By the Staff of AFP
Last spring, over 100,000 emails from former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s personal inbox were leaked by a group known as Distributed Denial of Service, the organization widely believed to be the successor to WikiLeaks. To this day, the actual hackers’ identities remain unknown, but it is widely believed that the government of Iran played a part.
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Since then, journalists have pored over the treasure trove of emails, which included communications from 2007–2016 with the richest men in the world as well as top government officials.
One particularly controversial figure—convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein—stood out in multiple emails, and, when reporters dug into those, what they found gave even more credence to the charge that Epstein, even after his conviction on sex crimes, had worked as an intelligence asset for the Israeli government.
Among the thousands of emails to business associates, foreign dignitaries, family, and friends, there were dozens between Barak and Epstein. One of these even referenced Epstein’s “birthday book,” the now infamous gift organized by Ghislaine Maxwell that had billionaires and top U.S. politicians, like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, celebrating Epstein’s abhorrent predilection for underage girls.
More shocking were the correspondence between Barak and Epstein that revealed, among other things, a scheme to try to turn the Russians against Syria and topple the government of Bashar al-Assad.
Libertarian magazine Reason first broke the hacked email story over the summer, but, since then, not a single major U.S. media outlet has taken it up, most likely because it proves the convicted sex offender had close personal and business ties with Barak, who, throughout his lifetime, had served in Israel as the head of military intelligence, the defense minister, and even the prime minister.
According to Reason, a number of key emails provided details on Epstein’s business partnership with Barak in 2015, when the two worked together to create an international security firm called Reporty Homeland Security.
While Reason claimed that Epstein was just using Barak “to seek out opportunities,” a more careful look at the emails showed that it was Barak who asked Epstein for help to secure, for example, meetings with top foreign officials, including even a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
On Oct. 30, left-wing news website “Drop Site” took it a step further, publishing an article titled, “Jeffrey Epstein and the Mossad: How The Sex-Trafficker Helped Israel Build a Back Channel to Russia Amid Syrian Civil War.”
In it, journalists Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussain wrote:
The trove of emails, exchanged at the height of the Syrian civil war between 2013 and 2016, reveal Epstein’s successful efforts to secure a private meeting between Barak and Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss a Russian- brokered end to the conflict, including winning Russian support for a negotiated removal of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
While the government of Israel was not specifically cited in any of these exchanges, “Drop Site” noted Epstein’s and Barak’s efforts reflected official Israeli policy at the time, which was to sow divisions between Russia, Iran, and Syria and take down Israel’s perceived enemies.
“Drop Site” concluded that the revealing email exchange showed how “Epstein used elite networks and quasi-official institutions to promote Israeli security interests and enrich his circle of friends and companions.”
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