owen MP that even

1:52:39

the House of Commons is no longer safe

1:52:42

from burglary.

1:52:47

So what's going on in a situation like this?

1:52:50

What's going on here? Don't

1:52:53

answer that yet. Here's another story

1:52:55

also from Britain. This

1:52:57

is from the Manchester Evening News. Quote, The

1:53:00

Westminster establishment turned

1:53:02

a blind eye to child abuse allegations

1:53:05

against former Roushdale MP Cyril

1:53:07

Smith for decades, a long-awaited

1:53:09

national inquiry has found. Smith

1:53:12

and other high profile members

1:53:14

of Parliament were protected from

1:53:16

police action by their parties as their

1:53:18

whips tried to avoid damaging gossip and

1:53:20

scandal, the independent inquiry

1:53:23

into child sexual abuse IICSA

1:53:26

concluded in a damning assessment of political

1:53:28

culture spanning years. The

1:53:31

IICSA inquiry found that

1:53:33

both in his case and

1:53:35

in those of other suspected MPs, including

1:53:38

the late conservative Sir Peter Morrison,

1:53:41

parties and other institutions effectively

1:53:43

covered them up. Professor

1:53:46

Alexis Jay, who chaired the inquiry said,

1:53:49

it is clear to see that Westminster institutions

1:53:51

have repeatedly failed to deal with allegations

1:53:54

of child sexual abuse from turning

1:53:56

a blind eye to actively shielding

1:53:59

abusers. A consistent

1:54:01

pattern emerged of failures to

1:54:03

put the welfare of children above political

1:54:05

status. The report found

1:54:08

institutions including the Liberal Party

1:54:10

and the police had known full

1:54:12

well that both Smith and others had

1:54:15

been abusing children, however.

1:54:17

It stated,

1:54:19

For example, in the 1970s

1:54:21

and 1980s, MPs including

1:54:23

Liberal Politicians Sir Cyril Smith and

1:54:26

Sir Peter Morrison were found to be

1:54:28

active in their sexual interest in children

1:54:30

but were protected from prosecution,

1:54:32

it found. Okay,

1:54:35

well, you would be justified in asking,

1:54:38

that's end quote, you would be

1:54:40

justified in asking

1:54:44

what kind of a person, like forget about

1:54:46

the perpetrators for a second, what kind

1:54:48

of person would cover for someone engaged

1:54:52

in the serial sexual abuse of children? It's

1:54:55

another part of it that is like, I think a block

1:54:58

to people really getting their arms around

1:55:00

this, they just can't imagine that. And

1:55:03

I remember I was in high school journalism class

1:55:05

many years ago and on

1:55:07

the first day of the class, the

1:55:09

teacher, the journalism teacher was giving us all

1:55:11

a lecture that was meant to drive home the importance

1:55:14

of certain journalistic principles,

1:55:16

it was like a big intro, welcome to journalism. And

1:55:19

he created a scenario. He said, there was

1:55:21

once a reporter who had multiple

1:55:24

young women independently telling him

1:55:26

that they had been raped in the same area

1:55:29

of town by a guy with a

1:55:31

matching description. He

1:55:34

does some homework, corroborates their

1:55:36

story starts writing this story up, serial

1:55:39

rapist loose on the west side.

1:55:43

And so then his phone rings, and it's the police.

1:55:46

It's the lead officer pursuing a case

1:55:49

against a man that they believe to be the rapist.

1:55:51

And he's heard that the reporter was writing a story

1:55:54

about it. He talked to the,

1:55:56

he talked to the victims and they told him that they

1:55:58

had been speaking with this reporter. and so

1:56:01

the cop has called him to ask for a favor.

1:56:03

He said if the reporter runs the story tomorrow, the

1:56:06

rapist is gonna get spooked, he's gonna cover all

1:56:08

his tracks, they'll never catch him. And

1:56:11

so can you just hold off for a few days while

1:56:14

the cops tie up some loose ends

1:56:16

and get what they need to actually nail this guy and get

1:56:18

him off the street? After that, he'll

1:56:21

have the exclusive on the story. Well

1:56:24

the reporter's a good citizen and

1:56:26

he wants to help out, so he agrees.

1:56:29

And a week later, sure enough, the cops catch the

1:56:31

guy, he admits everything, he's on his way

1:56:33

to prison. He publishes his story

1:56:36

the same day and lets

1:56:38

it be known that he and the paper cooperated with

1:56:40

law enforcement by delaying publication.

1:56:44

The next day he's at his desk when

1:56:47

a woman approaches and asks if

1:56:50

he's the reporter who wrote that story and he says he

1:56:52

is, and she starts cursing

1:56:54

at him and crying and says that in the days

1:56:57

after you decided to lay your story,

1:57:00

that man raped me. And I might

1:57:02

have avoided that if you had done your job of

1:57:04

letting the public know something as basic as

1:57:06

the fact that there was a rapist prowling

1:57:09

around the neighborhood. My

1:57:12

teacher wanted to drive home the idea that a journalist

1:57:14

stands outside of all political

1:57:17

and judicial and even

1:57:20

safety and national security concerns. That

1:57:23

their God is not peace or justice

1:57:25

or safety, their only God

1:57:27

is truth. That's the message

1:57:30

he was pushing to us. He wanted us to understand

1:57:32

journalism as an almost

1:57:35

sacred calling that must

1:57:37

be taken deadly seriously if an open

1:57:39

society is going to be possible. Well,

1:57:44

so he put this question to us, what would we have done

1:57:47

in that situation? And he told us, he

1:57:50

asked us that question before he kind of

1:57:52

told us the punchline at

1:57:54

the very end. And you

1:57:56

find that your instincts can kind of betray you on that

1:57:58

question. I

1:58:00

can't remember how I answered when he

1:58:02

put the question to us, but for sure a lot of the students

1:58:05

said that they would have helped the cops by delaying

1:58:07

the story for understandable reasons. But

1:58:11

the thing we're talking about here, this

1:58:15

is much less understandable. We're

1:58:17

talking about something several levels beneath that.

1:58:21

Something that's much harder for normal people to relate

1:58:23

to. And put

1:58:25

yourself in that position where you're

1:58:27

in some position of responsibility. You

1:58:29

know, you're a journalist at a major newspaper,

1:58:32

TV network, or you're a police officer

1:58:35

or intelligence official or some official

1:58:37

with oversight over some given

1:58:39

area. And you learn

1:58:41

about systematic child sexual

1:58:44

abuse taking place somewhere, but

1:58:46

you're told to drop the issue and that there will

1:58:48

be consequences for you if you keep

1:58:50

on it. And

1:58:53

we've all got families to feed. None

1:58:55

of us wants to be fired. But

1:58:58

I just can't imagine that there are many people

1:59:00

listening right now who are not pretty confident

1:59:04

that you would refuse to stay quiet about it. We're

1:59:07

not talking about embezzling funds here. We're

1:59:10

not even talking about leaking secrets to a foreign

1:59:12

country. We're talking about raping

1:59:15

little children. And

1:59:18

so we, regular people,

1:59:21

consider the issue and we think, I

1:59:24

don't really think there's a single person that

1:59:26

I consider a friend who would

1:59:28

go along with this.

1:59:31

And yet,

1:59:32

for some reason, there

1:59:35

always seems to be plenty of people willing

1:59:37

to go along with it, concentrated among

1:59:40

government officials, you

1:59:42

know, teachers unions and school officials,

1:59:45

high ranking law enforcement and intelligence

1:59:48

officials, major media figures. This

1:59:53

is from BuzzFeed News. This

1:59:56

was published just a few weeks ago, actually, in

1:59:58

December 2021. Quote, secret

2:00:01

CIA files say staffers

2:00:04

committed sex crimes involving children.

2:00:07

Declassified CIA Inspector General

2:00:10

reports show a pattern of abuse

2:00:12

and a repeated decision by federal prosecutors

2:00:15

not to hold agency personnel accountable.

2:00:18

Over the past 14 years, the

2:00:20

Central Intelligence Agency has secretly

2:00:23

amassed credible evidence that at least 10 of

2:00:25

its employees and contractors committed

2:00:28

sexual crimes involving children,

2:00:30

but only one of the individuals was ever charged

2:00:33

with a crime. Prosecutors

2:00:35

sent the rest of the cases back to the CIA

2:00:37

to handle internally, meaning

2:00:40

few faced any consequences beyond

2:00:42

the possible loss of their jobs and security

2:00:44

clearances. That marks